Alpha 15 has been released! Here is our alpha15 video demonstrating the new features:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIx92W6Q3dk

It’s been two months since alpha 14, with Chris taking time out to have a baby. Whilst he’s been away the rest of the Introversion team have stepped up to provide a series of awesome updates to the game.

Johnny has continued his focus on performance, delivering a series of optimisations which virtually double the speed of the game in certain conditions. These optimisations are particularly effective on very large maps, and when running the Windows builds. We have now seen several (community made) prisons with 300+ prisoners and 100+ staff, running at a solid frame rate - this was pretty unthinkable even a couple of alphas ago.

Here’s a performance graph from our test map - an extremely large prison with 200 inmates, which used to bring Prison Architect to its knees. You can see how much difference Johnny’s work has made.



Gary has extended the staff simulation so that all staff now become tired as they work. After a while you’ll see their nameplate showing “tired” or “exhausted”, and they’ll be forced to stop work and rest. He’s added a Staff Room to the game, along with some sofas and drinks machines, which you should add to your prisons somewhere appropriate. Staff will recover faster and will feel more rested for longer if they have a staff room to go to.



And then there’s a bit of a wildcard in this version : Leander has added a Mod system, to better support community made mods. We don’t really know where this will go, but we’ll be watching the community closely to see what people do with it. Without any official support our community has already translated the game into Swedish, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Italian, Polish and Turkish (Visit our wiki to download these translations), and they’ve produced mods which add tons of new Grants to the game. With this new official mod system it is now much easier to activate and deactivate those mods in game - and you can run any number of mods simultaneously. You’ll no longer need to hack the game files directly to make a mod work.



If you’re the creator of one of the existing mods, please take some time to update your mod so it works with the new official system. All this entails is creating a manifest.txt (which documents your mod title, version, your name, website etc) and a thumbnail.png, and instructing users to unzip your mod into their appsavefolder/PrisonArchitect/mods/ folder.

If you are interested in creating a mod, we have released some sample mods on the Wiki which you can download and try. They don’t do very much, but they show you how the folder structure works and how you can use lua scripts to drive a story chapter just like our Death Row introduction.

For a list of all existing mods:
http://devwiki.introversion.co.uk/pa/index.php/Mods

For technical details on how to create a mod : http://devwiki.introversion.co.uk/pa/index.php/Modding

NOTE: You need to register with Introversion Software to gain access to the PA wiki:
http://www.introversion.co.uk/prisonarchitect/register/

We’ve also added a bunch of small but much requested features to this build - screen edge scrolling, a faster time acceleration button, larger federal grants for max security inmates etc. See the full change list below for details.

That’s all for alpha 15 - we hope you enjoy the new features! We’ll be back with alpha 16 before the end of the year.

Alpha 15 has been released! Here is our alpha15 video demonstrating the new features:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIx92W6Q3dk

It’s been two months since alpha 14, with Chris taking time out to have a baby. Whilst he’s been away the rest of the Introversion team have stepped up to provide a series of awesome updates to the game.

Johnny has continued his focus on performance, delivering a series of optimisations which virtually double the speed of the game in certain conditions. These optimisations are particularly effective on very large maps, and when running the Windows builds. We have now seen several (community made) prisons with 300+ prisoners and 100+ staff, running at a solid frame rate - this was pretty unthinkable even a couple of alphas ago.

Here’s a performance graph from our test map - an extremely large prison with 200 inmates, which used to bring Prison Architect to its knees. You can see how much difference Johnny’s work has made.



Gary has extended the staff simulation so that all staff now become tired as they work. After a while you’ll see their nameplate showing “tired” or “exhausted”, and they’ll be forced to stop work and rest. He’s added a Staff Room to the game, along with some sofas and drinks machines, which you should add to your prisons somewhere appropriate. Staff will recover faster and will feel more rested for longer if they have a staff room to go to.



And then there’s a bit of a wildcard in this version : Leander has added a Mod system, to better support community made mods. We don’t really know where this will go, but we’ll be watching the community closely to see what people do with it. Without any official support our community has already translated the game into Swedish, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Italian, Polish and Turkish (Visit our wiki to download these translations), and they’ve produced mods which add tons of new Grants to the game. With this new official mod system it is now much easier to activate and deactivate those mods in game - and you can run any number of mods simultaneously. You’ll no longer need to hack the game files directly to make a mod work.



