Major Update 1.4 – New Entity AI, New Voice Chat & a lot more

(I tried keeping it short I swear)

 

Heyho PANICORE enjoyers! 📢

 

 

1.4 is live. This is the biggest update we've ever pushed, and most of it went into the two things you've complained about the longest: the entity AI and the voice chat. Both were rewritten from scratch, not patched. With this update, we're preparing things for two more planned major updates.

 

 

The highlights:

 

New entity AI. Rewritten from scratch. The entities behave sharper and far more consistent: better at reading their surroundings, better at staying on you, and each with its own way of perceiving the world. Every difficulty step now hits harder

 

New voice chat. Teammates sound muffled through walls, carry around corners and pick up reverb in large rooms. This is our take at making the voice chat sound as realistic as it can. Half the bandwidth, and it holds together on a bad connection

 

Walkie talkies. Transmit every voice around them to anyone on the same channel. Entities hear them too, so a radio in your pocket is a liability and one on the floor is a decoy, but only once. After an entity checks it and finds nobody, that radio never fools it again

 

The PANIC-meter. Your character's panic is now visible and reacts to what's happening around you, heartbeat included. PANIC is not just a word, it's a feeling now

 

Full controller support. The entire game, menus and typing included, plus a dance wheel and an item wheel

 

Results table. Every win now ends on map, difficulty, run time, files found and who got out when. Times are millisecond exact

 

Dead players get their own voice channel, and anyone alive near your body can hear you

 

Lobbies up to 10 players if the host unlocks them. The game is built for 1 to 5, so it sits behind a warning

 

Purchases can't vanish anymore. If you ever lost a map you paid for and got charged again, that's fixed: a purchase now confirms your save was really written before it takes any money, and damaged saves get restored from a backup

 

Reworked the in-game HUD and menus so the whole game shares one consistent style

 

Full patch notes are at the bottom, and there are a lot more fixes in there.

 

 

We're also changing how we communicate updates.

 

We've given you time windows in the past and missed them, over and over. That's on us. The reason is simple: we're two people, and we never really know how long testing takes until we're sure that everything works. So from now on we won't give you dates anymore: we'll tell you what state something is in instead. "In beta", "going live once the reports stop coming in", "in development". No more "1-2 weeks" that turns into two months. We'd rather say less than promise something we can't hold.

 

On top of that, this year has been rough for us privately, which slowed things down more than we would have liked. We won't go into details, but thank you for your patience.

 

 

The new map

 

All this being said, PANICORE's new map is only missing escapes & thorough testing. We will keep you up to date on this in the upcoming days/weeks.

 

 

The legacy branch

 

We know a rewrite this big can break things we didn't catch. So we're keeping the old version available:

 

Steam Library → right click PANICORE → Properties → Betas → "1.3-legacy"

 

No password needed

 

 

If 1.4 causes problems for you, you can go back instead of being stuck.

 

⚠️ Important: everyone in your group has to be on the same branch. A player on 1.3-legacy can't join a 1.4 lobby (and the other way around). If you suddenly can't join your friends, check this first!

 

 

The next few days

 

We'll be watching bug reports closely and patching fast. If something's broken, tell us here in the Discussions or on our Discord. The more precise, the better (what happened, which map, how many players, were you the host/client).

 

 

Thank you for sticking with us through the wait. The new map is next, and after that there's something bigger coming that we're really excited about.

 

 

Have fun and happy horrors! 👻

 

 

Your two brothers at ZTEK Studio

 

 

 

Panicore Release Version 1.4

 

Additions:

 

Voice & communication

 

Added realistic voice acoustics: teammates now sound muffled through walls, carry around corners and pick up reverb in large rooms

 

Added a walkie talkie item that transmits all voices around it to other walkie talkies on the same channel

 

Entities hear walkie talkies too: a radio going off in your pocket brings them to you, and one dropped on the floor makes a decent decoy — but only once. After an entity checks it and finds nobody, that radio never fools it again

 

Added a Toggle microphone mode: press your talk key once to open your mic, press it again to mute (Settings > Voice Chat > Microphone Mode)

 

Added a microphone indicator to the HUD so you can always see whether your mic is closed, open, or actually being heard

 

Added a talking indicator above players' heads, so you can see who's speaking near you

 

Dead players get their own voice channel, and anyone alive near your body can hear you

 

Information & HUD

 

Added a player status list showing every teammate's state at a glance: alive, hiding, in a chase, grabbed, downed, dead, escaped or disconnected, including who's talking right now and whose walkie talkie is playing. On PAINCORE and above most of it shows as "???" on purpose

 

Added on-screen messages when a teammate escapes, leaves, or rejoins after a disconnect

 

Added the PANIC-meter that reacts to monsters and visualizes the panic your character is experiencing

 

Winning a round now ends on a results table: map, difficulty, run time, files found, and who got out when

 

The tab overview now shows the round timer

 

The lobby now shows the selected map on screen

 

Controller support

 

Full controller support, the whole game can be played on a pad, menus and typing included

 

Added a dance wheel, hold X on keyboard or D-Pad Right on a controller to pick an emote or open the chat

 

Added an item wheel on controller, hold D-Pad Up to pick, tap left or right to switch items quickly

 

Lobby & gameplay

 

Hosts can now unlock lobbies of up to 10 players in the host menu. The game is designed for 1 to 5, so larger groups sit behind a warning and can be locked back down at any time

 

Camping an unreachable ledge is no longer a free safe room. Once an entity gives up on reaching you it starts "screeching" at you from below instead, and every screech leaves you drifting for a few seconds which will sooner or later result in falling to the entity's feet

 

Changes:

 

Voice chat

 

Replaced the proximity voice chat with a new in-house voice system for clearer, lower-latency communication

 

Voice chat holds together on a bad connection instead of breaking apart

 

Voice chat uses about half the bandwidth for the same speech

 

The voice meter now marks your loudest recent moment, so you can see how far a shout just carried

 

Entity behaviour

 

Overhauled the entity behaviour for smarter, fairer hunting, searching and reactions across the board

 

Improved entity memory and searching: entities track your last known position and sweep the area you fled to, including nearby hiding spots, instead of giving up early

 

Improved how entities react to sound (footsteps, doors, dropped items, breaking glass and nearby voice chat)

 

Entities now move with real purpose when a noise pulls them in, instead of shuffling toward it and arriving long after you left. Making noise is more dangerous now

 

Entities now judge muffled sound properly: a desk, a railing or a console between you and them barely dulls a scream, while a real wall still swallows it. Hiding behind furniture is no longer as good as hiding behind a wall

 

Improved entity target selection so they commit to the most exposed player instead of whoever was noticed first

 

Balancing

 

Difficulty now also changes how far entities can hear, not only how well they pick out a faint sound. Each difficulty has a much stronger effect on sight, hearing, persistence, search and movement speed

 

Hospital entity: chase speed raised on PAINCORE and PAINCORE+ where it now gains on you, still outrunnable on Easy, Medium and Hard. Its seeking speed has been lowered, it used to move faster while investigating a noise than while chasing you

 

Submarine entity: seeking speed lowered for the same reason

 

School entity: hearing range reduced and walls muffle a lot more. It no longer starts hunting from a noise alone, it comes to investigate first and only hunts once it finds you

 

Movement & noise

 

How loudly you use a door is now up to you: sprint through and you slam it and anything nearby comes to look, walk and it is an ordinary clatter, crouch and it is barely a sound. Hiding spot doors stay silent, so slipping into a locker never gives you away

 

Interface & quality of life

 

Rebuilt the lobby computer

 

Reworked the in-game HUD

 

Unselected inventory slots are dimmed, so the item you are actually holding is obvious at a glance

 

The intro video can be skipped now

 

Dance key now plays the dance you picked in the wheel instead of cycling to the next one

 

Readying up in the lobby now uses a single tool on the wall instead of one per player, so it never runs out however large the group gets

 

Recoloured the submarine's code keyboard and its colour hint tables: the keys now glow in bright, clearly distinguishable colours that cut through the submarine's murky filter, and both always match exactly

 

Your shop save now keeps a backup copy, so your purchases can be recovered if the save is ever damaged

 

More of the game is translated, the newly written menu and interactable text is now filled in across all 32 languages

 

Bugfixes:

 

Purchases & saves

 

Fixed a bug where a map you had bought could be lost again and charged for a second time, a purchase now confirms your save was really written before it takes any money

 

Fixed a bug where a skin could be paid for and then be gone on the next launch

 

Fixed a bug where a damaged save file would permanently show everything you owned as unbought, it is now restored from its backup or rebuilt from scratch

 

Fixed a bug where maps bought from the in-game pause menu did not cost anything

 

Voice chat

 

Fixed broken voice, snapping teammates and lagging animations: matches ran on a fraction of the bandwidth they need

 

Fixed one player's voice arriving chopped up for everyone else whenever their game stuttered

 

Fixed a bug where a talking teammate's voice would trail behind them while they moved

 

Fixed a bug where the voice chat volume slider did not match the actual volume or mute state

 

Fixed a bug where the voice chat settings showed an unusable input-device option and an incorrect ON/OFF label

 

Fixed a bug where plugging in or freeing up your microphone mid-match would leave you mute for the rest of the round

 

Entities

 

Fixed a bug where entities could see you through closed doors

 

Fixed a bug where entities would be confused when you stand on a table or anything else that elevates you

 

Rounds & lobby

 

Fixed the round ending while somebody was still alive

 

Fixed a teammate who escaped and quit early taking the win with them

 

Fixed being offered Restart after a round your group had won

 

Fixed the round timer running on after the round was over

 

Fixed the black screen of several seconds at the end of a round

 

Fixed the map you just lost on loading itself again back in the lobby

 

Fixed not being able to revive a teammate buried under their own dropped items

 

Fixed a bug where clients could not leave the game

 

Fixed a bug where quitting to the lobby from a running game hung on an endless loading screen

 

Fixed a bug where the lobby could hang forever on a start if level loading never finished

 

Interface

 

Fixed a bug where the tab overview screen would break while downed or spectating

 

Fixed players who joined after you turned nametags off still showing one

 

Fixed nametags covering chat messages

 

Fixed a bug where lobby computers and other interactive screens ignored your clicks when you stood too close

 

Fixed a bug where the server browser's hover highlight turned row text dark red on black and unreadable

 

Fixed a bug where connection errors and "no sessions found" messages appeared hidden behind the server list instead of in front of it

 

Fixed Snowbound showing the previously selected map's name in the lobby instead of its own

 

Some text was too small to read, the build number and the lobby buttons are bigger now

 

Low oxygen mode is now translated instead of showing in English in every language