Changelog

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This page lists the version history of The Dead Linger, starting from the first publicly released build. The changelog lists added, removed, or modified features since the previous game version. Note that the wiki changelog may differ from the official changelog, as not every change is expected to be listed in the latter. The game is expected to go through an alpha stage, a beta stage, and then receive further updates after the "full" release.

Alpha

The alpha stage is the first phase of public testing, focusing on core game mechanics. The first alpha release was on October 31st, 2012. Though there is no definitive list of planned content for the alpha, extras such as driving cars, using maps, and other planned features are not likely to be included in the alpha stage. Access costs US$25. Until December 4th, 2012, those who purchased the game received the exclusive DOVRAC gas mask. (A retexture of the standard gas mask.)

Version	Release date	Changelog
Build 005 - "Feliz Navidead"	December 18th, 2012	There is a new type of ammunition in the game. (.308) There is a new, rare, and more powerful .308 scoped rifle – the Vegas Rifle. There are a few new melee weapons, including a Katana. There are some new furniture pieces to be found in the world. Certain items have had their spawn rates tweaked. Firearms in particular should spawn quite a bit less often now. Many objects have had their collision boxes fixed up and will no longer block the player or otherwise sink through the ground. This should also make many objects easier to pick up. Multiple improvements have been made to the console window. Players now have visible backpacks. This is one step closer to swappable backpacks, which are planned in a very near update. We will have more information on the Kickstarter backpack reward later on. Firearms now spawn in the world with at least 1 box of ammunition. Zombies no longer slide around as much in the distance. Opening a door while reloading will now interrupt the reload process. Kicking while reloading will now interrupt the reload process. Fixed a “right_hand” crash. Other crash and bug fixes. Backpack stat bars now show up quicker when the backpack is open. There is now a popup box when failing to connect to a server.
Build 004f - "Zombie Buffs"	December 17th, 2012	Zombies have become more challenging, and groups of zombies are much more dangerous. Zombies will now hit players from slightly further away. Zombies will now slow players for a short duration when they hit them with their swipes. Zombies ignore players for 12 seconds, down from 25 seconds after respawning or spawning into the world. Fixed a crash that would occur when breaking a door that the player is holding. Players can now spawn within 100 meters of their corpse, up from 20 meters. Items can be seen from further away. (Apples, ammo, etc.) Hazmat Jacket can now be picked up properly. Fixed a bug where zombies would not attack you if you were right in between their minimum and maximum range. Servers hosted by players can now use spaces in their names. Fixed a memory corruption issue causing infinite ammunition in some cases. Various other crash fixes. The game should crash less now, in general.
Build 004e - "Informative Stuff"	December 16th, 2012	Mosin and SKS rifles now stand vertically at 2×4 grid squares in the inventory, instead of horizontally. Potential fix for a specific crash involving skeletal animation bones. Fixed a bug where the chatbox would lose focus after the console was closed. Added bold red text “GAME IS NOT PAUSED” to the escape menu. You can no longer open the inventory while on the respawn screen. Item durability now scales with item tier. Higher quality items, such as Well Kept, will last longer than lower quality items, such as Flawed. The game world no longer shows up behind the escape menu while respawning. The respawn screen now shows properly when in the escape menu. The chat box automatically says “Press “T” to Chat” to better inform players on how to chat in game. Crosshairs and hand-icons are now hidden when the backpack is open, to avoid confusion for players.
Build 004d - "Freedom of Movement"	December 15th, 2012	Player’s are no longer interrupted while swinging or reloading if they are hit by a zombie or take damage. Fixed a bug where zombies could not hit you if you were too far downhill from them. Zombies will now hit you if you are standing them as well. In general, zombies can hit you from angles they previously could not, but should have been able to. Server names are much less restrictive. They can now be between 2 and 32 characters long, and include all sorts of symbols, spaces, and numbers they previously could not. You can now run Solo Mode again immediately after exiting Solo Mode, without an error message or other interruption. You can now jump without stamina, and stamina can not recharge while jumping. We will modify this later to avoid bunny-hopping and other unrealistic jumping tactics. You can now open your backpack while aiming down firearm sights. This will now cancel the aiming. You can now refill magazines while walking, but sprinting or jumping will cancel the action. Fixed some of the long load times that can happen when entering a game, usually in Solo Mode. You can no longer run forever by opening the ESC menu when running. Fixed several issues with certain sound files. Some sounds should play more consistently.
