Hey everyone !

Since the last anoucement back in late december i’ve been working on a lot of different things torward my new goals for the near future of Project Apocalypse.

Today i am releasing the Pre-Alpha 1.42.0 which bring a lot of things to the game: Reworked weapon upgrades, equipement upgrades, reworked projectiles, compass system and more in addition of the usuals changes and fixes.

Let’s review all this in details into the following Patch Notes !

Content:

• The first major feature coming with this update are the new upgrades for weapons and equipements. As stated previously, these upgrades will now have a ‘rarity’ logic with 5 tiers of rarity: Uncommon, Common, Rare, Epic and Legendary. For the weapons, the upgrades are at the same place as before but the UI has been obviously changed as you can see on the following image

• The Equipements have now a button for their upgrade right in the Workbench leading to a very similar menu allowing you to upgrade your gear at your will. To upgrade both you will need ‘Rarity Upgrades’, they are distinct from Equipements and Weapons and for now, they are only craftable via the Workbench. To go with this there are also been some updates to the healing system and more precisely to the Shield: It now have 5 tiers, each one offering a certain amount of protection. Howewer, once your shield get “destroyed” (when it has no shield points anymore), it get reset to its lowest rarity.

• Finally I also added a small indicator to the Workbench menu showing how much upgrades the player has.

• The second major rework of this update is the projectiles rework. I reworked a lot of aspects from these, including the particles, the projectile prediction, the physics and more. In this small video you can see the new particles, they have been completely reworked to be better looking and more optimised. https://streamable.com/l0vdkk And this is the new projectile prediction system, it allow for a better visualisation of where the projectile will go instead of just having a small red area. I also fixed a bunch of bugs, I will detail some of them in the ‘Fixes’ section at the end of this patch notes.

• As already announced, this update also come with a small new map area !

• In this update I also added a small new feature which is a compass system. In its current state, it will allow to spot the ennemies but in future it will also allow to easily locate storage boxes, near items, etc

• You can see that I also made some changes to the health, armor and stamina display to be more simple and compact, the shield now also have a small rarity indicator.

• An other important addition of this update is the addition of more than 50 new zombie models allowing a huge amount of variation in the zombie hordes

• Finally, I also added healing sounds in this update !

Changes:

• (Healing) Changed the healing particles when regenerating shield

• (Optimisation) Made some optimisations to the spawn system to make it more efficient and fixed a problem that could cause the zombies to take a lot longer than exepected to spawn

• (Optimisation) Improved multiple particle systems to be better looking and better performing

• (UI) Made some changes to make some UIs more readables

• (AI) Changed AI behavior to reduce the chances for them to ignore the player when spawning

• (Crafting) Updated the crafts list with new ‘Upgrades’ items and rebalanced some crafts

• (Crafting) Made some changes to the crafting UI

Fixes:

• Fixed a major issue that could often cause some zombies to be invisible and ‘inactive’, blocking the game’s progression

• Fixed some issues with the zombies spawning in incorrect locations

• Pressing ‘Escape’ in the option menu will now properly close it

• Fixed an issue where the player couldn’t use heals after interacting with grenades

• Fixed some issues with the ‘healing tips’ when the player has low hp

• Fixed some issues that could cause the player to take more damages from zombies than it should

• Fixed various collisions issues occuring at some places

• Fixed multiple issues with the Workbench

• Fixed some issues with texts that could glitch out from their container or wasn’t properly aligned

• Fixed multiple issues with the healing system

• If zombies get stuck for a while, they will now respawn near the player

I hope you will enjoy to discover these new features, there is also a new small update (1.42.1) is currently planned in a few weeks !