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For that matter I'm getting tired of a few people who aren't interested in a particular feature assuming that this preference applies to the entire playerbase and that development of the entire game should fit around their own personal wants. If we said 'right, NO MORE MP STUFF WILL BE DONE UNTIL NPCS ARE OUT' we'd just be doing a search and replace on the complaints we get on the forums and how we're focusing on NPCs too much, and this isn't fair to the MP communities, and how NPCs aren't really required when you have humans and humans are so much better to play with than dumb AI, and WHY IS THERE NO VOIP?! You CANNOT win. FAO EVERYONE. NEWSFLASH: There are a lot of people who own this game. NOT EVERY ONE OF THEM WANTS THE SAME THING AS YOU DO AND STOP BEING SELFISH TRYING TO DENY THEM IT JUST TO MAKE YOURSELF HAPPY. We're a tiny team, and we're hiring outside help to do the multiplayer stuff for this very reason (well not just this reason, they are also awesome and can do stuff we cannot), yet even when spending extra money on an external team to avoid it affecting your fabled NPCs in any way whatsoever, and making that clear mondoid after mondoid, we still put up with all these constant complaints and opinionings whenever we talk about ANYTHING non NPC (and yet, ABSURDLY, we get 10x the complaints when we DO talk about NPCS), we are pritoritizing the work that gets done to try and keep the most people happy we can, to provide regular updates to make people feel they are getting their moneys worth, and the reviews suggest we're doing the right thing. If I have to read more whinging about NPCs its SO tempting just to stick static 'shopkeeper' characters in there, soak up the complaints, and never speak of them again. Sick to death of it. YOU GUYS are the biggest risk to NPCs out there, I tell you. We GET it. We read complaints about NPCs ALL THE TIME. It amazes me so many seem to think by posting a comment on the forums or on an unrelated mondoid we're going to go 'oh what?! WAIT. PEOPLE WANT NPCS? I DIDN'T REALIZE! Sorry! Right, they will be out next week!' - We're so very obviously aware people want NPCs, its like the worst kept secret in the world. Why people can't understand after a certain point it becomes MASSIVELY detremental to a small team where the developers themselves, who are human and bound by such human traits as motivation and stress have to READ this endless stuff themselves, there is no PR guy soaking it up. It's also tempting to put a complete ban on any versions until NPCs are out, and then direct all the huge anger at a list of email addresses I collect from NPC complaints, and see how they like it. Nope people excited for VOIP, you're NOT allowed it because the NPC gang want their NPCS and THEY are who matter, NOT YOU. Doesn't matter that we got extra external people to do all the work. If we talk about it, or god forbid release it, then that's unfair to NPC fans. They don't want other people having any enjoyment of new features if they aren't getting it themselves. Here's a list of people to go and harass about it every week. We try to be good to our customers, we try and be on their side all the time, we bleed for this game, but it's bloody hard. So so so tired of it. You wonder why NPCS aren't out? I used to love working on NPCs. Now it practically gives me ulcers, because of you lot. THAT is why. Thanks for taking something I loved, was obsessed with, had huge aspirations for, looked forward to 'getting boring stuff out the way' so I could get back to them, and instead making me want to puke every time I think of them. They'll still come, as we've said a bazillion times, but it'll be 1000x shittier working on them in the meantime, so thanks. And yeah, they'll come slower too when I have to nail myself to the desk to force myself to work to them, instead of gleefully thinking about them in bed and thinking 'screw it' and jumping up to quickly to my pc to do that cool thing I thought about and them realizing its 10am and I've worked all night. That happens to this day but not on NPCs no longer I'll tell you that straight up. Perhaps they would come faster if they weren't such a poisonous thing, a three letter acronym of the dark horrible side of PZ that makes most of the community groan and wince when they hear it, the cause of 99% of the stress and discord in the community, and maybe there'd be a lot more pep in development if the people who mention them so often didn't so often act so completely selfishly toward other features people are excited about or talk in such gross belittling terms about the work of other developers on the game. "Oh boy got to get those wonderful people their NPCs, don't want to let them down <3<3<3' If it weren't for all the wonderfully lovely and understanding people, and those who've never posted on the forums at all, nothing would give me more pleasure at this point than just canning them, tell you the truth. As it stands its all those I don't want to let down and why I'll work through the grime and muck and tears and get them out as promised. Sadly my lofty aspirations of them standing out as something special and unique has slowly been strangled over the past year or so, they are tainted and I just want them done and all that pleasure and love is long dead, so its only responsibility to those people that drives me now. To make matters worse, when I do anything that's not NPCs I have to omit my bloody name out of the Mondoid and take no credit whatsoever, for fear of people going 'WHAT HE'S NOT WORKING ON NPCS?' (I hope the above gives some indication of why working 100% on NPCs day in / day out is now an impossibility for me without some recharge time) I get no sense of satisfaction or recognition for what I do do on the game apart from the much delayed NPCs because I have to keep it quiet because I'm known to be doing NPCs, and the OPs post is proof that this is not done out of paranoia due to not understanding game development and the simplistic 'if this then not that' mentality that dominates these kind of NPC complaints. So basically, despite being one of two people who built the game from the ground up from day 1 before the team grew, writing the base of the entire multiplayer in my spare time within a month, as well as the animation overhaul, creative, professions and trait overhaul and numerous other things, often as a bit of refuge from NPCs or in my spare time, and having to run the company to boot, all I ever get back in terms of personal accomplishment or recognition is complaints about lack of npcs, accusations of being slow, and comments like one on Mondoid yesterday that 'I wish I had lemmy101's job so I could do nothing for years and still get paid!' - so fucking draining and demoralizing and people wonder why they aren't hurtling out the door at a billion miles an hour. Only in Early Access do you suffer the indignity of constantly having random people come in and start telling you how your team should be organized and what people should be working on what. We involve the community heavily with development but it only coincidentally seems to be people complaining about NPCs that seem entitled to that control over the development and team and start saying 'I don't think this person should be working on this, you should put them on that!'. And there are some people on the Steam boards right now wondering why we vowed never to do Early Access again. There's also a thread there right now saying 'are we the only people doing Early Access right?' yet that right ain't good enough as long as there's one thing on your list you've not gotten out the door. A lot of Early Access developers would have closed doors a year or two or three ago, NPCs or no, but the fact we're keeping at it, still updating the game, working on it 100%, and can't think of starting anything new or fresh or exciting, mainly down to our commitment to YOU means nothing because you still not got your NPCs. VERY IMPORTANT TRIP IN THE TOTAL PERSPECTIVE VORTEX: The people who post on this forum, and the people who post on steam, and the people who post on reddit, represent probably 0.001% of the playerbase. Just because the NPC noise is so deafening, the majority of people out there just want the game updating with new features. Most who bought the game did so long after we shut the fuck up about NPCs and we're keeping quiet so they can be content and not become more NPC noise dragging us down. All those people probably want updates coming out with features added to the game, not some total FULL STOP on any development that's not NPCS that wouldn't come much sooner if we did that ANYWAY. (to those without development experience, just consider the adage: "Too many cooks". Add 100000 developers to NPCs will not make them come out in 0.2 seconds) Ask yourself if our review score wouldn't be somewhere in the 20% if the majority truly did align with your own opinion? We should be getting nothing but NPC delay complaints. Instead we get reviews about the game that's there, and praising regular updates of new features, because lack of NPC tunnel vision means they appreciate all the massive work we put into the game in general. Npc complaints are, gladly, in the minority exactly because we don't keep going on about them and just work on them quietly, yet the minority who do complain do so so constantly, at such a deafening volume and with such incredible laser focus it just make me MISERABLE. I've always stuck up for NPC complaining people, 'oh its just because they are frustrated' and 'its our fault for hyping it too soon', full of apologies and sympathy, but it becomes harder and harder with each passing day. I think I'm hitting a threshold. We owe the majority their updates, and sorry that this makes NPCs take their time but that's the way it is. Apparently hiring external help to do MP stuff, and endlessly talking about how we're doing that in the Mondoids, isn't enough, so I'll just have to lay it out in black and white for you. I think I've done pretty much that. That's why NPCs are delayed, it has nothing to do with VOIP. or any other feature by any member of the team or even features I may myself work on instead of working on NPCs. If I'm not working on NPCs it's because I've hit a roadblock or am otherwise being unproductive, and my time is then better spent on something I'm making progress on. This constant NPC noise just makes that MUCH more frequent and MUCH more severe. The reason NPCs have been delayed is working on NPCs is now like working in a sewer, and when you work in a sewer you're only there as long as you have to be, you have to come up for regular breath to get the stink out of your nose and keep yourself from getting ill. And this is why I'm not being hyperbolic when I say if you'd all have shut up about them you'd probably be playing with them right now. This is perhaps a the most valuable thing to take away for future reference when talking directly to anyone relying on creativity to create something you want. I'm sorry if this all comes over as harsh, its your first post and from your perspective the heated response may not seem appropriate for your question, you may not have seen the sea of people saying the exact same things day in and day out that have wore our nerves and patience to a nub. but they are still there from our perspective and after so long the camel's back snaps.. a lot of this is general and not directed at you, though a lot applies to your comments, Have a nice day

