Update 17 - Combat PTB Fix Patch 2 (1.17.84)

Welcome, Park Testers!

This marks the final PTB release before the full launch of Update 17 on June 25th. We've continued fine-tuning animal aggression, locomotion, and combat animations to deliver the most natural and lifelike creature behaviors yet.

We've also expanded the building toolkit with new modular pieces, including animal signs and improved rock assets.

How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)

The Public Testing Branch (PTB) is a version of Prehistoric Kingdom that can be opted-into on Steam, containing experimental and potentially breaking changes. With the help of the community, we're able to hunt down various issues and gather feedback before pushing a an update to the public version of Prehistoric Kingdom.

1. Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library

2. Go to Properties

3. Betas

4. Select 'ptb_public_testing'

Please note that it is not recommended to play Public Testing Branch parks on earlier versions of the game. Please send feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's appropriate channel.

Known Issues & Additional Notes

• Several combat states are currently under various degrees of completion, with polishing expected to be occurring all throughout the PTB period:

  • Hunting is currently in the middle of being implemented, so you may find unexpected hunting behavior. Prey targeting is not incredibly selective at the moment, and predation behavior overwhelms predators' feeding choices. This will be tuned as we continue to work for the update's live release.

  • Animal circle states and some attacks result in more or less clipping - we are going to do our best to reduce this as much as possible, though the dynamic nature of the combat system entails it will never be resolved in all capacities

  • Significant amounts of animal combat can seriously degrade AI performance. This is an area we are currently optimizing

• Several animals are still missing their full combat capabilities, currently being unable to attack. These animals are Psittacosaurus, Dryosaurus and Leaellynasaura.

• Much of the audio implementation for combat audio events, as well as combat music is currently unfinished, and actively being worked on. We expect the audio library for animal attacks and reactions to be expanded as PTB continues

• Some recent data misalignment has caused some animals' swimming capabilities to regress, causing surface positioning to be offset, often pushing individuals under water. We'll be fixing this soon

Full Patch Notes

Additions

• Animals

  • The following animals will now sneeze when sick:

    • Acrocanthosaurus

    • Carcharodontosaurus

    • Coelophysis

    • Dilophosaurus

    • Protoceratops

    • Torvosaurus

  • Added kill finisher animations to:

    • Acrocanthosaurus

    • Carcharodontosaurus

    • Dilophosaurus

    • Torvosaurus

    • Velociraptor

  • The following animals have been given full combat capabilities:

    • Muttaburrasaurus

    • Ouranosaurus

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Added new modular items to the Rock Igneous set:

    • Rock Igneous Boulder 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9

    • Rock Igneous 4, 5, 6

    • Rock Igneous Cluster 2, 3 and 4

  • Added new modular items to the Rock Basalt set:

    • Rock Basalt Pillar 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6

  • Added new modular items to the Rock Stonehenge set:

    • Rock Stonehenge 4, 5, and 6

  • Added new Monolith stone pieces:

    • Monolith Brick 1, 2, 3

    • Beam Monolith Pillar 2, 4

    • Beam Monolith Pillar Sloped 1, 2

    • Beam Monolith Pillar Cap

  • Added new Animal Silhouette pieces:

    • Allosaurus

    • Stegosaurus

    • Pachycephalosaurus

    • Compsognathus

    • Diictodon

    • Diplocaulus

    • Mononykus

    • Peltephilus

    • Sahonachelis

    • Simosuchus

    • Tiktaalik

    • Titanoboa

    • Yi

  • Added new Stylized Animal Signs

    • Allosaurus

    • Stegosaurus

    • Pachycephalosaurus

    • Carcharodontosaurus

    • Coelophysis

    • Gallimimus

    • Oviraptor

    • Panthera

    • Paraceratherium

    • Plateosaurus

    • Styracosaurus

    • Archaeopteryx

    • Compsognathus

    • Diictodon

    • Diplocaulus

    • Mononykus

    • Peltephilus

    • Sahonachelis

    • Simosuchus

    • Tiktaalik

    • Titanoboa

    • Yi

• Audio

  • Added Nigel dialogue for Ugrunaaluk

  • Added generic yawns for large theropods

Changes

• Animals

  • Animals now passively receive gradual hydration when in the water

  • When taking damage, animals will only be granted a damage reduction for being hit on the tail if the attacker was their size class or smaller

  • Animals should now deal more damage when trying to kill, less damage when threatening or chasing off, and significantly less damage when sparring

  • Animals who are sparring will retreat from combat at a higher hitpoint loss threshold

  • Adjusted sizing on immature Argentinosaurus and Brachiosaurus, which don't grow quite as dramatically so early on in their life

  • Combat balancing:

    • Adjusted damage and defense for several species:

      • Nerfed Ankylosaurus

    • Megaloceros now has its very own combat profile, making it behave a lot more naturally

    • Tuned mouth hitboxes for several predators, making them more forgiving. Predators missing bite attacks that should have otherwise connected is now a rarer occurrence

    • Animal damage now scales differently based on the active intent, with sparring having the lowest damage multiplication while killing has the highest. This should result in fewer injuries from behaviors that are not meant to be completely aggressive

