EnigmaGrey

It's simply that most of this doesn't fit into the game's theme nor setting.
 
So while we "could" capitalize on whatever modders are doing, it's fairly unlikely this'll change to any great degree when NPCs come in. There'll be more story, but for a certain subset of people, "this is how you died" will always feel pointless ... and that's OK (and, depending on your philosophical bent, that's life!). They can mod it or play something else once they had their fill.
 
Minecraft also remains one of the most successful games of all time and sees gobs of players active across PC, mobile, and console. It might have failed as an "unfolding game," but then again it was always just legos with some neat survival mechanics bolted ontop of it. That is, I don't think it ever aimed to be anything like that -- beyond taking some rather popular mods and integrating them for the 1.0, anyway. That seemed less to do with a vision and more "it's cool and it's popular, so ... sure."

Yes, it's the right email address.
 
If you haven't in a while, you might want to give Stan another listen. Kinda makes me a teensy bit worried to send someone into the spambox to look. 
 
 
 

Not being invulnerable was “the thought,” actually. Hence why most clothing isn't a 100% guarantee and incur penalties from encumbrance and weight, to insulation.

Oh man. I'm sorry if I gave you the wrong impression by using this reference. The idea of a hardcore Zomboid fan with a Spiffo tatoo seemed pretty funny to me. To make it more interesting, I even put 9 zomboid references in this picture for others to find. I just wanted to ask about my emails in a non-boring way.
 
And as you recommended, I gave Stan another listen. So don't worry, my wife is okay. She helped me to make the picture. 

You just have to guard yourself against your own bias. That is, be critical of yourself and what reinforces your belief, not just the thing you feel deserves criticism.
 
So you have a game that sold millions of copies in the last few years, has more players per hour after a year without updates than it did for the 8-9 years, and has exceedingly positive reviews, yet also most of that success comes from people none of us will ever hear from, who played far less than any of us will ever play (at least as forum members). Is it really going to die because of the contents of this thread or the criticism of those YouTube videos?
 
Being a pessimist and someone that works on the game, who got a job because I was unrelentingly critical of the game and worked my way from tech support to management by filling any perceived holes I could, and yet saw it succeed despite my concerns and dour predictions, when I criticize myself and my own response to this, I lean towards “No. it’s more likely these criticisms come from fatigue due to playing the game 10x over those and wanting to reignite the spark with the new update and, in some cases, it comes from hitching one’s star to the game and depending on it to generate more content to survive (finding difficulty in pivoting to other things).” (At least for now — there are limits to everything, just compared to the bad old days, a year is nothing. It’s also year without breaking mods, without destroying saves, without fatigue from small updates, to boot.)
 
When dealing with people, there’s just more than what’s being said. There’s what’s driving it and what it means and what they might have actually meant but couldn’t express clearly, even what they remembered differently from what happened. And worse, it’s mostly personal opinion , all the way down, and therefore inaccurate and imprecise. You can’t just take anything at face value and run with it, even if it agrees with your position (or speaks to one’s anxieties).

Oh so banned.

What if we wanted to combine waffles and pancakes into some sort of pan-waffle enterprise of delicious proportions?

Trees block vision. Shoving a zombie onto/behind a tree therefore blocks your ability to see it.

That’s right.
 
LuteBoxes, macrotransfers, deal-c, sisään passé, expulsions. Jack up the price to $120 as befitting “early access.” Gotta catch em all.

You just have to guard yourself against your own bias. That is, be critical of yourself and what reinforces your belief, not just the thing you feel deserves criticism.
 
So you have a game that sold millions of copies in the last few years, has more players per hour after a year without updates than it did for the 8-9 years, and has exceedingly positive reviews, yet also most of that success comes from people none of us will ever hear from, who played far less than any of us will ever play (at least as forum members). Is it really going to die because of the contents of this thread or the criticism of those YouTube videos?
 
