Hi everyone! I've got a small but useful update for you this week as a follow up to last week's performance update! Introducing the Line of Sight visualiser!
When units are selected you can now see their line of sight. Hopefully this will provide more insight into what each unit can see and what they are thinking, although there is a lot more information that goes into the decisions the units make than simply line of sight!
Thanks for playing and I hope you enjoy the update!
Version 0.17.0 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got an exciting update for you!
This update started off as a small attempt to upgrade performance but before I knew it I was digging deep into the systems and giving it quite an overhaul but after a few weeks I bring to you the Performance Update!
After digging deep into the C++ behind the AI I have found that the most CPU intensive part was where every unit would check it's immediate area for surrounding units (an important part of the game as you can imagine.) This was especially true for cops as they doing a LOT of target seeking that was slowing the game down.
So let's dig into what has changed!
Previously the maximum a unit could see is 3 squares. I used a lot of other tricks to help get past this issue but it did end up being rather limiting. There was also no real line of sight. People could see through other people and around corners. In this refactor there is now a line of sight of 5 tiles. Every cop, every zombie, every civilian. I want to add something into the game so you can see what a unit's line of sight is when they are selected or being controlled but this will be for a future patch.
A lot of planning had to go into the systems for this:
After this update the metrics appear much better:
Both the before and after tests were 25,000 cops walking around. The metrics after the update is now showing things to be about 7 times faster than it used to be. That plus a new line of sight range growth from 3 to 5 tiles is a pretty good performance update in my book!
If you are a player of DeadOS who has been noticing performance drops or having a hard time running larger simulations, I really want to know how your experience has changed with this latest update! I'm especially interested in how the game runs on low spec machines.
Thanks everyone and I hope you enjoy the update!
Version 0.16.6 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got a small follow up to last week's update for you this week!
I've been reworking how the Cop AI works to better support last week's update of manual quarantining.
Previously cops only in adjacent zones would come over and help quarantine but now they will travel all the way down the street if they see a zone is in need of help. This should make the cops more responsive to the zombie threat.
I also fixed a bug where cops would walk infinitely down the street claiming they were "moving into formation".
Thank you all for playing and I hope you enjoy the latest update!
Version 0.16.5 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got an exciting update for you this week!
Presenting the Cop Quarantine Override Update!
Players can now override the Cop AI during the Quarantine phase and specify exactly which areas they want the cops to quarantine, allowing the player more control over how an outbreak is dealt with.
I want to try and allow more scenarios where the player can intervene in the sim and change the outcome and this is one of the next steps in that goal.
I've had to make quite a few changes to support this and fixed a lot of incidental bugs including fixing the Cop remaining percentage display being incorrect and causing issues in how the police retreat.
This is the next step of the Cop AI overhaul and more is to come in the future! I hope you enjoy the latest update and I look forward to your feedback!
Version 0.16.4 is now live!
Hi everyone! I've got the next stage of the cop AI update for you this week!
When using the cop overlay tab you are now presented with more information depending on the current state of the Cop system:
The Incident Phase is the first phase which represents cops going about their usual business before they realise they are in a zombie apocalypse. They will try to establish a crime scene and call for reinforcements when an incident occurs. After a certain amount of incidents happen (which is calculated by both the size of the city and the number of cops) a state of emergency is declared and the cop AI will change over to the Quarantine phase:
In this phase cops quarantine buildings and regions and try to set up perimeters surrounding them. If enough cops are in the area they may try to enter the area. They will keep going until a certain threshold of cops have died in action (which can be specified by the player in the Cop setup screen - police station section) and then they will move to the Withdrawing Phase:
Cops will give up on the civilians and withdraw to the police station to make a last stand.
A lot of this was already in the game but the new addition is that you can manually override the phases and move on to another phase manually and that the phases are more explained in-game. I also want to allow users to manually specify quarantine zones in a future update.
I'm interested to know what you peeps think!
Version 0.16.3 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got a small update for you this week but it's in preparation for the next part of the game that I'm working on, improving the Cop AI!
I've been refactoring a lot of the cop system in preparation for coming updates and have fixed a lot of the issues the cops were having this week. So let's get into it!
