Lifeless
The current status of Lifeless and Super Death Arena
As you may have noticed, the work on Lifeless has come to a halt lately. There are several reasons for this.
First of all, the launch of Lifeless was unfortunately not very successful and it did not sell as many copies as we thought. This means that we could not afford to keep working full force on Lifeless as few employees want to work without pay.
Secondly, now with a team of only two people we felt that we would make very slow progress if we kept working on a game like Lifeless with such a big scope. What we have done is created a game called “Super Death Arena” on the foundation of Lifeless with a much smaller scope.
Super Death Arena is a horde mode survival game where you fight increasingly larger waves of zombies.
Everyone who owns Lifeless will of course have already have received this for free in their Steam library as thanks, and everyone who purchases Lifeless in the future will also get Super Death Arena.
The updates, performance tweaks and bug fixes done on Super Death Arena will be able to be transferred to Lifeless in a future patch too, so the work done on Super Death Arena will also have a positive effect on Lifeless in the future.
If Super Death Arena is successful we will be able to continue working on Lifeless as well.
We have not given up, and we hope you understand the situation from our perspective.
Lifeless Patch!
Here's a little patch, we had to hurry it out a bit faster than intended, since an update to the anticheat made it impossible to play the game, which was out of our hands.
You should now be able to play fine again!
Some simple patchnotes:
- Screamer scream lowered by 50%
- High pitch ringing sound after screamer screames lowered by 90%
- Blurred vision for dazed status effect is less intense
- Tweaked fog settings in Stillwater Bay
- Optimized thousands of objects in the game, this should reduce hitches and lag for some people.
- Balanced and tweaked damage, block amount, crit chance and recoil for weapons
- Balanced and tweaked stats for consumables
- Balanced and tweaked durability and armor for gear
We also fixed several code bugs that are not as interesting to post about, but will help overall gameplay.
Have fun guys!
Update V0.7 LIVE - Safe Zones, Economy and more!
Hello, and welcome to Lifeless. If you've been here before, we've got a whole load of new features in our biggest update yet. If you're just joining us, welcome to the party - Take a look at our all new trailer!
At the core, Lifeless is a zombie survival game set in the fictional town of Stillwater Bay in Maine. At the start of the game, you pick from two different factions - The crazed, militant Spartan Phalanx; or the civilian survivors of the Nova Guard. By picking a faction, you already have a set of team mates that you can work with to survive in this harsh, hostile land.
In this latest update, we've tripled the amount of content in the game. Here's some of the new features -
- Safe Zones - New areas for both factions that allow players to socialise in safety, without the threat of attack from other players and zombies!
- Economy - Collect scraps in the world to take back to your safe zone
- Skills - Available from a trainer in the safe zones, players can trade scraps to learn a variety of abilities to help turn the tide of battle
- New Weapons - Get your hands on an AK-47, a Desert Eagle, the often community request Bolt action rifle and more!
- PvP Event - The first event allows players to capture an air drop and bring it back to their bases for a faction wide reward. Watch out, because the other faction will want it too...
- New Zombie - The Screamer will stalk the world with other zombies, and will strike when you least expect it...
- Storage - Save your scraps and rare weapons at the Storage deposit at your safe zone
And much more! You can see the full list of improvements over on our website.
That's just some of what we've been working on over the past few months, and we're only just getting started. We love seeing your videos, your posts on the community, and all the suggestions you write to us. Our community makes this game, and we'd be nothing without you, so thank you!
Can't wait to see you in Stillwater Bay.
/ Rigid-Soft and Green Man Gaming Publishing
Join us for our second community night!
Join us for our second community night!
Thursday 7/21 @ 8:30pm EST
Community Nights are fun events where moderators and developers play with the community! We all join the same server and play a variety of games, including traditional Spartan/Nova PvP, melee battles, hide and seek, group exploration, and more!
For community nights, we chat using our Discord channel.
We hope to see you there!
Patch Notes 0.6.7 - HOTFIX
First of all, I'd like to say that the reason this patch doesn't include any content is because we are preparing a VERY big patch. Which will be detailed in a post in a couple of days :). So stay tuned!
Patch 0.6.7 includes the following major changes:
- Keybinding is added
- Player count now displays in the server list properly
- More than 16 players should now be able to join a single server
- Some items have corrected stats displayed for Critical hit
- Players go into third person when eating now
- We now track a lot more playerstats when players play
- Multiple fatal error crashes fixed
In addition to these fixes a large number of smaller fixes and tweaks have been added.
Have fun guys! And hope to see you at the next community night! :D
Sydney Servers Are Now Live!
After lots of work the machine in Sydney is now alive and kicking. Thanks for your patience!
Have fun guys!
Kristoffer B
Patch Notes 0.6.5 - "The Coghammer"
Hi guys!
