Prison Architect Alpha 7 RELEASED
Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2013 2:33 pm
Breaking news: Starting with Alpha 8, Prison Architect will be a PS4 platform exclusive!
Just kidding. What other platform could have supported something like our Prison Architect Alpha but the mighty PC? The PC is the ultimate open platform, both on the game development side AND the business side - we decide when we are ready to release our game to you guys, and we set the business model that best suits our alpha needs. As of last week, thirty thousand of you agreed with our approach and jumped on board with us. We love the process of delivering new updates to you guys and your feedback and your youtube videos inspire us to work harder. Prison Architect will be a better game because of our alpha process, and opening it up to the community in this way could only ever happen on the PC.
Here’s our Alpha7 video.
Download it straight from our website : www.prison-architect.com/builds.html
Use your forum username and password to access the builds.
You can also get the latest version from the download url in your email purchase receipt.
In alpha 7 we’ve started making good on the some of the promises we made in the higher level tiers to include face in the game and name in the game entries. This is our way of giving back to those customers who are in a position to help at those higher different levels - you’ve been incredibly generous to us. You’ll find a new option in the Main Menu to list all the current Names in the game and Faces in the game, and you can transfer any of them into your prison straight away. In addition, about one third of all randomly generated prisoners will now take their name and bio from this database, meaning our prisons just became a little bit more colourful ; )
If you’ve bought the game and fancy including your own name and bio in our database, then we have a special offer for you. For the next two weeks you can upgrade your purchase for just an extra $10 - half what the upgrade would usually cost.
(Note: This upgrade does not include the game itself - you are purchasing your name and bio in our game database)
Click here to upgrade to the Name in the game.
Moving on, we’ve made a fairly massive change to the game AI rules. From this point forward, only guards can open locked doors. Previously we had a slightly weird situation where prisoners and staff could simply glide through any locked door, so long as they weren’t misbehaving. Jail doors ended up looking like supermarket doors, sliding open willingly. With this new change, your guards will be kept very busy indeed running around and unlocking doors to let prisoners and staff through. You will need to ensure you have enough guards distributed around your jail through the deployment system, otherwise people will end up waiting by locked doors for hours and will fail to achieve their needs or assigned jobs. You will need to think carefully when securing a building with several heavy doors, because this will tie up your guards for a lot of their day. This is another massive change to the guts of the game, and makes the prisons feel quite different.
We’ve also introduced two new Emergencies buttons. “Lockdown” immediately closes and locks all jail doors, sealing everyone wherever they happen to be. This is extremely useful during an attempted escape attempt. Long term fans of Prison Architect will no doubt have experienced the frustration of a single janitor opening the front gates just as a bunch of armed / escaping prisoners run through. This will help with that.
The other emergency button - “Bang Up” - instructs all prisoners to return to their cells. This is useful for crowd control when a fight breaks out. We may consider moving these two new alarm buttons to the main toolbar at some point.
And finally, long overdue, you’ll see a new Options menu in the Main Menu. From here you can change the resolution, fullscreen/windowed etc. You can also press F11 at any time to toggle fullscreen. It’s hard to believe we got by for so long without these basic options! Lucky customers with a shiny new Retina Mac can pick the highest resolution from the list (2560x1600 on a 13” screen!) and enjoy Prison Architect with a level of detail currently unsurpassed.
We hope you enjoy the game.
Here is the full change list:
Stay up to date:
Subscribe to our Blog
Subscribe to our Youtube channel
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Join our mailing list
Just kidding. What other platform could have supported something like our Prison Architect Alpha but the mighty PC? The PC is the ultimate open platform, both on the game development side AND the business side - we decide when we are ready to release our game to you guys, and we set the business model that best suits our alpha needs. As of last week, thirty thousand of you agreed with our approach and jumped on board with us. We love the process of delivering new updates to you guys and your feedback and your youtube videos inspire us to work harder. Prison Architect will be a better game because of our alpha process, and opening it up to the community in this way could only ever happen on the PC.
Here’s our Alpha7 video.
Download it straight from our website : www.prison-architect.com/builds.html
Use your forum username and password to access the builds.
You can also get the latest version from the download url in your email purchase receipt.
In alpha 7 we’ve started making good on the some of the promises we made in the higher level tiers to include face in the game and name in the game entries. This is our way of giving back to those customers who are in a position to help at those higher different levels - you’ve been incredibly generous to us. You’ll find a new option in the Main Menu to list all the current Names in the game and Faces in the game, and you can transfer any of them into your prison straight away. In addition, about one third of all randomly generated prisoners will now take their name and bio from this database, meaning our prisons just became a little bit more colourful ; )
If you’ve bought the game and fancy including your own name and bio in our database, then we have a special offer for you. For the next two weeks you can upgrade your purchase for just an extra $10 - half what the upgrade would usually cost.