Build 004c - "Crash 'n' Bug Fixes"	December 14th, 2012	The auto-patching process has been improved some, but mostly under the hood. Cleaned up some error messages to be more clear and informative. Zooming out of a scope now unzooms instantly, instead of over a short duration of time. Removed a wave of “Gun Prep” messages when loading a world. Fixed a bug where items would appear to move, wiggle, or sink into the ground when you picked them up and put them into your backpack. Rebalanced some of the item spawns. The Tundra Hawk and .44 ammunition boxes will spawn quite a bit less often now. Fixed a door-related crash. Fixed an “ActorMotion” related crash. Fixed a few more random crashes.
Build 004b - "Better Error Reporting"	December 13th, 2012	There is a now a crash error window that should pop up when the game crashes. Please CTRL+C the information inside the window and post it on the Bug Report forum so we can fix the issue. Friendly Reminder: Please do not get attached to your world saves or items at this stage in development. We can not guarantee world or inventory stability at this time. Store windows now have glass, but it does not yet have collision or break. Fixed a bug where the game would minimize in fullscreen when running a Solo Mode game or Hosting a game. Friendly Reminder: If you would like to play in Windowed or Borderless Windowed mode, as well as change your screen resolution, you can do this in the OGRE Rendering Setup window that pops up when you run The Dead Linger Alpha. Fixed a bug where weapons were not properly counting ammunition. Fixed an exploit where players could run forever by opening the console window. Fixed a bug where zombies would rapidly slide around on the ground without animating. (Not fixed in all cases) Fixed a bug where zombies wandering around aimlessly would not animate their walk. Fixed a bug where zombies in the distance were sometimes seen walking backwards.
Build 004b - "Stronger Zombies"	December 12th, 2012	Windows and other objects now have alpha blending. This means windows have transparency. You can no longer run/sprint forever by opening chat while running/sprinting. You can now close and open doors when a zombie is attacking it. Sounds that didn’t always play should play now more often. Sounds are still not always playing at the right times, but it’s an improvement. You can now get the black console window back by adding –console to your TDL.exe shortcut. We may request you do this for helping us debug and test. The game no longer minimizes when starting Solo Mode or Hosting a Game. Scoped rifles will now always have their scope. Fixed a few more crashes. You can no longer open your backpack with ironsights up. Items will no longer hover around a player’s feet in games. It may still occur under laggy conditions. Zombies now do twice as much damage to players. Players will die in about 7 swipes, instead of 14.
