Hi everyone! Got the next step of civilian self defence for you this week!
Civilians that have been alerted to the situation will spot weaponry laying around and pick it up to arm themselves. This is the first update where someone who isn't armed at the beginning of a sim can now become armed.
I've also updated Control Mode to reflect these changes so that players directly controlling civilians can pick up weapons and use them.
I've also extended the range of which unaware civilians spot dead bodies from 3 tiles to 5.
Hopefully this update will add a lot of new fun ways to play the game! Thanks as always and see you in the next update!
Version 0.19.0 is now live!
Hi everyone! I know you have all been waiting for this for a very long time so I'm super excited to present this update!
Civilians can now defend themselves with firearms!
The population screen now has the following settings:
There is the Armed Chance, which is the percentage of the population that are armed. Underneath is the same kind of stats used for Cops and Military but is exclusive to civilians. I've given them by default a single clip and less accuracy to try and make up for a possible lack of training but the values are changeable to whatever you wish.
With this comes some changes in civilian behaviour. Civilians with firearms will no longer panic unless they are out of ammo and will not flee but attempt to fight the threat. Civilians are capable of picking up ammo but at the moment an unarmed civilian cannot become an armed one. I wish to add this to a future update.
With this simulations have an interesting new dynamic as civilians will be able to survive scenarios on their own without police or military protection. I look forward to hearing what you make of it!
Thanks for playing!
Version 0.18.3 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got the next stage of the Cop AI update for you this week!
Cops now tell citizens to evacuate from quarantine areas! They will tell them to leave the building and go down the street targeting regions that are not currently under quarantine.
This feels like it gives the sim more depth though it doesn't necessarily guarantee survival as infected humans end up being evacuated together into groups causing more trouble!
I'd like to have something further down the line where you have regions designated as quarantine zones that people could be evacuated to, but I'd like to hear your thoughts!
I also have fixed a bug where cops were trying to clear buildings of zombies when they were out of ammo.
Thanks everyone and I hope you enjoy the updates!
Version 0.18.2 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got a follow up to last week's ammo update for you this week!
You can now set the amount of ammo the police station has, from 0 to 10,000 and then Infinite. I've also added the ability to track the amount of ammo the station has remaining when the mouse is over the ammo prompt:
The second part of this week's update has been spent on improving the AI, specifically the code that deals with trying to get into formation. I'm sure if you've spent some time with the game you've noticed police have had trouble getting into these kinds of formations:
Units were either getting stuck on cars or other units blocking them and ended up moving back and forth. I've reworked this algorithm so they are much better at getting into position and the police are a lot more efficient as a result.
I think soon I'll be winding down on tweaking Cop AI so let me know what you want to see next! Thanks for playing!
Version 0.18.1 is now live!
Hi everyone! This week is the next step of the Cop AI overhaul! Let's get into it.
The police station now has ammo reserves! At the moment it's just a flat amount (3000 bullets) but I want to allow the user to modify it soon. The AI has been changed to work with this new addition though!
When cops are out of ammo they will now withdraw to the police station, restock on ammo and go back into the field. This really helps cops deal with outbreak situations and they are a lot better at dealing with outbreaks now. I'll have to buff the zombies again in a future update to compensate!
I've also fixed the R rate display as it was pretty much doing all the math wrong since airborne infection was introduced. It should now accurately represent the rate of reinfection of infected survivors as intended.
Some small other issues I fixed:
Changed "infected" to "zombies" in some of the logs because of the existence of immune infected
Soon to come I will be adding a slider option to set how much ammo the police station has stocked. I hope you enjoy the latest update and there's plenty more to come!
Version 0.18.0 is now live!
Hi everyone! I hope you are all doing well.
This week I'm moving to version 18 and the theme of the next set of updates is adding more to the Cop system!
Some of the cops are now assigned jobs working at the police station:
Where before this update the police station was pretty much treated the same as other buildings except when retreating in the final stages, now cops will be assigned to manning the posts at the station. It's currently set to either 10% of the cops or 200, whichever is lower. (I would like to add a slider letting players adjust this later).
These cops will patrol around the station making sure everything is okay and acting as "dispatch" for the other cops to communicate with the system. This leads on to the second part of the new update:
The station can now request assistance if it is being overrun and all officers will respond to help save it. At the moment that just means if there are zombies in the building they will sound this alarm but once they are taken care of they will resume normal duties and in the future I plan to make a more flexible system that allows different parameters to decide when to invoke this emergency response.
Cops withdraw in a different way now - previously they used to just crowd around the building and walk into it but now I have taken the time to rework a lot of the commuting code so that the cops can use that to walk to the station.
