September 27 Update Notes

This update brings six lootable equipment types, a TAB radial menu and new ways to fight the zombies in Escape From Z. It also improves character animations, weapon handling, explosions, the interface and save loading.

New Equipment and TAB Menu

• Smart Turret: Deploy it on suitable ground. Its head tracks nearby zombies and fires automatically until its 50 rounds run out.
• Grenade: Choose your target using the throw preview. Grenades launch from near the character's hand, with physics controlling their flight, impact and settling.
• Explosive RC Car: Place it on the ground, drive with WASD and detonate with the left mouse button. The camera follows the car, its front wheels steer and all wheels rotate as it moves.
• Oxygen Cylinder: Place it on suitable ground and shoot it to trigger an explosion.
• Ground Mine: Deploy it on the floor. A living zombie stepping onto it triggers the blast.
• Wall Mine: Attach it to a wall to create a laser extending to the opposite wall. When a zombie crosses the beam, the explosion occurs at the crossing point.
• Hold TAB to open the radial menu and select your collected equipment. Menu icons are rendered from the equipment models.
• Each zombie now has a 15% chance to drop one equipment item. All six equipment types have an equal chance of being selected when a drop occurs.

Placement and Equipment Handling

• Placement previews continuously follow the cursor. Invalid positions turn red, and the preview no longer disappears when moving onto an unsuitable surface.
• Improved surface checks for turrets and other ground equipment, preventing accidental placement on wall tops and unsupported surfaces.
• Added nearby wall snapping for wall mines, making them easier to position without precisely targeting a wall edge. Furniture is not treated as a mounting wall.
• Wall-mine lasers respect solid obstacles. Placements without an opposite wall are rejected.
• Reduced turret size by 25% and allowed the player to walk through deployed turrets.
• Reduced the ground mine's model and collision size by 50%.
• Refined the RC car's suspension, acceleration, braking, reverse and steering behavior.
• Fixed the RC car getting caught on corpses. Nearby doors can be opened and closed with E while driving.
• Zombie visibility while driving now uses the car's viewpoint.
• After the car detonates, the camera stays at the explosion for 1 second before returning to the player.

Combat Fixes

• Matched grenade flight to the throw preview. Prevented grenades from spawning on the other side of a wall when thrown too close to one.
• Fixed nearby explosions sometimes failing to damage zombies. Corpses no longer incorrectly shield other zombies from blast damage, while solid walls still provide cover.
• Limited ragdoll launch speed to reduce bodies being thrown out of the map at excessive speeds.
• Fixed the turret's visible barrel and head failing to turn toward its target. Turrets now wait for the barrel to align before firing.
• Added targeting and hit support specifically for oxygen cylinders. Aiming the cursor at a cylinder directs the shot toward its body, while aiming elsewhere retains the existing weapon behavior. This support does not target cylinders through walls.
• Improved mine triggering and safeguards against applying the same explosion damage more than once.

Explosion Effects, Audio and Camera

• Reworked explosions for grenades, RC cars, oxygen cylinders and both mine types with layered fire, smoke, ground dust, sparks, debris and brief lighting.
• Tuned effect scale and behavior for each explosive type and added fading soot marks.
• Fixed explosion effects repeatedly replaying after a single detonation.
• Added camera shake that scales with explosion strength and distance, settles smoothly and stays within limits during consecutive blasts.
• Camera shake also follows the RC car's viewpoint. Distant explosions and explosions on other floors do not cause unnecessary shake.
• Replaced the previous explosion sound with a new effect. Pitch and volume are tuned by explosive type, with distance attenuation and support for the game's SFX volume setting.
• Prevented explosion audio tails from being cut off early. Improved effect, light, audio and soot cleanup, with limits on overlapping effects during heavy explosions.

Character Animations and Weapon Handling

• Improved transitions between idle, running, crouching and item pickup. Fixed crouched pickup and the return to movement afterward.
• Prevented injections, reloads, weapon switching and interactions from interrupting each other incorrectly. Fixed cases where interrupted actions could leave movement or weapon use locked.
• Prevented rapid repeated input from consuming multiple needles for a single injection.
• Matched reload completion to the animation. Canceled reloads no longer grant ammunition, and crouch movement timing no longer changes reload speed.
• Brought knife damage timing closer to the animation's contact moment. Fixed consecutive attacks inheriting the previous animation's completion state.
• Improved footstep sound timing and foot placement on the ground.
• Refined hand, wrist, elbow and finger poses separately for the M1911, MP5 and Lupara, helping hands maintain contact with the weapon across different aim directions.
• Corrected the M1911's sideways tilt, raised its hold to mouth level and brought it closer to the head's centerline.
• Corrected the MP5's sideways tilt. Lowered the Lupara's support hand to reduce clipping into the weapon.
• Prevented hand and finger adjustments from fighting reload and weapon-switch animations. Fixed pose drift while paused and upper-body animation conflicts during death.

Interface, Interaction and Languages

• Fixed the Z, X and Q injection keycaps becoming visually distorted after use.
• Added a TAB keycap above the injection shortcuts. Owned equipment icons stack vertically above TAB, with quantity labels such as x3 beside them.
• Equipment counts update immediately when used. Empty items disappear from the strip, and the remaining icons close the gap.
• Fixed TAB and equipment indicators appearing during the opening story, transitions and pause states.
• Localized radial-menu equipment names, descriptions and instructions into all 10 supported languages. Improved Arabic text layout and the readability of numbers and key labels.
• Limited all note-reading interactions to 1 game unit. Oversized interaction areas no longer allow distant notes to open when pressing E.
• Widened the area shown by the minimap.

Saves, Loading and Floor Changes

• Fixed controls becoming unresponsive after returning to gameplay from the death screen.
• Replaced Retry with Load Latest Save on the death screen in all supported languages. The button loads the newest valid manual or automatic save.
• When no save exists, an initial autosave is created after the introduction and tutorial reach a playable state.
• Integrated all six equipment inventory counts, equipment loot and deployed devices with the save system.
• Saves retain turret ammunition and orientation, mine arming delays, parked RC car state, and thrown grenade flight and remaining fuse time.
• Prevented collected loot and detonated equipment from reappearing after loading a save.
• Fixed turrets and other deployed equipment following the player to another floor. Devices belong to the floor where they were placed, and their state is restored when returning.
• Death and loading correctly clear radial selection, placement, remote driving and temporary camera states so control returns to the player.

Older saves: Saves without equipment data can still be loaded, but equipment inventory that was never recorded cannot be recovered. These saves load with an empty equipment inventory.