Sep 30, 2018

Roguebreaker - Tankor Smash

This update adds moving bricks, a new music track to jam to, fixes the unresponsive bumper and a few smaller changes.

The way the new bricks work is that draw a set of adjacent Rail bricks, and you set a Cart brick along the path, and any number of Cart bricks will randomly select a nearby Rail brick to move to, so long as it's touching. Note that you can get pretty tricky with it, since you can end up with stacked Cart bricks if they move around close enough!

I’m happy that I was finally able to resolve the mouse issue, I got lucky and found a laptop that could reproduce the issue.

Added ‘cart’ and ‘rails’ bricks to 12 existing maps
Added ‘cart’ and ‘rails’ bricks to the level editor (accessible via Custom Levels)
Added a new music track by PunchDeck

Fixed mouse and bumper being unresponsive for certain people (no longer have to hit M to play the game)
Fixed Wide Shoulders and You’ve Got Friends interacting in such a way that you could no longer move your bumpers
Fixed an issue with the level editor leaving extra bricks when clicking ‘Save’
Fix needing to restart Roguebreaker if you wanted to upload two changes to a workshop map

Tweaked ball trail to be more transparent

Thanks again to everyone who’s been emailing me, DMing me and giving me feedback. If you’ve got an idea for a future update, please let me know!

Sep 30, 2018

DevLog #9 - September

Prehistoric Kingdom - Shadow Raven Studios

Welcome to September’s development update!

It’s that time again for another look into some of the things that were worked on during the last month. Some non-project related events meant that some of our team members had other matters to tend to in September but nonetheless everyone is doing okay and we are back to show some of our exciting content. This update is a little shorter than usual, but we hope that its content more than makes up for that!

Programming has been back into full-swing after our unexpected and continued waiting on SpeedTree and some other third party tasks. While the development schedule may have shifted, we have been doing our best to continue working on other components and features in the meantime.

With some better news, however, the foliage and water painting are almost complete! Although we currently can’t import the new trees and foliage due to lack of Unity support, our programmers have been experimenting with some stock pieces and we’re blown away by the results.

In-Engine environment painting work-in-progress result using stock and old demo assets.

Please keep in mind that everything used is a placeholder development asset and will either be replaced or made far prettier in the future!

Foliage Painting

For reference, here is the foliage painting system that currently exists in the pre-alpha demo:

While it wasn’t necessarily bad, it didn’t behave as expected and resulted in players having to click over and over again. Foliage rendering caused a substantial drop in frame rate which meant that dense forests were hard to create smoothly. Thankfully, these issues have all but been eliminated.

Today, we’d like to present the foundations of Prehistoric Kingdom’s new foliage rendering system.

Please note that the gifs are played back at 24 fps due to automatic compression. Please click the gifs to view them in 60fps!

As you can see below the intensity of the brush can be altered, resulting in an increasingly sparse placement of trees.

And of course we couldn’t forget the ability to place individual trees by lowering the brush size to its minimum value.

Water Painting

Yes, it’s finally here! Eagerly awaited by fans and developers alike, the water brush is a quick and easy way to paint water directly into an exhibit.

It’s definitely taken some time to get to this stage, but we think that everyone can agree in that it was worth it purely for the results.

Resource System Progress Update

Now with a short and less gif-heavy update, we decided to jump ahead while waiting for SpeedTree to get started on the framework for the new and improved resource system. It’s mainly mathematics and programming at the moment but once we get some UI hooked up we’ll be ready to show it off!

Building Concept Art

The Off-Road Safari allows your guests to get up close and personal with animals by driving directly through exhibits via a set path.

Building a Restaurant is a great way to avoid queues and serve quality food to your hungry patrons. With a warm two-story design and plenty of seating options, the atmosphere is sure to light up your park’s night life. Players can rename the sign on the building in the properties window.

In the “unlikely” event of an emergency, the Large Underground Bunker is capable of holding up to 500 guests. Much like its smaller counterpart, injured guests can be treated for wounds.

Like our past buildings, any improvements or adjustments from the concept art will be made in the modelling process so everything above is sure to look even better!

Main HUD Design Update

In our continued efforts to improve the look and feel of the game, our UI designer has gone back and tidied up the main HUD elements.

It’s not too much of a departure from what we had previously, but it certainly helps give players more screen space when building their park – not to mention its sleeker look. New overlay and access buttons have been added to the top left of the screen, as well as some new icons for fencing and funds. As always the UI colour can be changed by players in the settings menu.

Music

Our composer was quite busy this month but he still managed to sneak in a little preview of something he’s been working on over the past week. It’s currently unfinished, untitled, and very much a work in progress but the final version should be ready for listening in the next DevLog!

http://prehistorickingdom.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/PK_TrackWIP2.mp3?_=1

This month brings one new creature and some alterations to an old classic. Please enjoy the new renders of some of our personal favourites; Dilophosaurus wetherilli and Ursus spelaeus – the cave bear!

Mesh Updates

In September we made some changes to our old demo animals to make them look closer to their fossilised counterparts.

Velociraptor mongoliensis first debuted in its current state back in 2016. Upon further inspection, our feathery friend had some definite anatomy issues that needed to be addressed!

One request we are often asked pertains to one species of a very well known genus; Triceratops. With some magical developer wizardry, Triceratops horridus will be joining the ensemble as an alt. species for Triceratops prorsus. Since we’ve decided to use textures to quickly swap between the two, no differences will be found in the frill or body. As for the general anatomy and body plan, we updated it to resemble more recent reconstructions of the creature.