There are a lot of little code reworkings going on under the hood that are going to change how things work, one of these was trying to create an organised system for telling units to go to buildings which was sort of the catalyst for this entire update.
There is still a lot to add to get the cop AI to be where I want it to be but this is the first update of many for it. I think this makes the simulations more interesting and future things I want to add is things like survivors sheltering in the station, more options for the player, etc.
I hope you all have a good weekend and thanks for playing!
Version 0.17.5 is now live!
Hi everyone!
I have a bit of a small update for you this week as I've been dealing with the unfortunate loss of my pet Kitty last Wednesday, but normal updates should resume from here on out.
I've taken the time I've had to tidy up a lot of the code and have been reorganising my AI flow charts:
When updating this chart it helps me organise how the code is laid out and find issues. I found a lot of problems in the Imminent Threats part of the code and have given it a refactor.
The need to reload was overused in a lot of places and I've reprioritized reloading in order to get a better flow.
Some other things I have also tweaked in the reordering of the code are:
Fixed "GOTOROOMCANNOTACCESS" debug status appearing in unit logs, this appears when units are blocked on the way to a room.
Cops were previously not firing at military enemies that were about to turn into zombies. This has been fixed.
Cops reporting a dead body as an incident will now take up an action and they will stop to do it.
Changed the log status of military units advancing into buildings as "MOVING IN" instead of "REGROUPING" as this felt more appropriate.
Now that I've done this cleanup I've identified a lot of changes I want to add in future updates. I hope you are enjoying DeadOS and look forward to future updates!
Version 0.17.4 is now live!
Hi everyone! A bit of a small update for you this week!
First off I've adjusted the line of sight code so that units can see other units stood on stairs where they could not before. In the previous version units could only see other units that are on the same set of stairs or on the first step. Now there is a proper system that allows units to see up staircases at the correct angles. This should help resolve more conflicts that revolve around stairwells.
Ammo piles have been altered to match the vertical update! They are now smaller and appear on the correct floors.
I've fixed a bug where the cop overlay screen was not updating it's information in real time and was causing issues.
Thanks for playing and I'll see you in the next update!
Version 0.17.3 is now live!
Hi everyone! I hope you are all doing well!
This week's update is a change in how the AI works. I wanted to give the cops the same ability to search and clear buildings that the military have, so I copied over a certain amount of the code so that when a quarantine is happening some of the cops inside the area will move through rooms and search the whole area.
When I put this code in and was testing it I discovered that there have been some critical bugs in the room searching code that I have spent this week dealing with. Before this update the room searchers would get lost in any room where they had to go up stairs to get to the next room and would randomly wander around. This has now been fixed by overhauling how the room searching algorithm works and this means that cops + military are now MUCH better at searching buildings and it should be a noticeable improvement to simulations as now military and cops can reach the infected on higher floors a lot faster.
I've been enjoying watching the cops clear out buildings and it has given the survivors more of a fighting chance against the zombies in the default outbreak settings. I'd love to know what you think of it!
I also fixed a rather large bug that was introduced when the airborne virus update was put out where the simulation was not ending when all the zombies had died. This has now been fixed!
Thanks again and see you in the next update!
Version 0.17.2 is now live!
Hi everyone! I'm excited to show you something I think you'll like this week!
Introducing the Airborne Virus update!
There is now an option in the zombie settings screen to have the virus be airborne:
When this box is ticked the virus will spread between infected civilians who have not yet turned to the virus. This system makes Patient Zero scenarios where a single person is infected from the start much more viable and is capable of wreaking havoc.
I recommend lowering the infection rate if you use this setting as this now specifies the percentage of the population who will turn when infected. Previously this slider was used as a percentage chance when zombies bit a human that they would become infected themselves, but now I've changed it so that this percentage is used to calculate how much of the population have an immunity to the virus.
This means we can have new interesting scenarios such as immune carriers who infect the rest of the population.
I intend to be giving the whole zombie settings screen an overhaul where I break it down into new categories soon which is going to hopefully make it clearer how these systems can be interacted with to create different types of zombie outbreaks.
I've also fixed some bugs:
Units can now see when a unit is stood in a doorway. Previously zombies would not be able to see a cop that was stood in a door shooting at them, this and other situations should now work better.
Fixed visual bug with the line of sight visuals remaining behind when a simulation is reset.
Fixed bug where zombie settings screen would forget player settings about how they want to infect.
Fixed the sim forgetting changes to the cop withdrawal percentage and setting it back to default every time the sim is reset.
Changed the default cop withdrawal phase percentage to 50% as I felt too many cops were withdrawing to the station too quickly.
Thanks for playing and I hope you enjoy the update!
