Survivalist: Invisible Strain News

Hello, it's patch day! I've been playing through the game in anticipation of releasing it out of early access soon, so this is mostly a bunch of minor bug fixes that came out of that. Here's the change list:

• Fix for PiP flickering when dragging the screen with the mouse in Command Mode and hovering over a character
  
• Fix for movie theater side entrances not being correctly aligned with where you actually come out
  
• Fix for carried body being left in mid-air in some cases when characters drop a body in multiplayer
  
• Fix for characters who are carrying bodies wandering off and dropping them in order to auto-collect/deposit/get ammo/use toilet
  
• Fix for characters who are carrying bodies keeping hold of them while entering buildings
  
• Fix for not being able to toggle Builder role Urgent/Not Urgent using the sprint button while playing the building animation inside a building under construction
  
• Fix for target switching after you throw something at a neutral character
  
• Fix for player community members not repairing their armor at nearby workbenches that don't belong to you
  
• When opening a Character sheet from a character in a building with the gamepad, select the button the goes back to the building by default instead of the skills tooltip
  
• Changed missing animation error to a warning, to stop a mod from crashing
  
• Tweaked vehicle wheel slip values to slide less on dry grass
  
• Updated Czech, Indonesian, Latin American Spanish and Thai translations
  

I haven't had any more problems with the previous patch, v236, so that's being promoted to the main branch. That includes the new Hit The Road features and the change to let you get achievements with mods active.



[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v237 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".

Hello, I've released another small publicbeta patch. This adds Thai support and fixes a bug introduced a couple of versions ago where you couldn't stash bodies in buildings/vehicles. But the biggest change probably is that achievements are now allowed when mods are active! I've found that a lot of people play the game with mods - and there are a lot of good ones now - and it's a shame not to allow achievements just because someone is playing with SIS Drop Loot enabled, for example.

I thought it might be a controversial change so I asked the discord folks to run a poll about it, and the poll was in favor by 64% vs 36%, which I felt was enough. One of the objections raised was that you could join a multiplayer game that had mods enabled, and accidentally get some achievements too easily. To address this I've added a tooltip to the Join Game screen so you can see what mods are active in a game when you join it. It shows a green tick if you've downloaded them already, and a red cross if you haven't.



Admittedly this is kind of stretching my definition of "no changes except bug fixes from now on" but the achievements stuff I started asking about before then, and I'm gonna call the "Active Mods" tooltip a bug fix because it feels pretty broken that you can try to join a game and get a loading screen for ages while you download 20 mods or something... yeah I'll go with that.

I know some people would like achievements to be enabled in some mods but not others, but that would mean maintaining a whitelist (which I don't think I can do) or making it a setting for the mod author to maintain (which has other issues such as mods by authors who have moved on would be missed out), and anyway it's hard to imagine what the exact criteria would be. Other Steam games don't seem to have a consistent rule for this, with some doing and it and some not, as far as I can tell. Achievements are always an honor system - it will always be possible to release a cheat mod that just gets you all the achievements, if someone wanted to do that. So I think this is the simplest and best solution.

Here's the full change list:

• Achievements allowed when mods are active
  
• Show what mods are active on multiplayer games on the Join Game menu
  
• Added support for Thai translation
  
• Updated Czech, Hungarian and Latin American Spanish translations
  
• Fix for player avatar characters giving each other the Lost Item quest, which doesn't make narrative sense for them
  
• Fix for Chicken Heist quest being given by characters who already have a relationship with the player
  
• Fix for stashing bodies in buildings/vehicles
  

v234 won't go to the main branch because of the Stash bodies bug.

EDIT - I've released another small publicbeta patch with a few crash fixes, 236.

• Fix for crash when medic has a wound bandaged with a rag that doesn't heal for 6 days
  
• Fix for rare crash when AI investigates damage to a building
  
• Fix for incompatibility with SIS Clothing Durability
  
• Updated Thai and Latin American Spanish translations
  

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v236 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".

Hello, I've released a small patch in publicbeta with some hotfixes for crashes that were reported in the last few days. There's also a fix for the map size setting not being retained when you Hit The Road - it should keep using the map size you originally chose. Here's the change list:

• Fix for crash when trying to bandage self while unconscious in Command Mode (also fix for various actions appearing enabled while unconscious)
  
• Fix for camera sometimes going crazy when dragging it in Command Mode
  
• Fix for rare crash when trading
  
• Fix for map size not being remembered when hitting the road
  
• Updated Czech, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latin American Spanish, Lithuanian and Russian translations
  

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v234 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".

Hey everyone, it's patch day! This patch introduces a small new feature to Hit the Road - your companions will now increase their skill caps by a few stars when you move to another map, perhaps representing their personal growth after having survived one area and travelled to a new one :) Each exit from the map will give you a different skill cap bonus, between 1 and 5 stars each, depending on the supposed difficulty of the new area. So there's a little incentive to go for more difficult areas, or at least more of an interesting choice between areas - and to take companions with you. (Note - since the player's starting character always has full skill caps for everything, it won't have any effect on them).

I've also made it so one Hit the Road exit will always say "Similar Area" and one will say "Harder Area", instead of giving you some stats for urbanization, etc. The Similar Area will re-use exactly the same difficulty settings that you had before, while Harder Area will copy them and then try to make them a bit harder by reducing resources and increasing enemies.



