Hello Survivors!
Welcome to a bright 2014, and an even brighter future for The Dead Linger. Build 12 is here and it’s Going To The Dogs! As you can imagine by the name, there might be dogs in this build, among some great improvements to framerate performance, doors, and more!

A dev vlog for Build 12 will come out in about a week, after Geoff is back from Steam Dev Days. In the meantime, here’s the patch notes, and you can go download the update on Steam right now!
Patch Notes for Build 12
"Going To The Dogs”

Notes:
- As with most updates, you will need to create a fresh, new world when you play this update to ensure you receive all the new world changes.
- This update features some great optimization, meaning higher framerate! Read on!

NPC Changes:
- There is now a new zombie-type enemy — The Stray. It’s viscious; fairly fast and bites hard. As the rule with all zombies, aim for the head to make them dead.
- Complete re-design to hit detection and how we check for headshots, melee hits, and so on. These things should be more intuitive and consistent.
- The Buck is now 40% larger in size.
- Fixed a bug where the Buck could sometimes not be killed by arrows.

Zombie Changes:
- Zombie movement code has been re-written. Zombies were one of the main reasons framerate and performance were low, and now should be much better. There may be some side effects (read: bugs) as we tidy up this rewrite, but your framerate should be substantially better for it.
- We took some time to clean up the zombie AI code and removed some bugs from it, so you should see slightly more agressive zombies as well.
- Zombies now hit a bit quicker and will deal damage much sooner when swinging, grabbing, and biting at a survivor.
- Zombies are now quicker to turn towards survivors when they’re trying to attack them.
- Fixed an issue where some distant zombies would appear to float above the ground. Zombies no longer have magical levitation powers.
- Fixed an issue where zombies were not properly repopulating an area over time.
- Fixed a bug where slow zombies could not be killed by arrows.
- There is a new bite indicator when bitten by a Stray.
- Zombies no longer emit long moans after being killed.
- Fixed a bug where zombies were super sensitive to sprinting sounds and some other noises emitted by the survivor.

Item and Weapon Changes:
- HUGE: Melee has been drastically enhanced. You can now hit multiple targets with a single swing, and hitting zombies in the head/neck area is much more reliable than ever before. We have even greater plans with this system as we progress, and this is the first step towards visceral, bloody close-quarters combat.
- There are 2 new firearms to be found in the world — The Mastodon Revolver and the C-Def Sandstone Rifle.
- There is a new ammo type for the revolver — .357 ammo.
- Head and Face items you are wearing now show up on your survivor in multiplayer.
- Head and Face items that obscure your vision will show up in first person. For example, when wearing a motorcycle helmet, you will see the rim and glass of the helmet.
- The Backpack you are wearing (if any) now shows up on your survivor in multiplayer.
- Your currently equipped weapon now shows up in your survivor’s hands in multiplayer.
- Removed the messed up ironsights mode from recurve bow. (For now.) Still accurate when fired from the hip.
- Motorcycle Helmet defense changed to 3, down from 4.
- Motorcycle Helmet now reduces movement speed by 2 when worn.
- The collision boxes of some loot items have been improved, so they sit on the ground better and don’t fall through the ground or float above it.
- Fixed a bug where items dropped from the inventory would return to their original spawn point instead of dropping in front of the survivor.
- Arrows now visually stick into their targets. (They still can not be picked up yet, but we will be adding that feature in the future.)
- Matchboxes can be seen from a bit further away.
- Crossbow properly plays a fire sound when firing it while zoomed in.
- Crossbow and Bow reloading is no longer interrupted by clicking.
- Crossbow and Bow now fire faster and further than they did previously.
- Small tweaks to the bow and crossbow spawn locations/spawn rates to make them slightly less common.
- Scopes have had a visual change, and you now have peripheral vision while using scopes. We have some more plans for scope effects coming up in the near future.

New Recipes / Recipe Changes:
- Putting together 4 2x4s in the crafting area now make a small size plywood sheet.
- Putting together 8 2x4s in the crafting area now make a medium size plywood sheet.

