Hello Survivors!
Hotfix 10h is finally LIVE! If you do not get it automatically, we’d
recommend restarting your Steam client (or verifying game cache) to
receive this update.
This has been a crazy month for us here at Sandswept! We started
development on Hotfix 10h on October 4th, and after slaving 7 days a
week, here we sit at almost 3 AM on November 5th! This build makes
sweeping improvements to performance, zombie AI, multiplayer gameplay,
some balance tweaks, and even more! Huge patch notes below!
Patch Notes for Hotfix 10h
“The Monumental Multiplayer Update”
This update is so large, we’ve added some categories to it like we do for our larger builds.
Achievements:
- New achievement “I Linger Too” is now active! Play The Dead Linger
(10h) before the end of November 9th to receive this Halloween
Anniversary achievement!
Multiplayer Changes:
- HUGE: Tons of fixes to the multiplayer experience! We’ll try to list them all here.
- General improvements to syncronization between clients. Survivors
should appear in the proper position and generally move more fluidly to
other survivors.
- Survivors now see other survivors facing the correct direction in multiplayer.
- Large improvements to the spiral world generator.
- Fixed a bug where windows and doors would not stay broken after reloading a saved world.
- Fixed a bug where some physics objects would pop into the air on World Refresh.
- Large improvements to long distance travel in multiplayer. Survivors can travel further apart with less problems than before.
- Chat should now properly show up for hosts and client survivors equally.
- Survivors are now properly removed from the game and scoreboard when exiting a multiplayer game.
- A message now properly displays when a survivor leaves a world.
- Fixed an issue where survivors would sometimes stop showing any movement to other survivors.
- Survivors can now see the flashlights of other survivors.
- Objects held by other survivors will no longer drop repeatedly while being held.
- Names from other survivors will now only show up from 50 meters away,
and when you’re looking at the survivor instead of simply showing up
when they’re on screen.
- Survivors can now see other survivors opening and closing doors. Doors are synced better in multiplayer.
- Survivor ping now shows up properly on the scoreboard in all cases.
- Disconnecting from multiplayer has been cleaned up and should now work much better.
- Improved host framerate when a client is joining a server. There is
still some stuttering during the join process but it is minimal. We
will improve this more later.
- Fixed a bug where client survivors would experience large terrain holes in farmland areas.
- Fixed a bug where a clients inventory was not being properly saved
after rejoining a game, causing them to lose inventory items.
- Fixed a bug where survivors sometimes would respawn all the way back
at the center of the world (regardless of where they were,) instead of
closer to their corpse as intended.
- Large fixes to issues where host/client survivors would turn
invisible to one another while still being able to interact with
objects.
- Client survivors can now cut down trees.
- Fixed a bug where buildings (such as a watertower) might have a different rotation for each survivor.
Zombie Changes:
- Zombies now animate their walks much better and no longer slide across the ground while animating.
- Tying in to that; Zombies are now slower. We will be adding two faster foes… Soon.
- Regular (Medium) Zombies now move at 1.1 speed, down from 2.5.
- Starving (Slow) Zombies now move at 0.4 speed, down from 1.
- Zombies are now less-CPU intensive than they were previously.
- Zombies should now more properly aggro on multiplayer clients.
- Zombie animations are now better syncronized across multiplayer.
- Zombies should no longer be able to emit multiple zombies noises at once.
- Zombies should no longer hit survivors through walls.
- Zombies should no longer hit survivors from far away.
- Zombie window climbing is improved. Zombies slide around and float much less when climbing obstacles.
- Zombies should now decide to climb over an obstacle or through a
window much quicker, instead of just walking into it for awhile.
- Zombies should rarely (if ever) hang in the air or appear motionless after spawning in the world.
- Zombies now pursue survivors more agressively once they’ve acquired a target.
- Slow zombies should be properly animating now.
- Potential fix for zombies repeatedly climbing the same obstacle and never getting over it.
- Potential fix for cases where invisible zombies may be present and able to collide with and attack the survivor.
- Potential fix for cases where zombie corpses may still move about and attack after they have been killed by the survivor.
- Zombies should no longer hover or hang in the air until the survivor gets close.
General Gameplay Changes:
- Hunger now decreases at a rate of .1% per 3 seconds, down from 5
seconds. In other words, it now takes 50 minutes to starve, down from
83 minutes.
- Fixed a small delay caused by animations when swinging with some melee weapons.
- Fixed a bug where a survivor would be able to climb a ladder to infinity.
- Potential fix for a large framerate drop sometimes encountered when
interacting with doors. (Not necessarily fixed in all cases.)
- Some fixes for large drops in framerate when respawning. Additional fixes will come later.
- Fixed a bug where survivors would be stuck on a white screen after
dying. (Most commonly encountered when dying of starvation.)
- Crosshairs now go away while interacting with or carrying an object.
- Potential fix for a bug where the previous weapon from the last
played world might appear in the survivor’s hands after entering a new
world.
Barricading Changes:
- General improvements to consistency of barricading. It’s generally easier to barricade now.
- You can now pry boards off with Mouse 2 (RMB) while holding a hammer. (Fixed a bug where it was Mouse 1 (LMB) instead.)
- Grab hand no longer shows up when looking at nailed objects.
- You can no longer melee while holding a nailable object and wielding the hammer.
- You can no longer melee while holding any object. The object will be thrown instead.
- Some improvement on held objects accidentally pushing through houses, walls, and other objects.
- When holding Mouse 2 (RMB) and dragging your mouse to rotate held
objects, the cursor will no longer leave the game window. This is a
particularly good fix for windowed users and users with multiple
monitors.