Ontogeny Sequences

Straight from the nursery and incubation chambers our park scientists have provided us with some more growth charts for a few new creatures. Today we’re proud to show off our geckos, fluff cubs, and lanky chicken bois.

Alt. Skins

With eight months worth of alternate skins shown since Kickstarter, we’re down to the very last one. There’s a few being saved for their eventual reveal on the model (such as a certain feathered tyrant), but we hope you’ve enjoyed waiting to see what Early Access design comes next!

The Final Countdown

All of our Early Access Thyreophora – including a new Sauropelta skin!

Believe it or not, we’re down to only three more animals that still need to be revealed. As the total number of finished animals begins to increase all future model reveals will be the alternate skin designs fully realised onto our critters. Stay tuned for next month’s exciting animal showcase as we unveil the last few remaining mammals!

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Thank you to our amazing backers and fans for continuing to support our project!

It seems like only yesterday that the Jurassic Patch was released and development on the full game began. We’re striving to make October even more productive and deliver on a tycoon experience that we can be proud of. It truly is a group effort and we couldn’t be doing what we are now without you.
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If you would like to check out our past blog posts, you can head to the official one here!

Sep 30, 2018

September 30th Update

Reassembly - manylegged

This is the first update in quite a while and it's a BIG one.

TLDR; rebalanced block P costs, lots of new weapon types for modders, significant optimizations for better frame rate and a smoother ride.

General Improvements:
* Block P costs have been re-balanced
* Significant performance, precision, and stability updates when editing very large structures.
* 'x' now properly stops the player ship from rotating when in key rotation mode
* tooltips are now properly updated after scaling a block
* World streaming and generation is now smoother. Improve performance when copying clusters and when allocating new clusters using a new port connection copying algorithm and pooled allocator for cluster structures.
* Use a different, more accurate method for sleeping between frames and update steps (smoother animations).
* Improve targeting for cannons and rockets, particularly when the velocity difference between the firing ship and target is significant.
* update Chinese translation (Thanks to community members Uiharu, Fgdfgfthgr, tang hao, liilili, Magnus siiftun1857 Frankline, and others). Improve Chinese and Japanese text wrapping.
* Significantly reduce the memory used by each game block by moving constant fields into a central, shared location. This also makes it easier to add new block fields in the future.
* Significant physics engine cpu and memory optimizations.
* Graphics transformation optimizations. Particle effect spawning optimization
* Significant healing laser optimizations
* New block sleeping optimization reduces CPU usage of inert blocks.
* OPTIMIZATIONS
* Fix several rare editor related crashes
* Weapon ranges are now displayed in the binding screen
* Lots of random crash fixes

Tournament:
* The AI now ignores weapons bound as either "point defense" or "auto-fire" when determining what range to engage at. Players can bind auxiliary weapons to either of these two binding slots to prevent them from interfering with AI positioning.
* AI will now use the fire mode ("fire all" or "ripple fire") from the primary weapon binding for its weapons.
* Weapons bindings are now easier to edit in sandbox mode. Just press 'b' without closing the console.
* AI now properly considers weapon boosters when calculating weapon range/damage in several places.

Modders:
* New "fragment" cannon field allows recursively defined projectiles that split into more projectiles.
* New cannon field "pattern" can be set to "random" (default), "spiral", "wave", or "constant" to change the way projectiles are distributed through the "spread" angle.
* New cannon/laser field "barrelTaper" allows modifying turret barrel aesthetics.
* New cvar kSensorRangeMultiplier allows modders to increase the sensor range of all ships (default is 2200 units). Particularly useful for mods that also increase kLiveRadius.
* audio.lua mods can now load sounds from the base game directory without having to copy the sound file into their mod
* Hold down "control" to display the prettier construction mode tooltip when in the sandbox (instead of the more verbose sandbox tooltip)
* level_save command now requires a -f switch to overwrite and existing level file. Add level_remove command.
* Allow setting block "health" and "mass" directly instead of setting "durability" and "density"
* Add new cvar kWriteJSON which causes the game to export ships and write other data files in easily parsable JSON format instead of the default lua-esq format. The game can now import ships and other data files in JSON format.
* Fix issue where multiple glsl shader #includes were sometimes garbled
* Add ability to glue several translation strings together in lua files. For example, blurb=_("foo") _("bar") will translate "foo" and "bar" separately and then glue the results together.
* Add new features ALWAYSFIRE and NEVERFIRE which cause weapons to either always fire or never fire (ignored even by AI). Useful for cosmetic lasers, etc.
* Extend the ONEUSE flag to work with SHIELD, LAUNCHER, and FACTORY/SELFFACTORY.
* Add PALETTE feature to allow placing blocks in the faction palette even if they are not in a ship (see also NOPALETTE).
* Add turretLimit block field to allow turrets that only partially rotate
* Increase maximum custom block scale from 10 to 32. Increase maximum number of vertices per shape from 16 to 32.
* Allow new kCVar += N syntax which helps mods conflict less
* Add new triangle based (instead of point based) particle rendering mode which is slower but works better with very large particles. To enable set kParticleTris=1.
* Add new feature LAUNCHER_BARRAGE which can be added to LAUNCHER to cause all missiles to fire at once.
* Add cvar kMainMenuBattleFactions and friends to allow controlling the contents of the main menu battle