Wait, That's Too Much Carnage?!

We've been incredibly humbled by the sheer volume of people trying to play PCE on Steam recently. Our development team is less than 5 people at present, we mostly work on Primal Carnage as a passion project outside of our day jobs...

So, opening the game and seeing so many full matches was amazing. It's been a lot to take in.

Once again, welcome to all of our new blood! We hope you're enjoying the carnage so far.

The team has been racing to make sure player inventories and servers stay up under heavy load, but it has certainly been a challenge!

ADDRESSING SERVER STABILITY

It's lucky that we reached out to Shockbyte last month for our server hosting, they've been able to help us scale up to meet demand. In a normal week there would barely be need for more than 10 dedicated servers, we now have over 30 official dedicated servers!

With this patch, we were able to make some server code improvements that shouid help with being able to connect when there's a high volume of requests.

Our community has often called this the "ghost player" problem, where players will disconnect from a server but they still take up a slot. This leads to strange situations where the browser might say there's 54 out of 32 players in a match, with the "ghosts" preventing new players from joining it.

We're hoping the changes we made this patch mitigate this problem somewhat, if not outright fix it.

(NOT) GETTING TO THE CHOPPER

Get to the Chopper mode still sadly has a crashing problem when swapping between maps. Our programmers will be investigating why the mode is misbehaving, but it may take until the next major game update to resolve (June).

For now, there will be a smaller amount of single-map GTTC matches going live. With map rotation disabled, they should be less prone to crashing at least. We're sorry for the inconvenience, GTTC is the team's favourite mode so it pains us that more people can't play it currently.

LOCAL SERVER HOSTING

With the influx of new players we've seen a lot of requests to host private servers where you can just play with your friends. We're sorry this isn't more straightforward.

We do have a Host Game option where you can set a password, however PCE was built around dedicated servers not Peer 2 Peer (which is what the ingame hosting uses). Host Game was originally intended for LAN games. This means that without extra setup these matches usually don't show in the online server browser and cannot be connected to.

If you would like to try hosting a match on your own PC, we've added some helpful instructions to the Host Game menu now and link to a community guide about port forwarding. Note: this may vary depending on your router.

As part of the PlayStation relaunch, we've fixed a number of bugs that come with running p2p servers over there. We're going to try bringing some of these to PCE on PC this summer. There's also a bigger Steam server architecture overhaul that is being investigated.

Hotfix 3.3.2

Change Log:

• sever code improvements to mitigate "ghost" player slots

• added some information to Host Game menu about how to port forward

• most official servers are now highlighted gold in the server browser again

• added link to Shockbyte dedicated server provider

• fixed a crash when trying to equip items when user has a very large inventory

• fixed Flyer shader being set to "mildly frosty" by default

• fixed Kilowatt Commando being bodyswapped with Kilowatt Pathfinder

• removed a non-solid fence on GTTC-RuthlessSnow map

• rebuilt lighting on GTTC-Downpour map

• minor updates to UtilityBase map

• minor tweaks to main menu map lighting

• reduced intensity of image sharpening filter

• reduced brightness of grass

Please bear with us for the next hour or two as the official servers download and install the new patch, it will take a little bit of time for the community hosts to update their setups as well.

UPCOMING

Earlier we mentioned the start of the sandbox beta on PC, which should begin this weekend. If you want to try it out, make sure to install the separate PCE Open Testing Beta app in your Steam library!

The first set of mutations for sandbox dinosaurs will be out as part of the Summer Meltdown update this June, when the rest of the Evolution content is added to the live game. Additional sandbox creatures such as Brachiosaurus will be added in the coming months.

And in case you thought we forgot, there's still new weapons on the horizon:

We're also translating PCE into several languages - Brazilian Portugeuse, German, Italian, French and Castellan Spanish so far on PlayStation, and will be bringing those languages to PC this summer. We are also looking at support for Polish language among others if we can fix a few text rendering issues.

Thanks for playing!

-The Primal Carnage Team