If you’re the creator of one of the existing mods, please take some time to update your mod so it works with the new official system. All this entails is creating a manifest.txt (which documents your mod title, version, your name, website etc) and a thumbnail.png, and instructing users to unzip your mod into their appsavefolder/PrisonArchitect/mods/ folder.

If you are interested in creating a mod, we have released some sample mods on the Wiki which you can download and try. They don’t do very much, but they show you how the folder structure works and how you can use lua scripts to drive a story chapter just like our Death Row introduction.

For a list of all existing mods:
http://devwiki.introversion.co.uk/pa/index.php/Mods

For technical details on how to create a mod : http://devwiki.introversion.co.uk/pa/index.php/Modding

NOTE: You need to register with Introversion Software to gain access to the PA wiki:
http://www.introversion.co.uk/prisonarchitect/register/

We’ve also added a bunch of small but much requested features to this build - screen edge scrolling, a faster time acceleration button, larger federal grants for max security inmates etc. See the full change list below for details.

That’s all for alpha 15 - we hope you enjoy the new features! We’ll be back with alpha 16 before the end of the year.

Chris is taking time off now to welcome a new baby into his family, but in the mean time we decided to release an interim update to alpha 14 that fixes a small number of nasty bugs.

The next planned updated will be Alpha 15, currently scheduled for the end of November.

Change list:

- Optimisations continued
Sun shadow rendering is now much more efficient

- Fixed: Shackled prisoners will no longer try to walk towards the guard who plans to search them

- Fixed: Dogs will no longer be taken to the medical ward when injured. They heal when resting in the Kennel.

- Fixed: The planning tool was not saving properly

- Fixed: A crash bug that occurred in extremely large prisons (more than 10,000 individual objects)

Chris is taking time off now to welcome a new baby into his family, but in the mean time we decided to release an interim update to alpha 14 that fixes a small number of nasty bugs.

The next planned updated will be Alpha 15, currently scheduled for the end of November.

Change list:

- Optimisations continued
Sun shadow rendering is now much more efficient

- Fixed: Shackled prisoners will no longer try to walk towards the guard who plans to search them

- Fixed: Dogs will no longer be taken to the medical ward when injured. They heal when resting in the Kennel.

- Fixed: The planning tool was not saving properly

- Fixed: A crash bug that occurred in extremely large prisons (more than 10,000 individual objects)

Alpha 14 has been released! Here is our alpha14 video demonstrating the new features:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSrUCIEFAuc

Guard dogs have arrived! You can now hire dogs from the staff menu, and they come as a team with a dog handler. Dogs will sniff any nearby prisoners and hiding spots, and can smell drugs and other forms of smelly contraband from several squares away. Assign your dogs to patrols within busy parts of your prison to have them sniff everyone during the day.



Dogs can also sense escape tunnels, although it isn’t quite as easy as that. They will scratch at the floor and bark a bit, but you need to keep an eye on them to notice this and perform appropriate searches within your jail. If they happen to be scratching the floor when there is an actual prisoner digging directly under them, the prisoner is rumbled and the whole tunnel is revealed. We suggest you create long patrol routes around the perimeter of your jail and assign dogs to these, to keep a handle on your escape tunnels.

And if some prisoners do manage to get out of their cells and make a run for it, dogs are excellent at chasing them down. Much faster than the guards, for example.

Dogs do get tired after working for a few hours, and need a Kennel (we suggest an outdoor fenced off area for your dogs) with some dog crates to sleep in. The dog and handler will be out of action when they sleep, so you’ll need shifts of dogs and handlers to keep continuous coverage.

We have also started work on one of the end game features - you can now sell your prison from the Valuation screen. Any profits you have made in this prison will be automatically transferred to a brand new starting location, meaning you can plan much bigger layouts right from the start. You can only sell your prisons once, but nothing stops you going back and continuing to manage a prison you have already sold.