Being a pessimist and someone that works on the game, who got a job because I was unrelentingly critical of the game and worked my way from tech support to management by filling any perceived holes I could, and yet saw it succeed despite my concerns and dour predictions, when I criticize myself and my own response to this, I lean towards “No. it’s more likely these criticisms come from fatigue due to playing the game 10x over those and wanting to reignite the spark with the new update and, in some cases, it comes from hitching one’s star to the game and depending on it to generate more content to survive (finding difficulty in pivoting to other things).” (At least for now — there are limits to everything, just compared to the bad old days, a year is nothing. It’s also year without breaking mods, without destroying saves, without fatigue from small updates, to boot.)
 
When dealing with people, there’s just more than what’s being said. There’s what’s driving it and what it means and what they might have actually meant but couldn’t express clearly, even what they remembered differently from what happened. And worse, it’s mostly personal opinion , all the way down, and therefore inaccurate and imprecise. You can’t just take anything at face value and run with it, even if it agrees with your position (or speaks to one’s anxieties).

“Teams” meaning individual people for the most part. We’re not that big.
 
There’s no need to force everyone into an office. The cost would be astronomical for absolutely no gain. We’d end up losing staff who can’t or won’t move and probably shuttering in a year or two if we were to do that. That’s the way you kill a company, not speed up development.
 
… I don’t see the point in getting into the rest of it.
 
So: We’re slow. We’ll focus on making the best game we can rather than doing things fast and loose. You can see that this has always worked out well despite it being a constant source of complaints, no matter the time between updates, over the past 12 years. You’ll just have to make peace with that. 

To get to the point, PZ is a game that most people get around 20 hours out of. There’s maybe 50-60 hours of actual content ( enough to get you through a winter ) otherwise. It took 12 years to get there, mind — to get to the point where only a decade ago, this would have been considered a crazy amount of content for 3x-6x the price.

If you end up spending hundreds  or thousands of hours playing it or (as people like myself have done) make a job out of it, you’re going to have quite a different view of it, naturally. No game can withstand that level of scrutiny,  provide the content necessary to fulfill the desire for novelty, or act as a vehicle to create content for when it’s effectively being played over and over again hundreds of times. And that, at least to me personally, is the main problem in many of those videos. (Ignoring that concerns about b42 often are imagined problems that people then argue for or against because they don’t and can’t have the full picture when it’s not out.)
 
I get that waiting sucks, that we all naturally become bored and jaded with the game, and that the long period of time between updates creates a kind of void where people invent and argue against their own ideas of future content, but it’s never been something we could address. I don’t think anyone can. 
 
Prophetizing the game’s death due to an imaginary wave of hate, if only we don’t change the approach that made us successful for the past 12 years, now,  will not help anyone or change anything.
 
Please don’t take the game so personally. It’s just one of thousands of great games to play. It’s not your job to “fix” it; it’s not worth investing yourself into; you don’t need to worry about it or try to change its nature. It’s just a game.
 
 Now I’m going to go visit the family for the weekend and spend my holiday away from
 this “whole” PZ thing. I hope you can do the same.
 
Have a Merry Christmas.

Pretty much? Anything else, based on hindsight, inevitably has trade-offs or situations that made it impossible to happen earlier in development. The staff available now doesn't become available earlier; the money made now doesn't somehow get made earlier; the lessons learned in the past don't relearn themselves today. That's always the dilemma with "what ifs."
 
All TIS really could have done differently comes down to communication (and maybe embracing marketing instead of word of mouth):  maybe being more humble early on would have prevented TIS from setting itself up to "fail" at its own self-imposed goals. Maybe they should have taken the publishing deal in 2014 and surrendered control / moved on with the game in a "good enough" state instead of what they originally wanted to do. That sort of thing: hide, conceal, fake it -- give the impression of speed or achieving your goals without really doing it.
 
It's not as though we don't see this time and time again in the game industry: companies hide information from the user, aside from what's useful for marketing purposes, and pretend things are going just swell right up to release. And sure, the result is a disappointing game that doesn't meet its original goals, but what does it matter? The money is made back, people don't care enough en masse to seemingly stop buying the games that do it. I can only guess offers a sense of closure you don't get with a game that tells you upfront "It'll take as long as it takes." One you don't feel like you're waiting for it, the other you do; one is spent; the other has potential. So on and so forth. 
 
Edit: I guess if you wanted a list of practical stuff, it'd be something like
 
TIS could have stuck with XNA instead of acting on Microsoft's decision to nix it TIS could have finished PAWS instead of starting a new game (PZ) TIS could have picked a prebuilt engine (but would have inevitably run into the limits of something like Unity for this style of game, especially in 2011) TIS could have foregone supporting multiple platforms (something Java promised to be able to handle gracefully, but didn't really for games) and a web-based version of the game (the pre-release game was an applet) TIS could have stuck with C# -- the thing they knew -- instead of using Java TIS could have built the game engine's architecture with an Entity Component System (the new hotness in 2020) instead of inheritance (good ol' OOP) TIS could have foregone OpenGL and OpenAL, which had some pretty severe compatibility issues later in life TIS could have opted not to install an auto-updater for the game, costing them significant money when it was abused by pirates TIS could have abused "free file hosting" opportunities to try and save money when updating the game outside of Desura TIS could have used a different payment provider instead of Google Wallet and PayPal to avoid having issues when those services deemed selling incomplete games problematic (naturally that policy didn't stick around for very long )  TIS could have had a better backup solution when they moved in 2011 (remember, at this point, they were basically bedroom coders, living in an apartment, not offices or Big Corp) TIS could have avoided any GNU code to avoid copy-left trolls TIS could have dropped most of their requirements for a Steam release and entered early access ~10 months earlier (also takes care of file hosting)  
That sort of thing ate up a lot of time and ate into what little money they had early on, imo. It gets less possible to "save time" as things progressed and the game saw more success.
 
TIS could have been more direct that their goals were based on getting a publisher (while they were being actively courted by one) TIS could have gone corporate and taken (a) the publisher's deal TIS could have used GIT differently to avoid issues with long commit times and binary files (or never used GIT at all, opting for SVN, Plastic SCM, and other alternatives)  
And then it gets just weird:
 
TIS could have avoided supporting mods (Lua, especially built on top of Java, is -not great- in terms of performance and does fragment the game development somewhat) TIS could have been satisfied with the release of MP in 2014 (or 2016 -- but 2016 was basically Project Zomboid: Together w/ the implementation of Steam co-op)  and called it done; anything not done would just be done post-launch or as DLC to keep the company afloat (or not) TIS could have just bluntly taken mod content instead of hiring modders as devs, as some advocate and even insist on TIS could have pivoted to making expansions or sequels out of the subsequent big updates that followed this point (in-game coop hosting; cars; weather; the animations update; the MP re-release; and now animals)  
I don't think there's much else they could have done that wouldn't require cosmic forces conspiring to help them earlier, such as certain staff members being available much earlier in production than they were, so I don't think there's much point going down that particular rabbit hole.
 
 

I mean, I’m afraid I have to agree with Win on this one. The thread is basically “if you don’t do it how I want, you’ll fail” after a considerable number of suggests and other criticisms, seemingly in the same vein over the past month. 
 
 I really would suggest just taking a break from the game. It’ll come on its own time and in its own way. It need not be forced.

Yes. Members from General Arcade work on the mp side of the game. The rest of works on sp/the engine itself, baring areas that bleed into one another (like admin tools or ui).
 
We’re all going as fast as we can, but we’re not going to metaphorically flog the staff bloody and to the point of unconsciousness to go slightly faster … and still be called “too slow” anyway. 
 

To be clear, are the bugs you’re referring to things that those mods fix? Because if so, a lot of those seem counter to the vanilla game vs “fixing” it. That is, I think overall your take on what is fitting simply doesn’t match ours. 
 
I guess I just don’t want you to feel like you’re tilting at windmills here, so I apologize if I’m confusing two separate things (bugs vs qol mods).

