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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."

The Big Stuff ETA! When will . . . TIS has a strict no-ETAs policy, while they may have their own internal timeframes. Only features in a playable (and fun state) will be released to the stable branch. For those looking to live dangerously, there's IWBUMS. Where're the NPCS? tl;dr Perpetually slaved over by our dedicated founders, NPCs are in the works and likely won't be out for quite a while yet. More information will likely be provided after the animation update. What are your priorities? Because TIS is a large (if small) team working remotely from one another, some features may be completed faster than others. This doesn't mean other highly requested features are being ignored; TIS has gone out of their way to avoid being side-tracked by hiring General Arcade to assist with MP development. Smaller stuff will be addressed when individual devs find time. NPCs remain the highest priority. Only things close to release are discussed in the Mondoids; this does not mean other things are being ignored or that the developers have changed their priorities. How often does PZ update? The IWBUMS branch can update anywhere from several times a day to once a week, usually, while the stable branch can take anywhere from one to three months for updates to trickle down. This timeframe depends on the complexity of the feature(s), the stability of the game, and how much polish is necessary, thanks to community feedback. What do Build Numbers mean? Not much. They're just a way of compartmentalizing features, bug fixes, tweaks .etc into manageable bites. If something is not ready for a planned build number, but the rest of a build number is significantly complete, that feature may be held back until it's ready for release. Everything Else 40% Is as Low as We Go No, we cannot announce sales ahead of time. Rathlord's Commonly Suggested Suggestions A quick rundown of what is or isn't planned by the developers, as defined by community activity. Rather out of date now. BlindCoder's Massive Map Project Self explanatory. A huge interactive map featuring both vanilla and mod maps. Coordinates are accurate within the game! PZ Community Wiki Project - We Need Your Help The PZ Wiki is a community effort currently lead by Connall. If you have some time and would like to help out Project Zomboid, consider joining our wiki effort. General PZ FAQ A quick rundown of just what PZ is and frequent questions asked by our users, presented by our community manager, Nasko. Needs to be updated Easy Co-OP FAQ Multiplayer is changing - the old method of setting up a dedicated server is being eclipsed by Easy Co-Op. Find out more here. Needs to be updated. Survival Mode -- It's Too Difficult! Back in the early days, PZ was a much more difficult game. Since Build 30, PZ has tried to recapture that sense of danger in the optional Survival mode. Be wary of the hardcore description, it means it. Indie Stone Moderator Policy Be lovely, follow the forum's rules. Criticism and discussion thereof are welcome but abusive comments are not. Do not engage in personal attacks.

I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt here and assume the charged language isn't intentional. tl;dr: Getting NPCs back in the game and doing it quickly, just to rake in that sweet cash, is a matter of "won't," rather than "can't." NPCs NPCs were in (basic tutorial then later survivors running around the map) up until the Steam release, but between the community outrage ( bugs and fear that the game would wrap up, leaving people with crap NPCs) and changes in the way the game worked, they were not immediately put back in. While it'd be possible to just re-enable and update the old NPC system, there's little point in doing so. Yes, it'd check off one more box on the planned features list and those that just want NPCs for the sake of having NPCs would be satisfied, but that's not what most of us want from Project Zomboid. They'll be released iteratively, just like everything else. Once animations releasable, NPCs will be the focus (because what's left aside from housekeeping, engine improvements, and injecting content, really?). Money -Sold for $5-8 before sales up until it's Steam release -Sold only a 16th of its Steam sales figures on Desura (its first 3 1/2 years) -whatever upfront costs were required to develop the game before it became successful -7 years of development is expensive -People that work for you generally like being able to support themselves and their families, rather than donate their time (almost all of us work remotely, anywhere from Russia to France, Britain, and Canada) So we have the interesting scenario where PZ sold comparatively well to many other games in early access (around the top 40), but sold for anywhere between 4 - 10x less than many of its contemporaries. Couple that to how long development has taken and that the future is uncertain, much of that profit cannot be freely spent. Unlike most developers, TIS doesn't tend to cut features and isn't interested in just getting a cut-down version of the game out of EA. Time You'll find if you compare PZ's dev team (particularly the number of programmers that worked on the game) to most (there are exceptions to this, such as one or two-man teams that produced great games, but they are exceptions for a reason), PZ's team remains pretty small. It's only this year that it's seen a large expansion (four new coders, not all full-time, but several at the top of their field). For the first three years, there were only 2 coders working on the game. After Steam, this changed to ~5 working full time on the game. TIS chose to do the game in Java (back in 2011 most indie-available engines weren't exactly great for isometric, tile-based games and Microsoft had started to shelve XNA), which rather creates a talent vacuum for games programmers and, later, some interesting quirks about the JVM and its garbage collection (namely the lack of control over it, outside of aggressive profiling) became more prominent. They also chose OpenGL, which isn't always well supported by the type of hardware people tend to think a "simple" "2D" game can run on, that only costs $5. Intel's lack of support for FBOs, texture mirroring on integrated chipsets, and other various things made it much harder to expand the game. The survival genre was also quite new when TIS started and expectations of what should be included in a survival game have just ballooned since. As can be seen, by its contemporaries (most of which are still in development), it's not exactly conducive to finishing quickly.

