v0.3.3 Pre-alpha: Vehicles and Animals

Summary

This update adds ridable motorbikes, huntable wildlife, third-person view, and rebuilt survivor models with swappable clothing and a refined main menu.

Features

• New survivor models. Survivors are rebuilt on new male and female character models with more detail and a full set of swappable clothing, and existing animation, weapon handling, revive and death behaviour all carry across.
  • Seven kinds of clothing (hat, jacket, shirt, gloves, trousers, boots and a balaclava) can be found and worn.
  • Choose from 5 survivors to play as before starting a game.
  • When you die, everything you had on you drops in one sack right where you fell.
  • You can now see your death location on the map.

• Steadier first-person weapon handling. Weapons track your view more tightly instead of floating and lagging behind your aim, while keeping the walk-and-breathe character.
• Third person. Press F5 to pull the camera out behind your survivor, and press it again to go back; the key is rebindable.
  • Right-clicking pulls the camera in over your shoulder and zooms, while magnified scopes cut to first person.
  • The camera matches first person for recoil, shake, mouse sensitivity and invert-Y, and it now follows more loosely with a wider frame and less head-bob.

A view from third person mode

• Motorbikes. Find a derelict bike, get it running, and ride it.
  • Bikes have real suspension over rough ground, lean into turns and will pull a wheelie.
  • There are 2 bikes to choose from so far, a smaller more nimble bike and a larger and faster one.
  • Ride in first or third person, switching at any time.
  • Every bike has a headlight, toggled with L: it is mounted on the steering head, so it sweeps where you point the bars and leans with the bike through a corner.
  • Crashes and zombies wear a bike down, and left too long it becomes a dead roadside wreck. A repair kit can fix it.

The motorbike and buggy models

• Wildlife. Rabbits, deer, wolves and bears can now be found and hunted for resources.
  • Each species behaves its own way: bears are territorial, wolves move in packs of three to five and only at night, and deer and rabbits try to get away from you.
  • Animals take damage, bleed and die like anything else, with impacts, blood and sound.
  • Butcher a carcass with a hunting knife or fire axe. Meat and leather now come from animals only.

Butchering a deer

• A new front end. Every screen in the main menu has been redesigned with a more polished look.
• HUD. Player names shown above other players' heads can now be toggled on and off.
• The banners for a level up, an approaching horde or a POI discovery have been made easier to read.
• Interaction prompts in the world are bigger, brighter and bolder.
• 5 difficulty levels of keypad-locked bunker doors. Opened with a keycard swipe or bypassed by hacking the panel with a hacking kit. Must be powered up before using.
• The Wooden Bow can be crafted by hand now, so you no longer need a Workbench to make them.

Bug fixes

• Small tweaks to the first person camera.
• A large framerate drop across the whole world is fixed: the bike seat prompts were rescanning the entire scene every frame, and the HUD was allocating about a megabyte on every update.
• The parking garage no longer drops the framerate when it comes into view.
• Campfires show firewood again, in every state, instead of showing as a bare ring of rocks.
• Various fixes for Co-op animations and aiming.
• Small improvements to some wording on various UI panels.