Planet Zoo - Update 1.0.3

Swjosdotschka

Swjosdotschka
Phew... I'll be completly honest with you all. I have very little bugs ans none of them are gane breaking. I know some people have, but I luckily have not. And while for me features are missing the game was marketed for (conservation, visiually different animals with different behaviour and personalities), I still don't see the game as unfinished. Because for me, this game is HUGE and you can do so many things in it already, that I can wait for the rest to be patched in and polished. Maybe that i due to my playstyle. I mean, my playstyle is the reason why I don't like sims anymore and others love it more than ever.

This surely will not turn out into lots of lost sales or a marketing drama for frontier. This game is simply to unique and can not be replaced with anything else that is currently on the market. (The only reason why the sims is still alive and ea can do anything in my opinion, by the way).

I'll join the club when the things I'm missing will never come. I understand that not everybody can share my opinion. As I said, it really might be due to my expierinces with EA and my playstyle. I mean, I despite franchise the way it is and others love it. We are all different. That's why I am relaxed, why I can at least understand some complains, even if I do not share them. But the rage, I will never get.
 

Imagin

Imagin
Swjosdotschka said:
You never played Sims 4, did you?
A lot of the new sandbox features were based on feedback, that wasn't there before release. They already said they will include some more (vandalism turned off I believe) in a later update. I think that alone is proof enough that we are heard.

I agree that sometimes delaying is a better solution. But these days unfortunaetly isn't always possible due to reasons of marketing, investment, however. As you say yourself: Planet Zoo has great potential and I'm sure it will reach that sooner or later. I do too missing content and features we were promised we will get. But I see how much the devs are working their butts of here and I (seriously not short in critical words normally) just do not feel the need to complain yet. Maybe because I was too long in the claws of EA, I don't know.

With the time issue: They said that they are working on it and that's not as easy as it seems. I'm only getting worried if we still don't have a good solution for it before the first paid DLC comes out.
Click to expand...

You'd feel differently if you had a zoo you put a hundred-odd hours into become unplayable.
 

marcnesiumHH

M
It's time for a tale. You may wanna take one to two minutes to read it carefully, tho many new posts on Instagram, Twitter and Reddit are waiting for you to be liked.

A successful, talented and above-the-average passionate Frontier developer has been working at least 12 hours a day for the last 6 months to get the company's newest game ready for launch right before Christmas, the most important season regarding customer sales in a year. The company is listed at the stock exchange, a huge growth in sales would also please the stakeholders and thus the possibility of a large bonus for a successful game launch.

Because she's ever been a huge movie fan she is able to order a soundbar at Amazon during her 15 minutes lunch break while hastily grabbing a coffee and a sandwich. She has to return to the office, fixing bugs!
This soundbar is the latest innovation, only this company has this technology so far. The best surround sound without a 5.1 system on earth. A technological revolution like the iPod or iPhone.

Three days later, the soundbar is delivered. At 02.00am, hastily and full of joy she is unwrapping, connecting and configuring everything. Her all-time favorite bluray is already in the player - Jurassic Park with its epic film music and its groundbreaking animations. She turns on the TV and the soundbar, hits the play button and...it just plays in stereo sound and there's no way to change it, even after hours of troubleshooting.
It's 07.00am, only one hour before she has to be back in office. Bug fixing to please the customers. She visits the official website of the manufacturer and learns that not all, but most of the customers are only getting stereo sound. There are comments like: "don't be upset, there are manufacturers, which sell totally malfunctioning soundbars. You should be content that there is sound at all" or like "there are other manufacturers, whose soundbars with a 5 year old technology have no problems at all. They are even less expensive."

And there's an official comment by the manufacturer: "We are aware that there might be some customers with problems regarding our latest groundbreaking soundbar (C). Though we are already aware of this issue, please register on our separate customer relationship website and open a ticket because our keep-the-customers-always-happy-department requires to. We are working on it."

[Enter an end according to your own imagination]

A nice weekend for all of you!
 
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willibix

willibix
Swjosdotschka said:
With the time issue: They said that they are working on it and that's not as easy as it seems. I'm only getting worried if we still don't have a good solution for it before the first paid DLC comes out.
Click to expand...