Disclaimer: I'm probably wrong on some of this. For much of it, I was, some guy on the forum. I'm also not a programmer by trade. Why is it all so unfocused seeming? Each member of the team was hired for specific reasons, has specific talents, and has a specific role to fulfill. It's not possible to focus on "one thing,' unless the goal is to poorly manage people and cease any semblance of regular, public builds. This means most people on the team are generalists, rather than specialists in a certain area. EA differs from traditional software development Normally, in software development, you have clear goal posts: alpha -> beta -> release -> maintenance. Only the last two involve the public, ignoring QA. Instead, Early Access, alpha funded, and (in some cases) open source projects differ from the traditional model for for several reasons, most of which involve the availability of that software to the public: the public-facing game needs to be maintained; any new features and content needs to be viable on release to the public, rather than good enough for an internal proof of concept; it's necessary to continually engage the customer and (try to) provide a novel experience with each update; and, for some, the expectation is the game can't get boring until finished, otherwise it's a failure, no matter how much time is played in it (not unlike an MMO). It’s not a linear process, for the most part Even if it were possible to just focus on one thing, software development (as a whole) isn't a linear process. Certain aspects of it is (cars depend on a physics engine), but for the most part you're constantly repeating a loop, each one resulting in a subsequent release (design -> code -> test -> release -> maintain) for every little thing. Let’s look at one example: the evolution of PZ’s graphical system Ignoring hindsight or those that specifically work in compatibility testing, who could have predicted that Intel integrated graphics adapters would "shadow" VRAM (it doubles the texture size of art assets in the game)? Doesn't sound that bad, but consider that PZ's often played (and bought early on) by players that had hardware from the mid 2006s. These aren't machines that can handle a 2 GB of art assets (they often have 2 GB of RAM, as is). Much of the progression of graphics for the game was driven by this. It's largely been the responsibility of a single dev: You've realized 16 FPS, hand drawn animations are killing your artist and slowing down the rest of the game. You now have snazzy 30 frame animations that are generated in 3D Max, touched up in Photoshop or an equivalent program. You planned for customization of character appearance (different clothing and colors). Suddenly your 2000 frames of character / zombie animations is something nuts, because each piece of clothing and color needs to have their own spirtesheet of thousands of frames. Well, first you remove the need for color. You produce greyscale sprite sheets and apply the color at runtime to save texture space. This is still taking up way too much time. Even adding a new animation like climbing through a window just blows out your max RAM requirements. You implement a compression scheme, but, oh no, nVidia cards on Macintosh don't like that. It's a minor problem (details aren't visible in the texture) and only affects a small number of Macintosh users, so there's little you can do here. While this happens, new actions are added to the game and new textures for the map, plus modding support has to be accounted in the RAM budget. Now we move to 3D models that are drawn off-screen, turned into a 2D image with pixelation, and drawn on-screen. RAM problems solved! But . . . for all the map and item textures. Here's Intel and certain Linux drivers here to tell you that Frame Buffer Objects aren't supported in certain classes of hardware (Intel HD 2000 and below, Radeon 4xxx and below, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 985 and below). Well, what do you do? You're forced to have a 2D and 3D pipeline that has to be maintained for the life of the game Oh, and the map's just too big at this point to work with the RAM budget. Loading screens suck, and the goal from the beginning was a streaming, open world anyway. You still want to expand gameplay, have lots of unique NPCs running around, and you want it to be clearly visible to players just what those NPCs are doing, too, let's not forget. So you implement a streaming map, RAM requirements go down, and you're able to add more textures. Now, a ton of people can't play the game, any work in 3D has to be duplicated in 2D, NPCs need to be rewritten both due to public rejection and change in tech, the game world is now too large for NPCs to exist in it so a secondary game on top of it needs to be written to abstract their behavior, and the current animation system way, way too inflexible to expand on. It needs to be redone and it needs to solve the flaws inherent with the current game, that's going to make playing with NPCs a shit experience. So you work on a new animation system (tied into NPCs for testing) , hire a modeler, and get to work implementing blends, a model loader, rotational root motion, optimization, and start removing all the hard-coded bits and bobs from the prior four years of development. But, shocker, it's taken four years to get here and finding new talent to take on the problem (and the risk of an indie) is difficult. Some will argue that NPCs could just go out without all of this but . . . what would even be the point? You'd have to cut them back down and toss out a bunch of stuff to make it nice to play. Just as you'd have to cut out all the MP work if you wanted to an SP build of animations. Oh, and certain features are proving to be a bastard -- can't get all the art assets out, disappointing everyone even if it were released. Fortunately, TIS did manage to find some new talent to take it on and now there's three people instead of one person working on it, but that doesn't really matter to the public: it's not out yet.

