Mondoid Reposts

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 9th of December, 2013

 

It’s a happy Mondoid in the sleepy town of Mondoidton. There’s a happy buzz as the townspeople meet up in the local Pie shop to discuss hammer spawn rates, Luck traits and null pointer reload bugs.

They’ve all been playing the latest Steam beta build, you see, which was released this past Saturday. We’re sorry for the delay on its release (regular Mondoiders will know that we had anticipated it to arrive much earlier in the week) but some last minute issues cropped up and enforced a few extra days in the development oven.

Among many other things this beta build has introduced far bigger zombie spawns, a weapon repair system, rejigged item spawn rates and also a bunch of optimisation fixes that should see good results on some systems – although, as ever, the latter is an ongoing process.

The next step will be to funnel in some extra bug fixes (like the zombies that run on the spot), after which we’ll look towards firming up this beta build as the primary release on both Steam and Desura. It would be nice to do this alongside providing a fix for everyone’s ‘Second Floor Building’ woes too, but it’s a bigger job than you might imagine – so we’ll see how we go on that front.

Elsewhere, as always, we’ve got Mash beavering away on map fixes – while a lot of our internal tools and exporters are getting some precious CaptainBinky love at the moment as well. It isn’t very glamorous, but sadly game development isn’t all new features, free drinks and helicopters. (Come to think of it, none of us have actually ever been on a helicopter)

There’ll be details coming later down the line, but it’s also worth mentioning that we’ll probably be having a community meet-up in Newcastle on Jan 25th next year (open invite, though you’ll probably have to be over eighteen as we’ll probably want to buy you a drink). We’re also planning to be at Rezzed in March though, so we can all have a group hug then too.

A somewhat mundane Mondoid this week, then, but hopefully one tempered by the appearance of the newest build. Thanks for still being on this awesome adventure with us, means a lot x

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 16th of December, 2013

Releasin’

Since it’s been a long time since we’ve had a stable release go out to Steam proper and Desura, we’re going to call time on the current Steam beta very soon, and will be soon be releasing it to the wider world. We won’t say today, because we made that mistake two weeks ago despite all our training, but we INTEND for it to be soon. (NEO Scavenger!).

Launchin’

We’ve gone full circle and come back to using a pre-game launcher, thanks to inspiration from the awesome Starbound (which is also a good game, much like NEO Scavenger). This affords us several advantages.

1) We can show a webpage that displays info for all users without a time limit, and which can be updated on the fly between versions if need be. We can have it contain links to useful information or news, perhaps changelists and all that gubbins.

2) We can provide more options. If your settings get somehow fubared (we still have a few instances of this) then you’ll no longer have to get into the game to set them. We also intend to add the mod loader outside of the game (as with Skyrim) to allow for better mod management, languages, as well as resolutions, and an option to completely zap all the option data in case any weird problems arise.

3) We can make Compatibility Mode a lot more visible while it’s needed. A lot of people miss it when launching on Steam, and this way it’ll be a lot more visible and likely to be tried.

4) If we want to abuse our position and recommend a game like NEO Scavenger, then we probably can.

SteamOSin’

With the first beta of SteamOS released, it’s an extra reason for us to make sure the joypad support is working throughout the game, this will be a priority (outside of course the other 5-10 priorities we have) as it would be great for Zomboid to join forces with Steam Box in its invasion of the living room, and we fully intend to support the platform naively. (Maybe fellow Linux compatible NEO Scavenger will do this too? Who can say.)

Modelin’

Andy has been a busy bee converting the 3D character exporter from the evolutionary dead end that is XNA (we curse thee Microsoft!) into the frustrating but open world of OpenGL, to allow for it to work on more than a subset of Windows systems. This is integral to allowing characters, costumes and animations to be fully moddable once the mod tools finally surface. If you’re wanting to mod new weapons, character skins, animations, clothing, animals, or heaven forbid cross the children line we refuse to cross, then this will be vital, and we don’t want such power to be solely in the hands of the Windows folks.

He’s a had a much frustrating time, as anyone who follows his twitter feed will attest to, but has made some great progress, and we’re very excited at the possibilities once the tool is finally done. As well as this, he’s been working on expanding and polishing the wilderness cells between Muldraugh and West Point, in preparation for more buildings and whatnot from Mash. Andy has also been playing a little bit of NEO Scavenger, and approved of what he saw.