So you may have noticed recently that cops have been stuck in "Incident Mode" for a long time. This is because there were some bugs with how the cops reported incidents. The cops are now MUCH better at spotting dead bodies and reporting them. They will also now report incidents when they fire at infected.
This means cops will now go into Quarantine mode a lot sooner than they have been previously and are more effective.
I also want to tell you about what I have planned for coming updates! I intend to add manual buttons to trigger the cops going into Quarantine and Last Stand modes so that players have more control over what the cops do. I would also like to add an option to manually define the quarantine areas instead of having them be automatically assigned.
I look forward to hearing your feedback on this and future updates!
Version 0.16.2 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got a small collection of features for you with this week's update!
First off I want to talk about a performance issue where every city region was updating information about it's inhabitants every frame. In large cities this was turning into quite a performance hit even if there wasn't a large amount of people in the sim so now I have changed it so that this update only happens 4 times per second. This should help with performance gains.
I've also tweaked the military AI so that they don't get stuck at the windows on certain buildings when they are clearing them out, they will now shoot out the windows and enter the building.
Thirdly I've made a change to the AI so that when people are doing an action in a specific room and are moving around randomly they will no longer randomly move onto the stairs or out the doors and accidentally leave the area they were supposed to be in.
Lastly I have fixed a bug in the cop AI where they would be stuck in a quarantining mode holding formation when they were supposed to be withdrawing to the police station.
As for the future of the upcoming updates, I believe the Cop AI needs an overhaul and I intend to do that so they are going to be much smarter about how they work.
Thanks for playing and I hope you enjoy the update!
Version 0.16.1 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got some small fixes for you this week after the big update!
The biggest fix is a change to how the visuals work for the grids on the height layers. They were causing big lag issues on larger cities when pressing the up and down arrows, this has now been fixed!
I also fixed a bug in the military AI where they leave a room with survivors that they are supposed to be hunting in no survivor mode.
Lastly I changed the survivor AI so that they pick the room they spawn in as the room they work/live in, as in the previous build they would go to a different room in the same building and work there.
If you are experiencing any issues with the most recent update and this one too please let me know in the comments! If you can reproduce the steps required to make the crash happen it would be very useful!
Enjoy everyone!
Version 0.16.0 is now live! Stairs & Verticality Update!
Hi everyone! This is the biggest update since DeadOS went into Early Access so it's a little special! After two months of work I am proud to bring to you....THE VERTICAL UPDATE!
The buildings are now up to 6 floors high with stairwells between them. Nearly every system had to be altered, redone or improved to support this change.
All of the buildings that were the previous defaults have been adapted into new buildings to support this as well as the level editor being updated so that you can make your own vertical buildings too!
All the current systems in place should work with this new update including the Control Mode and the AI overrides. The military have also been readjusted to sweep these buildings. A lot of work has gone into the system that allows the units to enter and leave the buildings on their commutes / searches / hiding and a lot more will be coming soon to really flesh it out!
As a result of the work involved there may be some performance hits and bugs that will need to be fixed so bear with me in the coming weeks for future fixes and patches based on your feedback. One of the things is that you may experience a slower experience on very large sims. I want to optimise the systems so they will perform better soon.
At the moment all the blood trails still appear on the ground floor but I'm working on that. I wanted to try and get the build into your hands as soon as I could so that I could get your feedback and have more eyes on the game so that the bugs can be found more quickly, and to show that I'm still regularly working on the game and updating it.
I've got a large list of things I want to do next as a result of this update and this is the first step in bringing you exciting new things! I've purposely left the rooftops mostly open so that in the future military may land choppers there for example. Also I will be working on lots of AI changes to work better with these new systems.
I hope you enjoy this latest update and I'm super excited to get your feedback on it! Thanks for waiting for it!
Version 0.15.4 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got a small update for you this week based on some feedback from player testing!
I've added a few small prompts that tell users about how to use some of the more hidden features of the game:
I've added these so that people can learn about the Control mode feature. I've also added a little prompt once the simulation is ready to run:
It is my hope that new players will have an easier time playing with these changes. Sorry the recent update is a bit small but I have some other commitments this week, hope to have more exciting updates soon!
