Jayty here,
Another busy period for the team. We had a blast at Insomnia 68 and hope to visit the next event in August. A lot of people asked to take part in the event that we ran. In this update you’ll find instructions for how to set that up!
As mentioned in our previous updates, we’re focusing on a deeper cycle now and most of what you’ll find in the regular updates will be quality of life, bug fixing and smaller gameplay improvements. Expect a bigger funner update in the coming month!
Unity Engine Update
We’ve taken the time to update things from Unity 2019 LTS to the newest ‘safe’ version of unity that we can use. In 1.17 you’ll not tell much immediate difference but the game is running in Unity version 2021 which brings us bang up to date with stable versions of unity! It’s never a fun task to update but keeps things fresh. You will notice some performance improvements with the version too.
Persistence
I know I know, it’s taken us a little longer than it should have to patch this one out. We hit some roadblocks with the engine update which tied us in to finishing those before patching. Vehicles and machines parts will no longer disappear.
Disclaimer! While we’re focusing hard now on through version persistence. There’s likely to be some loss/cleanup of items. We’re working on this all the time and aim to reach near perfect persistence through versions in the coming months. We appreciate all the patience on this front.
Insomnia 68 Finds / QoL
What an opportunity for us! We must have watched over 200 players tryout out the game. All with no experience of the game. It was painful to watch at times, but we learnt a lot about what things need to be more intuitive. We’ll be fixing/improving these things in the coming months but 1.17 does include a bunch of these fixes.
- Item hovers are now more responsive and update instantly when looking at them.
- Made interactions with small items a lot easier.
- Improved issue where player has to hold mouse over items for a while when pressing/holding interact.
- Slight increase to interaction distance.
- Tweaked colliders on fortifications to allow for easier placing on windows
- Fixed FRKS weapon clipping into the camera.
- Reduced logoff timer from 10 to 5 seconds
- Flashlights no longer turn off when switching weapons. ← wow this one made a lot of people die.
- Placement mode is now continuous for all items.
- It’s now possible to consume items from your inventory while in a container.
Horde Improvements
No we haven’t brought back fleeing. Rest assured though that it’s on our radar and will will introduce a solution for skipping hordes. Likely in the form of some kind of task… spreading zombie blood on yourself maybe?
We have made a bunch of tweaks though to make hordes more achievable and fun. All things that we were able to balance based on our experiences at i68.
- Tweaked colliders on fortifications to allow for easier placing on windows
- Fixed hordes not being beatable at later levels caused by delay being too long between zombie spawning.
- Zombies now do a bit more damage to fortifications for later horde levels.
- Zombie health increased slightly less for later hordes to balance against them doing more damage to fortifications.
- Added /hordedifficulty commands for admins
- Tweaks to door collider to improve shooting through gap in door.
- Lowered damage applied to guns when shooting fortifications
- Tweaked collider on barbed wire trap for easier placing
Insomnia Horde Event
Boy the response to the horde event at i68 was overwhelming! A lot of people asked us if they could try it out for themselves after attempting it there. Next time we’ll make it co-op out of the box and take advantage even more of the traps/fortifications (After we make them way better)
Here are the instructions for giving it ago yourselves. It’s built on the foundation of version 1.16 so won’t include the changes listed above. Also note that hordes are tweaked here slightly to make the whole experience more suited to a 20 min play session.
The idea is that you spawn at a mostly fortified/prepared base. You get about 5-6 mins to prep and then a horde comes for you. The default difficulty is pretty doable but you can ramp it up if you really fancy a challenge!
Patch Notes - Alpha 1.17
- Fixed issue which stopped the player being kicked back to the menu when the server process cannot be started.
- Persistence vehicles no longer disappearing.
- Persistence parts from items like fires no longer disappearing.
- Item hovers are now more responsive and update instantly when looking at them.
- Made interactions with small items a lot easier.
- Improved issue where player has to hold mouse over items for a while when pressing/holding interact.
- Slight increase to interaction distance.
- Tweaked colliders on fortifications to allow for easier placing on windows
- Fixed hordes not being beatable at later levels caused by delay being too long between zombie spawning.
- Zombies now do a bit more damage to fortifications for later horde levels.
- Zombie health increased slightly less for later hordes to balance against them doing more damage to fortifications.
- Added /hordedifficulty commands for admins
- Fixed FRKS weapon clipping into the camera.
- Tweaks to door collider to improve shooting through gap in door.
- Lowered damage applied to guns when shooting fortifications
- Tweaked collider on barbed wire trap for easier placing
- Fixed horde difficulty hardcore not fully working. More zombies will now come at once at the hardcore horde difficulty configuration.
- Reduced logoff timer from 10 to 5 seconds
- Placement mode is now continuous for all items.
- Chainsaw no longer spawning at melee container.
- Reduced loot amounts slightly in houses.
- Flashlights no longer turn off when switching weapons.
- It’s now possible to have both flashlight and headlamp on at the same time.
- It’s now possible to consume items from your inventory while in a container.
- Damage to players from zombies is now halved when the player is in a vehicle.
- Players no longer get damaged in vehicles until all windows are smashed.
- Tweaked when mental health effects show and tweaked delay
- Updated Translations from May 19th 2022
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Links
Discord: https://discord.gg/survivethenights
Changelog: https://changelog.survivethenights.net
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Website: https://www.survivethenights.net
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