Features from Planet Zoo

WingardiumLevicoaster

Volunteer Moderator
WingardiumLevicoaster
Would you be happy to have the backwards compatibility and other features at a cost of worse performance? Sometimes it's not possible to have it all. Development is always a game of trade offs, and everyone has a different idea of what they would prefer. I see that you feel that this could have affected sales, but I'm sure only Frontier would know and that would inform decisions in the future. I would think that the decisions made of features would be chosen based on what several people think will sell best and is the best for the series. Of course I would love these things, but it doesn't mean it's the best thing for a game to be most successful.
Still, we don't know what we get until later for Planet Zoo anyway. Retro updating Planet Coaster sounds unlikely from a technical standpoint from Frontier's statement.
 

breezerHOG

breezerHOG
Why are we repeating this convo? We know there wont be b/c

I spoke my mind and I made my opinion very clear, the poor performance issue is just one reason this game isnt as popular as it could be, and you ask me if I would be ok with worse performance? clearly your just playing games with me now

If performance was such an issue then it should have been fixed within beta, the guest Ai was always the biggest bottle neck so the first thing I would have removed was the inability for guests to walk through each other (at least as an option), cause that doesnt really add that much value to the game at all, especially for people with low guest count. Then I would have improved the transportation system as that always puts a dent in performance

If they can add rain into Plazoo then they obviously improved performance within the engine, so no it doesnt make sense to me that we had to go the route we did with this series. Most people assume buying a better CPU would improve frame rates in this game, but it really doesnt make that much difference when its the engine itself thats performing poorly
 
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WingardiumLevicoaster

Volunteer Moderator
WingardiumLevicoaster
Im really sorry if you felt that way about my post. I'm just trying to offer an insight of how things are based on my experience. It can be pretty frustrating for development decisions to be dismissed as wrong or not thought about or code being bad. To put it down to such simple answers can be hurtful to professionals.

I was referring to the full list in the im about not knowing what will happen, rather than b/C specifically and trying to offer some hope.
 

AliceInUK

AliceInUK
Planet Zoo features the next iteration of our game engine, a new version that has lots of exciting improvements and features that let us bring the world and animals of Planet Zoo to life. The features introduced with Planet Zoo are not backwards compatible with Planet Coaster.
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I understand that the features are not going to be able to be replicated on Planco. Am wondering though if there is any chance of us getting some of the scenery items in a DLC, I am particularly interested in some of the trees Zoo has which PlanCo does not. (guessing you can't answer this one way or another, but worth a try ;-)
 

LN

LN
AliceInUK said:
I understand that the features are not going to be able to be replicated on Planco. Am wondering though if there is any chance of us getting some of the scenery items in a DLC, I am particularly interested in some of the trees Zoo has which PlanCo does not. (guessing you can't answer this one way or another, but worth a try ;-)
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I agree. I hope we can see some items in both games, some scenery stuff from PlanZoo looks very interesting, and would definitely not look bad in my theme park.
 

wowman

wowman
Luuknoord said:
I agree. I hope we can see some items in both games, some scenery stuff from PlanZoo looks very interesting, and would definitely not look bad in my theme park.
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I would love this. even though the engine and the logic behind the scenes may be different, scenery items seems as simple as just importing the model. I clearly have no idea, but that is what it seems like to me. It would like a PZ scenery DLC. Not saying we need all the game features, just the scenery assets. I would pay for this in a second.
 

mr.sugar

M
breezerHOG said:
  • Weather (whats different about PlaZoo that it can work there but not here?
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Well, it´s engine that got improved. It´s normal, that newer game will utilize better features. Cobra engine is evolving for years, you could argue about RCT3 not having some features from PlanetCoaster, because it´s using the "same engine". Adding these new featuers to old game is not that easy as it sounds. When the game is released, it usually closes the door for doing bigger changes to the engine.

breezerHOG said:
Transfer-ability:
  • Seems like such a waste if blueprints cant be compatible, Especially all the scenery
  • DLC scenery kits should be shared, like Spooky/Adventure/etc stuff should transfer seamlessly to PlaZo
  • Very sad that we have to give up so much to gain a few new features, since were basically starting all scenery over from scratch even though its essentially the same game and same engine
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Sounds very entitled to say "it SHOULD BE shared". Why should it be? You bought the DLC for Planet Coaster and you got what you paid for. How can you expect you will get more? It´s not just that it´s not compatible withing the different engine branches, but why should they give you basically a DLC free for Planet Zoo.

I must agree that spline based tool for fences is something that should have been in PlanCo since day one (one would say they would design the game with this in mind), but oh well :(. Agree about some other features too. But it´s really not the same game or engine anymore, so you cannot expect these games to be "tied" together in any way.
 

breezerHOG

breezerHOG
mr.sugar said:
it´s really not the same game or engine anymore, so you cannot expect these games to be "tied" together in any way.
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Rockstar and Unreal use different engines, Planco and Plazoo use the same engine. Its just poor programming causing everybody to claim they are different. Slight modifications to the same engine do not count as a different engine, they both utilize the same features and toolsets. Maybe if Planco wasnt such a mess they wouldnt have to strip out all the basic scenery for a "new" game (and i put new in quotes cause its really just an add-on sold as a separate game)

If you read through the entire thread you would see most people agree that basic scenery items such as rocks or plants have no reason for not being shared in both games
 
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Wagi

Wagi
breezerHOG said:
If you read through the entire thread you would see most people agree that basic scenery items such as rocks or plants have no reason for not being shared in both games
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Yeah, but admittedly that's all of what, 14 people? LOL!