Build 004 - "Breach Point"	December 11th, 2012	New features All firearms can now be toggled to Aim Down Sights by pressing Right Mouse Button. You can not sprint while aiming down sights, and firing from the hip is now extremely less accurate. Scoped rifles now use the scopes when aiming down sights; by pressing Right Alt the scope can be switched with iron sights. Guns now require ammunition to be reloaded and fired. Melee weapons now have durability. When they reach 0 durability (indicated by text: Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, Bad, Broken) they become broken and will be destroyed. Clothing can now be found and equipped, but is not shown visually and has inactive stats. New items There are some new weapons to be found, as well as some rare ones[which?]. There is a new handgun (along with a new ammo type, .44), a sledgehammer, a wooden 2×4, and more. Clothes added. [which?] Removed features The DRM added in Build 003 has been removed; players can now check the box "Play Offline" in the login screen and play offline without requiring a login. Playing online requires restarting the game, and a pop-up has been added to inform players of this. General changes There is now a list of controls when you start the game. This list can be hidden and revealed again by pressing F1. Weapons now follow the player camera when looking up and down. Weapons now have their own FOV so that they feel closer to the player. Weapons that are equipped by other players will now appear in the other players’ hands in multiplayer, though many animations remain absent. Physics objects (i.e. a trash can, a chair) will now react when shot with bullets. Weight and propulsion values are still unfinished, so some objects will seem much lighter or much heavier than they should. Directional damage indicators are now 50% their original size. Doors are now more responsive to your mouse movement. The math on door pulling has been changed. Pulling a door is now completely relative to player position, so it feels much more natural. Doors now collide better with other objects, though many objects are still too light and are easily pushed out of the way. There is now a background image (placeholder) when the backpack is open. Inventory item tooltips no longer fade in and are now instant. Items held by the cursor when the inventory is closed are now dropped on the ground. Common quality items no longer have a prefix on the tooltip in the inventory. When the backpack is open, the player can now see bars with hunger level, battery, and stamina. Inventory now saves more often during play, so if there is a fatal error less data is lost. Item tooltips no longer display damage or other stats of the items, and items include more description as to what they do. When running in Windowed Mode, you can no longer resize the window during play, nor maximize it via the button in the top right. If you wish to change your resolution, change your resolution (“Video Mode:”) in the initial OGRE Rendering Setup window at the start when launching the game. Borderless Windowed Mode is now available. You can select it in the initial OGRE Rendering Setup, going to “Fullscreen:” and setting it to “No – Borderless”. Loading screen should no longer appear after signing in. Loading screen now calculates world generation and will vary in length based on the speed of the world generation. A yellow disconnect icon will now show if the client has not contacted the server for 4 seconds. The red disconnect icon will now show if the problem persists for 8 seconds. You will automatically disconnect from a server if you have not received a message from it for 30 seconds. SSAO (Ambient Occlusion) has been optimized some and should not be such a burden on your GPU, yielding in improved framerate. Multiple error message popups have been added in various locations where the game simply used to crash with no description as to why. The entire login screen and text input boxes look better, and are easier to read and navigate. A "remember me" function has been added, so you can remember your login and password for speedy login. Enter key works to log in. An "Exit to Desktop" button has been added. Clicking sounds have been added to the screen. Better support for varying resolutions. Other small fixes to make the screen more visually appealing, in general. You can now change mouse-look sensitivity by going to the Gameplay Settings menu in the main menu. You can now choose to invert the Y-Axis (up-down) of aiming and looking around in-game. You can change this setting by going to the Gameplay Settings menu in the main menu. Options that are changed in the Settings menu will now save when you leave the screen, and save properly between sessions where they sometimes would not. Gameplay changes Zombies will now attack doors and break them if they are in search of someone on the other side. The zombie head hitbox now more reliably matches the shape of the zombies head. The stat gain between various item tiers has been modified. Items of higher tier now offer a mild gain, instead of an overpowered one. Items of lower tiers are not as bad as they were. Many melee weapons [which?] have been buffed to do more damage. The general melee distance has been shortened by roughly 25%, or 1 meter. Melee weapons will have varying