Survivalist: Invisible Strain News

It's patch day! This patch is mainly all about jealousy. You can flirt with more than one person (and they'll get angry with each other), you can dump the person you started a relationship with. When you give gifts to some people, others will wonder why they didn't get any. When you give out green passes among your community members, they'll try and take them from each other. Hopefully it should all help create a bit more drama!



There's also the usual sort of bug fixes and such. I realized there was a pretty major one that stopped you from progressing to the next romance stage with certain personality types, which therefore would have locked off the new endgame stuff for a lot of people - that's fixed.

I've also made it easier to cook human meat - you can just do it over a fire now instead of needing to put it in stew with some vegetables. That should help in the earlier stages when you're often short of food... though of course, most of your community members won't be happy about it!

Here's the full change list:

• You can flirt with multiple people at once, and they won't appreciate it
  
• You can now dump people
  
• Giving gifts to a person will often cause resentment among others who haven't gotten any, particularly if they didn't much like that person
  
• Your community members will get angry with you if they haven't gotten a green pass yet, and may steal them from each other
  
• Fix for snowman quest (and others) not failing properly, also explained more how to scoop snow
  
• Drinking game quest ignores any drink policy you might have set
  
• Resume All Roles button on Community Page
  
• Disable bleeding from feuds to make them less deadly
  
• Made F8 debug menus translatable
  
• Made human meat cookable on a spit
  
• Fix for characters sometimes thinking they can't go to a nearby river to get a drink
  
• Fix for role icons not appearing on all icons on character switching bar
  
• Fix for relationships not being possible with some personality types
  
• Fix for out of sync error when trying to trade with someone, if you have a different language set from another co-op player
  

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v123 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".

I've put another patch out in publicbeta, this one's mostly me updating translations and just catching up with some bug reports that people sent me over the last few months while I was deep in the sandbox progression work:

• Updated Korean and Chinese translations
  
• Fix for NPC getting stuck in a loop telling someone to leave their community
  
• Possible fix for gunpowder crafters filling up their inventory with containers of curry etc
  
• Changed default limit of wandering groups on Medium maps to 4 instead of 2
  
• Make it harder to kite looters away from their base and then assassinate them when they are shaking you down
  
• Better handling when a mod or story fails to load a dll
  
• Fix for crash if you kill some fake FEMA teams
  
• Fix for crash if mods have a dependency loop
  
• Rare crash fixes
  

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v122 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 week I've been working on optimizations for online co-op. This was a particular problem when you had built up your base and there were a lot of characters around.

To get a bit technical, there were two main problems. Firstly the prediction code for nearby characters was a major bottleneck (which doesn't exist in single player). Secondly the fog of war calculations were causing framerate spikes, because unlike in single-player I was performing them on the main thread (for reasons relating to the need for determinism in multiplayer). In both cases the solution is I've offloaded them to different threads. PCs with 8 cores should benefit most from this, but I would guess most people have at least 4 physical cores, but 8 virtual cores with hyperthreading, so will probably be okay.

Anyway that was the most glaring performance problem, but I am of course aware there are other optimization needs besides this. Multiplayer will still be a little worse than single player, and even in single player it doesn't always run at a solid 60 fps on my reasonably high end PC. So I will come back to this again. (I think the main culprit is the renderer.)

Here's the changelist:

• Optimizations, mainly for online co-op when a large number of characters are nearby
  
• Fix for being able to activate Dark Past quest twice for the same person
  

EDIT - I've released another patch, v121, which mostly just fixes an error message introduced in v120.

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v120 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".

Yes, it's a patch! For the last few months I've been working on something to try and give Sandbox Mode a better sense of long term progression. I've always felt - and I've seen comments saying the same - that Sandbox Mode starts well (though it can be tough for newbies, but that's a subject for another time) but once you've gotten to the stage of building a base and growing your community it's a bit perfunctory. You're just given a quest to take over the area, and that's it. That's what this update is trying to address.

