New lighting, illness, UI changes, Steam sale and more!
Steam Sale:
A belated Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Z: The End is 20% off for the duration of the Steam Autumn Sale.
Lighting:
The lighting system has been completely overhauled. The previous system worked good for the day and night system and dark areas like the lab but something like a flashlight or static lights around the world looked awful and didn’t work well. But the new system can. Its nowhere near ray-tracing, or path-tracing, but it looks pretty good.
UI/HUD Changes:
The UI has received some minor changes with this update. Firstly the item names in the inventory have been shifted to the left and expanded slightly. The status effects such as bleeding, or sick have also been changed. Previously it was just one bar that showed all the effects now all of the effects have a separate bar.
Illness/Infection:
The sickness effect has been changed. It now lasts 5 minutes and can be cured with 1-2 GermX as each one removes 2.5 minutes from the timer.
It is now possible to get an infection when attacked by a Zombie. The infection is a bit more dangerous, it doesn’t go away on its own and takes away more health. But it can be cured with a single GermX.
Benchmark:
There is now a simple benchmarking tool in the game. It can be accessed in the video settings menu. It takes 30 seconds and will give the minimum, average, and maximum framerate when complete. This will mostly be useful for me as it allows me to test the impact of changes in the game. It probably won’t be useful for most people because as long as your PC was made in the last 10 years you can probably plat the game.
World Changes:
Previously all of the buildings were made up of separate blocks, similar to something like Minecraft. Now the buildings are made of one large object. This makes creating new buildings significantly faster.
The roof for the trailers has been remade. It’s definitely better than the old one but I may make some changes to it.
Launcher:
There is now a launcher for the game. It will only show up once so you can select which DirectX version for the game to use. After that, it will just open the game and close itself automatically. But if for some reason you like to press the play button on the launcher every time you can select to show the launcher. If for some reason the DirectX version you selected is giving you issues the launcher can be shown again by holding Shift while pressing play on Steam.
Fixes & Changes:
– Changed various item names
– Changes to the day/night system
– Enabled Santa zombie
– Enabled candy cane
– Disabled pumpkin zombie