It is time! The first content + bugfix patch is here!
Before we get any further, let me make clear we are continuously working on all the issues you guys face, and if you have any problems that didn't get fixed in this patch, they are still being worked on. Don't worry, you have not been forgotten!
So what does 0.6.5 include you say? Oh so many things... Weapons... And other stuff, nothing special.
New Content
6 New weapons! These have been in the pipeline and were just added, fresh (ish) out of the pipeline. For you guys enjoyment! Fight guys, fight!
- Leadpipe
- Frying pan
- Machete
- Tanto
- Saw Sword
- Pipe Hammer
Main Changes
Performance
We have managed to fix a lot of the memory leaks and performance hogs associated with those. This will be happening with every patch, as it's an ongoing process. Most likely wont stop doing this, ever.
As always a good tip for extra frames is running the game in normal fullscreen instead of windowed mode.
No Character List / Creating Character
A small subset of users had this issue, and we believe it's been fixed. The people that had it that we have tested with, have been able to play normally now :).
Other important stuff
Changes/Fixes
- Dropped items falling through concrete intersections fixed
- 2H Sharp Weapons blocking fixed
- Smoother general movement
- Item & interactables highlight layering fixed
- Water surface lowered, to combat the prone underwater exploit
- Lots of backpacks spawning is fixed
- Icon fix for some boots
- Lots of animation fixes
- Lots of collision fixes on certain houses and objects
- Updated Flashlight light
- Certain Anti Cheat crashes have been fixed on startup
Optimisation Changes
- ~ 1GB in texture optimizations
- Many underlying optimization changes
Patch Notes 0.6.4 - "Italian Meatballs"
Hi guys!
After a lot of coffee, hard work, and little sleep. We are happy to announce 0.6.4!
But before I get into the nitty-gritty I wanted to let you guys know that IF you guys don't get characters when you log in after this update. PLEASE restart STEAM!
So what does 0.6.4 include? Lots! But mainly a ton of optimizations and fixes! Without further ado:
Main Changes
Frame Rate Improvement
The game should run a lot smoother now, we put in a lot of optimisations that should help most people run the game much smoother. Reported framerate improvements for most people have been from roughly 15-20 FPS before this patch, to 55-60 in most cases.
A good tip for extra frames is running the game in normal fullscreen instead of windowed mode.
Joining Issues
This issue has been a big one. And we think we have mitigated this issue for most people. To try to nail this down we invited a group of people with the issue to try out an internal build, after lots of tweaks, downloads and fixes. Everyone in the test group was able to join and play the game.
Smaller but also important stuff
Graphical Changes
- Removed collision on small objects that players could get stuck on
- Added collision on trees that did'nt have collision
- Further balancing of item spawn time- and rate
- Optimized render distance, culling and shadows on objects far away
Gameplay Changes/Fixes
- Zombies keep quiet after dying, and their different sounds are better intertwined.
- First Person / Third Person reload / etc issues fixed
- No more crazy camera upon death
- You can now use "Y" for VOIP as well
Optimisation Changes
- Major cleanout of PhysX actions of zombies & players, much smaller workload for the CPU.
- Aggressive distance culling of unseen objects, less GPU workload.
- Proper distance culling of players and zombies
- Amount of objects in the world minimized and put together into fewer but larger objects, easier for occlusion.
- As a result of a cleaner world, loading times not as long
- Previous login fails caused by Steam Connection Timeout, prolonged timeout threshold to allow more people in and hopefully no more connection issues.
- Culling of smaller objects improved
- Disabled distance field shadows on smaller objects that never cast visible shadows anyway
PS: This direction of optimization has barely begun but we've noticed a good enough performance to push this up to you guys. We will keep optimizing further!
Patch 0.6.2 - We're Just Getting Started...
Hi guys! And welcome to the first public patch for Lifeless!
These are very exciting times and we are looking forward to the journey we are about to embark on together. With that said, let’s move on to the patch notes for the Early Access release!
New Features
- VOIP
- Looting players
- Lots of improved and updated areas
- Character names in chat appear in the color of the faction they belong to
- Quantity of items show up over icon, no need to hover items to know how many you have
- Muzzle flashes are now visible in third person as well
Changes
- Updated map (UI)
- Changed Melee Crosshair
- Flashlight is visible on other characters shoulders (visual)
- Grass render distance improved
- A huge part of our performance issues have been real-time cloth simulation of zombies’ clothes. This looks nice but unfortunately it seems to always be simulated no matter how far away from the zombies you are. Therefore it has temporarily been disabled, until we find a solution for it
- Servers that are running a different version (if you are running an older client) will not show in server list
- Client version shows in top right corner of login screen
- More keybindings are visible in the keybindings menu now