Author: Tom Gilchrist

Undead Blackout lives on! I think I left the last patch notes with a comment along the lines of ‘maybe the last patch ever?’. Ha yeah no. That was clearly never gonna be the case, I will be updating this game until the day I die.

Update 3.1.0 is a relatively small one to be fair but it is going to be followed by 3.2 (shocker there) which should update the game to Unreal Engine 5 and add in a whole host of fixes and things. Not sure when that one will drop but stay tuned.

The long-gestating Xbox One version may finally see the light of day after some technical challenges. Still a fair way to go but hoping that will finally emerge later this year. Oh, and I have also got the game running really nicely on Nintendo Switch so that seems like a pretty obvious move as well.

PATCH NOTES

Time playing the game seemed broken in the STATS screen. Not quite sure when that happened but the Time Played number got stuck at “0 HOURS 0 MINUTES” which is not ideal I guess

Increased rotation speed while the player is aiming from 50 to 100

Increased player walk speed from 100 to 200

Zombies have gotten faster! Their minimum move speed has gone up to 300 from 275

Removed references to keyboard controls but only temporarily. At the moment the game is primarily set up to be played with a control pad, as part of the next update I will be bringing back proper PC controls with mouse-based aiming etc.

New 4MB Logo is now added to the game! Have realised some of the splash images still have the old one on but that will have to wait for the next update

Shrunk the package size by over 1GB! Was previously 3.6GB on Steam, the game is now 2.5GB. Hopefully, this is just down to me removing a bunch of stuff rather than accidentally deleting four levels.

Upgraded to Unreal Engine 4.27.2 which is the last major engine release before we hit 5.0.0

Undead Blackout’s last major update is here! Probably the last major one. I think. Will discuss that in more detail with a separate blog post. Anyway, there are a whole bunch of quality of life improvements to the game as well as a new playstyle, Survival Mode, to give you an added challenge.

Pretty sure I have forgotten to write about some of the updates in the below notes but never mind, there have been loads of them. More importantly, the game has had a ridiculous amount of playtesting compared to recent releases which has helped me to balance it a little better as well as uncover all manner of broken things.

PATCH NOTES

All-New Survival Mode A brand new way to play through the levels! This essentially removes the Checkpoints from the normal mode, so as soon as you die you have to go right back to the start of the level and redo any Blackout Zones that you had previously completed. Much more of a challenge and adds some replayability to the whole thing. Naturally, on Steam this also means a bunch more Achievements for you to collect.

New Damage Effect Making it much easier to tell when you have been attacked by a zombie, the screen now flashes up a ‘Damage’ graphic just to make it super, super obvious.

Chambers Station Car Park Revamp It has ramps now! Like an actual multi-story car park. Breaks the space up more effectively and just looks slightly more realistic (when viewed from above obviously)

General Level Decorations All levels have received additional decoration, just a few extra objects or things to make them look better. I won’t go into each one or exactly which areas have had a revamp because I didn’t write them all down and cannot be bothered to go back through and figure it out. There is just more stuff. Trust me.

Extra Doorway in Redfield Manor Library It was a little too easy to get fully trapped in this section so an additional doorway has been added to allow you to try and get round any zombies that have bunched up in the hallway

More Explosive Barrels! They were actually not in every single Blackout Zone so that has been very much addressed. Go blow more things up.

Sprinting While Aiming No Longer Possible If you sprinted and aimed at the exact same time then you could sometimes end up with your Aimed Weapon mode on while Sprinting and then it would kinda get stuck on. No more! Have sorted that out.

Aim Mode Turn Speed Reduced This is part of some general tweaking to the difficulty of the game and so now while you are in Aimed Mode (laser targeting and one-shot kills) you rotate the player more slowly. I found it was a little overpowered the ability to just full one-hit kill the zombies. I like to make you work for it.

Aimed Walk Speed Reduced And alongside the above change I have also reduced the speed at which the player could walk. Again, making it slightly riskier to go into Aimed Mode.

New Checkpoints Added Before Blackout Zones If you die in a Blackout Zone the checkpoint was usually either at the start of the level or just outside the previous Blackout Zone, have now changed this so the most recent Checkpoint is right outside the Blackout Zone that you died in. Lets you get right back into the action.

Weapon Spawn Locations Tweaked There are now only two in each area and I have hidden them a bit more. Makes it slightly more challenging but also forces the player to explore each Blackout Zone a little more, there was a fair bit of dead space that could just be fully ignored if you focus just on refuelling and powering up the doors.

