After the Collapse News

After The Collapse 0.8.0 has just been released!

This first 0.8.x release is not as large in scope as my previous major releases. The main goals here were to make the game more friendly to newcomers, give more options to experienced players who want a challenge, while fixing many issues and doing the necessary internal groundwork for the next set of massive changes planned for it.

Before we start. I want to announce that I will be taking a break until early January. Beside the holiday season, I have important family matters to deal with and I also personally need to get some time off the game. I will still be around on our Discord channel, and will publish the usual hot-fixes if need be, just not at the pace you're used to.

Anyway, let's get to the update.

[h2]Scenarios, Events and Difficulty Settings[/h2]



This is the core component of this new update. The new game menu has been reorganized through several start scenarios. Each scenario can be customized and difficulty can be tweaked to satisfy anyone from a total beginner to expert players.



Food and water consumption can be tweaked, alongside dozen of other aspects of the game. One of which is the "Rare Water" toggle. This one dramatically changes the way water is handled in game. If this setting is selected, water wells must be placed next to a water source and must be placed at least 8 tiles apart from each other. It's also tagging purified water as a "rare" item, making it much less likely to appear while looting or trading. This, coupled with various other settings, like Lethal Sickness and high Pandemonium infection rates can make this game extremely difficult.

Of course, all of this is entirely optional.

Additionally, the distribution of "random" events (raids, traders, and so on) and frequency can be tweaked from this same menu.



Most scenarios allow you to preview and reroll your starting survivors to further tailor your experience.



The world map menu used to select your starting position in some scenarios is also a lot more user friendly and informative. It quickly explains what you can expect from a location, the reason why you can or cannot settle somewhere, and so on.

[h2]Notable Additions and Balance Changes[/h2]

Gas masks who were until now situational and overpriced items now protect against most illnesses and against the dreaded acid rains' effects.

Two new mobs have appeared in the city. The Fire Crab and the Explosive Shambler. While both can, very rarely, appear in standard event difficulty, they are more common with difficult events selected. The fire crab is relatively tanky and will hurl fireball at anyone hostile. The explosive shambler will explode on contact AND on death causing a short range but deadly chemical explosion.

Water is a more prominent features, you'll find small lakes dotting the surface and the underground caverns on a regular basis.

If you decide to start the game underground, you'll notice that the game will no longer trigger recruitment, raids and trading events until you've breached the surface. This was a common issue I finally addressed. Creatures will still occasionally appear on the surface map, though.

New events and traders will appear on your map. Notably, the exotic pet trader, who can start appearing after you've discovered the Animal Care technology and who will sell you those rare and valuable eggs so you can build your own army of mutated animals.

A new "Mature Content" checkbox is available in the gameplay settings menu. If unchecked, cannibalism, most blood effects, and prisoner traders will be removed from the game (it is still possible to take prisoners, just not to trade or eat them). This setting is best changed before starting a new game.

[h2]Graphics[/h2]



The water is now animated and, much, much, much nicer to look at. In the same spirit, wheat, tomato and mushroom farms got a much needed facelift with plants actually looking like what they are supposed to represent.

[h2]User Interface[/h2]



The most notable changes regarding the UI, outside of minor tweaks, are two important additions to the Combat UI. You can now order your survivors to go fetch more ammunition, either through a keyboard shortcut or through the new button in the bottom menu.

Additionally, it is now possible to add/remove individual survivors to your combat group without having to reset combat mode completely though the Recruit/Release button in their individual menu.



Furniture now have their own menu which allow you to move and rotate said item without having to raze and rebuild it. Same goes for power relays.

[h2]Engine & Fixes[/h2]

I went through a lot of old code and either rewrote or improved it, fixing bugs, improving performances and reliability. It's a very slow and tedious process which has very little directly visible benefit to the end user. But it's work that needed to be done nonetheless if I want to continue improving it. At least It led to a lot of fixes for both reported bugs and unreported bugs.

Oh and I've added support for the Cyrillic charset, which should open the door to the game being translated to new languages through modding.

[h2]Mod and Savegame Compatibility[/h2]

This version is NOT compatible with save-games from previous versions. You can roll back and finish your game by going in AtC steam properties, beta tab, and select the 0.7.7 version.

All mods I am aware of should work in 0.8 without any issue. Mods for which it could have been a problem have already been updated.

[h2]Author's Notes[/h2]

I hope you will enjoy this version, while it's not as large as I wanted it to be, I've done my best to provide most needed improvements. After taking my break, we'll resume our usual schedule and start working on the next content updates.