This is something I've wanted to say for a while, and something everyone should remember when getting frustrated by the delay to the NPCs. We started development of this game in early 2011. It's our baby and has literally consumed some 80%+ of my waking life (probably similar for the others) since 2011. We've had our lows (and some lows at that) and we've had our highs. The community we've built is incredible, and the love and pride we have for the game and community is immense. But... This game has been in development for over four years now, and that is a long time for your life to be consumed by one thing (This goes way beyond 9-5 job levels). We'd never ever abandon PZ before it's the game we set out to make, but that's not to say we're not tired, worn out, and missing that feeling of working on something new. As well as the rewards, of which we are very grateful, PZ has taken its toll. Even when the day finally comes that some of us move on, as we've said before, we'd continue to support development of PZ for as long as it makes the money to support itself, and likely even some time after that. But there is that ache there for the truly fun and exciting feeling of exploring new ideas and the potential and wonder of a new game, an ache that strikes every developer and truth be told is years old at this point. I hope we score points for resisting it. But we won't and can't even think about other projects seriously, even if we dabble in our spare time. It's too dangerous to even think about because we can't have any distractions as we need to deliver the full map, the vehicles, the NPCs, before we can hit 1.0. At the point PZ goes 1.0, a few of us will likely finally be able to explore what's next after PZ, and we hope our community is looking forward to whatever we do next too. As I said before, to reiterate, we'd make sure PZ was well supported as we don't want the day to come when PZ stops getting new content. I don't want to presume what the devs we've taken in from the community would like to do post 1.0, but I imagine PZ would continue with long standing devs the community knows and trusts to steer the ship straight, and of course even if working on something else we'd still be heavily involved. So I guess around to my point: I know waiting for NPCs is hard. I know they keep getting pushed back, seem vapourware at this point, and trust me I want NPCs out there more than any single one of you, by a factor of like 10000000. I know many of you are patient, I know a few aren't, but I also know their impatience is a good sign as to how much people care. I also know that these NPCs are one of the most ambitious NPC systems in the history of games. It feels arrogant to say as much but I can't really argue against that statement. I'm aware of what we're biting off here. I'm totally confident we can do it, but the fact is after this huge delay we HAVE to deliver, and we HAVE to deliver something brilliant. So that's ironically the reason for the delay. They won't be released until they are brilliant. It's as simple as that. I don't want to say NPC development is a nightmare, because it is also wonderful and exciting in equal measure, but it's a shit ton of pressure that is on around the clock. It only makes me want to weep with sympathy imagining what GRR Martin is going through with the sheer monstrous scale of pressure on his shoulders compared to ours. BUT. This is a good thing. Not for us, but for you. Why? Right now, EVERY member of the Indie Stone is working full time on PZ. We need to provide you with stuff, meaty content, to keep you happy, interested, and to improve the game in the meantime while we get our shit together with the NPCs and whatnot. We can't have 6 months or a year of no updates while we tick off our last remaining big bullet point planned features. We can't go 1.0 until NPCs are in. If that took a gazillion years that means a gazillion years of updates and support for PZ. If you think of all the many many great features that have been added into the game in the past couple of years since NPCs were removed. A lot of them would have made it in anyway, of course, but many of them may not have been. As we say, we don't plan on abandoning PZ at any point in the forseeable future. But the fact still remains, that when NPCs, or Vehicles, or the completed map, go into the game, the longer they took, and the more delays and frustrations they had in getting here, they WILL go in. And if they take a long time: The game they will be dropped into will end up better, more feature rich and deep because of it. All the while having the entire Indie Stone dev team dedicated to the game with zero distractions. So yeah. Brain dump, but its a point of view I wanted to share with you all. hope you don't hate us for dreaming of new adventures at some point in the future.

At no point anywhere in any of the store page do we suggest that there are NPCs present in the game. While we apologize that development of them has been delayed long further than we expected and understand the frustration of those waiting for it, you can't hold us to task for a feature you assumed to be in the game that is not, when we not only never once claim is in the game, in fact explicitly state is not, on our store page. The whole point of the store page and Early Access blurb is for us to inform potential customers to the features and state of development of the game. It's hard to know what further we could have done to prevent getting this complaint post beyond development of the game having gone differently and the focuses and requirements of the game's development to have been different, and unlike all the early purchasers who bought the game with the understanding of NPCs down the road, you had nothing to stop you waiting or voting with your wallet except your own lack of investigation into the game's state of development. If it's useful for you to blow off steam and get your frustrations at not investigating what was in the game before purchasing out of your system then fair enough, but otherwise this post has no other useful purpose and there is nothing we can do beyond recommend you put the game aside and return to it once the features you want are present, or request a refund if you are still within the window. If we'd have focused on NPCs at the expense of the other areas of the game, there is a very good chance that the game would have died and ceased development by now. We've taken the path we've needed to to ensure the game reaches completion and features are added in an order that doesn't cause severe development issues down the road. That's the fact of the situation and one we make great pains to express clearly on our store page. If you think that the estimated sales numbers you quoted are either an accurate representation of the revenue we've earnt, or enough to mean we can just throw as much money and bodies at the development as we'd like, then unfortunately you've underestimated how expensive running a business and a development team over years can be. The dark side of Early Access, or alpha-funding as it was when we started, is you have to lay out the big picture of development, get people excited about planned features and so on, long before you have the knowledge of what obstacles you will face, what the pressures of development will drive your focus on, what skillset you will have in the team down the road or what other priorities will emerge to keep the game afloat and keep people purchasing to continue to fund it. All of these factor have a huge impact on development, and it's just a sucky thing about Early Access that it forces developers to make promises they can't possibly have all the information without hindsight. The developers 5+ years ago who made the promises they did were much greener, and much naiver to the challenges they would face and would have been wiser never to mention NPCs in the first place. With vehicles going in, we've delivered on every single other promise we made, but are always instead held to account over the one we have not yet. The irony being, since most of our negative reviews are about features like NPCs not being present yet - if we never promised them in the first place our review scores would be higher, not lower, and we'd have probably at this point called it 1.0 and would, ironically, be ourselves used as an example of developers who 'did it right' and finished their game in a reasonable time, perhaps even by yourself when complaining to someone other developer about their Early Access game missing a feature, despite our game's content being identical in that scenario to how it is now minus the expectation of promised NPCs. The developers you are chastising now are not those same people that made those promises at the start, we've grown, changed, as a long time has passed, and can only do what they can do to try and finish development of them as soon as we can. Yet still where many other developers would think 'we've worked on this enough' and stick a 1.0 sticker on it, all these years later we're still working toward that goal and sticking to our principles of delivering the missing features. Yet that same dedication, despite the fact many of us might enjoy working on something new, is then turned into something to attack us with. Our game is not one of the longest Early Access developments on Steam because we're the slowest (tho I won't deny we're slower than a fair few), it's one of the longest Early Access developments on Steam because we're principled in finishing what we promised. Many others have delivered far less in far less time, then hung up their spurs and moved onto pastures new, and then later down the line when the planned features they abandoned or couldn't do are forgotten, they are used as examples of developers that did a better job than us, and to be honest I'm tired of us having to apologise for not doing the same.