I think what 'some' people might want is that basic scenery items like those we see in PZ could also be made available in PC. I'm not expecting them to be free myself, it would just be nice to have assets we see in the new game because they look nice. There very well be a reason why that's not possible due to different coding in the newer version of Cobra, or it might not make economic sense to make them work in both games even if they were offered as dlc (which I would happily pay for...).

I'm not really interested in PZ myself, so I have no expectation that dlc I bought for PC must work in PZ as well, although I think it would be nice that the same basics appear in PZ as part of the base game..
 
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mr.sugar

M
breezerHOG said:
Rockstar uses a different engine, Planco and Plazoo use the same engine. Its just poor programming causing everybody to claim they are different. Slight modifications to the same engine do not count as a different engine, they both utilize the same features and toolsets. Maybe if Planco wasnt such a mess they wouldnt have to strip out all the basic scenery for a "new" game (and i put new in quotes cause its really just an add-on sold as a separate game)

If you read through the entire thread you would see most people agree that basic scenery items such as rocks or plants have no reason for not being shared in both games
Click to expand...
I at least see "economical reasons" not to share assets between games. There also probably are some changes. for instance, you probably noticed scenery now casts shadows. On the other hand, I have to agree that Planet Coaster is a mess in some regards. Already argued about that on the forum in the past. I really cannot understand, why they did certain things the way they did them (complicated, unoptimized and unintuitive). It´s still beyound me why they didn´t add spline for fences for instead or why we have hundreds of walls that have only different texture while it would be much better if there was only one model for each wall type and then you could choose a texture for it...
 

breezerHOG

breezerHOG
mr.sugar said:
I at least see "economical reasons" not to share assets between games.
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I thought that too, but that would mean reselling similar scenery packs such as Spooky or Adventure. I'm sure they will change things up to prevent people from complaining. However, if the scenery was cross-compatible (just scenery not rides) then it might cause more people to buy the older DLCs that originally hadnt purchased them, like all the new players to Plazoo would probably be very happy to buy the Spooky or Adventure scenery packs for Plazoo even if it meant no rides. Although, maybe frontier will end up re-utilizing and repackaging certain assets and calling them new, guess will just have to wait and see how it plays out when people start wanting to make a zoo with spooky scenery
 

Ramm

Ramm
breezerHOG said:
Rockstar and Unreal use different engines, Planco and Plazoo use the same engine. Its just poor programming causing everybody to claim they are different. Slight modifications to the same engine do not count as a different engine, they both utilize the same features and toolsets. Maybe if Planco wasnt such a mess they wouldnt have to strip out all the basic scenery for a "new" game (and i put new in quotes cause its really just an add-on sold as a separate game)

If you read through the entire thread you would see most people agree that basic scenery items such as rocks or plants have no reason for not being shared in both games
Click to expand...
Correct, just because it's a new engine doesn't mean things no longer work. Especially files like models and materials/textures etc will obviously still work in the newer updated engine. I don't know where everybody gets their "information" that this somehow wouldn't work. I think they are just parotting what's being said here.

Or do people really think when Unreal Engine 4.22 is released everything from Unreal Engine 4.21 and before suddenly stops working? Give me a break. Sure some things need to be changed (updated) and every engine is different (we don't know much about the internals of Cobra Engine). But the principle stays the same. And if you even compare trailers or ingame footage of both games you can very well tell they are practicly identical. Just different versions. So saying stuff like models such as tree's from Planet Zoo wouldn't work in Planet Coaster is probably not the case.
 

Ramm

Ramm
mr.sugar said:
It´s still beyound me why they didn´t add spline for fences for instead or why we have hundreds of walls that have only different texture while it would be much better if there was only one model for each wall type and then you could choose a texture for it...
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Or hydraulic launches than can't be on an incline eventhough this is always like this on coasters. But yeah thanks for reminding me about those materials not being available on every model, I remember asking what was up with that back in 2016. And still no spline fence tool, why just why.

It could have been easily fixed if we had REAL Mod support like Cities Skylines had. Then we at least would have had a Prop line Tool to fix this issue for us. But no can't have freedom, can't have mods and can't have anything really game-changing.
 

WingardiumLevicoaster

Volunteer Moderator
WingardiumLevicoaster
All this discussion is painful for me to read as a developer. An engine is like a set of code libraries/framework that does stuff essentially. If you take a new branch of the code and then completely overhaul sections of it, it's not backwards compatible. It's essentially a new engine with similarities to the original. I doubt only slight changes were made given how significant the new features in the game are ( climbing ability on pxp objects, weather). Though, even a slight change could be incompatible with Planet Coaster. By making things backwards compatible, it could limit what you do in the new product. A new branch of the engine allows significant changes to be made without the risk of breaking the original.

I'm no expert in rendering graphics, but I know there is code involved. It's not just a mesh and a texture, so it's possible that if they had to change things for positive reasons such as performance, backwards compatibility would not work. They could however reuse the same meshes and textures.. ( which I think we have seen in screenshots) but blueprints from Planet Coaster would not be compatible if this was the case.
 
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LN

LN
The best sailors are on the shore as they say......

I work in finances, and I hate it when somebody makes remarks on my work without even knowing what went on behind it.
But then, it's easy from behind your computer.

I think Breezer had a fair point to raise some things though.
And it's fine to raise the bad sides of the game, and hope they will take that into account for the next game, but "what if's" or "should have had" doesn't count anymore for a game that was released 2,5 years ago.
 
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