[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]

• Balance: New and reorganized difficulty settings (there are a LOT more of them)
  
• Balance: Greater ability to customize event distribution and frequency
  
• Balance: Gas masks now protect from the negative effects of acid rains (both light & heavy) and most illnesses
  
• Balance: When starting underground, most surface events (raids, traders, recruits) won't fire until you build your first staircase
  
• Balance: Traders should, on average, have a larger selection of goods
  
• Content: New and reorganized game scenarios
  
• Content: Updated Halloween DLC to work with the new scenario system
  
• Content: New and difficult "The Plague" scenario
  
• Content: New "Really Bad Day" scenario (unfair solo survivor start, inspired by CDDA)
  
• Content: Player faction flag can be customized
  
• Content: Ability to start as a standard faction or as cannibals (more options coming)
  
• Content: Ability to customize your starting survivors and add as many as you want
  
• Content: New rare special traders (ammo trader, egg/pet trader after Animal Care tech)
  
• Content: New and altered raid events
  
• Content: Added ability to toggle "Mature Content" in the gameplay settings. Makes the game more kid-friendly by disabling blood effects, cannibalism, prisoner traders, human meat and so on...
  
• Content: Furniture and power relays can be moved easily (thanks to a new button in their menu) without having to deconstruct and reconstruct them again.
  
• Content: New Fire Crabs variant. Yes, they are basically a tanky flamethrower. Dangerous, but great as defensive pets if you manage to get some eggs
  
• Content: New Explosive shambler variant. Will explode on contact and death, causing massive but localized AoE damage
  
• Content: Added achievement for reaching day 60 in Last Stand (Steam only)
  
• Content: Added achievement for reaching 30 survivors in The Plague (Steam only)
  
• Content: The job template settings are now applied to prisoners too
  
• Engine: Technical debt payment (fixed/improved/removed a lot of crappy old code)
  
• Engine: The code in general should be more "secure" (crash preventing) and a tad faster (i have no idea if it's noticeable to the end user or not)
  
• Engine: Replaced the white screen of death during game loading by the console (showing that there's some progress being done)
  
• Engine: Added support for Cyrillic character set (opening the door for more translation mods)
  
• Graphics: Water is way prettier and properly animated
  
• Graphics: New sprites for wheat, tomato and mushroom farms
  
• Graphics: Minor tweaks and improvements
  
• ProcGen: New garage building added to map generation
  
• ProcGen: All surface maps and caverns can now contain lakes, also added a lake quantity setting to custom map generation menus
  
• ProcGen: In the Military Base map, the main building is more organic but also more difficult to clear
  
• ProcGen: It's possible to settle in city center, commercial districts and suburbs (no special map feature for now)
  
• UI: Completely reworked the "New Game" menu to manage all the new options
  
• UI: Reworked the Game Settings menu (larger menu, more tooltips, clarified obscure settings)
  
• UI: Added Encyclopedia button to the main menu
  
• UI: Overhauled the "select spawn location on city map" menu to give more helpful information (and made it better looking)
  
• UI: Refreshed the Recruitment panel (fixing alignment problems, added colors)
  
• UI: Added button/shortcut to order survivors to go fetch more ammunition (if needed) in combat mode
  
• UI: Individual settlers can be added/removed to/from combat mode on the fly using their info panel
  
• UI: Added menu when clicking on furniture (chair, beds, tables..) with the ability to move the item somewhere else.
  
• Modding: Replaced event handlers by scenario files with extensive gameplay and difficulty customization settings
  
• Modding: Added "Mature" to events, items and traits' tags. Also added to recipes (as a true/false flag). Mature tagged items will not be applied/run if the user unchecked "mature content"
  
• Modding: CattleAI is permanently deprecated
  
• Modding: Older turret component versions are permanently deprecated
  
• Modding: If only some of a mod's textures are compiled, the game could fail to load those which are not. This is fixed.
  
• Modding: Added WaterNoiseColor to terrain files (colorize the water plane if any. default blue-ish.)
  
• Modding: Thanks to the new "furniture" menu, things like chair, beds (and so on) can now be upgraded like other clutter
  
• Modding: Added "mod_examples" folder, containing a documented example to write your own translation for the game
  
• Modding: Added DeathShot to weapon files. Assuming the weapon is AoE, it will trigger a shot when the owner dies, shooting at itself. Useful for mines and such.
  