Haha this old chestnut. It often gets quoted like some holy commandment of objective correctness, yet "the customer is always right" is a customer relations philosophy used by big companies with lots of customer facing employees which means 'even when a customer is clearly obviously wrong and is being unreasonable, which will happen so damn much we need to come up with this rule, just be polite and pretend they are right. AKA The customer is always right'. It's got NOTHING to do with the customer genuinely being right. Sadly a lot of customers seem to have taken this as some legitimate proof to their infallibility. All it takes to disprove this notion is to go to the checkout and say 'this iPhone costs $1' and see how right the customer is then. Are you missing the bit where I said I was getting messages to my personal twitter feed telling me they hope I die of cancer? Can I politely ask you in what universe do you propose to tell me its inappropriate for me to tell such people to fuck off on my own personal twitter feed? On our official indie stone twitter, or even on these forums, you'll notice a distinct lack of telling anyone to fuck off. But that is kinda akin to someone knocking at your front door and shouting it in my face. I would ask you to honestly tell me how you would respond if someone knocked on your door, awaited your answer then shouted in your face that they hope you die of cancer? I should add, that due to the massive backlash over that entire incident, I DO refrain from saying such things to such people now, but I still stand by the fact that when we have an official indiestone twitter, my OWN twitter is MY OWN twitter, me as a person, and has a disclaimer saying my views don't express that of the indie stone, I shouldn't really have to bite my tongue against wishes of cancer or death threats or plain insults nothing to do with zomboid, even though I've felt intimidated into doing so out of fear of some onslaught of hate. And hey, this is the first 'NPC ETA PLS WHERE ARE THEY?' thread I've replied to in god knows how long, and when I reply, in length, politely, exactly as to the situation, in a way I would have assumed would have left no more room for argument or complaint, yet the thread is STILL GOING ON two pages later with people taking issue with it. At what point am I permitted to start clawing my 'thicker skin' off with my nails? 20 pages, 40 pages, 100 pages? If someone came up to me in the street and started going 'When NPCswhen NPCswhen NPCswhen NPCswhen NPCswhen NPCswhen NPCswhen NPCswhen NPCs' repeatedly, following me around all day all night every day and every night, would it be my responsibility to just take it with a big smile on my face for the rest of my natural life, being lowered into a coffin to the sound of 'when NPCswhen NPCswhen NPCswhen NPCswhen NPCswhen NPCs', and any slight display of frustration in the meantime be somehow grossly unreasonable and be viewed as some gross unprofessionalism? Forgive the hyperbole but hopefully you see my point through the powers of illustrative exaggeration? No, the gritted teeth relentless politeness comes from the guy behind a retail desk on minimum wage dealing with a customer where they know they will get into seriously trouble if they respond even remotely curtly. The customer is always right. we always try and be polite and friendly, repeatedly again and again, but that only lasts as long as our own human willpower can. With me, the customer is always right, until the 1000th time they are wrong and I have no manager that's going to fire my ass if I respond a little curtly, it doesn't mean we don't massively appreciate your custom, and I apologise that this is the case, but damn if you had any remote idea of how it is on the other side of the fence you would so understand that you're seeing the patience of a saint chipped away bit by bit over years until leaks of annoyance are completely unavoidable. Comparing me to the hired community PR guy for Blizzard or something, who is in the same boat as I mentioned before, who would get their asses fired for losing their temper, is not fair. I've seen countless other indie devs lose their rag too, and that's purely down to the fact that we're game developers, under a ton of pressure, with a massive premium on our time, and when we go out of our way to communicate with the community with detailed information as to why something is the way it is, and yet that time seems wasted since people continue complaining or disputing it for pages after (usually the same damn people too), it's bloody infuriating and disheartening. You ask for more information but what is the bloody point if the information is at best disputed or at worst ignored? I did the polite Why no NPCs yet' thing time and time and time again, in depth, spending a ton of time that hey, could perhaps have been better spent DOING the NPCs. It reminds me of the Bill Hicks bit, totally different context. "Pick up the gun." "No sir, I don't want to" "Pick up the gun!" "But I..." "PICK UP THE GUN" *picks up the gun* BAM! "You all saw him, he had a gun!" - like I get prodded and prodded and prodded and prodded and prodded and prodded and prodded into getting annoyed, and then get dragged over the coals for getting annoyed. And we are, of course, grateful people care. But it doesn't stop that caring in certain cases from getting frustrating, stressful or scary. If I woke to find 'WHERE NPCs?' scrawled in excrement on my front door I don't think my first reaction would be to be pleased that whoever wrote it 'cared'. The ultimate irony, due to my participation in this thread, both the time replying and the calming down from reading the replies, the ETA for NPCs is now: What it was before this thread + 1 day. I've not gotten a line of code written for NPCs all today (well its Saturday, but that's still a net loss of coding time) So all in all it's not been too successful an exchange no? and cut to next week, when a new thread pops up bemoaning the lack of NPC updates in Mondoid since whenever, and I will stay well clear. Probably annoying people for 'WHY DO NO DEVS REPLY ABOUT MY QUESTION ABOUT WHY NO NPC INFO?' and so on ad nausium. There is no winning. We post on Mondoid about NPCs, people complain because they are hyped. We don't post on Mondoid about NPCs and people complain that they get no info. There is no winning. The ONLY way to stop it is to get NPCs out, and as I've already stated on so many occasions I can barely recall, they are coming as fast as I can make them come. If there were any wonder why this whole NPC thing is getting more and more stressful as time goes on, there's your answer folks. Stress and frustration does not make for a super productive day. Is there any wonder I need to take periodic NPC breaks in the first place? They have gone from my most beloved anticipated feature, and the biggest joy to work on, to being a thorn in my side, a curse, a dark smudge that gives me cold shivers when I think about them, and I wish we never mentioned them in the first place if I'm quite brutally honest, and its all this relentless repetitive complaining I have to wade through while trying to keep up the motivation to work on them amidst it that's made it so. And then I have these same people puffing their cheeks out in bewildered shock if I can get a bit crabby in response to the 10000th NPC complaint post I've read that morning. Rome wasn't built in a day, but please can we know exactly when Rome will be built? I've been telling everyone about it after I read your description of what Rome will be like and they are so excited for the due date! Hey, you said Rome was going to be built today! Where is it? Is it built yet? I read all the information on Rome you posted and it sounds really exciting, I've told all my friends Rome is coming soon! I told everyone about it and they are all really excited. Here they come! When's it going to be built? Why won't you tell me when it'll be built? All my friends were really excited about all the pictures of Rome you posted, I shared them around and all my friends have signed up to ask you a question: When will Rome be finished? Wait what?? It's going to be that long until its built? Hey! You said Rome was definitely going to be built today! When is it really going to be built? Hey? I asked you a question! Tell me when it'll be finished! Why won't you tell me? Well that's not very professional, you're not even going to give a vague time? Why not?! Also where's the information on how the construction of Rome is going? I've not heard anything about Rome's construction in ages, have you just forgotten about it? What do you mean you don't want to hype people up for Rome so you're keeping quiet until its done? We could at least get some information on how it's coming along so we can pass it to all our friends so they can get excited about the upcoming Rome? Hey, why are you being so impolite? That's a bit rude! TL;DR: YES it's not escaped our notice you want your NPCs. We did get a slight inkling. As such we're working on it. There will be nothing but cursory mentions in Mondoid until they are within weeks of release. End of story.