ranges later on. Hunger level is now saved between sessions. The day-night cycle has been changed. A full game day is now 1 hour and 30 minutes of real time, down from 2 hours. Day is now 60 minutes long (down from 85), and night is now 30 minutes long (down from 35). Players' last position in the world is now saved. Sprinting now drains stamina twice as slowly. Stamina now takes 4 seconds to begin recharging after activity, up from 1 second. Hunger now burns 25% faster, so starvation happens in 1 hour and 30 minutes, down from 2 hours. Player can no longer walk around while the backpack is open. Certain items can now stack in inventory, such as ammo boxes. Items dropped by another player can now be picked up in multiplayer. The last weapon equipped is now saved between sessions. World changes New furniture: couches and other things.[which?] Buildings now have windows, which can be broken. The chance for Flawed and Contaminated items to appear has been reduced. Far house LOD now matches the color and shape better. The spawn rates of food, weapons, and other item have been substantially modified.[how?] A bunch of texture changes and improvements to houses and other objects. (Kitchen tile, house siding, ceilings in houses, bathroom objects, and more.) The front of a house now has a fancier door, instead of the regular white one. Convenience stores now use a glass door, and have metal doors in the rear. The water towers are undergoing some visual changes in preparation for ladders in a future build. Bugfixes Weapons no longer inter-penetrate walls when you are standing close to them. Zombies no longer block each other's line of sight. A bug has been fixed where zombies would not properly repopulate an area. Areas will now keep track of total zombies, and if the maximum limit is not high enough, it will steadily spawn new zombies randomly within the area. Doors should no longer fling, fly or otherwise rotate off of their hinges when being pushed by zombies, players, or objects. Doors now latch reliably when closed, and will no longer latch and hold in place when they are still visually open. Objects no longer hover or can be frozen when dropped. When dropped, objects now fall to the ground at reasonable gravity, instead of slamming into the ground. Fixed unlimited sprinting exploit with backpack. Multiple crashes related to inventory and inventory saving have been fixed. Multiple fixes to instances where inventory would not properly save. Inventory item tooltip quotes should no longer be cut off or in the wrong place. Fixed a bug where sometimes items would refuse to drop when dropped around the right side of the inventory. Fixed a crash that sometimes happened when un-equipping a weapon. The cursor no longer disappears when you right click food to eat it, while it’s being held. Items now have the correct names. Example: “weapon_melee_cinderblock” now shows as “Cinderblock” and so on. Guns now have names for easier identification. Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause all of the text chat entered in the chat box to be capital letters, even without caps lock on. The collision of stairs found outside houses has been modified a bit to prevent some cases where a player would be stuck on a very tall set of stairs. Mailboxes should no longer float. Fixed some open faces found near garages. Fixed more crashes that occur on disconnect and when quitting the game.
Hotfix 003a – "Server List Improvements"	November 21st, 2012	General changes Load screen now establishes instantly when running or joining a game. There is no longer a gray screen when joining, and there is no longer a "disconnect" icon when joining or starting a game. The server list has a refresh button now. Only servers that use the same version as the player's client will show up on server list now. Bugfixes Sounds (except music) do not play in the loading screen anymore. Fixed a bug where the server list would sometimes not show any servers when there were servers. Player count now shows on servers: instead of "0/0", Current/Max will now show properly. Objects no longer jitter or wiggle around when they should be sitting still. Fixed some sounds that weren’t playing. Removed some sounds that weren’t intended to be there. Fixed a few cases where the game would crash on disconnecting from a server.
Build 003 - "Feature Friendly"	November 20th, 2012	New features Players are now required to log in to their Sandswept Legion accounts to play, once for offline play and every time for multiplayer. The world now saves state and player position periodically. Player inventory now saves on a per-server basis. Zombies now steadily respawn in areas they have been cleared from. New items Weapons: there are a bunch of new melee weapons to be found.[which?] General changes The build watermark (i.e. “The Dead Linger Alpha Build 003”) now shows up on every screen, including the main menu. All debug text (such as d_fps) has black drop shadow now. There is now a hardware cursor in the game by default. Flashlights no longer appear "flat" on a surface. Improved sound system so more sound can be loaded, more variety in sounds added. A pounding sound is now heard when a player kicks a door. New sound when sprinting. Sounds (such as gunshots) can now be heard by other players and grow quieter with distance. A sound now plays when food is eaten. The character now makes a noise when injured. Doors now make noise when opened and closed. Gameplay changes Zombies can now only be killed by headshots, and not by damage to other parts of the body. Zombies can now be alerted by sounds, such as gunshots, and will seek out the source. At night, flashlights pointed in a zombie’s direction can now alert them. Fast zombies now appear less often compared to other zombie types. Slight reduction to intensity of the radial blur effect when injured. A directional damage indicator now pops up when under attack. Day/night are now 85/35 minutes long, from 60/60. 24 game hours remain 2 real-time hours long. When a player has no weapon equipped, the next weapon they pick up will be auto-equipped. Jumping now reduces ppstamina[[, and stamina is required to jump. Resized a bunch of inventory items, and made inventory items fill out their region more accurately. Double left-clicking no longer eats food in the inventory. Right-click instead. World changes New building: Swerts Convenience Store. Rooftops of houses have been raised. Items are more scarce. Floor removed from garages on the sides of houses. Stairs added to door leading from garage into houses. Houses should no longer be found with two doors side by side. Trash wheely bins have been slightly decreased in size. Garbage cans now also come in black/brown, tan, blue, and green textures, with backer names. In-game chat changes If there is no chat message typed in, the chat box will now close upon pressing Enter. When players type messages, it now shows on the server cmd window with their name. Bugfixes Fixed multiple crashes that occurred when disconnecting from a game. Added a hint for NVIDIA Optimus driver so the game prefers the dedicated GPU. Requires NVIDIA driver 302 or higher. Gaming mice freeze issues have been mostly fixed. Zombies should get stuck on walls less, and react quicker to the presence of a player when stuck. There is no longer a massive delay in chat and other network messages when first joining into a game. Removed a subtle gap between doors. Some furniture will float less. Servers are generally more reliable now. Fixed a bug where the cursor would disappear after moving inventory items or equipping them. Fixed a crash when picking up more inventory items than the inventory can handle. Fixed a bug where weapons without knockback would not deal any damage.
Build 002 - "Hotfix Alpha"	November 6th, 2012	New features There is now a drop area in the inventory to help players understand how to drop items. General changes TDL.exe and TDLServer_Main.exe now have desktop icons. Esc menu text now reads “ESCAPE MENU” instead of “GAME PAUSED” due to the fact that some players were confused. The game does not pause when in the escape menu in either single or multiplayer. Console command “kill” can now be used. This will kill the player character and respawn them. Removed console command “d_playerflip”. There is now a popup indicating when the player has been disconnected from a server. Improved error messages and error logging to help catch bugs and assist players with reporting issues. Gameplay Changes Unarmed punches now do 75% less damage. Reduced zombie health to 80, down from 100. Increased zombie damage to 15, from 6. Lowered kick damage to 5, from 30. Lowered kicks required to break doors. 3 to 4 kicks will now break a door, down from 7. Couches, fridges, and some other large items can no longer be picked up, but they can still be pushed around. Many items are now placed diagonally in their space to give better representation of how much space they require. World changes Worlds now generate and appear much sooner. Players should rarely (or never) encounter holes in terrain or houses that pop in right in front of them. There is a performance increase when loading chunks of the world, both initially and when traveling through it. In-game chat changes A sender's names now appear next to their message. The chat box window is now localized to the bottom of the screen, instead of taking a full third of it. The chat box now closes after sending a message. Players can no longer send blank messages. A message now appears when a player joins the server. A series of messages now appear as the player gets hungrier. Bugfixes The Print screen key will now properly create and save a screenshot while the inventory is open, as well as in other menus. Screenshots taken this way are saved to the %appdata%/Sandswept Studios/The Dead Linger folder. Quite a few crashes, both on startup and during play have been fixed. Players can now be able to disconnect from a server and reconnect to a new server without crashing all of the time. Fixed crash on startup for certain GPUs. Servers do not crash as often. Fixed a bug on slower machines where the game would crash on startup and/or initial connection to a server. A chat panel overlap bug on some resolutions is now fixed. Zombies no longer slide or "skateboard" around. Weapons and items no longer disappear when traveling long distances.
Build 001	October 31st, 2012	First release. Includes: Singleplayer Multiplayer with a basic server browser World generation with limited content Food, weapons, ammunition Basic zombies A flashlight function for every player. Basic textures.