(Note: This upgrade does not include the game itself - you are purchasing your name and bio in our game database)
Click here to upgrade to the Name in the game.
Moving on, we’ve made a fairly massive change to the game AI rules. From this point forward, only guards can open locked doors. Previously we had a slightly weird situation where prisoners and staff could simply glide through any locked door, so long as they weren’t misbehaving. Jail doors ended up looking like supermarket doors, sliding open willingly. With this new change, your guards will be kept very busy indeed running around and unlocking doors to let prisoners and staff through. You will need to ensure you have enough guards distributed around your jail through the deployment system, otherwise people will end up waiting by locked doors for hours and will fail to achieve their needs or assigned jobs. You will need to think carefully when securing a building with several heavy doors, because this will tie up your guards for a lot of their day. This is another massive change to the guts of the game, and makes the prisons feel quite different.
We’ve also introduced two new Emergencies buttons. “Lockdown” immediately closes and locks all jail doors, sealing everyone wherever they happen to be. This is extremely useful during an attempted escape attempt. Long term fans of Prison Architect will no doubt have experienced the frustration of a single janitor opening the front gates just as a bunch of armed / escaping prisoners run through. This will help with that.
The other emergency button - “Bang Up” - instructs all prisoners to return to their cells. This is useful for crowd control when a fight breaks out. We may consider moving these two new alarm buttons to the main toolbar at some point.
And finally, long overdue, you’ll see a new Options menu in the Main Menu. From here you can change the resolution, fullscreen/windowed etc. You can also press F11 at any time to toggle fullscreen. It’s hard to believe we got by for so long without these basic options! Lucky customers with a shiny new Retina Mac can pick the highest resolution from the list (2560x1600 on a 13” screen!) and enjoy Prison Architect with a level of detail currently unsurpassed.
We hope you enjoy the game.
Here is the full change list:
Code: Select all
= Name-in-the-game / Face-in-the-game
The community database of personalised Names and Faces has been imported into the game
You can view the full database from the main menu option "Names in the game"
Around 30% of all randomly generated prisoners will now include a custom name and bio taken from this database
You can manually transfer any prisoner from this list into your jail - they will arrive in the 8am delivery
= Only Guards can open doors
All locked doors must now be opened by Guards using their keys. Prisoners and staff must wait to be let in.
The exception is the doors on each jail Cell, which open automatically when the prisoner should be let out
Office doors are never locked - anyone can pass through at any time
You can right click on any door to open it manually
Doors can be blocked open but will gradually push blocking objects aside until they close
= Alarm buttons
Under 'Emergencies' there are two new "alarm" buttons:
LOCKDOWN immediately closes and locks all the doors in the prison
Guards will not open doors for anyone. However they will unlock doors on their way if you move them somewhere
BANGUP instructs all prisoners to return immediately to their cell (confusingly, this was called Lockdown in alpha6)
Prisoners will obviously ignore this alarm if they are misbehaving
= Game Options menu
From the main menu you can now access an 'Options' menu to control the application settings
Under GRAPHICS You can control the screen resolution, fullscreen/windowed setting and filtering mode
- Multisampling uses fullscreen anti-aliasing (4xMSAA) to improve the sprite render quality
- Supersampling renders everything at double resolution then downscales to your screen
Both improve the game visuals at the cost of reduced performance
There are also options for Sound, Game etc
- You can now press F11 at any time to toggle fullscreen
- You can press ctrl-p at any time to save a screenshot
- The game will no longer crash on launch if your previous save game was corrupted.
We have disabled autoload of previous saved games for now, until we can fix some loading issues.
(The game now launches with a new empty sandbox)
- Prisoners can now be re-categorised (Max/normal/Min) from their rap sheet
- All research times have been halved
- Fixed: Building lots of fences whilst paused caused endless delivery of empty boxes
- Fixed: Prisoners were no longer bothering to run around the yard whilst exercising
- Fixed: The main build toolbar was sometimes scaled wrongly at certain resolutions,
leading to an annoying scrollbar in the lists of objects/rooms etc
- Performance improvements:
Fixed a major performance bug in the renderer, causing occasional extreme frame lag
Many parts of the render system have been optimised - some visual glitches may occur in entity animations
Stay up to date:
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sorry me!