We would never blame those waiting for NPCs for 'being hyped', we blame OURSELVES for posting NPC videos and info way before it was going to be finished and hyping people too early. That's why we've stopped showing off stuff that's ages away, and why you only got to see MP videos about a week or two before it was released. So we could totally do a Mondoid next week about NPCs. We could fill it full of lots of tasty NPC goodness, and people would be excited. And then it might take another two months to get finished with the NPCs, and everyone would be pissed. Those Mondoids would start getting referenced instead of the ones last year, and we'd just reignite the 'WHERE THE FKIN NPC' flame. You've got to understand something about the Mondoids. We're so glad we do them, as it makes the community feel more informed as to what's going on, but bloody hell they are stressful affair. To be honest I haven't spent a weekend in the past year without stressing for the majority of it 'what are we going to write about this Mondoid'. We fell into the trap of wanting people to have a rewarding and rich information full Mondoid about NPCs, to help tide over the wait. But there's only so much you can show, and once that runs out either we have no information, or we start repeating ourselves. And in that pressure to provide interesting Mondoids for people, we once upon a time spilled beans way prematurely and we've learnt our lesson from that. Us not showing videos of NPCs doesn't mean there isn't videoable stuff about NPCs to show. It means we don't want to hype people for something that's still not directly around the corner. NPCs are in development, they have been on and off since they started development. However they have had various rethinks, system rewrites, design changes, all par for the course for arguably one of the most complicated and ambitious NPC systems in the history of gaming? Are we capable of pulling it off? I'm 100% certain of it. We knew exactly our capabilities when starting this game off, and are not biting off more than we can chew. For all our foibles and failings, that is not one of them. Are we however just going to be able to pull it out of the bag without roadblocks or other major design changes that reveal themselves to be necessary? Nope, that's not how game development works. That's before you consider the mental effect of working on something so hard without any breaks to work on other stuff. If I'd been working on NPCs solidly since those Mondoids were posted I'd be in a padded cell by now, and you'd not have your NPCs anyway. We can't do a magic trick and make NPCs miraculously finished, it's just hard relentless graft. And no, we're not releasing NPCs this week, or next, or the week after. That's just the way it is. And if it is gonna be 2-3 months before we're in a position to release them, then having NPC videos and crap on our Mondoid riling everyone up is the last thing in the world we should do. TL;DR - We're working on it. It'll take as long as it takes, but surely we've earnt enough credit over the past 3 years that we'll stick to our promises and deliver what we promise, even if it takes longer than people would like.

It's not going to be a year. We know the date we're going on Steam Early Access and I can guarantee it's sooner than you'd probably guess. Once that happens, and the initial rush of fixes and whatnot, the 3D stuff will be finished off. We're talking weeks for that. Then onto NPCs, which let's not forget we're far from 'starting from scratch' and have working (to an extent) on another branch of the game already that encompasses Kate and Bob, the meta-game, groups going looting, fighting or joining other groups, and so on. With NPCs comes Kate and Bob, and we were long adamant they HAD to be in the Steam build. But we were also adamant we had to be on Steam this year. The only reason we decided against doing this before Steam is because the codebases of NPC and the active development build split what must have been a year ago now. While working on NPCs I'd periodically merge code changes romain was working on the active branch into the NPC code, to keep them in-line and get the latest features and fixes into the working NPC build. And each time was a supreme head ache despite only being a week or two of changes, and each time there was a multitude of issues carried over from two different builds being merged together. Romain changes code X to do this, I change code X to do something completely different on NPC branch. I go to merge, and there's a conflict I have to resolve so both Romain's fix or addition continues to function, and so does mine. Then there are various hacks I made to the NPC stuff to get NPCs to function for testing purposes, like disabling the lua triggered spawn points, and tying it into the flowcharting system we detailed a long while back. Likewise to allow the NPCs to work some systems have been heavily changed. And this is before I was drafted onto the development build to do engine changes, optimizations and fixes and whatnot alongside Romain as we geared up for a new version. So the situation we have now is we have two code bases that over the past few months have diverged and diverged. At some point, for NPCs or just Kate and Baldspot, I'd have to do a code merge in the opposite direction, from NPCs into the development branch, and in that process I come across a line of code different on the NPC end and different on the current build end. IT's up to me at that point to remember if that particular piece of code was something I changed for the NPC build, or if it's been changed by Romain since, or heaven forbid a line of code that we've both changed independently and differently. I have to then copy the code across, possibly altering to fit. This over thousands of java files, all with hundreds, sometimes thousands of lines of code. Will it work? Yes. But you can imagine even a photographic memory super genius to make at least a few errors. Overwrite one of Romain's fixes with the broken code that was branched off so long ago and suddenly people are complaining about bugs reappearing that were fixed six months ago, or perhaps I don't merge something subtle across that's required for the NPCs. And so on and so forth. The result? Almost certainly, the main development branch of the game would regress to being a buggy mess (and to those critics of the last build, I mean buggy to the level of closed test version 1 of 40 before anyone here ever saw the 2.9 builds. It would then require probably a month maybe even two of testing and bug fixing to get the general build back up to scratch. It's end of October now. Assuming we did this tomorrow, what's a month or so from now? December. Exactly the worst time we could pick to launch on Steam. So then we're into next year, and let me tell you delaying Steam until then isn't going to help the game reach the pinnacle of NPC brilliance in the long run. So we could give you NPCs now. They would be buggy, and wouldn't do themselves justice, but we could totally do that. Then when that Steam release date crops up, we have a choice. Release what will be a near unplayable crashing buggy stuttering mess (and we're giving ourselves hernias trying to get THIS build fast, polished and stable for Steam in time), or wait until its ready again, which would be way after Christmas. This is why NPCs are delayed. It's more important to us, the game, and the future of Zomboid that we get on Steam soon with as stable and polished build as possible. In terms of going on Steam the existing community getting bored of Zomboid doesn't matter, as much as it may displease you and us in the meantime. New Steam people will be looking at it with fresh eyes and won't miss NPCs that they've never seen or heard of being in the game. They have all that time to explore Muldraugh and West Point out of the box, build a base, try some farming, making videos or writing their survival stories, and that buys us some time. And then, we can start merging over code into a beta build, and hopefully get Kate and Bob in rather quickly after Steam, though as said above 3D stuff has to come first. There's a ton less work involved in getting that in too, but we delayed it for similar reasons. An engine change immediately before going on Steam? We know what affect that would have. Once we're on Steam and we've planted our feet, dipping into destabilizing the build won't matter so much since I can take the time to fix it all up while Romain continues supporting the active build, and we could release special NPC beta versions as we go.