• Modding: Moar LUA hooks into the game: (Game.Time, Game.Paused, Tile.HasRoof, Tile.RoofStatus, ERoofStatus, and several UI components) (by Alex)
  
• Modding: Trade events can now have a list of preselected items (see trade_special_* events)
  
• Fixed: Survivors would occasionally ignore likes & dislikes when calculation their opinion of each other
  
• Fixed: The raid from "exiled" survivors couldn't trigger
  
• Fixed: Power generators were supposed to automatically make their job prioritary when near empty but weren't
  
• Fixed: The game wouldn't take the male/female ratio into account for the species which use this parameter
  
• Fixed: Mods couldn't override leader portraits and other textures (trait -> replace body part for instance)
  
• Fixed: If both "tech is unlocked" and "query is sent about player technologies" happen in the same frame, it could potentially lead to a crash
  
• Fixed: Rare crash related to minimap being updated by 2 threads at the same time
  
• Fixed: Potential crash on world map
  
• Fixed: In the new game menu, when customizing equipment, it was possible to crash the game by entering something else than a number in the quantity field
  
• Fixed: Right clicking items in the 'expedition result' panel wouldn't open the associated info panel
  
• Fixed: Several more internal issues way too obscure to go over
  
• Fixed: Fixed a bunch of typos in trait descriptions
  
• Fixed: Some more missing french localization strings (laws and traits especially)
  
• Fixed: When editing settings for a custom map, changing map architecture would not update settings properly
  
• Fixed: Clearing up an abomination nest from the map could lead to a crash when looking at the world map
  
• Fixed: Pausing game would remove clouds and fog from the map
  
• Fixed: The game wouldn't indicate you can't build over water (or other impassible tile) properly
  
• Fixed: The game would allow you to place walls directly over water
  
• Fixed: Monster spawner/nests could accidentally be hidden below mountains during map generation, causing animals to spawn around the mountain.
  
• Fixed: Issue preventing translation mods from translating the User Interface
  
• Fixed: In some cavern maps, it was possible for the bunker to "infect" the cavern, causing razed cavern walls to uncover metal walls instead of more cavern ones
  
• Fixed: Rare bug in underworld map generation which could lead a bunker to contain cavern walls and features
  
• Fixed: Mines would only explode on contact, not when being shot
  

Hi there!

With my work on the 0.8 branch of After The Collapse taking most of my time, we've hit a temporary lull in my release schedule. To keep you waiting, I think it's a good time to talk about the progress made toward the next major update. Out of the many things planned for the 0.8x cycle, I decided to focus first on what I consider to be ATC's major issue when it comes to player retention. Namely, a very unfriendly "New Game" menu, and near useless difficulty settings. Of course this first update won't just stop to those two items, but it'll be the main subject of this article.

Please note that many of the changes detailed in this article are still under construction. As such, the implementation might vary slightly.

[h2]New Game Menu[/h2]

The three different new game buttons (tutorial, main, custom) are being replaced by a single "New Game" button leading to a very complete scenario selection menu. For those in a hurry, here's a short video detailing the whole menu and a few other things:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As you can see, the same menu regroups all usual starting positions in addition to scenarios like the good old Last Stand and newcomers like "The Plague".



Scenarios are a fully customizable and moddable. They define the starting location, difficulty levels, events, your starting survivors, equipment, technologies among a ton of additional settings. They also define what the player can or cannot change before starting a game. For instance, with the "custom game" scenario, you can change pretty much everything about your game. While with "The Plague", you start with a preset location, survivors,  events and difficulty settings. We'll go over difficulty settings further down.

Anyway, once a scenario is selected, and we'll use "Custom Game" as an example here, you get to the next screen:



The first tab allows you to customize your faction. You can select your name, flag, ethics and (if the scenario allows it) if you want to start above or below ground. The main feature, beside the ability to select a different flag, is that you can decide to start with a bunch of cannibals or not. Speaking of cannibals, I also added a mature content flag to the settings which I will detail further down this article.



The next tab is your usual equipment customization menu. Not much has changed here except that the menu is larger and a few minor issues have been fixed. Let's get to the new and interest bit, then.



As requested, you can now customize your settlers, see what they will look like, add, reroll and remove them at will. I still have a small problem to overcome. It makes it too easy to start with overpowered survivors. In the future, I'll have to find a way to balance that. The obvious (and easy) solution would be to limit the amount of rerolls. But I know all too well how much people love to optimize the fun out of their games. I'm afraid it would incite some people to restart the game over and over again. The alternative solution, which is much more annoying to write, would be to write a secondary settler generator (for this menu only) which would attribute good and bad traits in a fairly balanced fashion. We'll see. I'll keep it "as is" in this first release, though.

