We’ve made a video demonstrating the key new features - take a look:
For this update we’ve focussed on a new system called Fog Of War, which changes the game in a number of ways. Internally we refer to this as the Visibility system, because you now lose visibility of the indoor areas of your jail gradually over time. Your guards are the only staff members who can “unveil” the hidden areas, and if you lose visibility of an area you have no idea what sort of things are going on there. This ties in very closely to the Alpha2 update, because you now have to use Deployment and Patrols to create pathways for your guards to walk along to ensure your entire jail remains fully visible at all times.
Note: Because fog of war is a brand new untested feature, it can be enabled or disabled when creating a new sandbox.
The second major feature in this update is CCTV cameras, and these are obviously related. Sometimes you have areas of your jail which are never visited by prisoners (you’d hope), such as store rooms, admin offices, power facilities etc. You might not want to waste a guards time by patrolling a zone which never has any prisoners in it. So instead you can construct cctv cameras which will give you a permanent “cone of visibility” which slowly sweeps from side to side.
Cctv cameras don’t just work magically (as they do in most videogames for some reason) - they need to actually be watched by a Guard to give you any visibility. You can now construct cctv monitors and assign a guard to watch them, and each monitor effectively powers up to three cctv cameras. A single guard can watch several monitor stations at once if you are clever with your layout.
Those are the two major features for this update, and we have a bunch of bug fixes and small changes as well - see the full list below. It’s worth mentioning that although this wasn’t the most requested item in the vote we are running, it was the closest to completion, so we thought we’d go ahead and release this now rather than sitting on it. The current highest voted item - zoning to allow for different self-containted “wings” within your prison - is our next objective, and should be in either the next Alpha or the one after that. There’s still lots of big changes to come - exciting times for us all.
Join the Prison Architect alpha now at www.prison-architect.com
Full change list
Code: Select all
= Fog-of-war / Visibility system
- You now lose visibility of the indoor areas of your Jail over time (Roof covers up the area)
- Guards reveal the area around them - spread them out to keep your jail fully visible at all times
- Fog of War is optional and can be toggled when creating a new sandbox
= CCtv system
- Unlocked by the Security Chief after Deployment
- CCtv cameras can be used to uncover fog-of-war instead of Guards
- Cctv cameras require monitors - each monitor station allows 3 cameras
- Monitor stations require Guards nearby watching them (One guard can watch a lot of monitors)
- Researching "Deployment" now unlocks Guard Patrols immediately, rather than requiring a seperate research project
- Guards who are deployed within a sector will now stay within that sector unless ordered away by the player
- You can now press R to rotate objects during placement
- You can now press Q and E to zoom in and out
- Metal Detectors improved
- Low powered electrical items no longer take damage from water, nor electrocute people in water
- High powered electrical items should never be allowed to touch water ;)
- Holding Cells no longer count towards your prison's capacity. (And no longer affect intake of prisoners)
- You can now disable the checkerboard room pattern if you wish, to provide a cleaner look
(Controlled by preferences option "RenderRooms")
- The PC executable now has an icon
- Fixed: You can no longer use the "Dismantle Object" tool to dismantle fire, polaroids, vehicles etc
- Fixed: Lights can now be dismantled
- Fixed: You can no longer search dead prisoners
- Fixed: The "Incident Reports" objective was sometimes remaining hidden when it should be displayed
- Fixed: You can no longer rotate the following objects: Light, Tree, Electric chair
- Fixed: Saving a prison with a '#' symbol in the filename would cause the game to fail to start on next run
(Preferences.txt would remember the map filename and the game fails to autoload the prison on startup)
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