And when it comes to mods, as Puppers, and Maddan touches on …
 
Well. Sometimes we’re just going to disagree. The dev team has its own goals and tolerance for the game’s systems and what you may consider bugs or poor design (take bites being 100% fatal — awful design … shame that’s a fundamental part of the game’s lore). We’re not always going to be on the same page with millions of players or tens of thousands of modders. It’s simply not possible make everyone happy and we’d be insane to try. 
 
Take both mods and the vanilla game as they are rather than try to pit them against each other or try to force one to be like the other. That is, sometimes all that we can do is respect each others’ decisions for why they do something and get on with it. Sometimes you can’t square the circle.

Our success came from being both ambitious and thorough, which naturally means being slow. I get that, to those who’ve played the game considerably more than the average, that the bloom eventually falls off the rose, but that doesn’t mean changing our approach now is the right choice or that the game is dying. We’ve heard it every single day for 12 years yet every build is ultimately more successful than the last and we have suffered from alternative approaches, be it smaller and/or faster builds or multiple simultaneous builds at once.
 
That does not mean the game doesn’t have flaws or shortcoming (assuredly, we’re well aware of them and are addressing them as fast as possible as part of build 42), but there comes a point where people need to move on and play other games. A good tell is when you start feeling contempt for something you once enjoyed. We all get there eventually, no matter the game or the development methodology behind it. Take a break, have some fun, and don’t worry about us.

To say the least, we’re not going to get into copyright and trademark issues or licensing agreements with gun manufacturers.
 
more guns will likely be added when we do update the system, but don’t expect true to reallife branding.

As I understand it, it’s not possible. To get higher performance, we’ve moved from crawling individual tiles to having one large image stitched together. To get an effect like the old builds would require regenerating that larger image any time the player’s view changes, negating the performance increase. 
 
PZ, as its grown, has kind-of ended up as a case study for why the older 2D approaches died off at the turn of the millennium. They just don’t play well with modern 3-D graphics cards, and it gets worse the more complex the world gets..
 
Tinting options should be doable.

Could just not kill yourself by excessive exercise and let it happen naturally though a well paced routine.
 
 You know. Like in reality.

Note that the hallway has windows and glass doors at its entrance, even if it’s not necessarily realistic that light would make it around the 90 degree corner and to the end of the hall.
 
You can see how much darker it is in the starting room, so I don’t really get why the empty hallway is the focus. Either way, toning down the color filter will result in a darker hallway as there’d less luminescence over all.

Note that the hallway has windows and glass doors at its entrance, even if it’s not necessarily realistic that light would make it around the 90 degree corner and to the end of the hall.
 
You can see how much darker it is in the starting room, so I don’t really get why the empty hallway is the focus. Either way, toning down the color filter will result in a darker hallway as there’d less luminescence over all.

As I understand it, it’s not possible. To get higher performance, we’ve moved from crawling individual tiles to having one large image stitched together. To get an effect like the old builds would require regenerating that larger image any time the player’s view changes, negating the performance increase. 
 
PZ, as its grown, has kind-of ended up as a case study for why the older 2D approaches died off at the turn of the millennium. They just don’t play well with modern 3-D graphics cards, and it gets worse the more complex the world gets..
 
Tinting options should be doable.

Our success came from being both ambitious and thorough, which naturally means being slow. I get that, to those who’ve played the game considerably more than the average, that the bloom eventually falls off the rose, but that doesn’t mean changing our approach now is the right choice or that the game is dying. We’ve heard it every single day for 12 years yet every build is ultimately more successful than the last and we have suffered from alternative approaches, be it smaller and/or faster builds or multiple simultaneous builds at once.
 
That does not mean the game doesn’t have flaws or shortcoming (assuredly, we’re well aware of them and are addressing them as fast as possible as part of build 42), but there comes a point where people need to move on and play other games. A good tell is when you start feeling contempt for something you once enjoyed. We all get there eventually, no matter the game or the development methodology behind it. Take a break, have some fun, and don’t worry about us.