World Changes/Additions:
- HUGE additions to the LeLand’s grocery store, from loading docks, back hallways, office rooms, employee rooms, restrooms, and more!
- Office Buildings are temporarily much more rare while we work out some performance issues with it.
- Lit campfires now emit sound effects.
- Breaking a window with unarmed attacks (punching, kicking) will now deal some minor damage to the survivor.
- Added a new damage icon to indicate damage from breaking glass.
- Roads fit the terrain a bit better. We have very large plans for roads, but this should be a good temporary fix for items falling into roads and being hard to see. (Some very small still do, but most items now sit on the roads instead of falling through.)
- Footsteps now change when you are in a building as opposed to outdoors.
- Fixed an issue where round haybales would look very low detail at a very short distance.

Third Person Mode:
- For debug reasons, we’ve added a very basic third person view, toggled by the F5 key. You can re-bind this in the Key Bindings menu.
- This feature is NOT complete and is NOT currently intended for gameplay use. You can use it if you’d like, but it will make gameplay very difficult until we improve it further. Things like the crosshair currently do not line up on targets or items properly. They will in the future as we tweak and progress with this feature over time.
- There will be a server-side option to disable this feature in the future, especially when we get to PvP modes and other situations where some survivors would feel it creates an unfair advantage.

Backpack Changes/Fixes:
- There is now an auto-sort button in the backpack. You can press this button to re-organize your gear. We’ll improve the sorting algorithm as time goes on.
- Fixed a bug where available backpack inventory space didn’t change immediately when removing a backpack.
- Fixed a bug where items could not be properly placed on the bottom rows of the backpack.

General Changes/Fixes:
- You can now set a server password when hosting a server.
- Hunger decays slightly slower, at a rate of 1.5x the rate when sprinting, down from 3x the rate.
- Doors have had a big overhaul. They’re now much smoother, easier, and more intuitive to open. We will be improving doors even further in the future, as well as adding some additional gameplay options for interacting with them.
- The diameter of the flashlight has been decreased by about 20%.
- The camera near-clipping distance has been fixed, from 0.1 meters to 0.05 meters. This means your camera will no longer clip through walls when you walk up close to them.
- You can now start to sprint from the crouched position.
- The HUD and scope views no longer fade out for a moment after crouching/uncrouching.
- Free Look (Left ALT key) can now look down about 20% further than before.
- The survivor is now the proper height (taller.) You will no longer have zombies towering over you, and are more or less eye level with your foes.
- Added a bunch of new gameplay tips to the loading screen.
- Fixed a small bug where the menu audio sliders sometimes didn’t work properly.
- Fixed a bug where the first person arms would sometimes freeze in the middle of a swing.
- Fixed an issue where ambient environment sounds (i.e. wind) were not tied to a volume slider. They are now tied to the Ambient Volume slider in the Audio Settings menu.
- Fixed a bug with sound. Zombies now properly swarm towards gunshots and other loud noises. Be careful out there!

Roadmap Changes:
- List of roadmap changes coming soon!

KNOWN ISSUES:
- Arrows can not be retrieved yet, and will not stick into targets — yet.
- Some gear may not always sit in the correct position, or may clip the survivor’s body at times.
- Many animations are currently missing from third person view.
- The third person camera currently does not collide with walls.
- Some textures are missing from the helmets and face items that appear in first person mode.
- Some items will look a bit strange indoors as we phase in our new lighting system. These issues should be fixed over time.
- Survivors can no longer hurt one another. (This feature will return in the future once we plan it out a bit better. We are currently focused on the Coop Survival game mode.)
- Ammo in boxes and guns do not keep correct ammo count when trading between survivors in multiplayer.
- Animations will sometimes loop or get ‘stuck’ from time to time.
- Creating and joining worlds without closing TDL.exe can cause things to get a little crazy. We currently recommend rebooting the game between sessions.
- Dragging doesn’t work just yet. We will add this feature 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 survivors 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 world.
- The game and framerate will sometimes stutter for a short duration, especially when coming up on a town or new area. Your PC is most likely fine. It’s not you, it’s us.
- 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 continue on to a new area where buildings do what they’re told.
- The Anniversary achievement is basically the running joke at this point, and for that we apologize. We swear you’ll get it! Hang in there while we find some time to figure out a fix once and for all. (Once we get done with a few more important things.)
- Lots of other very obvious issues that we’re going to be working on. (Welcome to Alpha!)

As usual, please report bugs on our Support & Bug Reporting forum.

Our hopes for Build 13 are currently a new zombie NPC, more buildings, dedicated servers, the start of transportation, additional survivor animations, shields, additional optimization, roaming hordes, improved zombie AI, and more! Stay tuned to our twitter for more information on that!