Instead of just a quest to take over the area, you'll see a quest to get to know the members of your community and "ask them what's up". Asking the right community member (i.e. right age/gender for you, and with a good opinion of you) "what's up?" will trigger a bit of flirty dialog, doing this a few times will lead to some quests and - if you don't give them the brush off - eventually the start of a relationship. Following this thread will lead to bunch of missions that ultimately end in a new way to complete Sandbox Mode. The quests involved have some variation depending on personalities, the time of year, and RNG. Not everyone can be trusted.

In order to test the new stuff I also did a full playthrough, fixing up bugs and various annoyances as I went. That's partly why it took so long. I have to say, having played it through, that I don't think I'm "finished" with Sandbox Mode yet. These new quests give it a structure that was badly needed, but it still needs to be filled in a lot more. Plus there's a lot of Quality of Life improvements still needed, and I'm not happy with all of the gameplay.

Upcoming patches in the near future will be smaller and focused on the above, and shouldn't take nearly as long as this one just did. Later, when I'm working fully on Story Mode, I guess there might be some long patch-droughts. Don't worry though, I've been working on Survivalist since 2009, it might take a while but I'm not about to disappear.

Note that this patch is in the publicbeta branch for now, and probably will be for a long time! Also in order to get any of the above to trigger, you should start a new game in Sandbox Mode, don't use old saves.

[h3]What's this publicbeta thing?[/h3]
v117 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".

Here's my changelist (warning, this is a bit more SPOLIER-y than the above):

• Rewrote how roaming hordes etc works to be driven by scripts and show which ones are currently active on the map screen
  
• Flirting, starting relationships with people in your community, triggered by asking them What's Up (if they like you enough, and are the right age, gender etc)
  
• If you get into a relationship with someone they will trigger a mission to contact FEMA and try to get a green pass into one of their bases, doing this questline is a new way to complete Sandbox mode
  
• Snowball fights and snowmen (can be part of the flirting questline)
  
• Feeding rabbits (can be part of the flirting questline)
  
• Raiders with pipe bombs
  
• A bunch of combat AI fixes
  
• Some balancing tweaks like making helmets reduce your sight while caps increase it more, being able to craft backpacks, not all zombies dropping loot, making some quests rarer
  
• Being able to pause/resume roles from the community screen
  
• Fix for chefs getting stuck and not cooking stuff sometimes
  
• Allow builders and crafters to go further when looking for resources (since you can limit them by setting a zone)
  
• Fix for pickaxe sounds not being played when mining inside the mine
  
• Forget places marked as inaccessible when setting movement zone or gate policy
  
• Added Hungarian! Updated Japanese and Spanish.
  
• Stop wandering groups from always spawning close to each other on maps with few roads
  
• Fix for error message when trying to play a mod if it depends on a mod that hasn't been downloaded
  
• Fix for miners sometimes getting stuck not going into the mine anymore
  
• Added & and | to speech formulas (for use by translators)
  
• Use new Unity input system for gamepads, in the hopes it fixes a bug where triggers didn't work on some XBox gamepads
  
• Crash fixes
  

EDIT - released a new patch with some quick fixes (v118):

• Insulation display fix
  
• Crash fixes
  

EDIT - and another one (v119):

• Fix for crash when triggering a tripwire after exiting a building
  
• Fix for crash when crouching and needing to get a drink
  

I'm moving all the most recent work from the publicbeta branch into the main branch! Here's a recap of the major changes which are now in the game for everyone:

When you start a new game, you can view, download and play any of the community-made Stories from the Steam Workshop:



I've split community content into two types: Stories and Mods. Stories are complete playable maps (whether procedurally generated or hand-made), while Mods are smaller bits of add-on content. You can only play one Story at a time, but can select multiple Mods. There have been quite a few useful ones made already!



I've made it possible to create mods that introduce new weapon models, new clothing models, and even new code! I made couple of example mods - the trilby hat and the revolver - with guides here and here explaining how to do that.



I also made a big internal change - Stories or Mods can now be dependent on each other, so you don't have to make a copy of Sandbox to make one small change to it, you can just make it a dependency.

Moving on from mods, I've also added the much-requested Ultrawide Screen Support.



And to fix a common source of confusion I've revamped the Equipment Policy Dialog so you can choose exactly which actions are allowed - for example, if you want people to plant corn but not eat it, you can now do that: