Overview
Performance improvements:
- Engine version updated (smaller performance boost)
- Job system multi-threaded
- Many smaller performance improvements (See detailed patch notes)
- Memory leak fix
Content/ Features:
- Zombies wearing pumpkin hats (Very scary)
- Pumpkin decoration
- Seasonal halloween content (Will automatically switch on from now on between 24.10 and 06.11)
- Gameplay hints in loading screen (And an actual loading screen where you can see progress and such!)
Balancing:
- Tutorial easier, steps to avoid some frustration.
- Very easy mission actually very easy now; Zombies deal almost no damage.
- Difficult mission less difficult. (Elite Zombies were almost unbeatable)
Patch Notes 0.20.0
Features:
- New loading screen with loading bar and gameplay hints
- Treatment chamber now shows status that resources are missing for treatment (Previously only showed when inputs were empty, but requires full inputs to operate)
- Seasonal content, for the time of 24.10. to 06.11 the game will show Halloween content with Zombies wearing pumpkin hats and more to discover!
- New pumpkin deco assets (permanently)
- Research tables, data simulators and T4 fridges now show a floating text with what resource they just produced to give better feedback.
- When placing a building in invalid location it now creates a floating text explaining why placement was invalid.
Balancing:
- Difficult mission decreased Zombie damage, more nights without zombies and less damage for elite Zombies to make the mission beatable.
- Tutorial smaller changes to reduce frustration and improve onboarding. Also changed Zombie reduced zombie damage to dealing almost none, to better guarantee that you can’t lose the tutorial. Zombie waves also only start when player has built defenses.
- Scientists turned into Zombies now carry a lesser weapon to deal less damage (Also affected tutorial difficulty)
- No more boss zombie in tutorial.
- Snowball shooter T2 and T3 deals a little more damage to tackle high health Zombies that can appear relatively quick in higher difficulty missions.
- Damage effects of Zombies attacking buildings increased in size.
- Reduced chase speed of Zombies (Was off the charts for some reason)
- Very easy mission zombies almost do no damage now, very small decrease left with high threat levels, should now be actually very easy.
Fixes/ Improvements:
The new engine version, multi-threading and performance improvements were major changes for the game and took quite a while and required lots of testing.
- Updated engine version which should already improve performance a bit.
- Job system now works with multi-threading, reducing CPU bottleneck performance problems. Big bases with lots of workers should see larger performance improvements.
- Fixed a memory leak regarding power pole placement, potentially reducing problems with the app occupying to much RAM.
- Small performance improvements (Reduced number of implicit casts, less character checks, smarter temperature visualization updates, health bars optimized, other)
- Lazy loading for menus
- Iron Ore/ Resource pick up problem fixed with resources sometimes not being picked up.
- Improved distance weighing for resource pick up drop off points, choices were to bring gathered resources are weight better with smaller distances.
- Big music notes bug fixed, reduced scale.
- Fixed a problem with tree nursery deletion.
- Cure progress option now hidden when antidote progress reached maximum
Known Issues/ Problems:
We made lots of changes to the technical core of the game, testing the game in every possible way to ensure everything runs stable costs lots of time and there are changes that instability problems will manifest in the late game.
PERFORMANCE: Depending on what your bottleneck is, performance might only slightly improve as we mainly tackled CPU and not GPU. Meaning if your graphic card can't handle Zombie Cure Lab, it probably still can't.
Loading old savegames from 0.19.4 is not garuanteed to work, we changed to much logic in the game.
But let us know! We are still in early access and every input helps, savegames and logs fuels our bug solving engine. Write us here in the comments, open a discussion in the steam forums, write an ingame bug report (Good to send savegames and logs and yes we read all of them) or join our discord!
Thanks for hanging around and thanks for any effort you took or will take to help us make Zombie Cure Lab a better game experience!
