v0.3.2 Pre-alpha: Electricity and defenses

Summary

Pre-alpha v0.3.2 is out for play testers! Generators, breaker panels, flood lights and three automatic turrets. Power up your base and let the turrets handle the horde. Also, the infected can climb now.

Features

• Base defenses: you can now build a generator and connect your defenses to it.
  • Build a generator, small or large, and its panel shows fuel, load and what has been wired to it.
  • A breaker sub panel wires into a generator and gives you ten more positions to wire defenses to.
  • Spot lights, directional and multidirectional flood lights are all buildable and wireable.
  • Three automatic turrets have been added: the Vulcan minigun, sniper turret, and a shotgun turret.
  • Running wire shows a strip on screen with what you are wiring and turns red when the run is too long.
  • Added three new categories to the build screen: Power, Turrets and Traps.

Power up a turret and let it handle the horde.

• Zombies now drop off ledges and climb up onto cars, dumpsters and fences to get to you.

You can't hide behind fences any more.

• You can now clear zombies out of an area and they won't come back (for a while).
• Zombies now spawn in and around POIs and along roads rather than scattered through the forest.
• Zombies no longer spawn in water or in rocks.
• Each spawn point has a cool down to ensure you won't get attacked from the same direction twice.
• A new Electrical 101 mission was added to teach you the basics of electrical work.
• Tooltips shown on belt and storage have been replaced in favor of the info panel. This now shows much more information about an item when hovering or clicking it.
• Food, drink and medicine now show what they restore (or take away) next to their weight.
• Building takes its materials up front and the structure goes up the moment you place it.
• You can now pack up a sleeping bag by holding Y.
• When someone dies, a skull marker shows where the body fell on the map and minimap until it disappears, so you can go back for your gear.
• Eating, drinking, healing, dismantling and every other timed action now share one progress bar low on the screen, and Esc cancels.
• The edges of the screen pulse red while hunger, thirst or bleeding is draining your health, and an alert names which one it is.
• Horde announcements and serious injury warnings now arrive as alerts in the right-hand feed instead of full-screen banners.
• Looking at a door that can be broken now shows how much health it has left.

Bug fixes

• Zombies see and engage you reliably now.
• Loading a save now brings back broken doors, smashed props, explored map areas, missions and the time of day.
• Eating works for everyone in a joined game again.
• When you die your belt items now fall to the floor around your body and the rest stays on it, for you or anyone else to loot.
• The host no longer hears everyone else's eating, drinking and out-of-breath sounds as though they were their own, and those sounds now play for the player actually making them.
• Selecting food, a bandage or a crafting part no longer claims your inventory is full when it is empty.
• The duplicate water bottle that weighed less, quenched almost nothing and quietly took up to five health when you drank it is gone.
• Off-screen objects are no longer rendered until you look at them, which cuts load time and improves frame rate by 5 to 15 FPS for most players.
• Ambient audio now has its own volume slider in settings.
• Eating a chocolate chip cookie plays an eating sound instead of a gulp.