If they do release a DLC before they are back to playable state, well I think some1 deserve to go to prison for fraud! hahahaha.Maybe the rise in refunds was some satirical joke from the devs expecting the same thing will happen with their game.... O.OLet's laugh it off a little. It is, after all, a game, and nobody will really die of it – only virtual animals…

I'll tell you a little software story.... there as been a major screwup in software development where I live. Long story short, a new federal paycheck software was released too early and with bad design. All kinds of Gov employees went without pay for months, some lost their houses... A few weeks ago, there was a suicide, a lady that had lost her house and was still not getting paid. She was facing living in the streets – she refused to do so and... killed herself.

We know why the screwup happened - the senior team got all recruited by a Japanese tech company, major rise in salary - impossible to refuse, the team all went «pouf». They gave the project to the juniors... rushed the launch... didn't plan for reversion options.... almost 2 years later, there's a suicide. Death by software ??? And it's not even AI.... Nah…The true reason : bad management + ignorant sales department.

Computer programs are buggy, bugs do happen and they demand time to solve - sometimes even more time than to create the thing in the first place, we KNOW about it - we can even build predictive models of it !!! What you can do to help that is minor … Research has shown that the most important factor in software maintenance costs (bug solving revision and addition) is the number of comments in your code. Meaning: pressure for time is what makes code unintelligible, ugly, makes bugs harder to solve and additions way more tricky.

Bugs will happen… But bad management don’t really have to happen, we could all do without it, wouldn't you say ? We could live very well without any marketing strategies that put unreasonable deadlines to a work in progress – as I just stated, it is the initial cause of many of the problems - release would be FASTER without the deadline!
I do prefer to have worst managers managing games than say... healt care, fire departement.... they all went to the same schools and apply all the same crappy logic everywhere... so let's look on the bright side and mourn our virtual lions, lol !
 

Imagin

Imagin
willibix said:
If they do release a DLC before they are back to playable state, well I think some1 deserve to go to prison for fraud! hahahaha.Maybe the rise in refunds was some satirical joke from the devs expecting the same thing will happen with their game.... O.OLet's laugh it off a little. It is, after all, a game, and nobody will really die of it – only virtual animals…

I'll tell you a little software story.... there as been a major screwup in software development where I live. Long story short, a new federal paycheck software was released too early and with bad design. All kinds of Gov employees went without pay for months, some lost their houses... A few weeks ago, there was a suicide, a lady that had lost her house and was still not getting paid. She was facing living in the streets – she refused to do so and... killed herself.

We know why the screwup happened - the senior team got all recruited by a Japanese tech company, major rise in salary - impossible to refuse, the team all went «pouf». They gave the project to the juniors... rushed the launch... didn't plan for reversion options.... almost 2 years later, there's a suicide. Death by software ??? And it's not even AI.... Nah…The true reason : bad management + ignorant sales department.

Computer programs are buggy, bugs do happen and they demand time to solve - sometimes even more time than to create the thing in the first place, we KNOW about it - we can even build predictive models of it !!! What you can do to help that is minor … Research has shown that the most important factor in software maintenance costs (bug solving revision and addition) is the number of comments in your code. Meaning: pressure for time is what makes code unintelligible, ugly, makes bugs harder to solve and additions way more tricky.

Bugs will happen… But bad management don’t really have to happen, we could all do without it, wouldn't you say ? We could live very well without any marketing strategies that put unreasonable deadlines to a work in progress – as I just stated, it is the initial cause of many of the problems - release would be FASTER without the deadline!
I do prefer to have worst managers managing games than say... healt care, fire departement.... they all went to the same schools and apply all the same crappy logic everywhere... so let's look on the bright side and mourn our virtual lions, lol !
Click to expand...

Hello fellow Canadian :) You are absolutely right.
 

NZFanatic

NZFanatic
Speaking of DLC, it is entirely possible that future bug fixes will be included in a DLC. Plenty of games do it that way; the Sims used to, and so did Zoo Tycoon. You'd buy the expansion/DLC and get a massive patch along with new content. I'm not saying Frontier will necessarily do it that way, but it feels like a lot of people are being rather melodramatic about the whole thing.

In saying that, I've never been a "gamer", so this kind of backlash isn't something I'm used to.
 

Imagin

Imagin
Imagin said:
I think that perhaps the reason that some are having problems and some aren't depends on their zoo. The Sandbox zoo I was working on before 1.0.3 has become unplayable. Others experienced no problems. I started a new Sandbox Zoo last night to do some testing and didn't have any problems. Perhaps there was just so much in that patch that it was causing conflicts with what I had. For now, I'm just going to keep my new zoo closed and paused and play with building and terraforming. No guests, no animals, and no staff until I'm sure this won't happen again. The building system is working better than ever since the patch so I'll focus on that. Terraforming is freaking amazing in this game so that's safe to play with too. No way I'm going through this again with a zoo I put so much effort into. I'll save everything as blueprints and wait until Frontier finishes the game to the point it's just tweaks and addons. I hope they take their time and get it right.
Click to expand...