Most has been explained in the wall of text, but the reasons are primarily: 1) Small team where there isn't enough resources to have more than one person doing NPCs due to the rest of the team being needed to do other things to keep the game moving along during dev for everyone getting updates. Expanding team with AAA AI experts would soon diminish the 'pot of gold' and make the company less stable, potentially leading to no NPCS EVER, so slow and steady wins over 'fast but if anything goes wrong run out of money'. Them being slow and delayed is ironically due to responsibility to make sure they are finished at all. Even if there were many AAA AI experts out there who were java experts too, considering all of AAA uses C++ not java. In short it's a very very difficult role to advertise for. 2) The dev doing them needing to do other things intermittently to cover things only that dev can do due to prior experience or proximity to animator IRL or as stated before because there aren't enough resources to cover everything. 3) The dev needing to do businessy things as MD of a company like taxes and other boring stuff. 4) the dev needing breaks due to incessant NPC complaints destroying all sense of fun and excitement of them, and making NPCs associated with lots of negative stuff, that results in NPCs being very much a 'day job' unlike other features being made at fast speeds due to being done in spare time as a 'hobby' as well as for work, often in 12-14 hours stretches, all nighters and over weekends. 'Willing perpetual crunch, for fun' when dev is enjoying it. NPCs are very much 9-5 maximum, and are no longer welcome of my free time for own personal health and mental well being. 5) We were over zealous in our initial ambitions and goals being a more naive company in the earlier days. Got a bit carried away imagining the future of PZ. We're also true to our word and therefore have commited to delivering those lofty goals. They are extremely complicated and difficult, requiring a lot of research, learning and experience building, rethinks, reorganizations, and at least one do over. This massive requirement of research and experience adds to the difficulty of getting more developers from the team in on the work requiring a long 'ramp up' time until anyone else could be productive on it, even if we could spare anyone. 6) There is huge expectation to live up to so it would be suicide to put them in in progressive stages of completeness like we do other features. There'd be nothing in theory stopping us putting some npcs in in a more basic state and moving code and features over as its refined, building on what's there, but it would be 'THIS IS IT AFTER ALL THIS TIME?!?!' apocalypse soonafter. Therefore they have to deliver pretty much everything we promised in the first version. As a mental exercise, imagine we had to do the same with the map: people would be still saying 'when are we getting more than this 300x300 tile alpha map?! Why the delays?!' and Muldraugh and Westpoint would be nowhere to be seen since we'd have to get Louisville and other areas in before you saw any of it. 7) It became obvious that trying to develop them alongside animations was a fools errand, so much needs changing for movement / combat, they need to come out after, and be developed after, animation overhaul. 8) Dev is human and has a life that may occasionally be complicated and interfere with ability to work either practically or mentally. Nice example: Dev is getting married this year. There are less nice examples too. That all said dev will get NPCs out eventually and 5 years of steadfast commitment to the game should show that dev is serious about that.

Firstly, not to boast on the matter, but we pretty much invented Sims 3 Story Progression Mods. evidence is all there with a quick google search. This approach is key to how we're doing the NPCs. We're dealing with Story Segments more than AI. That is what the meta-game is. To call it 'AI' is a bit misleading, because the NPCs don't have AI so much as the game's 'director' has AI and it bestows 'zombie movieish' series of actions that make sense for the characters involved. It's writing an interactive zombie movie effectively using a hopefully one day massive library of branching scenes with 'criteria' for triggering that match situation and character traits, that in themselves require little code to function and can be put in as fast as Will can write them and Ringo can script them. The sophistication and detail will be in the stories that the director can weave, the more branches it has, and the more specific things it can do with different personalities and situations. Characters can get flags which triggerable events can use as conditions, allowing the scripting to allow for any conceivable long term plan or decision or tendency for an NPC. Want them to start hearing Spiffo plushies talk? (as Strider suggested at indie Stone meet ) Flag them as 'spiffo_hearing_nuts' and make some scenes with spiffo talking taht require that flag, that perhaps trigger paranoia moodle, and bingo. Once the system is fully functional expanding the AI or the perception of AI will be easy for us and modders, and the NPCs will seem more and more vibrant and detailed as this expands. Crusader Kings 2 + Sims 3&Story Progression Mod = ambitious - well yeah it's a lot of work but the very reason we're doing it like these two things is because they produce quite complicated and sophisticated stories from much simpler set of rules than doing AI simulation across the world, and making that simulation able to play as well as a player. CK II may have an event that triggers on average once every month if a vassal's opinion of you is less then -50, and you have the trait 'lunatic' for example. That event has flavour text, and button choices with effects, adding a trait or removing a trait, or somehow changing the state of the game to match the flavour text. Ours will be more complex than that since it will involve dialogue scenes, characters moving about, talking to eachother, and potentially other game actions. But it boils down to the same thing. In same way we will have scenes, with NPCs filling the parts, and those scenes will be picked based on the group's situation and the members in that group. Outside the player's stream circle all this happens conceptually, and the effects are virtual until the player approachs, at which point they are applied solidly after the fact. If there was a slaughter in that house, then place bodies around. If there is an NPC group at home in their safehouse, ascertain the fortification level of the house (that may have increased due to certain story events or some general board gamesque set of rules) and barricade it up / build walls / rooms or whatever else to fit. If it happens inside the stream circle then the actual NPC characters will be 'soft' scripted (aka their exact movements are not predefined, but they may 'go closer to the player' or 'go into the adjacent room' or 'go to a window and look out'. This doesn't apply to stuff like combat or idle AI however. the difficult bit about that is making sure these virtual NPCs transition into real NPCs in positions that match the context of the event, and that they can pathfind around the local area without getting stuck on something, or try and pathfind outside your spawn radius, and if they do and reenter the meta-game, then it stays consistent. Making NPCs move from room to room and behave naturally when you're around etc. Making NPCs fight effectively against zombies, as well as look natural and like a player would when they fight. If NPCs are getting caught on locked doors or getting bitten by a zombie right next to them without reacting due to some conflicting set of priorities then it spoils the NPCs completely and makes them a detriment to the game and shatters any reality. TL;DR: The whole point of the CKII / Story Progression philosophy is to make it massively LESS ambitious than it would be using proper persistent AI, and thus allow us better higher level 'story' results instead of having an AI that just fails because the programming required to make them 'make it up as they went along' would be immense and unmanageable. It's the stuff that's NOT CKII / Story Progression mod that's the tough stuff. ;D Will post more another time to answer OP's questions specifically.

As long as it takes. Not soon. It sucks for everyone involved, devs included, but they will be held back until they are worthy of the wait, as they are extremely complex and could completely ruin the game if not just right. But more crucially people have waited a long time and that's a near impossible amount of expectation and anticipation to live up to. They need to be as good as possible on first release. With the new anim system coming in, it also means NPCs need to be tailored to the new combat / movement / stealth systems that come with that. It's just going to take as long as it takes. But on the plus side, the longer it takes, the more PZ people will get for their money since more and more will be added to keep people as happy as possible until they are done. Not the best news, but a silver lining. Trust me not a day goes by I don't stress about the NPCs and feel the burden of it hanging over us. We'd release if we thought it wouldn't disappoint people, break the game, and the NPCs objectively added to the experience. Sad fact is after such a long wait we can't release a 'WIP NPCs' and that cut it. People would be up in arms if they were broken after such a huge wait, and rightly so. Despite it being obvious a lot of work has gone into them as they stand, they are still short on the promises, and there are still hills on the horizon to climb (like the WIP stealth revamp) that will result in vastly better NPCs ultimately, but are non-the-less unavoidable roadblocks in the way. We'll make being patient as easy as it is possible to do so, and have some super exciting stuff coming up (IMHO anyway) but it'll take as long as it takes, and this is for the good of the community, the game, and ourselves, even if its torturous for all in the meantime. Make no mistake, our earlier predictions that multiplayer is more complex than AI were naive, at least the kind of AI we're aiming for. That's why NPCs have taken so long and MP kinda slipped in unexpectedly within a month. There have been a few recently on the steam reviews calling into question our ethics over not having released NPCs yet and still being in Early Access. I'd make an argument that its our ethics that have stopped us releasing them. Where some others would bow to the (immense) pressure and add a 'bullet point ticker' substandard NPC system to fulfill their promises and deflect criticism, where we actually REMOVED an NPC system we deemed detrimental to the final game (admittedly it would have been a lot of extra work to get them working with the big map), and created a LOT (god only knows a LOT) of extra work for ourselves to make an NPC system worthy of our original promises, and no matter how angry people get we continue to flat out refuse to release anything substandard even if it means stretching the Early Access on and on and on.. and we really want out of Early Access. We're suffering by those promises, as are you, but the end result will be better for us all and Zomboid will be a better game for it not only for the better NPCs but all the amazing features the other devs add in every update that may not have been implemented otherwise.