Compatibilitin’

Work is still continuing on trying to fix the GODFORSAKEN Steam Overlay bug. Thankfully we can now at least warn of the cause of it on our new launcher, should it drag on any longer, but this is a nasty that’s setting itself up to be this season’s Big Bad. (Previous fan favourites have been the ATI Bug and Invisible Walls). Once we’ve resolved it we’ll have very few serious bugs left. We hope NEO Scavenger doesn’t have to deal with Steam Overlay issues, as they are very frustrating to us and users alike.

Lightnin’

In between bug fixing, Romain has carried on the Indie Stone tradition of ‘taking a break’ bymaking more fun and indulgent additions to the game instead of perhaps going for a walk or doing something sensible. As such, he has made an awesome addition to the weather system, which will lead to some dramatic and exciting moments in future. (Despite being turn-based, NEO Scavenger is also dramatic and exciting btw)

Since Lemmy was dumb enough not to put the video on unlisted, this may not be a surprise to everyone, but what the hell!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKRPpcZ-8cI

 

Quick! Watch it before Youtube decides to protect our rights from the evil money hungry YouTubers and blocks it or something. (That’s some cutting edge Mondoid satire there, folks.) We sincerely hope that YouTubers posting NEO Scavenger videos are never hit by any problems with Content ID Matchs, as we’re sure the creator of NEO Scavenger would not appreciate it.

NPCin’

Okay, we’ll give you a hint, since a few have been a bit sad at the short functional blogs, but again we need to reiterate THIS DOESN’T MEAN IT’S INCOMING.

Our plan to develop the meta-game a lot more solidly, quickly, and easily, is that we are quite literally developing the META game. A game outside the game, using java and the PZ engine for easy portability. We’re using very simple network code and developing a test-bed that’ll allow us to play the meta-game system as a turn-based board game of sorts – using all the same meta-game events that the game would use. We’ll be simulating noise generated, for example, with ‘tokens’ and keeping everything rooted in the physical world – despite being wholly virtual.

The idea behind this is that we’ll be able to balance and polish the meta-game system to produce a solid and elegant systems that were otherwise going to get complex and muddy. We’re positive that it will result in a much, much, much better system

The meta -> real -> meta code is already functional, so once this is complete, as we tie the meta-events (represented as cards) to the actual scenes that play out in the game. This means we can make massive progress and involve the entire team (and maybe one day the community?) intimately with the design and evolution of meta events, and chaining them together into emergent narratives. It goes without saying such a system may lead to other interesting ways to play the game in future!

A side effect of this, and just one of the great design philosophies to come from this way of thinking, is a planned re-partitioning of the map that will divide smaller areas of the map into ‘regions’.

It will think of areas like ‘that row of houses’, ‘that street’ or ‘the school and the surrounding grass’. There will be logical map partitions that will have adjacency, and can be tested for security via construction or barricades. Not only will this solve our issues for zombie migration, giving us logical area transitions for Zombies to move between, but NPCs and players alike will be able to secure both buildings and (potentially) entire streets – having them Zombie spawn proof as well as understood as a single secure location. In short: a ‘Woodbury’ situation will be something that happens naturally with any survivors able to hold and clear and fortify sufficient areas.

Exciting non? Almost as exciting as NEO Scavenger, we think.

Buyin’ NEO Scavenger

Other important work this week has involved going onto Steam and purchasing NEO Scavenger, and playing NEO Scavenger. Not only is it inspiring and vital research material for creators of a hard-core survival game, but NEO Scavenger….

BUY NEO SCAVENGER

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 23rd of December, 2013
 

 

Hello folks! Truth of the matter is the PZ team, more than ever, are cast to the winds visiting family, last minute shopping and all the other things that get in the way of posting blogs. As such this has been tapped out onto the touch screen of a mobile phone, we’ve quite literally ‘phoned this one in’, so forgive the brevity though we don’t want to break the year plus tradition of Mondoidin’.

This week and next week will be quite the bare bones Mondoids. Not much substantial to report about the game itself.

 

Binky has more or less wrapped up the cross platform shenanigans and hopefully that means we can look into a tool release before long.

