On SteamNotes only · this build shipped before we watched the app
PATCHNOTES SUMMARY:
The camera got a full pass — every movement is smooth now, and it no longer looks at you through walls and ceilings
A new third camera for driving: it hangs behind the car like it is on a tow rope, so it follows where the car actually moves, not where it points
A large performance pass — the world streams in small slices, and big zombie hordes no longer halve your frame rate
The OBD tester got a complete visual overhaul — a real handheld device on screen, with fault code history
Fixed a crash when using the bed, the phone booth and other menus
Fixed parked cars teleporting back to base while you were on the road
New
A third camera for driving. It does not swing around the car like a normal chase camera — it hangs back on a tow rope. The car drives off, the rope goes taut, and the camera gets pulled along, always looking at the car. That means it ends up behind the direction you are actually moving in, not behind the nose of the car: slide the back out and you watch the car go sideways in front of you. There is a slight pull towards the rear of the car mixed in, so a drift does not turn into a pure side view. Small movements do not drag it along at all — parking and shunting stay calm. Press the camera key twice while driving to reach it; the crane camera moved one place along.
The OBD tester has a whole new look — a real handheld device in landscape view with its own boot screen, and a fold-out realtime graph in the live data view. Faults that clear themselves now stay listed as "not active" until you erase them, just like a real scan tool.
Controller support keeps growing (still work in progress): every window shows a button guide that adapts to what you can actually do, text fields open an on-screen keyboard, and the workshop camera turns with the right stick.
Improved
The camera never jumps any more. Anything the mouse or the controller moves — zoom, tilt, angle, field of view — now eases into place instead of snapping. The mouse wheel used to change the picture in one hard step; that is gone, as is the jump when you switch camera or get in and out of a car.
The camera keeps your view clear. If a wall or a ceiling comes between you and the camera, it moves in front of it and pulls back out again once the way is clear — quickly in, gently out. Furniture is deliberately ignored: shelves, crates and barrels no longer shove the camera around inside a shop. Neither do cars, zombies or other players.
Roofs and walls no longer turn transparent. Buildings used to fade parts of themselves away so you could see inside. The camera now simply moves in instead, which keeps the building looking like a building.
On foot the camera looks a little further ahead — the point it centres on sits higher than before. Behind the wheel it stayed as it was.
Driving is much smoother. The world is built in slices across several frames instead of one, which took the noticeable hitches on a one kilometre drive from nine down to one. Locations like the gas station and the motel no longer jolt when they come into view.
Big zombie hordes run properly. A hundred zombies packed together used to spend their time shoving each other around and dragged the frame rate down to about 30. They now keep their distance without fighting the physics engine — the tutorial's final wave is where you will notice it.
Cars parked in the world are held in place more reliably while the world around them streams in.
Front tyre grip raised on all three cars.
Disabled menu entries now dim the whole row, icons included.
Fixed
The game crashed when a menu tried to grey out an entry — the bed, the motel, the phone booth and the "nothing to do here" hint were all affected.
Parked cars no longer teleport back to base. If you left your car by the roadside, drove off in another one and came back, it could suddenly be standing at the base again — frozen, and it ploughed through the world on its way there. Cars now stay exactly where you parked them.
The motel's upper floor was sealed from above. The cut-open roof deck that lets you look down into the rooms was never applied, so the upper rooms stayed covered. The floor is open again as intended.