When going between maps you'll see a little UI sequence showing the skill cap stars increasing. I've re-used this to show a similar sequence when you die and lose a Constitution point, as I always felt that needed to be made a bit more clear to new players. Besides that, I've also made the game remember your equipment policies when hitting the road so you don't have to set them up all over again.

Finally, three more translations have been finished and checked for technical errors - French, Lithuanian and Hungarian! Thanks to Jean-Charles Rocher, Audrius Vaidalauskis, and Attila 'Ateszkoma' Kurucz for finishing those off :)

This patch is a bit of a sad one I'm afraid because I'm making it my cutoff point - no more new features from now on! There will be bug fixes, hopefully not too many of those either but we'll see. And of course translations are still welcome. But as for the feature set, the game has been in early access for almost 5 years now and it's time to move on.

That means if all goes well I should probably be able to release it out of early access some time in April. I want to make sure I have a nice, stable build before doing so, so it has to be left to sit and cool down for a while. If things crop up, as they often do, it might take longer but I certainly hope it'll be out before the 1st of June as that would make it fully 5 years since it was launched, and I really don't want to go beyond that.

I have a long wishlist full of great ideas, both my own and suggestions from other people, that I would have liked to have done, but I think at a certain point it becomes easier to implement these things in a fresh new project where I have the ability to break stuff and change the rules, rather than being always afraid of some knock-on effect on existing systems. So that's what I'll be doing - starting a new project! I'm not sure yet if it'll be a sequel or something else (or both) but I'm going to start dividing my time between figuring that out, and whatever bug-fixing is still needed for Invisible Strain. (Also, I'm going to try and bring this game to other platforms - but more on that later).

Here's the full change list for v232:

• When dying and being rescued by another community, show a brief sequence informing you that you have lost a Constitution point
  
• When hitting the road, increase your companions skill caps, using the above mentioned sequence to show them increasing
  
• A couple of Hit the Road exits in Sandbox maps will give you the options of Similar Area (to keep your current settings) and More Dangerous Area (dial the difficulty up)
  
• Equipment policies are remembered when hitting the road
  
• When doing an urgent role, characters will play animations such as wood chopping faster (and chop the tree down faster)
  
• Updated Czech, French, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latin American Spanish and Lithuanian translations
  
• More support for Hungarian cases
  
• Show on the debug menu when achievements are disabled because of mods
  
• Fix for enemies smelling or hearing followers while creeping up on them
  
• Fix for being able to bury two bodies in the same grave by putting one in while someone is walking towards it with another
  
• Fix for followers sometimes playing fists up melee stance while holding a bottle or other item that isn't a weapon, before moving to attack an enemy
  
• Fix for characters and equipment on Community screen showing black squares when you switch the sort type
  
• Fix for characters sometimes freezing at the end of certain animations like hugging or unequipping
  
• Fix for shades sometimes clipping characters' foreheads
  
• Fix for sun lens flare disappearing when highlighting a character and showing the PiP
  
• Fix for terrain cache error sometimes when saving a multiplayer Story Mode game
  
• Fix for incompatibility with SIS Explosive Props mod
  
• Fix for Out Of Sync sometimes when dying and getting rescued
  
• Crash fix
  

EDIT - someone reported a crash, so here's a hotfix, v233.

• Updated Czech, Indonesian, Italian and Simplified Chinese translations
  
• Fix for crash on character inventory screen
  

Lastly, v231 has been promoted to the main branch.

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v233 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".

Hello, it's time for another patch in publicbeta. I would say I am pretty close now to releasing the game out of early access, which means pretty soon I'll be locking the build down and only adding essential fixes (as I don't want to be adding instability around launch). There's a small new feature in this patch though - if someone is following you, and you assassinate an enemy, they will assassinate nearby enemies, The Last of Us style (with a bit of fudge factor on the stealth - also The Last of Us style). They'll only do it if they have a hunting knife and enough fitness/hand 2 hand skill to be successful.



I'm mostly doing "tidying up" tasks these days. There are now seven "completed" translations - Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Turkish - and I've been running a script on them to check for errors involving formulas, emoticons or missing parameters. (When I say "completed" I mean every line has a translation, though there could still be corrections, so let me know if you'd like to add any). I will do Lithuanian and Hungarian next.

Also I made the smaller backpacks have color variations. Okay no one was crying out for this but it always felt jarring to me that they all looked the same. And I've made vehicles more slippery in snow and mud, but a bit less likely to slide sideways as it always felt like they swung around too easily when cornering. Here's the full list:

• Followers will assassinate (or choke hold) enemies nearby when you do (with a little cheating on the stealth)
  
• Using right-stick on gamepad, or XZ on keyboard, on the Scavenge screen (et al) switches between the two inventories
  
• Smaller backpacks can have different colors
  
• Reduce wheel friction on slippery terrain types and conditions (mud, snow, ice), increase sideways wheel friction slightly so vehicles less prone to sliding when cornering
  
• Optimizations mostly to Community page
  
• Updated Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and Turkish translations
  
• More grammar functions to support Czech translation
  
• Fix for trader icons sometimes showing where refugees who have left the map were last
  
• Fix for your followers breaking stealth to attack enemies when you stealth-attack them
  
• Fix for characters using the the wrong indefinite article when saying things like 'I'm getting a slacks' or 'I'm getting some pot'
  
• Fix for not being able to load Huge maps created in mods
  
• Fixes for some languages not being rendered correctly after switching to them, until you restart the game
  
• Crash fix
  

And I've promoted v230 to the main branch!

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v231 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".