Inventory Changes:
- Items and objects should no longer fall through the floor of houes nearly as often.
- Some backpack items experiencing a squishing issue should no longer squish nor stay squished when equipped into slots.
- Some GUI elements, such as the inventory system, have changed appearance a bit; particularly in contrast.
- Drop Item box in the backpack now has a darker color scheme.
- Potential fix for overlapping items in the inventory.
- Potential fix for an issue where backpacks would switch when switching weapon sets.
- Fixed a bug where backpacks would not display their tooltip when moused over in the inventory.
- Added some simple numbers above “Change Weapon Set” to show which set number you have equipped.
World Changes:
- Large fix for framerate drops when running around farmland areas.
- Suburban neighborhoods now have more trees in them.
- Corn stalks have a brand new appearance.
- Farm crops, specifically corn fields, are much denser. Other farm
crop fields (wheat, soy, cabbage) have been removed for the time being
and will return in a future build.
- Far away houses now look much better, higher resolution, and more realistic.
- Some detail objects have been added to the Swerts and Office building rooftops.
- Better ambient occlusion lighting has been added to many of the structures in the game.
- HUGE improvement to content creation. The general stuttering when
building new content as survivor’s travel should be vastly improved.
- Moved furniture and other items should remain where you moved them
and no longer reset to its original position when rejoining a
previously saved world.
- Fixed a bug where you could not rejoin a world immediately after disconnecting from it. (Better memory cleanup.)
- The interior water tower ladder now extends to the bottom of the
tank, so survivors will no longer have trouble getting back out of the
tank once they’ve dropped down into it.
- Reloading an existing world or joining a multiplayer world will now
properly show the correct cliff textures and other terrain textures.
Menu Changes:
- There is now a View Distance setting in the Graphics Settings menu.
Setting the view distance lower can drastically increase framerate and
general performance. The default view distance has been lowered
sligthly, but you can turn it back up again if you prefer it. We will
also add an even closer view distance option in the near future,
allowing for even more performance gains on lower end machines.
- Worlds on the World List and Delete World screen are now in a more readable font.
- Worlds on the World List and Delete World screen now include a timestamp of when they were last played.
- On the in-game Escape menu, the “Game is not paused” text has been
moved down, and now properly shows up on all Escape menu screens. [Yes,
we do have plans for a Pause function in Solo Mode in the future.]
- Funny bits on the loading screen now change at a bit slower rate.
- Fixed a grammatical error on the loading screen.
- For new survivors, the configuration launcher should initially
default the game to “Fullscreen” mode instead of “Windowed” mode.
- TDL desktop shortcut is no longer pixelated or low-resolution.
- Dropboxes in the options menus now have a cleaner look.
Server Changes:
- Console command “save” will force the world to save. [Saving is done automatically, but this forces a save if so desired.]
- Fixed an issue where “-8″ coordinates (for one example) would be interpretted as “+8″
Audio Changes:
- Removed the out-of-place breaking sounds that play when you run into a door.
Misc Bug Fixes:
- Potential fix for the “black-screen only-hands” issue some survivors
encounter when running in Windowed mode. This fix will manifest as a
brief flicker when intializing the game in windowed mode.
- Potential fix for a rare (possibly obsolete) DesiredStateInt crash.
- Fixed an issue where the local survivor instance would be lost on death.
- Fixed an issue where controls would lock up.
- You can now force close the game by typing “quit” or “exit” into the
console. This is good for closing TDL when it locks up or otherwise
encounters a soft crash.
KNOWN ISSUES:
- Swapping weapons directly will cause the weapon to not equip
properly. Until we fix this (soon) you just have to re-equip the weapon
again to make it equip properly.
- Creating and joining worlds without closing TDL.exe can cause things
to get a little crazy. We currently recommend rebooting the game
between sessions.
- Guns do not always reload or fire properly and are missing recoil. We
will be updating the game to fix these issues in Hotfix 10i, coming up
next!
- Throwing objects doesn’t always work yet. We will fix this soon.
- Dragging doesn’t work just yet. We will fix this soon.
- Host survivors may experience some mild framerate stuttering when new
survivors are joining their game. We will be improving this as we
progress.
- Some survivors experience black screen with hands and nothing else.
We have added a fix for this, but if you still experience this issue,
run in Fullscreen instead of Windowed Mode. You can also try moving the
window frame, which may correct the issue as well. We will be looking
at a more permanent fix for this issue.
- Zombies are sometimes still appear in different positions for
different players in multiplayer games. We will be improving this.
- Sometimes the Settings menus get overlapped or otherwise crazy. Just
press the ESC key or “Done” button to get the screen back to normal.
- There is a bug where you will sometimes plummet to the ground very
quickly when dropping from a ledge. Holding Left CTRL right before
impact will mitigate some fall damage. Watch your step!
- You can sometimes have a phantom weapon or duplicate weapon in your hands when joining or rejoining a multiplayer game.
- The game and framerate will sometimes stutter for a short duration, especially when coming up on a town or new area.
- Sometimes buildings will forget to spawn. Sometimes loot inside
buildings will forget to spawn. The buildings want you to know they’re
sorry. If you experience this issue, curse loudly at the aformentioned
buildings and then start a fresh, new world, or continue onward to a
new area.
- Lots of other obvious issues that we’re going to be working on. (Welcome to Alpha!)
As usual, please report bugs on our Support & Bug Reporting forum.
We are going to hotfix for a couple more days, bringing more and
more features, fixes, and content that was leftover from the Big Engine
Change. After we are satisfied, prepare yourselves for Build 11 – The
Hunting Update!
Linger on, Survivors!
