Roles now lock behind how much you've played: the Huey pilot needs 5 hours, the AH-6J pilot 10 hours, and the Grenadier (back in Incursion) needs 10 successful extractions. Blasts can take your helmet off, big enough blasts gib the dead, the M2, Mk19 and flamer mounts get focus mode, and V flips every helicopter hardpoint at once. Dead bodies past revival husk and turn to bone, a lost limb cuts through your clothes, and one shot draws as one streak instead of a row of bullets. EAST soldiers call out kills, new leaders, sentries and grenades. Under the hood, people on smaller MTU connections were getting whole cell snapshots instead of small updates in every busy cell, and the server tick with a huge zombie horde is a lot cheaper.
Role requirements
- The UH-1H pilot needs 5 hours of play, the AH-6J pilot 10 hours, and the Grenadier 10 successful extractions. Everyone starts at zero extractions, and existing play time was capped at 10 hours.
- A locked card in the loadout carousel dims with LOCKED, the requirement and a progress bar, and a role whose slots are all taken says that too instead of just FULL on the button. ERT roles never lock, and ERT play doesn't count toward anything.
- Grenadier is back in Incursion.
Combat
- Blasts blow helmets, caps, berets, goggles, night vision and headsets off whoever is wearing them and fling them one to three tiles away. Caps and berets come off from a small blast, goggles and headsets need more, and a helmet only comes off near the full force of a C4 blast.
- Big enough blasts gib the dead bodies they land on and fling the limbs away. C4 does it on the tile it's planted on, fuel cells, the fuel tank, the half cell and the SMES do it within three tiles. The living never gib from a blast, and a gibbed body is past revival.
- Brace on an M2, Mk19 or flamer mount and you get focus mode like a scoped rifle: the camera leans 3 tiles toward your aim and the shot gets the zoomed accuracy. It lets go when you unbrace or dismount.
- V while piloting flips every fitted hardpoint switch at once, so one on and one off swap and two on go dark together. It's listed beside ARM in the flight console CONTROLS tab.
- A single shot read as a row of separate bullets along its path, because the tracer art was a bright comet head stepping 32px every frame. It's one moving streak now, and a round fired from a hardpoint or out a cabin door flies as one tracer instead of two.
Death
- A body past revival draws as a husk, then over the next 20 minutes turns to bone one limb at a time. Severed limbs lying on the floor don't age yet.
- Lose a limb and your uniform or suit no longer covers the gap. Gloves go with the hand and headwear with the head.
- ZOMBIES KILLED on the end of round board was counting EAST kills too, so every Incursion kill showed twice. EAST kills get their own count.
EAST
- Soldiers call it when they drop one of you, when a new leader takes over from a dead or downed one, when they spot one of your sentries, and when a grenade lands next to them. 64 new voiced clips.
- Soldiers were appearing standing inside the hotel's second floor rooms on LV759. The airdrop was picking seats through the parapet into the rooms; a seat needs sky above it now, so a roof deck too small for the squad gets passed over.
Anomaly
- The creatures on LV759 would pile up at a ladder foot that refused them (17 at one foot in a round) and never reach a containment on the second floor. They route to the second floor ring now, and a creature refused at a ladder gives that foot up for 90 seconds and goes for a different emitter.
- The extraction guards wear CBRN suits in Anomaly, the medic in the radiation suit and hood.
- The Old One screamed once per six swings while tearing you apart, and the scream you did hear was the knockout cry landing seconds after it let go. It screams every second now.
Vehicles
- An AH-6J beacon activated in LV759's underground corridor found no landing spot and kept re-offering the call to ghosts every few minutes for the rest of the round. It looks for the nearest spot under the sky across the whole map now, and if there isn't one the call is cancelled and everyone who volunteered is told.
- The fuel pump loop in the cockpit goes quiet when the tank is empty.
- The UH-1H flight crew ERT beacon gets its own kit, the MK30 helmet with helmet-mounted NVG and medical HUD glasses, instead of sharing the Little Bird crews' kit.
Ghosts
- An ERT DEPLOYED chip the moment a response team is on the ground. For a helicopter crew the jump lands on the aircraft, not the beacon.
- Click a name in chat to follow them even when the chat is click-through. Before, every click went to the world.
- POOR CONNECTION and BAD CONNECTION show for ghosts and in the dead view, they were only drawn while alive.
Jungle
- Jungle thicket walls on LV976 draw as a hedge block, the plant, tall grass, bush and vine sheets are redrawn, tropical trees and big plants cast sun shadows, and heavy vines block line of sight while staying visible, for you and the AI.
LV376
- Upper hospital extended and more money placed around the map.
ATM
- Pistol holster at 120.
- The MARINE ERT beacon went 4000 to 6000, it was too cheap.
Netcode and performance
- People on a 1200 MTU connection were getting a whole cell snapshot instead of the small update every time a busy cell filled a packet. One LV759 Incursion round with 64 people sent 5764 of them, all to six people. Updates are cut to fit every connection now, and the lag report shows who still falls back.
- A trace of the live server with 14,000 zombies had half the tick in two walks that read every zombie's state before asking whether it could hear the noise at all. Those are cut down: the all-awake step went 6.3 to 4 ms a tick and the noise ripple 11.6 to 5.5.
- Below Floors quality gets Ultra, which is the old native High. High renders the floors below at 0.75 scale, Medium 0.5, Low 0.25, and every pass only covers the tiles you can see through, so a 5120x2160 screen stops spending half its frame on the floor below. If you want native, pick Ultra.
- A smoke cloud on the floor below shaded its whole disc and then kept only the hole pixels. It only draws through the holes now.
Fixes
- The server went down when someone crossed into a Huey cabin and let go of a gun with a lit rail flashlight in the same tick.
- The server died under an EAST airdrop on LV759 when the scatter ring reached past the map edge.
- A client crash on build 6260 entering the left side of a helicopter.
Server
- vehicle repair <id> mends a hull fully, tail rotor included, and vehicle list prints every hull with its id, def, state and map position.
- progress pushes someone their play time and extraction totals, and --no-role-requirements turns the role locks off.