 

Romain has been fixing up problems in the build, not least of all the PERPETUAL THUNDERDOME that is Kentucky at this point. Lemmy be carrying on fixing up the meta-game system for NPCs that we detailed last week, amongst some other stuff which may turn out to be pretty interesting but he’s saving shouting about it until he’s positive it’s doable.

 

Mash meanwhile has been painting some really cool Zomboid related stuff (think what we don’t have yet with regards to Steam specific features).

 

We also have to apologize for the tardy Desura build. It’s sucky but we’ve not forgotten anyone, we wanted to get the build right first since the process of updating is longer and we’d run the risk of leaving a broken build up there too long. We’re pretty close tho and the next incoming hotfix should wrap up the last issues and we’d feel comfortable calling it a super proper release. Truth is we’d have held back on the official Steam build the same, but with the Steam flash sale last week we needed to get the launcher out there to stem the potential masses of support questions.
 

 

Easy Pickins

For those who follow the forums, you may see a bit of cheeky copy pasting in effect, but given the circumstances we’re sure you understand, but we wanted to make sure to shout from the blog about some exciting news for the team.

The mighty and ridiculously talented Tim Baker, aka EasyPickins, is now a fully fledged member of the PZ dev team. Hurrah! It’s been on the cards for a while, since he’s done such wonderous work on the tools (that you lot have yet to see but you’ll be amazed), but after he revealed his ‘side project’ which basically amounts to PORTING THE MAJORITY OF PROJECT ZOMBOID TO C++ (missing the lua integration particularly, which mean in itself this isn’t something we can run with without abandoning the modding) his ridiculous talent and genius needed snaffling up proper immediately.

He’ll be the official tool and engine honcho at Indie Stone towers, and will be working toward making a C++ native rendering engine using the stuff he’s been working on, that in the short (ish) term will hopefully provide a tasty FPS boost, and in the long term will pave the way to the new 3D engine, as well as continuing his amazing tool support, and hopefully generally contributing to the usual bug fixery and additions to the game if it tickles his fancy.

Congrats EasyPickins! Or should we say, congrats Indie Stone! Our bad luck with events and set backs with the game are more than compensated for our ridiculously good luck when it comes to talented people falling onto our lap, from Zach, Paul, Romain, Kirrus, nasKo and now Tim, and that’s before mentioning all the modders and moderators and everyone else who make us what we are.

Thats all, hope you forgive the short Mondoid once more, we’ll have another shorty next week but hopefully have some cool things to report the week after. Stay tuned!

So now all we have to do is pick an image for the blog. Since a graphics package is not at hand, how’s about a lovely pic of Romain from the archives? Let’s hope the blog title doesn’t obscure his sexy face.

Happy Holidays everyone!

 

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 30th of December, 2013

 

Hello everyone! Another exceptionally lazy Mondoid to see in the end of the year!

Again, nothing substantially new to report, we’re all taking a bit of time off for the most part, but a couple of us are still finding time to beaver away at our PCs – be that arting stuff up, or doing codey things which are still as yet unannounced (but rather exciting). One thing of note is EasyPickins has already gone to town on the PZ code and made some changes to the depths of the rendering system which should yield a significant FPS increase in future builds (on multi-core rendering, that is, though some minor improvements may be seen otherwise due to him removing a few redundant state changes from the rendering) – this is awesome and exciting and we hope to finally put to bed the FPS issues of the game. It’s only going to get better here on in, as there is plenty of scope to improve this further with native rendering and the 3D engine support we have planned.

 

That’s it really. We can’t wait to see if Mathas’ video breaks new ground in brevity. Sorry this is exceptionally short but really the alternate was no Mondoid at all, and after over a year of them it would seem a shame to let even one Monday slip by without.

 

We hope you’re all having a great holiday, and we’ll see you for 2014, which will undoubtedly be the biggest yet for Zomboid fans and Zomboid devs alike!

 

Love,

 

The Indie Stone

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 6th of January, 2014

 

Evening all, a good Mondoid and a Happy New Year. Front and centre, today, will be the work Binky has put into our character animation and lighting systems over Christmas. Before that, however, why don’t you cast your eyes over the glorious array of tweaks, fixes and exciting optimizations that’ll be going into the next build?

 

EasyP has really been putting a shift in over the festive period, and in terms of polish, usability and niceness the next update should be a doozy. There’s other stuff in the pipe too that’s too early to talk about, but we have some awesome things incoming which Binky will tell us all about.

