🛠️ Patch Notes – Version 0.3 (Build 0.3.3)

Hey everyone,

Update 0.3 is the biggest technical update in the history of Occultus Vitae. Under the hood almost everything has been touched: AI, sound, interaction, guidance, cinematics, settings and localization. And yes, there is a new chapter waiting for you. We won't tell you anything about it. Go and find out yourself.

🧠 Adaptive Enemy AI – It Learns How YOU Play

This is the heart of the update and honestly the thing we are proudest of. We built a completely new enemy system from scratch, and it doesn't just follow a script. It watches you, it remembers, and it adapts to your playstyle.

• Real perception: enemies see through a view cone with true line of sight, so walls, doors and corners actually protect you. Detection builds up gradually instead of being instant, so a quick glimpse is not a death sentence, but staying in sight is.
• Light matters: your flashlight is your best friend and your biggest risk. A lit flashlight makes you visible from much further away.
• Sound matters: sprinting and hard landings make noise. Moving slowly keeps you quiet. Enemies investigate what they hear.
• Smart behaviour: patrolling, investigating noises, chasing, searching your last known position and giving up when they lose you. They pause, listen, sniff and move on.
• It learns your habits: the system tracks how you play and gets better at countering it:
  • Hide a lot? It will start checking hiding spots on its own.
  • Love your flashlight? It will spot your light earlier and from further away.
  • Always sprinting? It will hear you from further away.
  • It remembers places where it has seen you and comes back to check them.
• Your behaviour is saved with your game. Load a save, and it still remembers what you taught it.
• Doors are no longer a safe zone. Enemies can open doors, and when they are angry enough, they break them down.
• Fair combat: attacks can be dodged. A hit only counts if it actually connects.
• New hiding system: hide in lockers and watch the world through the slits. But if something sees you climb in...
• Improved pathfinding, smarter navigation through doorways and automatic recovery if an enemy ever gets stuck.

🖐️ Reworked Interaction System

• Interacting is now much more reliable: a precise aim check with a slightly wider fallback makes small items like keys and batteries far easier to pick up, while walls still block.
• Interaction prompts no longer stay visible on objects you have already turned away from.
• Interaction reach has been tuned to feel more natural.
• Keys now catch your flashlight beam with a short metallic glint when you look at them, so small items are easier to spot in the dark.
• New interaction type: electronic keypads with their own on-screen number pad, operated with the mouse, including a display, status light and audio feedback.

🧭 Guidance & Objectives

• Objectives now separate active and completed goals in their own columns in the inventory (TAB key). Long objective lists scroll instead of pushing the screen out of view.
• New thought system: if you're stuck on an objective for a long time, your character's own thoughts will give you a subtle nudge. First vague, later more concrete. Quick players will never see them.
• Clue notes in the journal grow with every new discovery, including hand-drawn sketches.
• Additional save points in the new chapter.
• Long titles in the journal now wrap properly instead of running off the page.

🎬 Cinematics & Atmosphere

• New cinematic camera sequences with multiple camera shots, smooth transitions and fades.
• New original music. Selected tracks now continue seamlessly across a level change instead of cutting off.
• Phone conversations play with fitting background ambience instead of silence.
• More varied lighting: flickering, dimmed and failing lights make every corner feel a little less predictable.

🎧 Sound Engine Overhaul

• Fully reworked 3D audio: natural distance falloff, sound occlusion through walls (sounds behind walls are quieter and muffled) and distance filtering.
• All positional sounds are now properly spatialized, so you can actually hear where something is.
• Room reverb: footsteps and sounds now reflect off the environment.
• New dynamic music system: music fades in and out with phases of silence in between, instead of looping endlessly.
• The engine can now play twice as many sounds at the same time.
• New sound priority system: every sound in the game now has a defined priority. Music, menus, phone sounds and atmosphere always win over footsteps and small effects, so nothing important drops out when a lot is happening at once.
• Fixed an issue where all running sounds could stop when a level was loaded.

🔊 New Audio Option: Stereo / Surround

Some 7.1 headsets lost sounds coming from behind. The new "Output" option in the audio settings (default: Stereo) fixes this. The setting takes effect the next time a level loads.

💥 New Screen Effects

Intense moments now come with dynamic screen effects: pulsing vignettes, field-of-view distortion and camera shake that react to what's happening to you.

🌍 Localization

• All new content is available in English, German, Polish, French and Spanish.
• English item names no longer show underscores (e.g. "Archive_Key" is now "Archive Key").

📜 Credits

• The credits now show the current version number and list new music, sound effects and more special thanks.

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed a rare issue where a combination lock wheel could register a different digit than the one shown.
• The player no longer gets stuck on ceiling lamps and the ceiling fan in the house's stairwell.
• Fixed a sound that could stay at its starting position and never stop playing.
• Fixed scripted scene transitions that could be noticed under certain camera angles.
• Fixed an enemy that could get stuck at a door during a scripted sequence.
• Many smaller fixes and polish.

Thank you for playing, for every bug report and for all your feedback. You helped shape this update more than you know.

– Place2Start Studio 💀