PacManiacDK

That'd be my fault. The moderators are doing the #### versioning as a means to help us keep up with every independent version, and this one got mislabeled in game by accident. Rest assured you're on the most recent update.

Off to PC World to get an i3 laptop ;D Don't ever say we don't love you guys and gals.

Good post! Pinned!

Nice post "Alpha" is one of those words which can mean pretty much anything depending on your game and development process, so it's nice to see it explained here as it applies to our game.
 
Typically, games are developed as such:
 
Prototype ... Development ... More development ... More development ... Alpha ... Beta ... Release and Sell
 
Opening up that sort of game at the point it hits alpha means you can expect bugs, a couple of missing or incomplete features, but essentially the game is done at that point - everything going forward is just bug squashing and the odd bit of optimisation.
 
Games such as ours are developed as such:
 
Prototype ... Alpha  ... More development ... More development ... More development ... Beta ... Release ... Updates
 
So opening up this kind of game at the first point of alpha is going to yield considerably different results. Huge swathes of missing features, game breaking bugs, all manner of things to be expected with something released this early into its life cycle. You repair those things as you go, add features, expand the gameplay, and reach the point just before Beta when the game is in a state equivalent to a conventional game in Alpha.
 
The problem comes with the fact that both these games, one in a state just before Beta, and one in a state just after Prototype are both called "Alphas" (and would both appear under the umbrella term "Early Access" on Steam), which makes it awfully difficult if to know precisely what to expect from any random game which calls itself an alpha.
 
Really, there ought to be two different terms for these two differing development styles.
 
Neither of these uses of the word "alpha" are correct, and neither are incorrect. There is no such thing as being a "true alpha", there is just the particular flavour of alpha your game happens to be adhering to.

Ok,
 
I have seen lots and lots of confusion from new (and older) players who are coming to project zomboid and get mixed up with the versions and the state of the game. So I've decided to write a little segment about what's going on. Now I should be on top of this but if I make any mistakes please be kind and correct me via pm or just comment here! You can also give your knowledge and make your questions about the versions and things that you have figured out or don't have the slightest clue on to what's going on. I'll try to update this with big changes (such as the full steam release etc.)
 
Alpha
Project Zomboid is currently an alpha release game which broadly means that there are and will be bugs until time unknown. Also alpha means that the game is missing essential features that are planned (or maybe not even thought out yet) and will be added to the game in the future. The alpha phase usually ends with a feature lock which means new content will not be added. (although this can be debatable as many game developers add stuff even after release and will likely be the case with zomboid too) After alpha comes beta! Yayy!!
 
Beta
Firstly Project Zomboid is NOT a beta game as you probably figured this out by now. Beta game is considered feature ready and this is where the true bug squishing and tweaking begins. Now because Zomboid is an alpha release and there are lots of people playing it, the devs are doing some more bug fixes already to help with the playability of the game than maybe if it was just a closed alpha.
 
Build
The build is a version of the game (ie. 2.9.9.17) and atm is marked with numbers counting to 3.0 which will most likely see the release of NPCs. The build can be stable or unstable and the version number isn't dependent on changes (2.9.9.17 can have different versions of it).
 
Stable release
Stable release is a point where major bugs of a build have been fixed and the game is essentially playable. This does not mean that there won't be any bugs, it's just that the amount is minimal and not game breaking. All of the present and future Desura releases are planned to be stable releases. You can see the current progress with the releases from the downloads section of the forum.
 
Unstable release
This is mainly for bug squishing and features that are new, unstable and haven't been tested much. The unstable releases are atm handled through the Steam beta.
 
Steam beta
Now this is where things get interesting. Steam beta is an unstable version of the game that as you probably guessed, is unstable (Wow good job! ), which means that there might be some game breaking stuff or some major bugs. Back up ya saves! This is NOT a beta version of Project Zomboid as the name might suggest. It is more or less a beta of the alpha. You can choose this version from the steam library as follows:
 
Hopefully this will clear some of those misconceptions some people are having and also help you understand what's going on.