Ah, there it is. Haven't looked at in a year or so: IsoWorld: public void CreateSurvivorGroup(IsoGridSquare sq, IsoPlayer player) You'll notice it does indeed create IsoSurvivors and place them at the player's location, complete with basic AI. You can actually find poeple playing with this on the old forum: http://www.theindiestone.com/community/viewtopic.php%3Ff=34&t=6487&start=120.html Uh . . . huh . . . Can't say I expected such a defensive post from you, MisterInSayne. I'm not sure why our past interaction warrants it. As far as fridges go, we've been using XBO on SpiffoSpace to replace damaged tiles, including fridges, without much trouble. We did have to modify the mod a bit to bring it up to date and add some new tiles. Perhaps we mistakenly fixed it? I'll have to check, as you insist. But sure, on reflection, I suppose I do have a small problem, but none of it is on you. This has been possible since NPCs were removed from the game (and probably before that). A large portion of the NPC code found in the current game will either be work in progress, incomplete, or buggy. It should be noted this code specifically isn't related to the development of the newer NPC system. They're contained on a separate branch and aren't merged into the normal updates. Suddenly having NPCs back in, even in mod form, could restart the old "NPCs suck!" and "We want NPCs now!" wars of our past. For example, your selling it as something that' impossible, which you've surmounted gives the impression that TIS should be much faster, after all, a modder could do it . . . even though this functionality has been quietly stewing in the JavaDocs for several years now. I appreciate that you may have done this in an unorthodox way, and am in no way prohibiting you from working on this mod, but it does have some unfortunate side effects that you probably should be aware of.

It's funny to realise that the whole reason for the current blackout with NPCs is specifically due to "fans wanting answers" and because of the response those answers always resulted in. It turns out sometimes the only satisfactory way to make a statement and provide updates is to actually release that content; just talking about it or showing off intangible things just pisses enough people off (far more than the lack of communication) to make it difficult to be a member of this community, yet alone work on the game. No doubt if TIS could turn back time, NPCs would never have been part of the tech demo, or even in the game until, just one day, they were. So TIS made a choice. Show things off or get things done, at least when it comes to NPCs.

To reiterate: NPCs won't be discussed until after animations are out; no time frames will be provided; the only promise is that NPCs will be in the game for it to be considered complete. Till then, the reasons behind the decision to avoid discussing and showing off NPCs has been made abundantly clear and should have been further driven home considering how unexpected delays with animations were received.

