Hi everyone! This update has been a long time coming and I know you've all wanted it, introducing the Hospital update!
This large new building will spawn in each generated city. You can also make your own custom hospital in the block editor by marking it as such.
At the moment only a single hospital spawns but I'm working on having the amount of hospitals be a variable settable in the city generating screen and to accommodate this I have changed the city generating screen to make more room, with the Generate option being it's own screen that I will update soon in a future update.
Any civilians that work in that building will now be assigned as Doctors. At the moment they don't look different to regular civilians as they commute back and forth to work / home like the rest, but they have new behaviours.
Instead of becoming alerted and calling for the police a doctor will perform CPR for a while until the patient does not resuscitate. Then they will declare them dead, put them in a body bag and carry them away to the hospital. I'd like to add an ambulance for this in a future update.
The ability to move dead bodies is a large change in how the game works as before they were all left behind. In future updates I want people to be able to move bodies in other behaviours, such as military cleaning up corpses after cleaning up an area.
Once they reach the hospital (if the person doesn't get up as a zombie beforehand) they will take the body to a room for storage. I might add a Morgue type room in the future specifically for this but because of the sheer amount of bodies it feels a little impractical to force them all into a single room and instead they pile up around the hospital.
At the moment Doctors will only do this work when they are unaware of a zombie outbreak, but they will not change from unaware when they see a dead body like other civilians do. To them a dead body is more....normal in their line of work. Civilians will also not freak out when they see body bagged corpses as they assume this means they are being dealt with. Non-bagged corpses will arouse their suspicions however.
This new system means that the Cop Incident system has also been updated. When doctors have performed CPR and taken away all dead bodies from the region it will be released from being an incident zone and the cops will go back to their patrols. This is something I've wanted to add for a long time as previously cops were stuck there until the Quarantine was declared.
If you wish to see this body system in action the best settings are to uncheck the randomized ticks box to make sure zombies don't appear right away, but to have the Die First setting on and high symptom ticks. This means all the infected will drop down as bodies and passing doctors will take them to hospital. This allows plenty of time for the infected bodies to pile up in the hospital before they turn.
I've also fixed a visual bug with body bags clipping through floors and another bug where cops would get stuck when citizens reported dead bodies inside buildings to them.
As you can see this was a lot of behavioural changes, so let me know what you think! There's still a lot more to add. I want the possibility of infected citizens to "feel sick" and take themselves to hospital, though that also means I need to change the symptom system as at the moment they merely stumble around until they turn. I'm also working on a system for the doctors to be called to the incidents to recover the bodies.
As always thanks for playing and see you in the next update!