 

 

Modelin’

Well basically, as anyone who follows me on Twitter will know, over the past few weeks I’ve been slowly porting the sprite export tools from XNA to OpenGL and having a lovely time *cough* doing so. All the models we were using to generate the sprites are saved in DirectX *.x format which is lovely and convenient as far as loading them into an XNA project goes, but an utter nightmare when loading them into an OpenGL project for a variety of very boring technical reasons.

 

But anyway, the upshot of getting all of this working is that we are now able to spit out sprite frames from a more cross-platform friendly environment (which will be good news for modders) and also then have the ability to spit out mesh and animation data which is straight-forward to load into another OpenGL project (such as, for example, the game itself).

 

One of the other things we’ve been slowly working towards is using proper 3D-but-rendered-as-isometric environments in order to give us better performance on modern graphics cards (as well as nicer lighting and other advantages which come with real 3D) so with this in mind… well… we’ve got friendly model and animation data, why not do the model->sprite stuff in real time?

 

 

Please bear in mind this is a WIP and there are a couple of lighting issues and some pop between 3D and sprite zombies.

 

While fully animated models aren’t exactly the speediest thing you can render, don’t forget that the sprites aren’t going anywhere, settings can specify the number of models that can appear on-screen at once. What we’re able to provide is much smoother

animations, more straight-forward character modding, better character lighting, and graphics level-of-detail options to determine how much or little of the characters remain sprites depending on hardware’s capabilities. This is the first step toward the 3D engine which will make Zomboid much better at leveraging hardware.

 

So a non dedicated graphics card will see big improvements in texture memory due to not needing all the many character anims for living people, with the relatively minimal cost of drawing one model, and while lower specs may struggle with zombies (though could perhaps have the closest 1/2/3/4/5 Zombies render in 3D) high-spec PCs will be able to choose improvements across all characters and everything in-between.

This will afford us more flexibility in terms of combat animations – melee animations specifically will see drastic improvements in terms of general feel and variety, makes combat feel more immersive and intuitive, and add many more player animations without concerns about the number of texture pages we generate for player sprites.

 

 

Eventin’ (1/2)

Now the new year is in, and NPC work is dialing back up, we’re looking to start increasing the number of meta-events and generally getting the Sadistic AI Director in motion for the time NPCs come in. As such we’re going to be implementing more meta-events, a bit more intricate than the current gun-fire or helicopter noises. Find scenes of gory horror in buildings, find burnt husks of buildings, dead survivors at the feet of their killer and so on. As well as this, we are working on a new implementation of the zombie migration and distribution, to hopefully allow for more exciting extremes as flippantly or cruelly decreed by the Sadistic AI Director to give the player more stories to tell.

 

 

Eventin’ (2/2)

We can also confirm that we’re going to have something of a mini community meet-up on Saturday Jan 25th in Newcastle. We’ll keep it low-key and with limited numbers at first, as we have no idea how many people would want to come, but you can find our Eventbrite ticket application doo-dah right here.

 

Once we have a firmer idea on numbers we’ll think about potentially expanding, and of course sort out the venue. It will be an 18+ deal though, unfortunately as it’ll be in a pub somewhere. It’s also worth noting that we’ll also be at Rezzed in Birmingham in March too, and we’ll do something similar then.

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 13th of January, 2014

 

Have you ever wondered what your home town would be like when overrun by the living zed? How about those plans you’ve formulated about escape and survival in your school, street, library or place of work? Well.. with the newly release Project Zomboid mapping tools maybe it’s time to put that fevered imagination of yours to work.

 

In this past week we’ve released the tools we used to create Muldraugh and West Point to the community, and we can’t help but feel that it’s lit the fuse to a user map explosion in the weeks, months and years to come.

 

Please be warned that at this point in time there are no guides, tips or example vids for prospective mappers to use [bar Mendonca’s early one here], but the team are on hand to answer questions in the download thread on the forum. It’s likely that initial descents into WorldEd, TileZed and whatnot will be easier in weeks to come when documentation from some of our trusted collaborators will have appeared, but until then – download, map and be happy! Exciting times!

 

 

OTHER BUSINESS
So, what of the next update? Well an initial version of it is currently in internal testing. You can see a list of its fixes (second storey bug, we think/hope, included) in the Upcoming Beta thread on our forum.