Going to have this conversation every time anything that's not NPCs is mentioned, it seems. Blanket statement for everyone, not just the OP: Just because TIS hires an outside contractor to implement VOIP doesn't mean the feature you personally value above all others isn't getting the love and attention it needs. Likewise, just because members of TIS not directly involved with NPCs should work on a feature you don't personally value, doesn't mean your desired features are being ignored. Smaller things (e.g. "Why don't towels dry over time?") will be implemented when other devs find the time and enthusiasm to do. There are thousands of similar nothings like that that need to be done, along with larger and far less fun things. Your desired feature is still being worked on diligently by TIS and will continue to be worked on. The only reason said feature is not out yet is because the version that currently exists wouldn't be fun to play or is incomplete. If it were possible to expedite the completion of this feature without harming the quality of said feature, Project Zomboid, or TIS, all necessary action would be taken. Nothing is being held back because of VOIP. You're not missing out on anything by not having NPCs out now. Replace VOIP with any other feature you feel strongly about, such as easier co-op.

They could also be left over from the NPCs that were in the game before (well before my time). PZ did have NPCs in a while ago, but it was in a much older build of the game. As I understand it, they were removed when the game underwent a huge expansion that made them obsolete, or at least very underwhelming. A perfect example of TIS's determination to get it right, and not release a hackneyed product just for the sake of being able to say it's in the game. @Lemmy forgive me, I didn't mean to imply our community was less than lovely. I was merely throwing out there that it can be easy for a developer to harbor resentment at having to explain themselves time and time again. From what I've seen, you at TIS have a really decent handle on damage control, and mitigating your own levels of irritation seems to not be a problem for you. Sometimes it helps to hear what you already know, if that makes sense. wait wait wait there were npcs in game then they were taken out WHY WAS I NOT TOLD THIShttp://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/2064-older-versions/?hl=%2Bolder+%2Bversions+%2Bdownload#entry29858 2.0q. Have fun.

The thumping thing I agree on and have suggested as much back when we were looking more closely at the issue. I imagine it'll happen at some point (zombies losing interest in the thump-thing if given no indication a delicious meat bag is hiding nearby). The clumping stuff though? No. The whole point of having it is to keep you from just laying waste to disparate groups of zombies, as you can if they're just evenly spread out. Try it by changing the sandbox variables for zombie grouping and setting uniform instead of urban focus spawns. It's boring and easy. You can fanwank it away, if you need to to, by remembering that they clump up and form hordes in works like The Walking Dead and The Zomibe Survival Guide. At best (in terms of nerfing grouping), I feel they should just be more random instead of all pulling from the same starting values. That is, you don't get consistent group sizes of 20 eventually (that's just weird). Metaevents will probably change at some point. There's no real point bringing NPCs into the mix for the purposes of this discussion, however. They're not in the game right now so balancing things around them doesn't make much sense. With meta events you do have to remember that real zombies (individual zombies on the map) only exist in the immediate area of the character (it'd be exponentially costly to have a larger area active). This can make things a bit odd when playing, like zombies in your immediate area pathing through your house because it's in the way on their way to the meta event, but it's just a limitation of computer tech at the end of the day; it can't really be "fixed" to be more realistic, imo. (The reason I'm pointing it out is I feel from our last discussion you may have felt that multiple meta-events were occurring over-top your character. That shouldn't actually happen in practice, even though it can certainly feel like it some days. I know i've been suspicious of it, too. You can change the frequency of meta events in sandbox or start a private MP server to see differences in the active area. It just takes a lot more resources.)

Not aware of a modder working on a wilderness mod for the game, though there's been several wilderness additions, so I'm not sure which one you're referring to. I'd argue the main selling point of PZ is "a realistic survival game with Romero/Brooks zombies" rather than NPCs. Most other survival and zombie games already have NPCs to varying degrees of success (and failure). They're only a selling point if TIS can somehow one-up the traditional fair, or the buggy/simpler type they already produced. While they may be on the store page, it's only a single mention among dozens of items. Though you might have followed along with the earlier blogs when they more avidly discussed design and philosophy, it's understandable if that's what made you buy choose to buy it.

Really depends on how you look at it -- a goal of the now defunct RC3 was to have NPCs in, if I remember correctly -- it didn't work out. But, no mention of multiplayer was made at that time, so any inference as to whether NPCs were to be in before multiplayer has to be made implicitly. It's likely the same for most old posts, depending on the age and whether they were made during the time that NPCs were still in the game or not.

