0.8.0 now live for closed testers!

0.8.0 Change Log

Major Changes & Additions

Entire town area redesigned & upgraded

The main city area of the map has been almost completely replaced with dozens of new buildings and a new layout including more residential buildings, parks, parking lots, and more. Placed abandoned vehicles around the map, still going to place a few more.

New procedural AI physics based probe

A new probing system using procedurally animated AI with full interactable physics to randomly search through buildings. This is still a work in progress and the probe may get stuck or act odd at moments.

New Procedural Red Weed

Tripods now spray red weed that procedurally grows over anything it comes across. Staying inside of a red weed cloud inflicts small damage on the player over time. Rain will also turn blood red if it’s raining while you’re in a red weed area.

Aliens

The very basics of aliens have been added in. Note their procedural movement animations are first draft and will be worked on more. The aliens come out from the tripod after probing. If they see you or an NPC they will chase you down. It only takes one hit at the moment for one to kill you. The aliens have idle sounds, attacking sounds, and growling sounds. They are scripted to spawn and then search the same areas of the building that the probe did but for some reasons they choose not to sometimes. This will be patched soon.

New game settings menu

A new menu has been added to configure your game before starting a new survival mode game. This is for closed testing so people can tweak how quick or long they want their game to last, start on a certain day to test certain mechanics, and tweak other settings. More were added but got deleted when my SSD died last month. I’ll be adding the ability to choose your spawn point in a later patch.

New lightning storm sequence

One of the new game options added lets you begin the game before the storm to witness the lightning storm and first tripod rising. The storm effects have been redone from scratch and include wind effects that blow the grass and trees and new ambient sounds.

New tripod rising sequence

A new rising sequence where the first tripod will rise from the ground with complete custom sound effects and animations and blends into an AI Tripod that will wander the map.

New tentacle system

A new tentacle system is in the works, currently tentacles will only pick you up, not other NPCs or vehicles as I still am implementing this new non IK, more dynamic physics based system which looks a lot better and has collisions.

Tripods will now crouch down to pick you up

If you have been spotted by a harvester tripod it will attempt to chase you down and once reaching you it will crouch and chase you with the tentacle before grabbing you. This new tentacle has physics and collisions meaning if you run inside you can avoid being picked up but if you are stuck outside you won’t have as much luck. Once grabbed a new animation has been done where the tripod picks you up, brings you in front of its main spotlight to inspect you, then puts you into the cage with a new cage opening and closing animation.

New cage death sequence & tentacle animations

The cage sequence has now been added and includes an animated tentacle that comes out and grabs people from both cages. If you are in the cage you will be pulled into the machine and a new death sequence will happen. New animated humans have been added to the cage and can be observed being pulled into the tripods even from the ground. These animations will be improved overtime, hopefully with motion capture.

NPCs re added with various improvements

NPCs now spawn by default. I still have a lot of work on the NPCs to get them working as expected.

New Fire damage added

Fire damage has been readded and reinvented to work as expected

New lighting, weather and skybox & major graphical improvements

The entire weather, lighting, and skybox system has been replaced and has many new features such as improved rain effects, rolling cloud shadows, new dynamic volumetric fog with light shafts and density based on the weather.
Tripod textures & materials improved

Tripod lighting improved

The tripods textures & colors have been improved as well as the night lighting and spotlights now illuminate the grass and trees.

New Sounds

A ton of new sounds have been added, replaced, and improved with distant variants for a more immersive audio experience. This includes heatray sounds, horns, tripod actions like spraying blood, probing, and more.

Bug Fixes

Fixed basement door that wouldn’t let you walk up the stairs

Fix tripods getting stuck and walking in place on cliffs

Fixed loud noise at start of game

Fixed missing desks in prison

And like 100 more I can’t remember but plenty new bugs :)