I'll skip the surface and underground settings as they are pretty much unchanged from 0.7x.

Finally, assuming you're playing on a scenario asking you to select a location on the map, this menu has been overhauled too!



As you can see, it got a much needed makeover. It's not exactly what I want it to be yet, but we're getting there. You get a lot more information about the spot you want to settle on, It warns you about potential difficulties related to the selected map. The menu also tells you why you can't settle in some locations like point of interests and AI factions' headquarters.

And, of course, after the location is selected, the game starts as usual.

[h2]Difficulty Settings[/h2]

Difficulty settings were pretty lackluster in previous versions. Finding a balance between the newcomers who find the game too hard and the regulars who find it way too easy was pretty much impossible. Well, this will hopefully become a problem of the past. As you might have noticed in the previous screenshots, scenarios have 3 drop down menus below their descriptions. Let's see what up with those.



Clicking the Difficulty dropdown (which comes with several presets) will unlock this sub screen. As you can see, it's fairly complete and adds a ton of new settings to the game. I am not going to explain each individual one, as you can easily guess what most of them do, but I will still go over a few of the more interesting options.

First we have the "Pandemonium Infection Rate". It determines the percentage of survivors who are infected by the virus (which will slowly turn them into hostile tribals or shamblers if left untreated). It does not impact your starting people, but it does impact any new recruit. In the same vein, you can now select if the "Sickness" meter is lethal or not and you can disable the negative health effects given by acid rains.

The next setting, which I still have to implement (I am not yet 100% certain it will make it to 0.8.0), is the "Rare Water Sources". Simply put, it makes water a lot more difficult to get. Water wells will need to be next to actual water sources like lakes or rivers (yes, those are being implemented), and cannot be placed too close to one another, while purified water itself is made a "Rare" item, making it much less likely to appear during expeditions. The idea behind this setting is to give a proper challenge to the most experimented players.

You can also customize other factions, making them easier or harder to deal with. And finally, we have the "Bandit Lair" setting. It's not yet implemented, and probably won't be part of 0.8.0 but its goal is to occasionally spawn bandit lairs around the maps. As the name entails, bandit lairs are local bandit groups which will attack nearby bases and points of interest in a regular basis until the player (or an AI faction) destroys the lair.

[h2]Event Settings[/h2]

And of course, game "random" events will be customizable too! The 2 other drop down menus (events and event frequency) both open the same sub menu:



You can filter in/out easy and difficult events and you can even completely remove positive or negative events (or both if you don't want any event at all). It's also possible to customize their frequency manually or by using one of the 3 different presets.

[h2]Toggle Mature Content[/h2]

I know that there's quite a few parents playing the game with their kids and that the recent additions to the game might not be very kid friendly. As such, I am replacing the "toggle blood" setting by a much more complete Mature Content one. If checked, it will disable several of the most 'controversial' features:

• Blood effects and decorations won't appear in the game
  
• Cannibalism is completely disabled (with the exception of the Pandemonium virus)
  
• Prisoner buyers and sellers will never spawn (you can still take prisoners if you want to, just not cook or sell them)

On a technical (and moddable) level, events, recipes, items and traits can be tagged with a "Mature" tag. The game will simply ignore everything marked as such when the "Mature Content" checkbox is disabled. As such, mods can also support "kid friendly" versions if need be.

[h2]Map Generation[/h2]

As shown in the video, water looks a lot better now. It's an animated 256x256 texture (again, fully moddable) which is tiled under the map, instead of being a small 64x64 blueish tile. Lakes will be added to maps (to fill up those map corners and in preparation for the "Rare Water" difficulty settings) both above and under ground. I'm also adding a few new building variants and other small tweaks and improvements.

Nothing major, but do not worry, there's a LOT more to come in this area. Just not for the initial 0.8.0 release.

[h2]Game Engine[/h2]

I went through most my code, looking for issues, removing duplicate code, optimizing what can be and so on. It's definitely not as sexy as the previously mentioned features, but paying your technical debt is an important part of maintaining an healthy project. Still, it should make the game way more stable. It's not like it's particularly unstable, but all bugs must be exterminated nonetheless. It should be a tad more optimized, but I am not entirely sure it's something the end user will notice, except in particularly busy situations.

[h2]Weather and Climate[/h2]

Last but not least, the weather system is going through a major rewrite. Contrary to previously mentioned changes, I am still in the middle of rewriting this part, as such the final implementation may vary a bit from what I am writing right now.