Nevermind what I said about building being better than ever. I just lost a bunch of work to a crash. Zoo was just created last night and is closed. No guests, no animals, no staff. Nothing but an entrance with a bit of path and 1 exhibit. I was just playing around with building, not even anything fancy. I never crashed before 1.0.3.

i7-9700
32G Ram
RTX 2070
DirextX 12
Fiber net connection
all drivers & Win 10 updated - nothing else crashes on this sytem - ever

Frontier?
 
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Nat1984

N
In Sandbox, I’ve had a lot less crashes since this update. A few things needed tweaking- some work zones seemed to have disappeared etc but was easily rectified.
To be honest, prior to this update, my game crashed a lot and it drove me mad. So for me, this update has been really good.
 

Imagin

Imagin
Nat1984 said:
In Sandbox, I’ve had a lot less crashes since this update. A few things needed tweaking- some work zones seemed to have disappeared etc but was easily rectified.
To be honest, prior to this update, my game crashed a lot and it drove me mad. So for me, this update has been really good.
Click to expand...

How odd, prior to this update the only problem I experienced was starving and thirsty animals in one exhibit where I had about 30. It was not a big zoo, just 4 habitats and a handful of exhibits. Everything was set up properly with workzones and ran perfectly. Since the update my zoo is unplayable. I only play in Sandbox too and I'm wary to start another now because of the crashes. So for me, this update has been horrible. It's not my computer and it's not my zoo so why do we have such widely different experiences with the same update?
 

marcnesiumHH

M
Imagin said:
How odd, prior to this update the only problem I experienced was starving and thirsty animals in one exhibit where I had about 30. It was not a big zoo, just 4 habitats and a handful of exhibits. Everything was set up properly with workzones and ran perfectly. Since the update my zoo is unplayable. I only play in Sandbox too and I'm wary to start another now because of the crashes. So for me, this update has been horrible. It's not my computer and it's not my zoo so why do we have such widely different experiences with the same update?
Click to expand...
I am upset, too. I've been loosing several save games over the past weeks but fortunately I have been ever been able to rescue my only franchise zoo by loading an older save.
However, it's very common that they are quite different experiences, which heavily depends on the specific zoo setup and dimension, playstyle (workzones for everything; none at all) and the specific PC setup. Before you start raging, I'm talking in general not about your specific case.
I dared to start my broken franchise zoo again yesterday (after 2 days not touching it) and was able to deal with most of the bugs, thus running it profitable again.
But this again took some hours to invest and a deep knowledge of the game after 300+ hours play time, which many people don't have and don't want to invest in a game. Which is absolutely comprehensible.
 

NZFanatic

NZFanatic
I started a new sandbox zoo last night and it seemed to be running fine. No guests on the staff path, and weirdly the heat-map didn't automatically pop up when I placed down an education board (it still did for the conservation display).
 

NZFanatic

NZFanatic
NZFanatic said:
I started a new sandbox zoo last night and it seemed to be running fine. No guests on the staff path, and weirdly the heat-map didn't automatically pop up when I placed down an education board (it still did for the conservation display).
Click to expand...

Scratch that, must have been a glitch. It brought up the heat map for the next one I placed.
 

StockInsAug

S
CloudBerry said:
I think there is some mess with food price for animals..

Before i had 2 Grizzly bears and food showed under 300 now i have 2...and it showed over 20k ? what? :D
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Yes, there something realy went wrong. The food for my Gavials costs now 18k. Before the update it was just 600$. I stopped playing atm, before i go broke. :(
 

Nat1984

N
Imagin said:
How odd, prior to this update the only problem I experienced was starving and thirsty animals in one exhibit where I had about 30. It was not a big zoo, just 4 habitats and a handful of exhibits. Everything was set up properly with workzones and ran perfectly. Since the update my zoo is unplayable. I only play in Sandbox too and I'm wary to start another now because of the crashes. So for me, this update has been horrible. It's not my computer and it's not my zoo so why do we have such widely different experiences with the same update?
Click to expand...

No idea to be honest. The crashes over placing workshop blueprints has even stopped.
 
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