 

As you can see, a lot of this is our newfound team member EasyPickins’ bug witch-hunt: fixing all the deeply buried and long suffered maladies we’ve had with lighting, chunk streaming and various other unrooted snares. He’s also come up with some cool additions, like saved UI positions (no more moving your inventory windows each and every game!

 

Lemmy, meanwhile, has been working on redeveloping the zombie migration systems and tying it into the fledgling Sadistic AI Director. New security is in place to make sure zombies will never appear in places they could not have gotten to, which simultaneously gives us a lot more freedom to move virtual zombies around the map in response to sounds and other events.

As such alarms and other meta-events (including some new ones in-development) will be a lot more dramatic and dangerous, and scouting around your safehouse regularly and thoroughly will become ever more important.

 

The Sadistic AI Director (while not always in a sadistic mood, even occasionally taken to being friendly) will soon have more control to guide events to ensure the player has a fair and dramatic experience. It’ll give players a slightly easier time at the start and drive up the drama if nothing has happened in a while, while taking care not to sacrifice the unpredictability and simulation aspects of the game.

 

Lemz and Binks have also been working together to finish off the 3D model system that we showed off last week as there’s still a bit of a push required to make sure its compatible with all graphics cards and optimized well enough for general release. This is all on top of some, frankly awesome, stuff Lemmy has been working on for a while, that we’re going to be tight-lipped on until we’re good and ready to show it off. (The mystery!) Oh, and Romain is beavering away with fixing gamepad control and some cool new crafting options, as well as a whole  bunch of other stuff listed in the upcoming thread we linked above.

 

Finally, we’ve been having quite a few issues with our new launcher not working on some people’s machines, and despite it only affecting a minority of people it’s still led to an influx of tech support queries for our moderator team – the exact opposite of what it was intended for!

 

We have a launcherless version of the game in testing now that we hope to release ASAP, as a demo and full game alike, that should address all these problems. (And in the mean-time Romain is working out a fix.).

 

We’ll then get straight on adding a non-steam version of the demo, as well as finally updating the Desura version. We know it’s been a long while, but the current version of the game needs replacing as soon as humanly possible – and we want to keep EnigmaGrey, Rath and the crew sane in the mean-time!

 

Oh, and finally finally – what are you doing on January 25th? Would you like to come to Newcastle for Zomboid-developer man-hugs? (Lady-hugs also available).

[nasKo]

Hello everyone.

 

 

What’s that?

 

 

I don’t think I quite caught that….

 

 

Is this some kind of elaborate hoax?

 

No it’s not.

 

What started with a very early and rough Christmas multiplayer test between Lemmy and Binky across the UK some 2 years ago, progressed through to the integration (and subsequent untegration. Sorry about that, we’re working on it!) of split-screen, we’ve been poking our noses in from time to time and its finally time to show it off!

 

 

SO WHAT IS IT?
Online multiplayer with persistent player run servers! Yes!

 

We have no figures on maximum player count as of yet, but we’ll be expanding our tests in the run up to release and suspect it’ll be connection and server spec limited only. Bugs aside, it managed 10-12 or so on a domestic cable connection pretty effortlessly though, and could probably have gone higher and whatever the limit can definitely be optimized further.

 

Anyone with a copy of PZ will be able to launch their own dedicated console only PZ server just by passing the appropriate parameters to the executable (or running a batch file, or whatever) with whitelists and blacklists, choice of co-op or PvP (purposefully defaulted to co-op to ram the point home) and all that goodness. Servers will be fully moddable using the same stuffs you mod PZ with now. Modders will be able to create their own networky messages to sync the server and client, and we’ll add checksums to check both server and client are running the same mods. In future we could look to auto-download stuff in cases the clients don’t have what is required.

 

Due to the moddable nature of the game and the easily decompilable nature of Java, it’s likely that we’re not particularly hack resilient, so until we can work on some solid countermeasures, people should stick to whitelisted servers with user/pass access, to allow servers to be policed effectively and ‘wrong’uns’ removed. You can read more on all this on this thread, where Lemmy was very proud and also frustrated to hold his tongue on the status of the multiplayer in his responses.

 

We also plan for split-screen to work seamlessly with the multiplayer once it’s reintegrated, so two, three, even four players on a single machine (perhaps in a living room on SteamOS!) all to inhabit the same online world together.