stick around for a month (we're not like this all the time ;)) and you'll before long understand fully why such a thing would never work unfortunately. I'd love to be able to release a simpler NPC system to expand on along with the community, and the community itself you're exactly right, it would be great. But it's not the community that's the issue, its those outside of it, that still participate in the internet, are perhaps disgruntled by the delay and went off and forgot about the game, or wait on the fringes for news to reach them of the game. Sadly there's so much expectation at this point, even a mention of NPCs in the mondoid fanning the flames and brings these people back with supreme anger and prejudice. There are so many who've gone away and plan to come back when they hear NPCs are in, and the actual promises and goals for the NPCs so lofty, having simple versions in there, even stating in a blog post 'THIS ISN'T ALL WE'VE DONE' would have twenty responses saying 'THIS IS ALL YOU'VE DONE?!' it would just.... seriously it wouldn't go down well and we'd probably be looking at hundreds of negative reviews and miserable forums for weeks. We once made a joke in a mondoid in response to the Mojang sale to Microsoft, that we'd sold our company to Sony for $2bil and were flying around in golden helicopters, and for months after were getting accused by some of being sell outs or congratulated on it was remarkable. The community are wonderful, but a lot of those outside the immediate community who just keep tabs on the game. who don't pay close attention, it's impossible to convey the situation to many or even most of them, to remotely set or temper their expectations in advance. As soon as NPCs go in in any form, even in a beta branch, those NPCs will be judged as 'the npcs we've been waiting for for YEARS', they won't ever be able to be made to understand that 90% of the code may be on another branch, and us moving finished bits into testing. The assumption will be 'that's what's been done in the YEARS we've been waiting' and there will be blood in the streets. Everyone whose been here long enough knows it in their bones and in their blood. It's just very difficult to get a message out there to people who often just see an update in steam, run the game, and pass their judgements without ever reading a word. We obviously know that everyone in the community, everyone who keeps full track of development, will know and understand. They aren't the ones making the constant complaints and queries about NPC progress though. This is where the frustration comes from, because people here have no sooner explained, or disarmed, or in worse cases banned, the last person, when the next person comes with almost the exact same post. Like you put the fire out and immediately notice the curtains catch on fire, and you're running around putting out flames all day, despite it only being a tiny fraction of people in comparison to the number of players of the game, it just feels it never ends and nothing you can say can 'get the word out' there and get everyone on the same page. This is more an issue on the steam forums than here, which is probably why the npc info isn't as prominent as it should be, though I'm still convinced its here somewhere I think it may have lost visibility in the forum upgrade recently. not that that makes any substantial difference to the posts it just gives you something to point at when they don't read it and post anyway , The community has gone through a lot in the past, with a burglary and various other things that have given us somewhat of a spidey sense about exactly what kind of response we'll get from any action from the wider fringe of the community. You'll understand in time, and probably start wincing at every NPC mention yourself one day.

HeyI As I said in the post I'm going to finish it that's not in question. The point is at a game studio, doing a day job for money, some crunch aside, people don't work 12-16 hour days, they work 7.5, 9 till 5 until the end of a project when the crunch begins. You'd also likely have a team of 3-4 in a studio doing AI as extensive as this. Say 3 people, that's a 21 man hour day. So what happens when one of them gets stuck, has a problem they can't get by? They walk over to the desk of their team mates and say 'hey can you give me a hand'. You go to the technical director of the studio and say you're having a problem with something, and you have meetings with 8 programmers and discuss how to get by the problem. You contact the publisher and see if they have a solution to the problem. Or more likely, you don't have that problem in the first place because you've got the AI from the first 4 games the studio made to draw from, or you have the behaviour system from the AAA engine you've licensed. When you're a small indie company, working remotely from home, with only one person to do all this, the difference between 'doing it for fun' for 12-16 hours a day, which is about 2 people worth of 9-5ing, the moment that becomes something, as I say, you have to 'tie yourself to your desk' to do instead of doing it because you enjoy or are interested in it, you CANNOT maintain those kinds of work hours when it's work, or you'll make yourself ill. Imagine working 14 hour days at something you hate, 7 days a week. Every waking moment. No that's not acceptable and I'd be concerned at anyone who thought it was. My point is by turning NPCs into a horrible job one doesn't want to do, you're effectively instantly killing off one entire developer on the NPCs, one that knew everything the other developer did. Now on top of that, you have a problem, you're stuck on something, a complete roadblock you can't figure your way past. Do you walk over to the other AI programmer? They don't exist. The technical director above you? Doesn't exist. Do I ask my collegues? They have never done any of the AI on the game, and beyond general suggestions are unlikely to know the way around a roadblock the person with all the NPC and AI experience is stuck on? So what then? Search the internet? https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=behaviour%20trees Oh. Seems the #1 search result is an article by... me. I'm in uncharted territory a lot of the time. Nope, there's only one solution. Put it to one side, stop driving yourself crazy, and work on something else that you CAN progress with. Also something you'll be working as two people on, because you're into it and can work as two people due to having 'day job' you and 'after work hobby' you both working on the same thing. This is how I work, I hit a roadblock, and stew and try and rev my car over it for a while, until it becomes clear its not going anywhere. I can't see the wood for the trees, so I put it to one side and work on something for the game that IS being productive and come back later, where suddenly I have a fresh perspective, and within a bit more struggling will almost always find some new route past the roadblock. Then progress whirs along again. This has been the way I've worked throughout the entire of my indie career, and it works and is the way it has to work for a lot of the time. This is nothing to do with the fact that 'oh its not fun and I want my job to be fun' and feeling entitled to that, I'm not stacking boxes in a warehouse or putting labels on boxes on a conveyor belt. My job requires a great deal of mental discipline, creativity, and many other factors that control how capable I am of navigating through extremely complicated roadblocks, to make creative leaps of imagination to come up with solutions to problems that I have no colleagues or superiors to bail me out, or to collaborate with, that if I google to get an answer, often the answers I need aren't there on the internet. There's no one to turn to, and at the same time I'm having this onslaught on my motivation, mental well being, confidence and stress levels by having to read daily complaints and often insults, second guesses, suspicions, accusations. I can't avoid this, I NEED to read the communities feedback on the game, read problems people are having with the game and so on. Yes of course the NPCs are part of this, but I'm just being honest about how grueling the constant NPC complaining is, and the fact that it's literally hurting development of them severely. This isn't me throwing my toys out the pram and saying 'blergh I don't like that people are being mean so I'm cutting how much I work on them', or feeling entitled because its my own company and I'm not doing a day job, and therefore feel I can get away with doing less if I'm not enjoying it. I put 10x the effort into this company and game, part my own, than I ever did working for some big AAA corporation that didn't give a crap about me. The difference is at a big AAA company, if I hit a roadblock I would have more routes around it that wouldn't necessitate some breathing room and a break from it. Also there'd be a PR guy, several marketing guys, countless other people whose responsibility it would be to read all the stressful and endless complaints that company may be receiving. It's kept away from the developers, its of no direct consequence to them, and they are not weighed down by them in the same way as an Early Access game on Steam where the people running the company and managing the community feedback, and reading the mondoid comments, are the same people sat there in front of a code IDE expected to solve problems and motivate themselves to write hugely complicated NPC systems single handedly. I apologize again that you happened to get the full unload of all this stuff, it's just an unfortunate combination of wrong place, wrong time, and some frustrating comments in your OP but I'll admit you didn't deserve that level. That all aside, this all needed to be said, and you're right, we've put NPC information up in lights on the Steam board and that should be the same here and am a bit confused why this isn't the case, I'll look into it as I'm certain we've had one in the near past, FAQs and all sorts. Regarding your last quoting myself back at me, I fail to see the relevance. I know that many people want different things from the game, and that's why we're developing lots of different things for the game. I can't control the resources we have and what roadblocks we hit, or what particular team members have what particular specialities and what combination of the things that need doing happen to be suited to what developers. We get complaints for working on 'cosmetic stuff' instead of NPCs by people who seemingly don't understand that someone who does art has absolutely no way of helping in the development of AI behaviours. I've been in the industry including indie for 15-16 years, and I know who needs to be doing what, but we're not ARK we don't have several teams all working on this, there's just a few of us strewn around the planet. Even so we specifically enlisted the help of a third party company to do all the VOIP so that it would not effect any of the current game development whatsoever, but there is literally nothing I can do to get NPCs out faster than they are apart from putting myself in an early grave first, and as much as I'd find that non-preferable that's also a good way to ensure NPCs never come out.