Weapon Spawn Icons Makeover Just a slight jazzing up of the shape as well as changing the colours so the ammo and health are distinct from each other.

Removed Score Boosts Didn’t love these actually, they were dotted around the level but actually didn’t add much to the gameplay and so have been removed.

Ending Levels Somtime’s Gave Double Score Not even entirely sure how this happened? But I re-did the whole score calculation process and this seems to have stopped happening now.

Occasionally Couldn’t Finish Redfield Manor Due to the Trigger Volume not quite registering the player for some reason, you were sometimes unable to complete the third level. This has now been fixed!

Could Get Behind The Police Station This should not have been possible and could result in the player falling into the void of nothingness underneath the level. Has now been blocked off properly

Pavement Too High Outside Downtown Restaurant You could not walk onto it! Super annoying. Has been lowered.

You Were Unable To Shoot Through Open Blackout Doors on Valentine Forest Level This was due to trigger volumes being too high and the bullets reading them as having hit something, therefore they would disappear! Obviously not the case when the door is supposed to be open.

Reload Icon Now Disappears On Weapon Change It just stayed there before, even if you swapped to a gun that had loads of ammo in it. Now the icon will disappear but reappear should you then swap back to your low on ammo weapon.

More Zombie Models There was only one poor zombie before, now there are four variations which are randomly selected when a zombie spawns into the world

Zombies Damaged You Too Quickly Occasionally you could get from max health to dead far too quickly and all from just one zombie. This has been tweaked so the damage is in time with the zombie ‘attack’ animations.

Zombie Spawners Repositioned In almost every level and Blackout Zone these have been tweaked to allow for a more even spread of zombies and their routes to attack the player

Added Extra Spawner To Blackout Zones Five possible places the zombies can attack you from now within each Blackout Zone!

Zombies Spawning Outside The Prison In an area totally inaccessible to the player. Not very useful.

Zombie On A Wall In Redfield Manor a zombie would occasionally spawn up on a wall and not be able to get down nor could you shoot it.

Zombie On A Subway Train Very similar issue. Sometimes a few zombies would make their way onto the roof of the subway train within the Burton Line Subway level.

Blackout Door’s Have a Mesh Above The Main Door Just to make it look slightly less like you could probably jump over the door and not worry about having to power it up and stuff.

Helpful Yellow Cables Link All Blackout Doors & Power Consoles Makes it much easier to navigate from the consoles to the doors, they are not always right next to each other. Now you can just follow the yellow cable and you can find the exit.

Blackout Lights Mesh Improvement They now have a proper base to them! I mean, it is not a huge difference but it is better.

No More Skipping Music Tracks A few of the audio tracks stuttered as they started playing again and caused a notable hitch, this has now been removed and the music flows much more smoothly. Can barely tell it is the same thing on repeat mostly.

Generator, Blackout Door And Petrol Pump Now Makes Noise This was an oversight from previous versions, the generator actually makes some proper generator sounding noise now. The petrol pump is pumping petrol (shockingly) while the door makes some whirring ‘door opening’ noise. Makes it much easier to realise when these have stopped happening because the door is open or you ran out of fuel.

Zombies Groan That’s is pretty much it. They make weird noises. It is me. I am making the weird noises. I am so sorry.

Upgraded to Unreal Engine 4.26 which gives us some lovely improvements under the hood.

BUY THE GAME!

Undead Blackout: Reanimated Edition is currently going through some huge changes in preparation for release on Xbox One. Less on the gameplay side and much more on the polish and optimisation side. This has been sorely lacking for a while now so it is about flippin’ time.

The original plan was just to launch with version 3.0 on PC and Xbox at the same time, but while going through some early optimisations I realised the game runs TERRIBLY on less powerful machines and so felt the need to push out some optimisation gains early for the PC crowd. Frankly, these should have been done ages ago so very much my bad.

This will then be the last patch Undead Blackout: Reanimated Edition receives before the launch of 3.0. Currently, that is planned for very early Autumn.

FULL PATCH NOTES

Adding Culling Volumes to the levels which is weird as they definitely used to be there. Somewhere in the many updates, they disappeared which is a bit of a disaster. A Culling Volume basically removes objects from the game when we don’t need them as the player is far away. The game can save on memory and performance by not rendering a bunch of floor tiles on the opposite side of the map to the player. 