    • Fixed a feed aggression behavior oversight which could prevent carnivores from eating right after a kill

    • Family behavior:

      • The casual ‘fight other species’ behavior now requires the attacker to not be with family. This should prevent some herbivores from getting into fights that can drag their offspring into danger

      • DefendWithFamily is now less restrictive, which should better allow parents to defend their family from any type of incoming threat

      • Added family defense capabilities to a lot of animals that missed them, hopefully making parents better caretakers for their offspring

      • Males should no longer bully their own offspring during the mating season

    • Defense:

      • Animals exhibiting the 'PreyDefendFromNearbyPredator' behavior should have an easier time defending themselves from incoming threats, instead of constantly fleeing. This profile's activation range has also been restricted so that predators need to be closer before prey goes into active defense

      • Reduced proximity threshold for nest defense behaviors

    • Social & Intra-specific combat:

      • Lowered overall trigger chances for animals fighting their own species

      • Added a new 'SparOwnSpecies' behavior, which allows active social animals to spar with each other without having to fight to the death

    • All animals now share a global behavior for getting into brawls if their welfare is low or if they feel overcrowded, giving exhibit management a new layer of depth

    • Reduced attack cooldown duration during Sparring behavior

    • Animals should now stay further away from each other when positioning in combat

  • Locomotion improvements:

    • Adjusted locomotion speeds for younger sauropods (infant and adolescent), which shouldn't move quite as quickly now and should more smoothly grow into their adult speeds

    • Adjusted locomotion speeds for medium and large theropods across the board - younger individuals for theropods like Tyrannosaurus or Carcharodontosaurus should now ‘shuffle’ much less when in combat

    • Slowed down adult locomotion for Protoceratops, the speed demon

    • Tuned locomotion speeds for other young and adolescent animals across the board

• Characters

  • Nigel’s animal voice lines won’t be triggering anymore for animals that are currently in combat, or dead

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Overhauled many rocks and rock-adjacent pieces across the game, featuring improved models and textures. Visually, the new rocks should maintain their old proportions but now have much higher fidelity, with higher resolution materials

• Environment

  • Reduced Juniper Bush 3 frequency on a few Scrubland presets

• Foliage

  • Lightened Italian Strawflower yellow flowers after resolving an issue

• Audio

  • Slightly lowered guest crowd audio volume

• UI/UX

  • Overhauled the Paleopedia Menu, featuring a more condensed and practical layout. The information in the Animal Paleopedia screen, specifically, has been re-arranged and re-grouped under the following categories: Info, Exhibit, Enrichment, Social, Ecology, Disease and Thoughts

  • Color-corrected new animal hero renders in the Animal Nursery

  • Changed exhibit welfare UI to not turn red if Animal Habitat Welfare is off

  • The animal’s current action text now provides much more information for animal combat, providing a more comprehensive read-out of their current behavior

  • An animal’s reason of death text can also scale vertically and has a locate button that can select their killer, if available

Bug Fixes

• Critical

  • Fixed a long-standing oversight where save processing timeout would be sped up by in-game time, where 4x speed could give only a quarter the intended save timeout

  • Save system error detection has been improved, and more specific error messages can be displayed. This includes Out Of Memory detection and reporting

  • Added some shader math safe-guarding in the Custom Map Boundary renderer which should hopefully prevent the shader from exploding visually for certain players

  • Resolved a number of rare multi-threading instabilities

• Animals

  • Fixed an incorrect check which could cause animal combat to not recognize offspring as part of the same family group, resulting in heightened and unnecessary aggression

  • Sparring between animals is no longer considered aggressive behavior for the purposes of prompting defensive action from allies

  • Fixed Flee state timing out after 30 seconds and then being penalized for 10 seconds, causing very poor escape attempts

  • Fixed attacking animals getting confused when a smaller target huddles up against a navmesh boundary that the larger animal can’t get as close to, leading to erroneous fallback flee behavior

  • Rear-facing attack moves will now use a coherent hit-target location on the other animal, based on approach direction

  • Fixed animals engaging in crowding-related aggression behavior before their crowding bar was actually full

  • Fixed animals still trying to choose interactables based on group behavior when they are very far away, in a different enclosure/nav area, or have desperate immediate needs

  • Fixed animal interact point selection being overly restrictive about height differences

  • Forward facing attack animals now choose a more appropriate target location on the other animal, based on approach direction

  • Fixed a rare case where animals could get stuck collapsed

  • Fixed an animation jump at the end of stagger locomotion

  • Fixed vivarium animal death notifications stalling out background processing

• Humans

  • Improved general human AI stability

• Construction

  • Fixed gate placement not respecting rotation tweening, which could result in incorrectly-aligned gates along fences

  • Fixed fence side-switching logic triggering while placing new segments in an existing fence line

  • Modular undo processing is more defensive

• UI/UX

  • Fixed a selection oversight which would ignore user settings and force camera tracking when selecting an exhibit

Performance

• Massive optimization to the game shutdown events. Quitting and reloading saves should now freeze much less

• General CPU performance improvements