Survivalist: Invisible Strain News

Just a quick note to say I've now moved my latest patch, v140, from publicbeta to the main branch, so everyone now has the latest fixes. Here are the change lists again:

v140:

• Fix for crash when trader asked to be let into gates in online co-op
  
• Fix for character getting stuck inside gates
  
• Updated Japanese and Chinese translations
  

v139:

• Fix for NPCs coming in gates without permission, if the gates are open
  
• Fix for military zombies not spawning with armor or helmets
  
• Fix for characters waiting 10 seconds to bandage themselves after an injury, if the player stops controlling them
  
• Fix for watchtowers not counting towards Presence even though it says they are
  
• If you selected multiple characters in Command Mode, deselect them on returning to Direct Control mode (it was too easy to forget you had selected them and order them all to do something by mistake)
  
• Updated translations
  
• Action menu text optimization
  
• Memory leak fix!
  

v138:

• Dialog options to set whether characters from other communities can come into your base (by default they won't enter gates now)
  
• Fix for traders not moving on when you tell them to
  
• More dialog variations when interrogating people to try and find out if they have invisible strain
  
• Graves deteriorate and disappear over time, but you can keep them around by "paying respects" to them from time to time
  
• AI communities bury bodies from other communities that die near their base (not zombies etc as those disappear anyway)
  
• Make feuding less likely if people fear each other
  
• Don't plummet morale because fences got destroyed
  
• Some deer spawning fixes
  
• Moss Effect on cars, rocks, old buildings etc
  
• Hungarian and Brazilian Portuguese Updated
  
• Fix for characters sometimes stealing stuff in non critical situations
  
• Fix for crash when deer became infected (which isn't supposed to happen)
  
• Fix for character circling around someone forever in MoveAdjacentTo goal
  
• Fix for surrender dialog not working because the Alert goal was taking higher priority than the conversation goal
  
• Fix for some towns being set to no infection when they should have been white strain
  
• Fix for people being able to slide around when getting up after being depressed
  
• Fix for dark past speech not playing after hug because another queued speech about approaching invaders was blocking it
  
• Fix for zombies grappling with someone not being visible in pip
  
• Fix for "subgoal not possible" error in FleeFromAllEnemies
  

Yo, it's time for another update. This one is fixing a bunch of bugs, most importantly a memory leak that I introduced a few patches ago (which means over time the game uses up more and more memory and I suppose would probably crash if you played it for long enough). As with all new patches this is in publicbeta to start with but I'll aim to get it onto the main branch quickly, along with v138, because of the memory leak. Here's the full changelist:

• Fix for NPCs coming in gates without permission, if the gates are open
  
• Fix for military zombies not spawning with armor or helmets
  
• Fix for characters waiting 10 seconds to bandage themselves after an injury, if the player stops controlling them
  
• Fix for watchtowers not counting towards Presence even though it says they are
  
• If you selected multiple characters in Command Mode, deselect them on returning to Direct Control mode (it was too easy to forget you had selected them and order them all to do something by mistake)
  
• Updated translations
  
• Action menu text optimization
  
• Memory leak fix!
  

EDIT - someone reported a crash in the gates code so I've released another patch with a fix for that, plus some translation updates (v140). Here's that change list:

• Fix for crash when trader asked to be let into gates in online co-op
  
• Fix for character getting stuck inside gates
  
• Updated Japanese and Chinese translations
  

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v139 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".

Patch time! This one is mainly about two things - giving you some dialog options to control who comes into your gates (in case they have invisible strain), and stopping the map from being overrun by graves or corpses. Here's the changelist:

• Dialog options to set whether characters from other communities can come into your base (by default they won't enter gates now)
  
• Fix for traders not moving on when you tell them to
  
• More dialog variations when interrogating people to try and find out if they have invisible strain
  
• Graves deteriorate and disappear over time, but you can keep them around by "paying respects" to them from time to time
  
• AI communities bury bodies from other communities that die near their base (not zombies etc as those disappear anyway)
  
• Make feuding less likely if people fear each other
  
• Don't plummet morale because fences got destroyed
  
• Some deer spawning fixes
  
• Moss Effect on cars, rocks, old buildings etc
  
• Hungarian and Brazilian Portuguese Updated
  
• Fix for characters sometimes stealing stuff in non critical situations
  
• Fix for crash when deer became infected (which isn't supposed to happen)
  
• Fix for character circling around someone forever in MoveAdjacentTo goal
  
• Fix for surrender dialog not working because the Alert goal was taking higher priority than the conversation goal
  
• Fix for some towns being set to no infection when they should have been white strain
  
• Fix for people being able to slide around when getting up after being depressed
  
• Fix for dark past speech not playing after hug because another queued speech about approaching invaders was blocking it
  
• Fix for zombies grappling with someone not being visible in pip
  
• Fix for "subgoal not possible" error in FleeFromAllEnemies
  

All this took rather longer than I would have liked. I did a bit of a playthrough to try and make sure it was having the desired effect, and found and fixed a number of bugs along the way.. but for that and other reasons it ended up being a bit of a time sink. There's some good news coming on that front though - I'm quitting my day job and I'm going to work on this game full time, starting from March!

