A new update has been uploaded to the Steam Beta branch for ZomB Battlegrounds. This update contains some work in progress changes mainly to the graphics that massively improve how the game looks. These changes are going to have a very noticeable impact to performance, hence why we are uploading this to the beta branch first.

The biggest change is that we have completely overhauled how materials are handled in the game. Before, objects barely had any sort of properties that made them look like they were made of any sort of material, but this update changes that and gives a lot of the objects new properties that give them the appearance of real world materials.

Beyond that, we have added new details to textures to allow them to show more depth, especially when combined with the new materials system.

We have also completely revamped the fog system used in the rainy and snowy maps. The new fog system is much more dynamic and animated, plus it just looks so much more detailed than the previous system, which just used Unity's default fog system. (Note that this new system is going to be much more demanding performance wise than the old system)

Lighting has also been completely redone. We have replaced the fully dynamic lighting system with a baked lighting system. The new lighting takes some of the load off of your system since it has already been pre calculated and baked into the textures of the maps before we export the game. Not only is this going to come with a performance increase, but the lighting that the engine calculates is much more complex and accurate than the old dynamic lighting system. The main downside to this approach is that the overall file size of the game has increased. The old version of the game was around 300MB but this new version is around 1.5GB in size. As this is still relatively small, we think this trade off is worth it.

Those are the biggest changes that have been made in this update, but there are other smaller changes that we have listed in the full patch notes below. Note that this update is a work in progress and things might change before the final release of the update. There are also some new pieces of content we have in development that will be released when the final release of the update is available, but are not currently in a playable state, hence why they are not being included in this beta update.

In order to get this update you must own the Steam version of the game and move to the beta branch to download it. To select the beta branch, right click the game in your Steam library, click properties, click the Betas tab, and then select "public-beta-test" through the drop down menu, the update should automatically download after that (If the game isn't already installed you'll have to install it)

We'd love to hear your feedback on these new changes. The full list of changes is listed below:

- Added materials properties to the terrain for the following maps: Rainy Desert, Forest, Rainy Forest, Mountains, Snowy Mountains, Rainy Zombieland.
- extra texture detail added to the terrain of all maps
- Vastly improved fog in all Rain & Snow maps
- Added environmental detail added to Forest
- Removed the MSAA system and replaced it with TAA which should result in better performance compared to MSAA
- Added Motion Blur
- Introduced Baked Lighting
- Improved Ambient Occlusion