Friday July 16th,
Hello everyone, another Friday and another update from the team. We’ve had a rather productive week. We’ve been mostly focused on bug fixes and general improvements. Nothing super exciting to showcase but general improvements always make the game better and that’s what we’ll be focusing on for the next couple of updates. As always, please remember to check our changelog out for all the details on what we’ve been up to.
Continued Placement
The community has asked for this for some time now. Currently, the player opens the inventory and places a free placed fortification. The player then needs to open the inventory again to place another fortification. James has come up with a way to easily implement continued placement while you have multiple of the same item. This solution does still rely on adding the items to the world but because of that the implementation is tiny. The player can continually place the fortification they’ve selected until they press escape.
This change should make placing fortifications more fluid and less of a chore. If you have any suggestions for further improvements to the placement and fortification system, please feel free to share your ideas below.
Weapon Melee Attacks
When zombies are all over you and too close to fire at you can now use weapons for a melee attack. Many of our supporters have requested this feature and Andre and John have sorted it out for 1.9. Melee attacks are automatically assumed when AI or players are too close to each other. You’ll automatically smack zeds unless you aim down sights. We feel this is the best solution as it still allows the player to play as they see fit. It’s incredibly useful when you’ve run out of ammo and don’t have a melee weapon.
Weapon melee attack on zombie
Weapon melee against player
Stack Improvements
We’ve had issues with item stacking since literally our first build. Nails, screws, most anything with a quantity or resource didn’t properly stack. The issue is actually quite complicated and James has worked out a solution for the time being. This is something we can improve on later should the need to do so be there.
We’ve adjusted the quantity of most everything that has had stacking issues. Boxes of nails, screws and bolts now hold up to 500! They’ll also properly stack up when picking up partial boxes. Items like screws and nails will now always take from partial boxes before taking from full boxes.
This isn’t a comprehensive fix of the issues relating to resource stacks, however, it should greatly improve the situation without drastically increasing the chance of things breaking. In this instance it might be possible to still somehow get two part boxes but this implementation took a fraction of the time it would take to implement a fully robust way of doing what this achieves.
Harvest Improvements
As some of you know, our world is very interactable. From trees to fences, a lot of what you see can be interacted with in one way or another. The issue for some is they're not aware of this, perhaps due to the fact that it's not that common in games. We set out from the start to make nearly everything you see usable in some sense and we'll continue to improve and develop that feature. In 1.9, you'll notice that harvestable props are now highlighted. Andre has created this system and I've spent the last week or two getting back into the project and adjusting and adding new 'harvest machines' to existing props that previously didn't serve a purpose.
Harvest Highlighting
One of many new scrap metal harvest points (much requested)