Dev Diary: November 2023
Welcome to the November Development Update!
Update 8 is now available to all players! This is a massive update that introduces Velociraptor, genetic mutations, rewritten animal locomotion, AI, and more! You can find the full patch notes for Update 8 here. We will be releasing hotfix as soon as possible to address a few leftover issues from the Public Testing Branch. Thank you for your patience!
Update 9: Coming Soon
For the past little while, Update 9 has been cooking in the oven. It’s been cooking so well in fact that we’ll actually be announcing the release date in a few short days! As a refresher, this upcoming release will be bringing 3 new animals to the game alongside the Grassland biome, a brand new map set in Tanzania and perhaps most exciting of all - swimming!
The content within Update 9 is super exciting, but we’ve also got some great tech news to share, too! Navigation for both animals and guests will be improved with not just smoother pathfinding, but faster pathfinding. We’ve created a custom algorithm and filtering system that offers a 3x boost in performance whenever an animal or guest decides where and how to get a destination.
Players will also be able to see significantly reduced load times when Update 9 releases, particularly on dense saves with hundreds of thousands of pieces. Improvements like these are all part of our ongoing effort to improve Prehistoric Kingdom’s performance and ensure we can get the game as stable as possible.
New Species
A classic of Cretaceous Africa, we are very pleased to reveal your final animal for Update 9 - the magnificent Ouranosaurus!
Having once roamed the prehistoric floodplains of West Africa, Ouranosaurus is best known for its stunning sail made up of tall vertebrae.
Much like one of its cousins, Iguanodon, this ornithopod also features spiked thumbs on its hands. Unlike Iguanodon though, Ouranosaurus walked upright as a biped, getting on all-fours when it had to get low to the ground.
Swimming
Get ready to watch your animals splish and splash their way around Update 9! This exciting addition is an extension of our brand new locomotion systems introduced in Update 8, allowing animals to glide or doggy paddle their way through the water seamlessly.
Swimming will be available for all animals, regardless of their shape or size. Just ensure the water in their habitat is deep enough, and they’ll dynamically transition into a swim when entering the water. You can see some work in progress footage below!
If an animal were to fall into water (e.g. deleting a platform from beneath them) or enter from steep shorelines, you might even catch them briefly sinking and ascending to the surface with buoyancy. No Tyrannosaurs were harmed in the making of this gif.
Down the line, we’d definitely love to introduce some semi-aquatic creatures that can really take advantage of this system. We think that there’s a lot of potential there for not only adding some incredibly unique animals, but potentially making the player consider water depth and how that impacts their exhibit design. If this is something that sounds interesting to the community, be sure to let us know!
For today’s final bit of news, Prehistoric Kingdom will have a small presence at TetZooCon - the Tetrapod Zoology Convention - this Sunday in London!
Our Creative Director, Maurizio Morosan, will be one of the guests presenting at Joschua Knüppe’s ‘Show-and-Tell’ panel beginning at 10am GMT. Those attending will get to learn more about how we make Prehistoric Kingdom, watch an early screening of the Update 9 trailer and hear from some amazing panelists who are part of the TetZoo community. It’ll be a great experience!
The Update 9 trailer will be released online after the screening at TetZooCon. You can find more information about TetZooCon (including scheduling) on their website.
Created by Incog
Created by Rayne
Created by luci257
Thank you for reading November’s dev diary!
As this is our last dev diary for the year, we’d like to wish everyone a happy holiday and a fantastic new year. Dev diaries will return at the end of January where we’ll be detailing what’s to come in the new year.
Update 9 is right around the corner, so we hope you look forward to seeing the trailer in just a few days. Stay tuned and make sure you follow our socials to stay up to date!
- The PK Team