One of the most consistent requests from players is to deal with performance. The game has always lagged quite badly in large prisons or with large prisoner populations. Our resident technical expert John Knottenbelt has spent all month optimising the hell out of the game, and it’s running a great deal faster. The entire pathfinding system is now running on a separate processor, taking advantage of dual core and better setups that most gamers now have. This has lowered the cpu burden of the game, but also means there is much less “backlog” in the pathfinding system - often entities would be waiting around to have their route generated before they could move. Now it all happens virtually instantly. We hope this work will help you plan and build even more epic prisons.

Chris is expecting a baby (his second Son) in about a months time (well, his wife Jo is), so unfortunately our regular monthly alpha process will be disrupted while Real Life takes over for a bit. We are planning to skip the alpha that would have come at the end of October, and aim for alpha 15 at the end of November, ie two months from now. We hope you understand.

In the mean time, enjoy the new features (there’s a ton of additional stuff in the full change list below) and we will see you all soon:
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=44984

Alpha 14 has been released! Here is our alpha14 video demonstrating the new features:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSrUCIEFAuc

Guard dogs have arrived! You can now hire dogs from the staff menu, and they come as a team with a dog handler. Dogs will sniff any nearby prisoners and hiding spots, and can smell drugs and other forms of smelly contraband from several squares away. Assign your dogs to patrols within busy parts of your prison to have them sniff everyone during the day.



Dogs can also sense escape tunnels, although it isn’t quite as easy as that. They will scratch at the floor and bark a bit, but you need to keep an eye on them to notice this and perform appropriate searches within your jail. If they happen to be scratching the floor when there is an actual prisoner digging directly under them, the prisoner is rumbled and the whole tunnel is revealed. We suggest you create long patrol routes around the perimeter of your jail and assign dogs to these, to keep a handle on your escape tunnels.

And if some prisoners do manage to get out of their cells and make a run for it, dogs are excellent at chasing them down. Much faster than the guards, for example.

Dogs do get tired after working for a few hours, and need a Kennel (we suggest an outdoor fenced off area for your dogs) with some dog crates to sleep in. The dog and handler will be out of action when they sleep, so you’ll need shifts of dogs and handlers to keep continuous coverage.

We have also started work on one of the end game features - you can now sell your prison from the Valuation screen. Any profits you have made in this prison will be automatically transferred to a brand new starting location, meaning you can plan much bigger layouts right from the start. You can only sell your prisons once, but nothing stops you going back and continuing to manage a prison you have already sold.

One of the most consistent requests from players is to deal with performance. The game has always lagged quite badly in large prisons or with large prisoner populations. Our resident technical expert John Knottenbelt has spent all month optimising the hell out of the game, and it’s running a great deal faster. The entire pathfinding system is now running on a separate processor, taking advantage of dual core and better setups that most gamers now have. This has lowered the cpu burden of the game, but also means there is much less “backlog” in the pathfinding system - often entities would be waiting around to have their route generated before they could move. Now it all happens virtually instantly. We hope this work will help you plan and build even more epic prisons.

Chris is expecting a baby (his second Son) in about a months time (well, his wife Jo is), so unfortunately our regular monthly alpha process will be disrupted while Real Life takes over for a bit. We are planning to skip the alpha that would have come at the end of October, and aim for alpha 15 at the end of November, ie two months from now. We hope you understand.

In the mean time, enjoy the new features (there’s a ton of additional stuff in the full change list below) and we will see you all soon:
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=44984

Turns out alpha13 was unlucky for some after all.

As many of you are aware, we broke the pathfinding quite severely in alpha13. We introduced a bug which would cause the Deployment screen to show a greyed out world, meaning no sectors had been found. This had the knock-on effect that all pathfinding would fail, grinding your prison to a halt. Everyone would just stand around, looking lost.

We have now released a hotfix that resolves this issue, and a few others. Steam users will be automatically updated (you may need to restart steam).

The new version number in the main menu should be "alpha13b".

Here is a full list of changes in alpha13b:

Turns out alpha13 was unlucky for some after all.

