Welcome, Park Managers!

This patch for Update 14 fixes various issues and adds a new screenspace global illumination effect under the 'Indirect Lighting' quality setting.

We expect that this will likely be the last support patch before the team moves onto full production for Update 15 with its expected release in July. We're aiming for the first PTB to start in late June. Please check out future Dev Diaries for more updates!

Full Patch Notes

Additions

• Rendering
  • Added Screen Space Global Illumination to the game, helping to light shaded areas more realistically. Its quality can be set in the ‘Indirect Lighting’ setting in the Options Menu

Changes

• Animals
  • Animals will now only engage in the Play Chase behavior when near the group destination, so they don’t get distracted when the group is moving
• Staff
  • Reduced max staff count to 2048
• UI/UX
  • The ‘Social’ group tab is now disabled for baby animals, since they can’t form social groups. Instead, the ‘Family’ tab is selected by default for them
    
  • Upgraded the save/load menu to use the same layout and visual style as the rest of the game’s GUI
• Environment
  • Updated wetland grass texture to feature a mix of soil and grass
• Foliage
  • Adjusted Field Elm coloration
    
  • Adjusted Marula coloration

Bug Fixes

• Crashes
  • Fixed animals caching references to animals which had been sold or otherwise invalidated, which could have caused crashes
• Animals
  • Fixed animals getting stuck on corners, and reduced false negatives in nav adherence checks that were contributing to animal teleports
    
  • Fixed baby animals filling their nutrition and hydration bars at super speed
    
  • Fixed a logical error that was preventing animals from validating their roam destinations relative to the group destination, causing animals to roam far and wide regardless of the group
• Staff
  • Staff gates will now keep better track of who is walking through them, including the first person character controller, and should not remain open anymore
• UI/UX
  • Fixed the Nursery animal preview animations being stuck on a glitchy loop - animals should be back to playing their fidget animations, with babies having a chance of playing their specific baby animation too
    
  • Fixed a small oversight causing animal exhibit preference bars to not produce a tooltip on hover

Performance

• Fixed memory leaks in vegetation tracking
  
• Environmental reflections are now baked for each time of day and weather combo, reducing the stutter and potential performance degradation from the real time probe used previously