This week I've added a little button to the top left of the screen that lets you bring up the entire log for all the entries that appear in the top left corner of the screen. I've done this after some feedback that people can miss the information that appears up there and I thought it would be a good feature.
I've also made some UI adjustments behind the scenes that shouldn't change anything but hopefully will be less glitchy. Let me know if you find UI glitches!
Thanks for playing!
Version 0.15.2 is now live!
Hi everyone! I have a rather large amount of information for you with this update as this took a few weeks to accomplish! (also I was in bed sick for one week, boooo!)
Civilians now have homes and jobs!
Civilians are assigned locations as a "home" and "work" location. They will alternate going back and forth between home and work and will spend time in these locations. They will be assigned a single room to be their "home" and their "office" and will go to these locations.
To be able to do this I have put together a new upgrade of the pathfinding systems in buildings so that units can figure out how to reach different rooms without causing a hit on performance.
At the moment I have chosen to assign 50% of the civilians a job/home based on the default settings because when 4000 civilians have a job in an 8x8 city area there is a small problem with traffic and congestion:
I've been doing a lot of experiments with trying to reach a good balance and avoiding congestion issues and reached this conclusion for now, though I would like to allow the user to specify how many people work or come up with a congestion calculation system to try and deal with this issue, which you can hopefully expect in future updates!
The current downsides are, people in vehicles do not have jobs. Work/Home locations are randomly assigned and may seem strange based on what a building looks like. I'd like to make it so certain blocks can be designated work and home blocks so that people can do more reasonable commuting but that's for a future update.
Hopefully I would like to eventually have a system where people who live together might be considered a family and this information would influence AI decisions about what to do in the zombie apocalypse, things like "I must get home to make sure my family is safe" etc to create the level of depth I want this game to eventually have.
Thanks for playing and I hope you look forward to future updates coming soon!
Version 0.15.1 is now live!
Hey everyone! Got a continuation of last week's update for you this week!
The AI has now been updated so that they will completely destroy vehicles, moving them out of the way so that issues caused by units being pinned into corners with vehicles is no longer an issue.
Military when set to No Survivors mode can shoot vehicles to destroy them, and zombies will do the same in the same way they break doors and windows.
I have also added an important AI tweak to the zombies! Previously the way their AI worked is that they would not attack doors and windows when they are trying to swarm into regions. Now they do that alongside their swarming so that they are a lot better at attacking areas simultaneously as a group, so you might notice people dying a bit quicker than usual!
I fixed a bug I accidentally introduced a few patches back where zombies were able to walk through doors when in Control Mode.
Human AI has been slightly changed when their vehicles are destroyed. Previously they would get out and continue on their ignorant day as if their car had broken down, which I thought was a little strange when a soldier has shot your vehicle, so they now more appropriately panic and run away. I would like to have a system that takes into account all types of crashes but that is further down the road.
I hope you enjoy the update and the game as it keeps moving forward! Thanks for playing and let me know in the community discussions if you encounter any issues!
Version 0.15.0 is now live!
Hi everyone! I'm all finished with the UI changes for now and have a new feature to bring you this week!
Cars now have a third state where they are completely destroyed. When they are destroyed in this way they act as if they no longer exist and units can pass over them. The purpose of this is for a few reasons.
Firstly there have been issues with vehicles trapping units in-between vehicles in a place where zombies and military are unable to get to them. Having a system in place for them to destroy vehicles means they can get over this obstacle.
The AI for the military and zombies isn't in place to do this yet (coming next week hopefully!) so at the moment the only way cars get destroyed is when an already damaged vehicle is hit by another car. I will be working on getting the AI involved in this system but it's beyond the scope of a single week update.
I'm hoping that having a system for dealing with cars in awkward spots will mean that I can allow vehicles to do a lot more things, crashing into buildings and driving into awkward positions as currently that would cause issues with blocking entrances and such. I'd love to see vehicles crashing through store windows!
More to come in future updates and thanks for playing as always!
Version 0.14.6 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got a visual update for you this week! Last week I introduced the beginning of the animated UI, this week I have finished implementing it! Screens that now have animated intros are:
Escape Menu Human Spawning Screen Cop Allocation Screen Zombie Infection Screen Military Request Screen Controls popup Stats screen
So, a whole bunch! ^__^ It's been a slow and tedious process but an important one for getting the game into the place it needs to be to come out of early access!
Thanks for playing and more to come in the future!
Version 0.14.5 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got a UI update for you this week!
I've replaced the default Unreal checkboxes with some custom ones I've made. I still have a little issue where sometimes you have to double click to change the setting but I'm working on fixing that!
The slider bars have been changed to be a little clearer. The controls popup now has a button for you to close it rather than it automatically closing so people can spend some time looking at it. You can bring it back via the escape menu under Show Controls:
The last part is, I've started animating the UI! At the moment only the first screen where you generate the city is animated but I intend to improve and use this across the entire game over the next week, so let me know what you think of it!
Thanks for playing!
Version 0.14.4 is now live!
Hello again! You are probably surprised to see an update the day after a previous update, but there was another bug that cropped up that needed to be fixed! Such is game development sometimes!
Yesterdays update fixed one issue but introduced another where civilians would stand still after leaving their vehicles, this is now fixed! I've also snuck a few other things into today's update:
Cars will now react to hearing gunshots in their immediate vicinity and will speed away or stop if they are cops, so this car on the right of the image will now react.
The car sound effects were ignoring the Mute SFX option in the options, this is now fixed.
Thanks again everyone!
Version 0.14.3 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got an important update for you this week!
First of all, I fixed a nasty bug which I had accidentally put in the game when I did the zombies driving cars update which caused all the units to synchronize their movements together until they all moved at the same time. This bug has been fixed so movement should be back to normal! Now on to the new content!
This week I've been adding more AI interaction with vehicles, namely that the military and cops can now shoot at zombies and civilians that are driving vehicles. This is also possible in Control mode as you can see in the image above. Zombies are now also capable of directly approaching and attacking vehicles in order to force survivors to exit them, where previously they were reliant on people panicking and either exiting or crashing their vehicles. This should make for more exciting content when driving into crowds of AI zombies as they will attack the approaching vehicles.
There are still more things I need to do for this like get civiilians / military / cops to use abandoned vehicles and also have people react to hearing gunshots near vehicles, but it's another step closer!
Thanks everyone and I hope you enjoy the update!
Version 0.14.2 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got a rather unexciting but important update for you this week!
I've been working on an options screen with many tabs for all the different kinds of settings. It's not a glamourous job but it's an important one! I've added many tabs to switch between so that things get less messy as I add more options from here on ahead.
The first option I've added for this new update is Zoom Speed, which affects how quickly the mouse zooms in and out with the mouse wheel as I noticed that it was rather slow zooming in and out. The new default is about 3 times quicker (the default before this update was at 0.15, it is now 0.5 and you can go up to 1).
Unfortunately I got rather bogged down in a load of technical issues with the settings not being saved correctly and game crashes when changing between the versions of these files which is why this update is a little late, I believe I've ironed them out but if you encounter any issues let me know!
More to come soon!
Version 0.14.1 is now live!
Hi everyone! Welcome to the first update of the new year!
This first update revolves around zombies in cars. Previously when an infected human turned into a zombie they would simply exit the vehicle, but now they will act like panicked civilians and put their foot down on the gas, running people down before crashing into something, then emerging to bite further survivors.
This should cause a bit more mayhem than previously! One other part of this update is that the player can now choose to infect people inside cars where this was not possible before. I'm going to try and add more to make it visually obvious when a zombie is driving a car in future updates.
Happy New Year and I hope you enjoy the latest update!
