I'm pretty busy right now, both with the holidays and with Youtube, but there's still been time to get some updates going. Things are largely prepped for the backporting process to get up and running again, though the next batch of backports I need to get through are annoyingly dense.
Autotraveling should now properly draw a highlighted path on the world map again. This one had stumped me for a really long time but it turned out that just a single variable was wrong in one place. Sigh.
Improved the way mortar shell shrapnel is modeled. They now cause quite a bit of destruction in most places.
Turrets (as in the enemy turrets that try to kill you) should contain less ammo. They're still pretty stacked if they don't get drained by you or the zombies, but it's a little bit less of a "oh, I guess i'm done playing now" moment when you crack one open.
Searchlights can no longer beam through solid walls.
The driving proficiency is gone. On regular roads, characters are now always treated as though they were proficient under the old system. In its place is the offroad proficiency, which basically acts like driving proficiency used to, but only when your wheels have very poor traction. This usually means you're offroading. TLDR: It's easier to drive on-road and harder to drive off-road now. If you already had the driving proficiency, it will automatically change to offroading.
Driving now checks your vision and manipulation scores, meaning injury, mutation, or encumbrance might make you worse at it.
Impaired reaction scores that get below 75% will now contribute a scaling penalty to vehicle handling. This mostly means if you're drunk or concussed you should not be trying to drive. Unless...
Drowned zombies are now a bit slower than normal on land, but move around pretty good in water. Swimmer zombies remain quick and nimble and quick and nimble
Tracked down and fixed that weird issue where once in a blue moon a refrigerator would have like forty BLTs in it.
Backported a fix to crafting from DDA that should allow you to make certain crafts (such as larger homemade explosives) again.
@scale2x found the issue that was making the battery charger not work, and fixed it. Thank you!
The ASCII art which appeared in the item info panel for some items was of inconsistent quality, often inaccurate, copy-pasted all over the place, and in my opinion it just did not look good even when the ASCII was well done. There were only a couple hundred items out of many thousands with pictures, and as I had no plans whatsoever to make all the rest of the item ascii art, the entire system has been thrown in the garbage. Hooray for cleaner item info panels!
Backported a fix from DDA that makes it so you can't sell unsellable things (e.g. integrated items) via the autobalance trade button in the trade menu.
Fixed an issue with human cracklins not counting as cannibal food.
Renamed cooked creep to cooked human flesh. If you're eating people, you're the creep, not them. I will probably remove some of the more forced/unfunny cannibal food names, but don't worry, manwich and manburger helper are staying.
Added three new types of improvised ballistic plate to the game, though currently only 2 are accessible. You autolearn the wooden ballistic plate/wooden ballistic side plate at I think 2 (3?) fabrication, and the paper one is learned from arms & armor of imperial china or one of the books that teaches melee. The fiberglass ballistic plates are spawnable via debug if you want to check them out, but I need to add, like, fiberglass before I can let you craft them, and I have no idea where you'd find fiberglass in the world, so I'll need to do some research.
The paper and wood plates are not really going to do a whole lot to stop a bullet, but they exist as a quick and cheap way to make your plate carrier into sort of a cuirass for melee, so maybe that's something you're into.
Rebalanced ESAPI and the steel plates a bit. ESAPI is not the be-all end-all for melee torso protection anymore, though it's still pretty good. Some of the plates, particularly the steel ones, now have higher encumbrance values.
Steel armor of all kinds except chainmail now protects a bit better against ballistic damage.