As you've certainly noticed, the weather in ATC didn't make a lot of sense, a cold wave could follow a heat wave, and weather could suddenly go from a stormy weather to clear skies in the blink of an eye. While I don't think it was that much of a concern gameplay wise, it was still annoying. I'd like to replace that by a climate system that will determine the average temperature, precipitations, acidity levels, wind strength, and their min/max variation.

It would have several implications. Firstly, not all starting locations would be equal when it comes to weather. Some regions would be colder and humid while others would be arid. Yes, I know, we're in a city scale-wise and that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but nor do crops growing in 3 days. Scale and speed have to be tweaked to make a game. Secondly, instead of switching from a weather pattern to another every few hours, changes would be more gradual, clouds will appear before it's raining, temperature will slowly rise up and down instead of toggling between different states, giving you some time to prepare.


Of course, it also means I have to scrap and rewrite the whole weather thing. It's going to take a week or two and we'll surely find new an interesting bugs that way.


[h2]In Conclusion[/h2]

This 0.8.0 update is going on nicely. The "New Game" menu was incredibly painful to write, the user interface library I am using was definitely not made for that level of complexity, but I am very happy with the end result. I don't have an exact ETA for the first release yet, but I'm pretty sure it should be ready in early December, hopefully during the first week. I will publish an untested version in the Nightly Branch soon-ish.

So, what next? Well, after the usual cycle of hot-patches, I will start working on the new expedition system detailed in my previous devlog at least as the main focus. I will still continue to improve other parts of the game in parallel.

Cheers!

Hi !

Here is another small patch for 0.7.7, fixing more reported issues, most of them too obscure to really explain at this point. As usual, it's compatible with previous versions.

You can also expect a proper devlog next week-end, explaining the progress made toward 0.8 so far.

Cheers.

[h2]Changelog[/h2]

• Modding: Generators, relays and batteries are now compatible with the UpgradableTo field (a proper button is shown if the field is present)
  
• Fixed: Settlers would not check if their inventory is full before accepting building jobs, causing them to freeze in place if there's no depot available either
  
• Fixed: The weird circle of light visible by night in the top left corner of the map has (finally) been removed
  
• Fixed: A room placed on the extreme border of the map could crash the game when it's checking if it's walled or not
  
• Fixed: Several rare/situational crashes
  
• Fixed: A couple rare/situational thread collisions (another form of crash, just way more annoying to find and fix)
  

Happy Halloween!

To celebrate this event, I added a batch of thematic and optional content to the game. It's made available as a mod integrated to the main game which you can enable or disable at will through the mod menu.

I hope you'll enjoy this update.

Have fun!

[h2]Halloween Content[/h2]

• Pumpkin farming (plants + seeds)
  
• Jack'o'lanterns (small decorative light sources)
  
• Pumpkin pie (food item)
  
• Explosive pumpkins (early game artisanal mine)
  
• Carved pumpkins (to decorate your settlement)
  
• Decorative spooky lights (orange, purple and red)
  
• Pumpkin helmets (can be made at the armor forge)
  
• Shamblers have a chance to spawn with pumpkin helmets
  
• Custom difficulty level replacing most normal raids by giant spiders and zombie attacks

[h2]0.7.7 Patch 7[/h2]

• Engine: Support for official DLC/Mods (no, i'm not going to start selling DLC)
  
• Fixed: Missing random prisoner seller events
  
• Fixed: Typo in code causing problems preventing settlers from emptying their inventory properly

Hey!

Here is another small patch for 0.7.7, fixing reported issues. On that note, I'd like to thank everyone who helped by making me aware of bugs or problems, no matter how minor, it's an invaluable time saver.

Anyway, nothing major this time, just a couple of very situational crashes and minor issues with the user interface. As usual, it's compatible with previous versions.

In other news, progress on 0.8 is advancing at steady pace. It's still a bit too early for a demonstration, but we'll get there soon :)

[h2]Changelog[/h2]

• Engine: Various improvements to bug report system (by Alex)
  
• Modding: Inter mod communications (by Alex)
  
• Modding: The game will check mods' data files for common errors and warn the user if any is found (it's a superficial check, not a guarantee)
  
• Fixed: Possible crash with Steam's leaderboard (by Alex)
  
• Fixed: Possible crash when switching to fullscreen without selecting a screen resolution
  
• Fixed: Rare crash with bullets (probably, as i couldn't reproduce it)
  
• Fixed: Annoying light flickering when selecting a start location on the city map
  
• Fixed: Renaming a survivor or depot with just one or multiple space(s) and no character would prevent you from renaming the agent again
  
• Fixed: On the city map, it was possible to reinforce your main base with defenses (which are useless in that particular context)