I won't deny there's been an element of the NPCs needing to grow to fit the expectation. It's kind of unavoidable to an extent after such a delay. However, the truth of it is is that the NPC system we're building now is the NPCs we talked about in the really early days. We gave an example in really early interviews of a clumsy kid in your survivor group who keeps leaving doors open and making noise, and you finally choosing to take him out and put a bullet in his head, go back to the safehouse and claim they were got by zombies. Dark moral choices, deceit and safehouse politics. That in a nutshell described our vision for the NPCs, and instead we implemented a quite shoddy implementation that didn't really even register on the chart of where we wanted it to be. that was our attempt to get a version in there and expand and improve, and it was a disaster. rotten at its core because it was just implemented in a naive way, and needed ripping out. And it turned out the vision of NPCs we had early on was a big ask. Bigger than we imagined. Then people were confused as to why NPCs would be removed. You can't build on shaky foundations. I've had to learn a lot to be able to reapproach the NPCs from scratch, built upon a proper framework. It's been a tough job expanding my knowledge to be up to tackling what the NPCs need to be to complete that early vision. It's why it's been difficult to give a time frame, since a lot of the work is pretty experimental. And it's difficult to find good resources/libraries on the subject on the internet (considering a search for behaviour trees on google yields an article about Zomboid's AI code as the first result but hopefully this should inspire confidence too) It'll take as long as it takes. I know enough to know it can be done. There's enough of the system there to be proof of concept x 1000. It's just very very ambitious and with a high bar it needs to be reach before it can go public.

Well considering the animation system being required for the NPCs the prime reason for a lack of recent progress on the NPCs, that the animation system was started about 2 years after NPCs were, and the animation system needing to be in before NPCs can be released, this pretty much means 100% that it's impossible that animation system can take as long as NPCs ;P

Thanks! Anims -> Hunting -> NPCs -> 1.0 is the current broad plan, not necessarily 3 builds though, we'll likely phase npcs in over about 3.

There is a good reason we didn't persist with the NPCs on the move to the big map, and all the time building on IsoPlayer and other systems without NPCs, it would never be a case of flicking a switch and them being there. We specifically removed them because they wouldn't have worked with the next build without a ton of work, work we deemed a waste due to them needing rewriting to live up to our promises. Also for full disclosure the animation update build has such radical changes to the IsoPlayer / IsoGameCharacter classes, your mod will find it very very difficult to survive the transition to the new animation system I'm afraid. IsoSurvivor won't be able to work with the game without extremely heavy changes. I've completely removed it from my codebase as it would require so many changes to compile, and the new NPCs use IsoPlayer not IsoSurvivor. Though that build is a while away yet. Just to apologize but the nature of this mod, and the nasty comments directed toward us that will ensue, will push us to defend ourselves against some more trolly elements, and in that we may need to somewhat belittle what you've done to an extent highlighting the fact you're enabling our old code, to those who don't realize you're using our existing code and think we've been outdone by a modder and are incapable of releasing NPCs ourselves. It's shitty to get forced onto the defensive and this is something we'd always try and avoid, but we need to defend ourselves from this stuff. But don't let this imply we're not impressed with what you've done or hoping you make a big success of it. Either way it's really cool to see and hope to see more from you in the future. If this mod doesn't overcome the issues you're hitting, you're clearly one to watch in what you do next <3

So since I was a kid, I've always wanted to make a turn-based tactical game with Fallout / XCom / Laser Squad mechanics. My best bud growing up (since I was 5) and myself spent many many an night splitting XCom teams in half to make an improvised multiplayer version and even with the awesome new XCOM we still have an itch to scratch. He'll likely be co-designing this with me. In fact, prior to zomboid, I actually did want to make one, even started dabbling, but it appealed less to Binky, and that led to our decision to do Zomboid since it needed to be something we were both passionate about. (ironically since the new XCOM his interests in the genre have risen, so who knows for the future!) Well, now the proper modding system is in, I figured I'd make one as a mod! Things to bear in mind: 1) The MetaCombatSystem I'm writing demands a lot of the functionality that could be leveraged for a turn-based stuff. A lot of the work is required anyway and directly benefits NPCs and the meta-game. 2) This is a strictly out of hours thing, no one get mad. 3) There will be no version of this until NPCs are out, as a lot of the code it depends on can't be put into the main dev branch until NPCs go in. So what's the plan? Zomboid plays as usual, until the moment you get aggro (or combat with NPCs start), at which point it'll go into a combat mode (using just slightly tweaked (literally two lines of code) the system I'm currently working on for the combat in the vanilla game) At that point you'll be moving your dudes one by one, you and any npcs in your party, proper Fallout style. Other planned features = * Aim for body locations * Cover system (ahem in vanilla, not sure why adding this as a feature) * Multiplayer hotseat mode (with replays for next player) - to turn into over net once we have internet mp. Truth be told it may even beat vanilla to being online since it's about 100000000000 times simpler with turn based games. * All the things I want in a turn based squad tactics game but have never got. * Deep mechanics. Basically want this to be really deep and geeky.

No offense or anything, as I say everything you said was fair, I just wanted to give an insight to how it works on the inside to perhaps explain better than the Mondoid did about exactly how it works and how it's really impossible for me to with certainty ever say NPCS WILL BE DONE BEFORE MULTIPLAYER or NPCS WILL BE OUT NEXT MONTH. It's all just too fluid with so many factors, its impossible to predict where we'll be in six months as moments of frustration or inspiration can completely sideline any plans. Of course, we have to take a stab at the most likely scenarios because we need to say SOMETHING, but we can't help being wrong sometimes, so it comes down to managing what we say and saying only those things we're most confident about. We were sure NPCs would hit before MP due to the complexities involved, but NPCs over time became much much more ambitious to the point of becoming the true meat of the planned game, but the 'NPCs first' idea kinda stuck due to community tradition and inertia. But if something's done, or nearly done, we gotta go with the flow. The alternative would be just to sit on multiplayer and not release it, which isn't fair on us or those excited for MP. It's Will and RingoD I harbour a huge amount of guilt about on a daily basis, since it's their (substantial) work that hasn't seen the light of day yet on account of the same things I mention in the above post.