Like i said, it's called metal working. The blacksmithing side of the profession was basically left out due to disagreements on how it should be represented in PZ. Though, yes, the disabled files and are were included for modders to use. It hasn't been worked on since its release (build 35 in 2016). Though that will probably change when the bigger ticket items (npcs) are finally done. (If you mean antique wood burning stoves, you can find them in secluded cabins in the woods. Basically a safe, indoor campfire.)

Anything that is added to single player is added to multipalyer; there's no neat division between server and client in PZ; it was programmed as a single player game and still operates as one. The same modder whom wrote the erosion mod, yet you disparage for his work on television/radio, whom now is a developer on Project Zomboid, after proving himself? Just as RobertJohnson was hired for his farming work. They've both proven themselves to be capable of creating complex systems, with harsh restrictions on available information at the time. A better way to put it might be "I feel like more gaming companies should hire talented and dedicated modders for developer roles, more often." Yet that's not what happened with Project Zomboid. You discredit TurboToTone's, Mash's, Romain's, and several other developer's own work expanding and integrating the erosion mod by being so flippant. Should it not? Why should its appearance or core systems drastically change from whatever indefinite period you deem worthy of measuring time? The core of the game is already here, baring some tweaking, balancing, and expansion of content (if we ignore the two remaining features on the developer's checklist: cars and NPCs). Expecting dramatic upheaval at this point is your own personal folly. I doubt you bought the game expecting it to be a different game later on. I'd recommend investigating other indie projects funded in a similar manner. You'll find they're rarely fast, and are often multi-year projects (sometimes even multidecade). Multiplayer has been planned from the beginning, and was only added after it was found to be a much simpler act than earlier thought in the project. So much so that, if you know about programming, you'd probably be unhappy to learn that PZ's multiplayer focus is really just bolting a simple server to a single player game, baring some enhancements for management of that server. If there was a focus on MP, I doubt there'd be updates at all, similar to the final year(s) of MineCraft's attempts to re-integrate Survival with their client/server paradigm. Instead, TIS has gone out of their way to hire a separate company (General Arcade) to add Steam integration of both MP and Workshop, as well as to make the multiplayer process simpler. An absence of visible progress on your most-desired features does not mean something else is in "focus." You might even say zombies aren't the true threat in a zombie apocalypse; that they're effectively a personified natural disaster. It's an old trope, present even Romero's eerier work. Feel free to disable NPCs in sandbox if they may bother you so much, or make zombies redundant. If you really do feel that the direction of the game is going to an area that you do not like; that the developers have mistreated you by choosing to avoid confrontation in certain areas, please, feel free to "quit." These things happen, we understand. It's not you, it's us. Life is fluid and development projects themselves are living things. If you actively be "unlovely" on the forum (e.g. openly attack, lie, and be rude or abusive in your criticism, you may be banned. You'll find our policies much more lenient than most, yet I suspect you may fear you've been a bit too, uh, short in some places and are trying to stave off possible punitive action. Might want to reflect on your post, if that's the case. Buying a game doesn't warrant people making demands, trying to impose their own timelines, and being outright aggressive, abusive, and rude towards the content creators, either. This is our community, and we want it to be exactly that: a collective of people sharng a common interest in experiecing the development of a game, not a stage for people to yell at one another or hurl insults. Criticism and complaints are fine, but at this point I have a hard time believing anyone whom has been part of toxic forums and groups wants TIS to become one itself. There is a line. We all get it: You bought a game, your assumptions proved faulty, either aren't or don't feel fully informed, you're upset, and you want it now. Great, everyone does -- including the people who's livelihood and future depend on delivering a good game, despite your anger, frustration, doubts, and feeling of disconnect. If that means some of us choose to opt out of situations that depress, frusturate, or distract us in order to reach that same goal, then, well, that's just the way it is. No amount of condensation or appeals to "man up" will change that.

Kind of the way it was when they were in. Even had a little mood selector to choose how you appeared to other players. Based on your traits and stats, you might be locked into a more grumpy, angry, sad, or happy state. NPCs of specific dispositions would act according to how they felt about that.