Removed Dynamic Shadowing from some foliage because it was causing some enormous hitches on the Xbox. Most notably on the trees, running near to them with your torch on causes the Frame Rate to absolutely die for a period. Changing the settings here has allowed them to be Culled without the Shadow disappearing from the world, which was a temporary issue I had to deal with. Overall, big performance improvement there. 

Reduced the number of meshes in each level to save memory. And boy did we save some memory. On all levels, the number of Actors (things in the level) has been reduced by AT LEAST 50%. In some cases, it is well over 75%. This has been done through a combination of merging meshes where appropriate and creating new, larger meshes that are more fit for purpose. The result is less memory usage and far less strain on mid/low-level PCs.

Sewer Level is more claustrophobic now as a result of me making the tunnels a lot tighter. This gives a much better feel to this level and was something I realised while reducing the number of meshes in the level. This is much less to do with performance and much more to do with aesthetics.

It has been so long since I last wrote patch notes for Undead Blackout that I have accidentally released two patches and precisely no notes. And so here is the super-massive-combined patch notes for versions 2.1 and 2.2. They are a combination of absolutely boring things and some genuinely good updates for the game. Patch notes for 2.1 can be found at the bottom, but 2.2 is where the good stuff is. The core mechanic of the Blackout Zones has been redesigned and is loads more fun. Lots more quality of life improvements as well as some good old-fashioned bug fixing.

The plan now is to move onto some serious polish and fleshing out of existing features or modes as I really accelerate the Xbox version plans. It is currently running really well on the console and so the next major update for Steam will coincide with the release on console, hopefully sometime toward the end of the summer.

Full patch details below!

Blackout Zones have been redesigned and the outcome of this is the game increases both the fun and action by approximately 87%. This is according to some in depth data analysis I did. Honestly. Basically, the whole ‘Power up the door by holding down a button’ has been replaced with a somewhat similar but vastly superior mechanic. You now have to refuel a generator, switch it on which in turn switches on a bunch of lights, then turn on the door which will slowly open. Now once the fuel runs out, the lights switch of ( A BLACKOUT IF YOU WILL!) and you have to refuel again. The switching on of these things attracts the zombie horde, otherwise you get a steady stream of them coming into the area.

This ramping up of excitement/zombies works really well. You have to balance the risk and reward of how quickly you try and power everything up. Go crazy fast and you might be overwhelmed. Go slow and you score will be decreased by the end of the level as you took so long. Plus you still might randomly die anyway.

Redesigned Levels with the intention of funnelling you to the action much quicker. I have removed pretty much all of the more open spaces in between Blackout Zones as I found the player could end up getting lost or at least confused about which way to go. Funnelling them directly to the Blackout Zones, which is really where all the fun happens, makes so much more sense.

You can walk slowly while aiming now as I think the Blackout Zone tweaks meant the player vs zombie dynamic needed a little balancing. Being stuck still while aiming lead to you dying way too much.

Animated the opening titles to make the game seem fancy.

Added a Subway Car to the Subway cos I mean…that makes sense right? You need an actual Subway car in a Subway level right?

Tweaked audio for zombie footsteps as the ‘Dirt’ audio had no Sound Attenuation and so didn’t sound right. It was far too loud.

Player start on Station level was in the wrong place and if this has been there for a while then it basically meant if you died on the third Blackout Zone and then restarted, you would be stuck in some level geometry. Good stuff.

Improved functionality of the tutorial text in that it will just disappear on its own after a while. Previously you had to get to a certain spot in the first level to switch each promt off. Now it just times out and disappears.

A random UE4 man was in the Police Station and I cannot remember if I added him while testing this patch or if (as I suspect) he has just been hanging out there the entire time, minding his own business and providing me with something to measure height against. But he is now gone.

Raised the roof in the Prison but not in a fun, party way. In the very literal sense the roof mesh was far too low and clipped into the camera.

Upgraded to Unreal Engine 4.25.1 mostly so I am all updated and ready to go with the Xbox version of the game which will be the next major patch just FYI!

All new logo! Yes, it is the big update everyone has been waiting for. The 4MB Interactive logo has been updated to the new 4MB Interactive logo, replacing the old 4MB Interactive logo.

Fixed bug where you could run while using Aimed Shot. Yeah, you should not have been able to do that. By mashing Fire and Aim at the same time you could trick the game and sprint around with the super-powerful aimed shot. Cheating. Pure cheating. Anyway, this is gone now.

Updated to Unreal Engine 4.23 which was good but in 2.2 we have updated to 4.25.1 so basically this is pointless.