Having this game on Steam is something really special - one and a half years after the early access launch it has good reviews, people are still buying it, and there's a whole community of people waiting for updates and even making mods! But it's clear that at the current rate of progress it would have taken me years to finish it properly. Hopefully now (from March onwards) I'll be able to fully dedicate to it the time it deserves.

It's still gonna take time, and I don't have a specific completion date in mind or anything, I've just got a long wishlist of features including of course Story Mode, and this should really help me get through them properly :)

In the meantime, the above patch (v138) is now in the publicbeta branch, and I have moved the previous patch (v137) to the main branch.

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v138 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 patch time! This one is mainly about addressing a bunch of bugs people have reported, and adding some small Quality of Life improvements.

The biggest change is that the tracks you leave in towns will time out after a while. Up until now after you entered a town you would be told you'd "left some tracks" there which resulted in hordes of zombies spawning from the town and coming to your base at intervals over the course of the rest of the game. Now those tracks will "disappear" after a while and the zombies will stop spawning.

I think having done this I also need more ways to attract you back to the towns after the tracks fade away, so there's an element of risk/reward. They do have resources you might need, but I probably need to add some quests or something that will make you keep wanting to return from time to time and brave the hordes again, but in a more controlled way. But the current rate of horde spawning was causing problems for some people in the late game so I've done this step for now. Hopefully it doesn't get too easy as a result, but in any case there are probably better ways of adding challenge. Let me know how it goes.

(P.S. for existing savegames the fade-out timer will just start from the moment you start playing with the new version, so it'll still take a while for them to fade. I didn't save the time you entered the town originally, so I wasn't able to base it on that)

Here's the full changelist:

• Tracks in towns time out after a while
  
• Stop characters from drinking water immediately after give them a direct order (such as chop a tree)
  
• AI characters equip armor if you sell them it and they don't have any on already
  
• Option to turn hints off (under Settings/Graphics, for now)
  
• Set Farm Zone option is available in action menu when highlighting your crops, and now shows all crops you have already planted, not just the ones you currently have seeds for in your inventory
  
• Only play the peeing sound for the currently controlled character
  
• Fix for bug where tree stumps were cleared when a group were set to follow a lumberjack
  
• Fix for invisible strain bites triggering a war if they come from someone in another community
  
• Fix for a case where characters got stuck trying to deposit items they'd crafted, if the desired depot was inaccessible
  
• Crash fixes
  

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v137 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".

This patch has several new features in it. First of all, deer! I've always wanted to add more animals, so deer are just the beginning - I intend to add more down the line. Their AI is quite similar to the rabbits, which is why I started with them. They're nervous and very fast, but you can creep up on them in bushes. Shoot them in the legs to slow them down a bit. If you can catch them, they'll provide a good food source in those early stages of the game before you've got farming up and running.



Next, leg armor! Ever since launch, many NPCs have been protected with body armor and helmets, but they've always been vulnerable to being knocked over by shooting them in the legs. But not anymore as some characters will have leg armor now, so you'll have to vary up your tactics.



I've also changed the way armor works, a little. Previously when armor was damaged a few times, it disappeared, and was instantly replaced by another piece of armor if you happened to have one in your pocket. I've changed it so the armor doesn't disappear now, and you can't change armor in the middle of combat. Instead, it stays on you and can be repaired afterwards at workbenches. (NPC communities now have workbenches as well.) Idle characters will automatically repair their armor at the nearest workbench.

Why do this? I want to cut down on the amount of busywork you need to do to manage a community, and picking up every piece of armor and helmet you see on corpses, in order to use them as spares, felt like busywork to me. Now, once you've kitted a character out once you can just leave them to it as they'll repair their own armor when it gets damaged. Admittedly it wasn't the biggest problem but I figured I might as well do it while I was adding the leg armor. (Probably the biggest source of busywork imo is collecting gold from corpses, I do aim to address that at some point too.)

The next new feature is these cool blood effects:



Because it's a zombie game.

The rest of the patch is some small tweaks to this and that, Here's the full change list:

• Deer
  
• Leg Armor
  
• Armor can be repaired at workbenches, but you can't change your current armor while in combat
  
• Fancier Blood Effects
  
• Recover faster from damaged animations
  
• Aiming penalty when target is moving sideways or away from you
  
• When highlighting a campfire, workbench, etc, show recipes in a separate section at the bottom of the action menu if you have no ingredients for them
  
• Need less vodka to make bandages
  
• Some tweaks to the action menu
  
• Some crash fixes
  

The above will be in publicbeta for a time, as usual. I've also moved v135 to the main branch! v135 contains the (optional) new hud layout and optimizations, nicer grass, and some improvements to the action menu.

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v136 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".