Survivalist: Invisible Strain News

A lot of people have been asking for translations in their own language and several have been offering to help, so I decided I need to start supporting it officially! Thanks to Leonardo aka System Tech for doing the first translation, into Spanish ːsteamhappyː

I have made this available in the "publicbeta" branch so far. You can play it by right-clicking the game in your Steam library, going to "Properties...," clicking the Betas tab, and selecting "publicbeta" in the drop-down there.

In future I'll probably be making all new features available in the "publicbeta" branch for a while first, before pushing them 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 that branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it'll 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"
  

P.S. If you want to help with translating into another language, send me an email:

It's... another stability patch. With a few bug fixes thrown in :)

• Fix for body not disappearing for a few seconds when burying a corpse in online co-op
  
• Fix for character getting into a weird animation state when assassinating someone who turns out to have invisible strain
  
• Fix for vehicles juddering endlessly when hit by an explosive
  
• Fix for traders getting stuck in a loop between burying someone and going for a drink
  
• More crash fixes
  

Hello, I've released another stability patch. This one is mainly about fixing a bunch of different crashes and some out of syncs that were reported to me since the game shipped. Hopefully with these out the way I'll be able to work on more interesting things soon :) Here's the changelist:

• Fix for terrain from previous co-op games sometimes being left visible when you start a new one (I think)
  
• Fix for character showing idle pose all the time instead of animating in some situations on online co-op
  
• A lot of crash and out of sync fixes
  

I've released another a new patch, this one's purely for stability as it fixes a bunch of crashes and out of sync errors that people have reported to me since the game launched. Let me know if you get any more crashes once you're running v80!

Hello everyone! It's been a mostly successful launch, I think! ːsteamhappyː I do have a lot of new feedback and bug reports to process and I'm going to be doing that over the following weeks.

First on my list is the difficulty, which a number of people have complained about. I kind of knew this would be the case as I got a number of similar comments during the beta, and had spent some time trying to make it easier in subtle ways (yep, it actually used to be even more difficult lol).

If you're wondering why make it so difficult, well it serves a purpose which is to try and encourage you to tackle things in more varied ways than just going in and hitting or shooting everything. Such as using stealth, hiding in buildings, digging traps, throwing meat as a distraction, and making use of the NPCs in the world. I find that once people are familiar with the mechanics, they don't generally find it too hard at all. I probably need to be messaging some of that stuff better though.

I think the biggest problem is that because there's no story mode as yet, there isn't a nice tutorial to introduce you gently to the game systems and you're kind of thrown in at the deep end in Sandbox mode. Story mode is going to take a long time to make, though, so to address the issue in the short term I'm adding difficulty modes!

When you start a game you'll now be presented with this dialog:



Your options are "Normal" and "Slightly Easier". The only difference currently is that in Slightly Easier mode, half the zombies will be spawned with leg injuries which means they limp and don't move fast. If you're a beginner let me know if you think that helps or if it's still too hard.

I also added an option to set where you want your saves to go, as some people have been having mysterious problems with access violation errors when using the normal place.

Here's the full changelist:

• Added slightly easier difficulty setting
  
• Make it possible to change the directory the game saves to by putting 'savedir c:\\foo' or suchlike in your launch parameters