Ever since I released the original Survivalist people have been asking if I could add drivable vehicles... I always figured it would be awesome but technically difficult and might unbalance the game in various ways, so it was better to focus on other things. Survivalist is primarily a game about people, and community building so I that's what I put most effort into. However recently I started to realize that, having ported the game to Unity and added physics for ragdolls and thrown objects, a lot of the technical issues with vehicles might be solved now.
So anyway I'm focusing on Story Mode mainly at the moment, but after doing that for about a month I wanted a break of sorts, and I decided to give drivable vehicles a try! It actually just took one fairly intense week, or so.
I haven't done extensive playthroughs with this, so I'm not sure of all the implications. You can't just get into any vehicle and drive it, of course. You have to find "Car Parts" scattered around the towns - garages are a good place to look, and other cars, and traders might stock them. (Note - you'll need to start a new Sandbox game for this loot to be spawned, so I recommend doing that!) You will probably find it takes a while before you can get together enough car parts to repair the vehicle you want. You also need a toolbox and high enough construction skill.
There seems to be a general consensus that petrol.. I mean gasoline would expire about a year into the zombie apocalypse as it breaks down into its component parts, though you can find examples of people saying they started a car or lawn mower after X years standing idle and it was still okay. I've added the ability to make fresh gasoline from maize using the Still, but I figured it would be a bit limiting if you had to get all that production up and running before driving any vehicle.
So, drawing on my deep knowledge of chemistry and mechanical engineering *cough* I decided maybe there would still be a small amount of usable gas in the tanks of these abandoned cars, and in jerry cans you might find in gas stations and houses, etc. (Currently everything runs on gasoline, but probably a few of them should use diesel, for which you can substitute vegetable oil, which could be a reason to bring back the sunflowers - I just didn't get round to that yet).
I was initially afraid that vehicles might be a super weapon, so as well as the above-mentioned need to find car parts to get them working I made them take a little damage from running over people (or zombies), and from bullets. People and zombies will also try to dodge out their way, so it's not all that easy to run over all your enemies. Zombies will be attracted to vehicles with running engines (but can't hurt you while you're inside them), while animals will flee. NPCs will shoot or chuck molotovs/pipe bombs at them. In practice I don't think they're a super weapon now, if anything I might have made them too fragile but let's see how it goes.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
There are a few caveats:
- The AI won't use them
- The game takes place on a grid of 1x1 meter squares, and every prop or building (including vehicles) must be a rectangle on that grid. So if you park diagonally, it can make a rather ugly collision box around the vehicle.
- You can drive any 4 wheeled vehicle if you get it working, but you can't drive the tank
- You can't do fancy things that require nice animations that you often seen in games with vehicles like GTA, such as leaning out of the window and shooting, or sliding across the hood, or standing on the roof
Sometimes a vehicle will roll upside down or get stuck in a river or something. For those situations, if you get out and highlight the vehicle, there's a feature on the action menu called "Park" which will try to revert it to a more sensible location (and align it with the grid).
There's likely to be a lot of refinements needed, which I'll hopefully be able to add slowly over time. It could use some hud elements showing a speedometer, rev counter, etc. There should probably be a friendship quest where someone in your community wants you to help them fix up an old pickup truck or something. The engine should emit smoke when heavily damaged. The grass draw distance could be improved. Etc. But it's in, and it's fun!
One other new feature of note is an experiment where I made some of the zombies in towns start off lying on the floor, as if dead, only to rise up and start chasing you if you get very close to them, or make a noise. I thought it might add more variation to town encounters, give you more of a chance to use stealth and possibly give you a jump scare or two.
Here's the full list of stuff in this patch (v187):
- Driveable vehicles
- Incorporate code for the Revised Crop Safety mod code into the game for AI so they don't waste their seeds planting crops when it's likely to be too cold. For the player, this is still a manual decision to risk it or not.
- Increased some font sizes to try to help Steam Deck compatibility.
- Mapped Voice Chat Push to Talk to the Start button on Steam Deck and game pads by default - hold it to talk, or click it to open the title menu. (I am seriously running out of buttons)
- New tent types (to make camps more varied in story mode, but also usable in Sandbox)
- Various small bits of editor work for story mode
- As an experiment, allow NPCs from AI communities to level up their skills the same as player community members do. So you have more incentive to help them survive.
- Fix for characters who tried to flirt with you, but who you turned down, getting negative morale due to jealousy anytime you hug your partner, forever afterwards - that will now happen for one day only.
- Moral and Prudish characters won't try to flirt with you if you are taken.
- Fix for exploit where you can extract more gunpowder from shotgun shells than it takes to make them
- Removed some old code that stops farmers from tending crops more than 64 meters from where they started, you can use zones for that now
- Get fatigued a little less quickly when running
- Some Zombies in towns play dead, so you can creep past them if you don't make any sound or get too close
- Helicopter taking off animation
That's in publicbeta now, and I've moved the previous patch,
v186, to the main branch! The main new thing in v186 is the art pass with the new style houses:
Anyway, back to working on Story Mode.
[h3]What's this
publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v187 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".
