Hey everyone, it's patch day! This patch introduces a small new feature to Hit the Road - your companions will now increase their skill caps by a few stars when you move to another map, perhaps representing their personal growth after having survived one area and travelled to a new one :) Each exit from the map will give you a different skill cap bonus, between 1 and 5 stars each, depending on the supposed difficulty of the new area. So there's a little incentive to go for more difficult areas, or at least more of an interesting choice between areas - and to take companions with you. (Note - since the player's starting character always has full skill caps for everything, it won't have any effect on them).
I've also made it so one Hit the Road exit will always say "Similar Area" and one will say "Harder Area", instead of giving you some stats for urbanization, etc. The Similar Area will re-use exactly the same difficulty settings that you had before, while Harder Area will copy them and then try to make them a bit harder by reducing resources and increasing enemies.
When going between maps you'll see a little UI sequence showing the skill cap stars increasing. I've re-used this to show a similar sequence when you die and lose a Constitution point, as I always felt that needed to be made a bit more clear to new players. Besides that, I've also made the game remember your equipment policies when hitting the road so you don't have to set them up all over again.
Finally, three more translations have been finished and checked for technical errors - French, Lithuanian and Hungarian! Thanks to Jean-Charles Rocher, Audrius Vaidalauskis, and Attila 'Ateszkoma' Kurucz for finishing those off :)
This patch is a bit of a sad one I'm afraid because I'm making it my cutoff point - no more new features from now on! There will be bug fixes, hopefully not too many of those either but we'll see. And of course translations are still welcome. But as for the feature set, the game has been in early access for almost 5 years now and it's time to move on.
That means if all goes well I should probably be able to release it out of early access some time in April. I want to make sure I have a nice, stable build before doing so, so it has to be left to sit and cool down for a while. If things crop up, as they often do, it might take longer but I certainly hope it'll be out before the 1st of June as that would make it fully 5 years since it was launched, and I really don't want to go beyond that.
I have a long wishlist full of great ideas, both my own and suggestions from other people, that I would have liked to have done, but I think at a certain point it becomes easier to implement these things in a fresh new project where I have the ability to break stuff and change the rules, rather than being always afraid of some knock-on effect on existing systems. So that's what I'll be doing - starting a new project! I'm not sure yet if it'll be a sequel or something else (or both) but I'm going to start dividing my time between figuring that out, and whatever bug-fixing is still needed for Invisible Strain. (Also, I'm going to try and bring this game to other platforms - but more on that later).
Here's the full change list for v232:
- When dying and being rescued by another community, show a brief sequence informing you that you have lost a Constitution point
- When hitting the road, increase your companions skill caps, using the above mentioned sequence to show them increasing
- A couple of Hit the Road exits in Sandbox maps will give you the options of Similar Area (to keep your current settings) and More Dangerous Area (dial the difficulty up)
- Equipment policies are remembered when hitting the road
- When doing an urgent role, characters will play animations such as wood chopping faster (and chop the tree down faster)
- Updated Czech, French, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latin American Spanish and Lithuanian translations
- More support for Hungarian cases
- Show on the debug menu when achievements are disabled because of mods
- Fix for enemies smelling or hearing followers while creeping up on them
- Fix for being able to bury two bodies in the same grave by putting one in while someone is walking towards it with another
- Fix for followers sometimes playing fists up melee stance while holding a bottle or other item that isn't a weapon, before moving to attack an enemy
- Fix for characters and equipment on Community screen showing black squares when you switch the sort type
- Fix for characters sometimes freezing at the end of certain animations like hugging or unequipping
- Fix for shades sometimes clipping characters' foreheads
- Fix for sun lens flare disappearing when highlighting a character and showing the PiP
- Fix for terrain cache error sometimes when saving a multiplayer Story Mode game
- Fix for incompatibility with SIS Explosive Props mod
- Fix for Out Of Sync sometimes when dying and getting rescued
- Crash fix
EDIT - someone reported a crash, so here's a hotfix, v233.
- Updated Czech, Indonesian, Italian and Simplified Chinese translations
- Fix for crash on character inventory screen
Lastly, v231 has been promoted to the main branch.
What's this publicbeta thing?
v233 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:
- Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
- If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
- If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".
To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".