Hi everybody! Got some exciting things for you this week! The cop AI has been revised and a new system has been added to it.
Previously the cop AI would try and quarantine from the beginning, with a possible retreat to the station. Now they work in 3 stages:
Incident Mode: This is the stage prior to the knowledge that a zombie outbreak has occurred. The police will hear about individual incidents and backup will be dispatched to deal with each one, as they would with any other crime in the real world. Each incident has marked a zone in blue. It is when they are overwhelmed with incident reports that they switch to Quarantine Mode.
Quarantine Mode: At this stage the cops are all aware they are in a zombie apocalypse and try to contain the threat. Once in this stage they will start looking for infected survivors as well and remove them from the population. This mode is what you all mostly know from the game up to this point. When a certain percentage of cops have been wiped out (the default is 75% but you can change it) the police will go into Retreat Mode as a last resort.
Retreat Mode: The cops have given up on protecting the city and are congregating at the station in order to make a last stand. They will stay here until they are eradicated.
I intend to add more to this revolving around how the cops react to the station being attacked during these stages in later updates. There are a few other changes:
A random building will be assigned as a police station by default. Users can still choose to not have one if they wish or to change it's location. If a police station is not assigned the first two Cop AI stages will still take place, but not the Retreat Mode.
The Military overlay tab is now hidden unless the military are being deployed or are present, as it makes no sense to have a tab that doesn't do anything while there are no military in the sim.
Fixed a crash when using the Find Civilian tool and it would select invalid units.
I hope you enjoy the latest update!
Version 0.11.5 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got something you've all been asking for this week!
Military units now have their own stats that are separate from the cops, so now you can customize them to be better or worse than cops, it's up to you! Some other fixes this week:
Game logs no longer talk about cop stats when there are no cops present in the simulation.
Civilians will now panic when military units are killing civilians and approach their vehicle.
I hope you enjoy this latest update, more to come soon :)
Version 0.11.4 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got some interesting behind the scenes stuff for you this week!
This week I've given the AI an overhaul and updated an important document that I will share with you (open image in new tab to get a real close look):
This flow chart shows nearly all the AI the game uses for the decisions each AI makes. Reforming this has helped me overhaul what needs changing in upcoming updates. Speaking of which, here are the patch notes!
No Survivors mode has been altered so that once it has been activated it cannot be changed back as it doesn't really make sense to have the military change it's mind after executing such an order and it helps fix a lot of AI issues.
Manual control mode has been updated so that players can shoot civilians/cops as the military and that cops can defend against the military now.
AI tweaks that have removed a lot of bugs and erroneous thinking.
Military will now search the building for citizens to kill when the No Survivors option has been activated in the same way they do for zombies.
Military search algorithm for buildings improved.
Thanks for playing everyone and I hope you enjoy the latest update!
Version 0.11.3 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got two parts updated for you this week!
So this week's update requires a bit of an explanation. First of all I set off to fix a bug with the military where units would get stuck and stop moving. This has led me down a bit of a rabbit hole of fixing the underground systems that the AI use. As a result of this one of the changes I needed to make was to change the editor mode so that it does not accept city blocks that have unreachable areas:
I made a nice visual effect to show where it is so people can fix it.
The other part of this update is that I fixed that AI bug. The military now do a better job of figuring out how to reach their destination, though there's still a bit of work going on under the hood to make a more interesting system in the future.
Also there was a bug where on reset the UI would forget the setting of No Survivors on the military, this bug is fixed!
Hope you enjoy the game as always everyone!
Version 0.11.2 is now live
Hi everyone! Got some exciting things for you this week!
The military has a new option when being deployed called No Survivors:
When this is checked the military will attempt to wipe out all the remaining survivors as well as the zombies. As a result the simulation will not end even if all zombies have been eradicated when there is still conflict between the military and survivors. They will even confront the police who will fight back!
Also new: destroyed vehicles now have smoke coming from them!
This might be the beginning of adding some new visual aspects to the game, though I'll be trying to keep performance issues in mind while adding them.
Last there's a small fix regarding infection rates. Previously infection rates were applied when a person dies, which meant people were incorrectly getting infected when bit even when the rate was set to 0%. The rate is now set per bite so that there's a chance on each bite a user will get infected. The default is still 100% but it'll work properly if people try different values now.
I hope you enjoy the latest update!
Version 0.11.1 is now live!
Hi everybody! Got a small update for you this week.
Patch Notes:
Cops will now barricade alongside civilians, either when they are doing a last stand in the police station or when guarding a building.
The cop overlay visuals have been adjusted to not show incorrect quarantine information on blocks.
The code has also been reworked to have all the compilation warnings removed.
Hope you all have a good week!
Version 0.11.0 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got an exciting update for you this week! Presenting the panic driving update!
Civilians will now panic when confronted by a zombie while they are driving their car and drive recklessly into zombies, people and other vehicles. This can create quite a situation:
So this update took a bit longer than the others because of the large amount of different situations that can occur. Cops will not panic drive, they will get out and fight the threat. Panic driving cars will drive faster than normal cars and will stop panicking if they encounter nothing after 50 turns. If they encounter a wall or another vehicle they will crash and destroy the vehicle. I hope in future updates to have it so that abandoned vehicles can still be used by survivors.
I hope you enjoy this recent update as it takes the game another step closer to being out of early access!
Version 0.10.5 is now live!
Hi everyone! A bit of a small update this week because the UK weather has been FAR TOO HOT recently!
The main change of this week is a behaviour update where civilians will now flee when cops fire their weapons. This is a continuation of 0.10.2's update where infected behaviour changes were added so that cops could shoot infected humans. This shakes up the dynamic a little bit because it means infected humans will attempt to flee being executed before they turn.
Also fixed a bug introduced in the UI update that caused reserve ammo and ammo count tooltips being the wrong way around.
I hope you enjoy the latest update!
Version 0.10.4 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got some quality of life features for you this week!
The sim now shows and detects the amount of ammo the remaining cops have and if they have enough to take out the remaining zombies and infected. The simulation will tell the user that the scenario has a 99% probability of being overrun by zombies without military intervention.
There are also tooltips to explain the time and R-rate values so hopefully the sim is more clear about how it works. Bug Fixes:
"Temporarily Dead" corpses are now set as "Dead" when cops shoot them. Changed how R rate is calculated to better reflect infection.
Hope you all enjoy the latest update!
Version 0.10.3 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got some UI changes for you this week!
First of all the UI has been shrunk in size by a rather significant proportion to make more room for more options. I think it looks better for the change but I'm interested to know what you think!
With this new UI change I have also added a new slider option:
This allows you to set when human behaviour will change when infected into a suspicious zombie-like mode that was added last week.
