This is the largest update since the map release: 43 changes covering the freezing, the entire art style, every car, the characters, the props, the adverts, and a controls system players had been asking for.
1. The freezing is fixed
This was the complaint that mattered most, and it deserves the honest version.
The game stuttered every few seconds while moving or turning. It was worse on HIGH, and switching to BALANCED made it stop — which is what eventually gave it away. There was never one cause. There were six, and each was hiding behind the last:
Six arcade cabinets were more than half the world's triangles. 1.55 million between them, in a game whose entire city is around 1.3 million. Decimated to 1.7 MB total.
The scene was recalculating 34,000 object positions every frame, whether or not anything had moved — 15.1 ms of every frame, before a single triangle was drawn. Static scenery is now frozen in place. Frame cost fell to 4.2 ms.
Shaders were being compiled as you drove into them. That is the stutter that fades the longer you play — each new combination of material and light compiled the first time you saw it, one street at a time. They are now compiled up front.
The cel-shading toggle silently destroyed the sky, and from that moment the day/night update threw an error on every visual tick for the rest of the session.
One late spotlight on the first car you approached invalidated all that pre-compilation, so it had to happen again.
The sky reflection was being redrawn every two seconds, forever — six render passes each time, for a reflection of a sky that had not changed.
What you will notice: one pause of a few seconds while the world loads, and then no stutter. That pause is deliberate — it is the shader pre-compilation doing at load what used to happen in your face while you played. Kevin's own verdict on the fixed build: "one 4 second freeze and then did not freeze again at all."
Finding cause 1 through 6 needed a tool that only ran on real hardware, because the software test harness could not reproduce it. That tool has been removed from the shipping game.
2. One art style
BRICK had two art styles fighting each other: a flat-shaded world, and a cel shader layered over the top with ink outlines, colour banding and a vignette, adjustable in Options.
All of it is gone. Kevin's call: "It makes no sense to give the game 2 different styles." Every surface in the world is now lit the same way.
Two things came with it:
The art-style settings have been removed from Options. They were welded to the most expensive graphics preset anyway — turning them on quietly forced a heavier render path.
The whole full-screen post-processing pass is gone, which is a real saving on every frame for every player.
The Graphics options that remain — LOW, BALANCED, HIGH — now describe what they actually do: draw distance, shadows, reflections, grass and weather.
3. Graphical detail pass
Cars
Every vehicle is built in code again rather than imported. The imported models were not badly made, they were badly optimised — and fitting them to their slots by scaling a bounding box is what stretched them out of shape.
The bodywork is built from profile bands, so a bonnet slopes into a windscreen instead of stepping into it.
Lamps sit on the bodywork, positioned by measuring where the surface actually is, rather than floating 60 mm inside it.
Wheels and arches are welded into single meshes instead of a draw call each.
A nose and grille, mirrors, door handles, window dividers, grille slats and wheel hardware.
Paint is lit flat, matching everything else. Cars were previously lit like a showroom, which is why they looked borrowed from another game.
The ATV replaces the old buggy, and the Beetle is no longer sized like a dune buggy.
Traffic no longer drives through itself, and every car was, briefly, driving backwards. Both fixed.
Characters
The complaint was that they read as "a bunch of shapes stuck together." They now have a chest and waist rather than one box, shoulders, elbow and knee joints, tapered limbs, hands, a longer neck and toes — and on top of that: noses and ears, hair raised off the eyes, shirt pockets and seams, sleeve and trouser hems, boot soles and laces, and shaped fingers and cuffs on the first-person hands.
Street props and buildings
Big Tony's, the warehouse and the church are buildings you can read as buildings, not coloured boxes.
Furniture reads as furniture rather than blocks stuck together.
Walls are made of something, and graffiti looks sprayed on rather than printed.
Dumpster ribs and handles, newspaper displays, bin rims, hydrant fittings.
The Brick
The item the game is named after was a crate. Measured against a real brick, it was 440 mm long where a real brick is 215, and 43% too tall for its length. The "frog" — the dish pressed into a brick's top face — was sitting 9 mm above the surface, so it read as a slot cut into a lid.
It is now a real brick's proportions with a proper chamfered edge and fired clay, colour-matched against a photograph by measuring the pixels rather than picking a swatch.
4. Rebindable controls
Players asked for this. Options now has a CONTROLS section listing all 36 actions in nine groups. Click a key, press the one you want, ESC cancels. Changes are saved and restored next time you play. Reset Controls puts everything back.
Two behaviours worth knowing, both chosen so nobody can lock themselves out:
Mouse buttons are kept. Binding a key to Use / Attack adds to the left mouse button rather than replacing it, so you cannot accidentally leave yourself unable to shoot.
A key already in use is taken off whatever had it, and that action shows UNBOUND in red until you give it another. Two actions quietly sharing one key is not a preference, it is a fault you cannot see.
5. Names, clans and adverts
Every survivor has their own name. They used to be the same handful of names with a number stuck on the end. There are now 112 written names plus 256 generated combinations behind them.
Clans show as three-letter tags beneath the name on a nameplate, instead of a long clan name stretching the plate across the screen. Every clan gets a tag of its own — no two share one.
The billboards and bus shelters advertising Kevin's other games were deformed, and the reason was not the frames around them: the Chiggas and Thugz artwork only ever existed as pictures of a billboard standing at an angle, and the game was showing a rectangular crop of that. The perspective is now undone properly, so the posters are flat and square-on.
Emoji Massacre has been added as a third advertiser.
6. Smaller things you may notice
A line under the minimap tells you which key opens Options — and it reads your actual binding, so it stays correct after you rebind.
The download is 332 MB smaller — 847 MB down to 515 MB. A third of the previous build was files the game never loaded: duplicate high-resolution arcade cabinet models, unused vehicle wrecks, development screenshots, test scripts and internal notes.
Police cars no longer park in the road during a chase. A cruiser that wedged against something would settle at a crawl and stay there for the rest of the session. They now give up and rejoin traffic.