As many of you are aware, we broke the pathfinding quite severely in alpha13. We introduced a bug which would cause the Deployment screen to show a greyed out world, meaning no sectors had been found. This had the knock-on effect that all pathfinding would fail, grinding your prison to a halt. Everyone would just stand around, looking lost.

We have now released a hotfix that resolves this issue, and a few others. Steam users will be automatically updated (you may need to restart steam).

The new version number in the main menu should be "alpha13b".

Here is a full list of changes in alpha13b:

Alpha 13 has been released! Steam users will be automatically updated.

Here is our alpha13 video demonstrating the new features:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3gwuarc4c4

It’s time to rethink your prison layouts! Prisoners can now dig escape tunnels, using tools they’ve stolen from around the prison. They will do their best to dig around buildings and walls (which slow them down), and they will even co-operate and join up their tunnels and dig together to escape quicker. If they manage to tunnel outside your outer wall they will dig up out of the ground in a puff of dirt, and make a run for it. And we don’t have snipers in the game yet, so it’s just tough luck if they make it that far.



An important thing to realise is that when prisoners are tunnelling, they are actually deep underground and often far away from their cell. However you will still see them in bed asleep. If you search a sleeping prisoner who is actually tunnelling, the fallacy will be immediately revealed - his face will be replaced by a papier mache dummy with a face painted on the front, enough to trick your guards into not realising what was happening. The tunnel will be revealed and the prisoner will pop out of the ground wherever he is, and will make a run for it.

You can build new Perimeter Walls around your prison, which are very tall, very deep and very expensive. Prisoners will do their best to tunnel around these, and will only tunnel through them if there is no other escape route - and it will take a long time to do so. However you can’t build pipes and electrical utilities through these walls, so you’ll need to plan where your weak-spots are going to be.

We also continue to work towards better right wing controls over your prison, for those that want them. You can now research and unlock a new “Policy” report, which allows you to set the type and amount of punishment doled out for fighting, stealing, rioting etc. The defaults are set to exactly how it was before, but if you choose to you could throw prisoners in solitary confinement for 24 hours after a fight, if you thought that was appropriate. This will have a seriously detrimental effect on that prisoner and he will not cause any more trouble for quite some time. On top of that, from the new Policy screen you can request automatic searches of prisoners and their cells when they go off the rails. Catch a prisoner with an escape tool? Automatically search his cell.

Alpha 13 has been released! Steam users will be automatically updated.

Here is our alpha13 video demonstrating the new features:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3gwuarc4c4

It’s time to rethink your prison layouts! Prisoners can now dig escape tunnels, using tools they’ve stolen from around the prison. They will do their best to dig around buildings and walls (which slow them down), and they will even co-operate and join up their tunnels and dig together to escape quicker. If they manage to tunnel outside your outer wall they will dig up out of the ground in a puff of dirt, and make a run for it. And we don’t have snipers in the game yet, so it’s just tough luck if they make it that far.



An important thing to realise is that when prisoners are tunnelling, they are actually deep underground and often far away from their cell. However you will still see them in bed asleep. If you search a sleeping prisoner who is actually tunnelling, the fallacy will be immediately revealed - his face will be replaced by a papier mache dummy with a face painted on the front, enough to trick your guards into not realising what was happening. The tunnel will be revealed and the prisoner will pop out of the ground wherever he is, and will make a run for it.

You can build new Perimeter Walls around your prison, which are very tall, very deep and very expensive. Prisoners will do their best to tunnel around these, and will only tunnel through them if there is no other escape route - and it will take a long time to do so. However you can’t build pipes and electrical utilities through these walls, so you’ll need to plan where your weak-spots are going to be.

We also continue to work towards better right wing controls over your prison, for those that want them. You can now research and unlock a new “Policy” report, which allows you to set the type and amount of punishment doled out for fighting, stealing, rioting etc. The defaults are set to exactly how it was before, but if you choose to you could throw prisoners in solitary confinement for 24 hours after a fight, if you thought that was appropriate. This will have a seriously detrimental effect on that prisoner and he will not cause any more trouble for quite some time. On top of that, from the new Policy screen you can request automatic searches of prisoners and their cells when they go off the rails. Catch a prisoner with an escape tool? Automatically search his cell.