Representing the vocal minority, as per his title . . . Getting upset about these things, at this point, doesn't help. I'm sorry you're frusturated with the development process, as relating to NPCs, but they'll take as long as they take, boredom or not. Just remember that the devs are just as frustrated as you at the slow progress and feel immense pressure to perform at this point. In the meantime, I'd recommend trying out multiplayer if you're able. It certainly is nice to play with more than just yourself. And if you'd like to see how NPCs used to be, try out 2.0q: http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/2064-older-versions/?hl=%2Bolder+%2Bversions+%2Bdownload#entry29858

Without getting into "it" over this, I think I'll just say "After almost eight years, we can put to bed the idea that we have to be fast and that the important thing in all of this is just checking off features. We have our own vision for how NPCs (and the rest of the game) should be and will continue working towards that."

I really don't know how adding NPCs would fix anything relating to combat with zombies, or the way zombies migrate around the map. These changes had to be made, NPCs or no.

The originals had a habit of just telling you to f*** off and leave if you tried to micromanage them. Or if a hoarde approached them while they were on guard duty, they'd sometimes bolt, rather than go down swinging. So, much like the idea that NPCs are going to be a complex neural-net rivaling Skynet, I don't think you have too much to worry about there. They just need to be a bit better than what we've gotten before - a little more autonomous and the gateway to scripted events. Then again, who really knows what they'll be at this point.

Well, that's the thing: what release date? There was some talk of what 1.0 would look like in 2014 back when things seemed to be rapidly accelerating (the release of MP, PZ's success on Steam, courting publishers, new hires), but aside from that the only mention of an actual release was coached with "not an ETA" They're certainly guilty of showing and discussing things off early (and without bugs visible), but it's not like they promised to release NPCs in January, though they hoped that 2015 would be a good year for the game. You can know the broad strokes of something and give a good guess as to how long it'll take, but chances are your plan's going to be inaccurate, as TIS still working on PZ in 2018 proves. (it's not like anyone planned for that, even pessimistic me.) Most of the time it's just because something unexpected happened (hardware compatibility) or being unwilling to cut things just to hit a self-imposed, largely imaginary, release date.

I doubt the game will ever be a linearly progressive narrative. Though the tl;dr page on the over-all idea of PZ was easy to miss back when the game first released, the game was billed as a sandbox (which K&B dropped you into), with almost no mention of the story. I missed it, too, and was pretty upset when MP started to be discussed more-openly. https://web.archive.org/web/20110705075350/http://projectzomboid.com:80/blog/index.php/tldr-just-give-me-the-jist/ I'd have to go back to the old blogs and see if they discussed the story and expanding it (outside of the context of scripting mods and in-game events). But from what I remember, it was more of a "making your own story through what happens," something that PZ lacks, excepting a few specific ones. There's only so much you can do when you're the only actor, outside of MP or mods. But you know the reason it's not discussed. People will lose their shit and be spurned to a new level of hate, repeating the same attacks that go on now if TIS started talking about quest implementations or progressive story elements suddenly. It'd just be the new NPCs, just as happened with animations. Without either of those things done, it's shooting themselves in the foot to bring it up. From reading the comments and suggestions we've received about the game over the years, everyone has different priorities for what Project Zomboid should be. No matter what we work on, we'll let someone down.

Ah, but MP is meant to include NPCs, as well . . . Mu wah ha ha ha ha ha ha . . . Small print: don't mistake that for me saying NPCs are going to be included in MP. They'll just have a place there once they're in the game..

My NPCs will capture other NPCs and bring them to my secluded island; on which I will hunt them for sport.

August 29, 1997. I don't like multiplayer ( beyond providing an experience for others ), so I want a crafted sp experience, even if the NPCs don't ultimately rise up against mankind. They just have to be better than what's on the market today (about equivalent to the 2012 iteration). Though I'll reserve judgement until they're back in, if anyone can do it, it'll be the TIS team. Deity love them for actually caring enough to try to be better.

There can be only one. Thanks for the kind words. It's really appreciated. I imagine that if the devs could do it again, NPCs wouldn't have been in the Tech demo / mentioned at all. But that's hindsight for you. So many things you could do better if you just knew how it'd all turn out. They even have a handy presentation about "how not to make a video game" commenting on PZ's early lessons kicking around YouTube. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-10-rezzed-sessions-project-zomboid-how-not-to-make-a-game