Here is a picure of the behaviour debugger doing its thing poking into the brains of AI NPCs brains: For more details on how behaviour trees work, look here: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ChrisSimpson/20140717/221339/Behavior_trees_for_AI_How_they_work.php At this point most of the survival behaviours are in. NPCs can loot for food, barricade, will stockpile water, hang sheets on curtains, change dirty bandages, sew deep wounds, and all the stuff to keep them alive (am currently coding in specific looting targets based on items the characters want, say going specifically to Cortman Medical for medical gear). Their combat skillz ain't too great, but since there is a big combat rewrite incoming with the new animations there is zero point in working on zombie (or npc -> npc/player) combat as it'll all need rewriting once that goes in (and that will be released before NPCs, almost certainly), so at the moment am focusing on group interactions. Group interactions use an entirely different system built based on inspiration from Crusader Kings 2 using xml driven event chains to describe story beats in kind of mini-plots that will be stitched together.. Currrently writing an event chain for when a group walks toward a safehouse of npcs. What happens if a patrolling guard spots you, what happens if a guard at a window sees you, what happens if you get spotted while trying to jimmy a window on the safehouse, what happens if you're spotted inside the safehouse. Each of these will lead to their own consequences, branching events based on the personalities of the people both in the safehouse, and the people approaching the safehouse. From a stand off with shotguns to begging for help dealing with some raiders, there will be all manner of outcomes based on numerous factors. We're going to have all these 'storylets ' that branch in numerous ways, and pieced together we hope they will make for a Walking Dead story like experience that's different each time* Idea is to build a whole metric ton of branching possibilities for single events, so that they can play out dramatically different. * without actual game wide plot arcs considered and discussed and written by a team of writers, the results are unlikely to be as narratively sound and tight as a TV show story or purposefully written main quest game story, however we hope for enough variation that it feels like a unique story each time. NOW WHAT'S IN THE BOX?

Further if people want NPCs to be funded to completion it would probably be wise for us not to use all our available visible store space to prospective buyers, that pass through and who we need to attract their attention, talking about the features we don't have in the game, and instead trying to sell the features that *are* in the game. Once those customers are interested and aren't clicking 'next' its up to them to read more to get a more complete picture but we HAVE to put our best wares out front or sales will dissapear and no NPCs for anyone.

Understand, this is just 'a build of a game you're waiting for' for you - this is our livelihood, reputation and future. It's not ready yet, it still needs a few important fixes, and even then it'll still have millions of bugs for you to find in iwbums. We're not releasing it until we're confident it is as close to playable that the reaction from the majority will be positive since a lot of people treat IWBUMs as 'complete' and have been waiting for years for this, and will think nothing of bad reviewing our game out of visibility if on their first play, beta or not, they don't like how it plays with all the changes. We want it out there ASAP and are not holding it back out of some evil sadistic glee, we're holding it back only as long as it takes to get our 'MUST BE FIXED BEFORE IWBUMS' list of serious issues wiped out, and just because you may not have seen these issues in the relatively short time you've watched someone (who had instructions on what to avoid) play doesn't mean they wouldn't cause you and many others serious issues if we released today. We have a LOT riding on this release going down well, we've sunk a TON of money into its development, and we need it to be positive and help push zomboid further out and get attention for something other than horrible bugs making it unplayable. Just because you think you'd be satisfied with it from the streams you've seen doesn't mean it wouldn't go down like a lead balloon and potentially screw us up going forward toward NPCs. We're already anticipating some pushback from some about the Survival difficulty and weightier controls and don't need game breaking bugs risking too much upset after such a long wait. We just need a week or two more to make sure we release the IWBUMs right and that's not going to change.

lol if NPCs were in we'd be talking about going on Steam. PZ's code is pretty much open for anyone to look at, I really doubt we'd have gotten away with adding NPCs and not telling anyone for long. When NPCs are in modders will see they are in a heartbeat without every having to run the game.

My appologies, I agree, assault wasn't the right word to use, I'm not a natively english speaker, which normally isn't an issue, but well, I guess I didn't fully know the exact definition of the word assault. bla bla *snip* Stopped reading your post there because you don't read mine apparently .I appreciate you're frustrated and upset but you're stepping into unlovely territory here. The problem is just like with my posts here, you are focusing on a small negative part of a long and totally reasonable and positive response and then being snarky about it. Our position has been quite clear and is completely reasonable. Please reread all these exchanges again and try responding in a less hostile manner to people only trying to help and explain the situation. Let me tell you myself and CaptainBinky, as well as a ton of Modders here, have been in the same situation. It's a risk of modding an in development game. The amount of times we've trampled/undone/accidentally stolen blindcoder's mod work here is remarkable. We must have invalidated about 6 of his mods in the past year. He takes it with grace and understanding though. He gets it. And this says a lot about him and makes him the sort of person we feel comfortable in supporting and working with. The problem is you're reacting like you've been attacked out the blue, when in reality EnigmaGrey has already explained the reason we were apprehensive and worried about this mod while we were still at EGX. This is not news to you. The way you handle the frustration of modding conflicting with the game dev says a lot and let me just say Ringo, RJ, Tim and Turbo are not on the team now because they reacted in this kinda way on the forums. Consider for a moment how upsetting these 'belittling' comments we've made (amongst apologies and shouts of support and statements of how impressive your work is) then consider how hurtful comments like 'Oh the modders have to fix the game because the Indie Stone can't' are to us. Trust me, those posts won't be full of 'this is really impressive' and 'best of luck to you' like ours are, it'll be all out ripping the shit out of us calling us incompetents and claiming you're more talented than us and we should eb ashamed modders need to fix our game for us. We predicted it and it was literally within the first three posts on the Steam forums that someone said exactly that. And the fact we'll likely be getting these daily until NPCs are released due to this mod. We've tried to be diplomatic, we've tried to explain the situation as apologetically as possible, but you're only concerned with how this affects you, that we didn't feed your ego sufficiently and gleefully Mondoiding your in progress work and singing about how amazing you are, despite me and EnigmaGrey explaining in no uncertain terms that the sheer existence of this mod will result in us getting abuse hurled at us on a daily basis and that we wouldn't be able to shout about it in the same way we otherwise wouldn't. I'm sorry but if we're all about comparing who read what and who's feelings are hurt by what, then myself and EG's posts dont' even register on the scale of shit we get over NPCs and frankly I won't apologize for being scared of getting more of it. I understand the language barrier but you keep focusing on things you've misunderstood, things that we never even said, and this has been explained numerous times by numerous people. If I wasn't clear then I apologize for that but the 10 replies here explaining what I meant and your misunderstanding ARE clear yet you persist with the notion that we've been saying you're crap and your mod is worthless. Not true at all.

NEVER mentioning NPCs in a Mondoid ever again until they are like a week away. No more APZDTISA questions on it will be answered. Never shall those three letters leave my keyboard. This is why we don't mention NPCs. The amount of shit we need to deal with far far outstrips the appreciation we get for NPC updates. It's a shame but it's the only way we can go cause damned if I feel like working after today. *hides under a rock and cries* APZDTISAEANPC If anyone complains in future please send them here and maybe here to explain this isn't because we're dropping them or anything crazy. I got all manner of conspiracy theories for hiding all the NPC videos on my personal youtube to stop the unending nasty comments spilling into my gmail notification bar and pretty much instantly making me want to climb into bed for a week just the emotional toil from dealing with post mondoid NPC complaints does nothing but hurt the development of them.

Not quite - but literally every build ater weather, including animations, is on what we internally call our 'road to NPCs' roadmap which we'll talk about after animations and will be major. There may be quick inbetween builds though depending on circumstance.

Actually NPCs will likely make the game harder as well as easier. While I agree that we'll probably need a further rebalance then, it makes no sense leaving the game unbalanced for the meantime. NPCs aren't going to be released tomorrow.