 

Y NO NPCS?
YES NPCs are still very much in development. In fact we’ve done some work on them in the past couple of weeks, along with the new meta-game stuff detailed in the last couple of Mondoids. However, since release, and particularly since our appearance on Steam, it’s become clearer and clearer not only that MP is of such massive demand, but that the lack of multiplayer has had a not insignificant effect on the ‘must-haveness’ of Zomboid to a large chunk of gamers out there, that would otherwise have dove in long ago.

We need to make clear that this in no way impacts the Indie Stone’s massive focus on single-player for this game. Remember that outside of game design, Will, one of the co-owners of Indie Stone,  as well as PZ dev RingoD’s sole development responsibility on the game is single player story and NPC writing and scripting, so you can bet they will be given a ton of attention.

 

As a development team we vehemently uphold the principle that a game should not punish those who wish or have to play alone with less features and scope, and we are the first to complain when an RPG series we like goes all ‘MMO’ and more or less ends our interest and participation there and then. Our fondest hope is that once NPCs are added to the game, most people would choose to leave them enabled as part of a multiplayer server, so integral as they will feel to the dynamics of the game. In short, multiplayer will always remain just that: A way of playing the single player game with multiple people, and we’ll never rest on it as a crutch and let single player features slide.

 

That all said, despite the closer community of our game being ravenous for NPCs, the lack of multiplayer has been a cavernous hole in our game as far as a huge percentage of people are concerned.
So why did multiplayer hit before NPCs? Well, as amazing as it sounds, and it has surprised us too considering the nightmare that is network coding. The NPCs have become such a hotly anticipated and crucial to get right feature of the game, as Mathas has repeatedly quite correctly said, they are the feature that PZ will live or die by, and so  the unthinkable happened and NPCs ended up becoming a more complicated and difficult task than the multiplayer did.

 

As Lemmy dropped back and forth between them as one or the other caused migraines and/or swearing at the computer monitor, it started to become clear that multiplayer was beginning to slot into place a lot faster than expected, and NPCs a lot slower. Multiplayer development however had the privilege of being mostly unknown to the community, who had wrote it off (often with sadness) as ‘not for a few years’, where NPCs have been more or less perpetually in the spotlight. This doesn’t affect how long one or the other take, regardless, despite NPCs having the lions share of time devoted to them.

 

There are two camps in the PZ community, and while a lot of the community will be ecstatic about this Mondoid, we don’t want the NPC camp to be fearful or disappointed. The team are still beavering away at those AI controlled twerps and the only reason you haven’t gotten your mitts on them is because ‘damn we need to get this right and it ain’t quite right yet’.

 

 

SO WHAT’S LEFT TO DO?
Despite the cherry picking of footage, there are still a fair few issues, things not synchronised, and a few map streaming bugs over the ol’ internet, so this isn’t releasing tomorrow or anything, but as you can probably tell it’s largely functional and the vast majority of the work is behind us.

 

A few things. Bugs like barricading, farming and hanging sheets not synchronizing between the clients. Coding the thirst system to work over the net. Fixing a few bugs in the map downloading system that transfers the maps to the clients. An uncannily large percentage of the game is fully functional online at this stage, but there’s still a bunch to do – and since we’re now at the stage of closed testing you should not read that a public release is super imminent. Just it’s harder and harder to contain and keep this on the down-low: we’re very very excited about it all.

 

In the run up to open testing, however, you can probably look forward to peeps like Twiggy, Mathas and whatnot partaking in some multiplayer Zomboidin’, given their (now rather obvious) tester access, as soon as we’re comfortable with unedited video of MP being stable and bug-free enough to be transmitted warts and all.

 

No ETAs as usual but hopefully its clear that it’s not far off. Though ‘not far off’ doesn’t necessarily mean this week, or next week. But then again that’s in the realm of remote possibility none-the-less.
It all really depends on how well future tests go and what new issues crop up, but it’s certainly not months away – or ‘next year’ as per previous community estimates.

And finally, our forum peeps have something else to say when the ‘WHEN MULTIPLAYER’ threads pop up!

 

BUILD 22
On its way soon! As Twiggy viewers will no doubt be aware the build is starting to look pretty darn stable, so we’ll look to getting that build out on the beta branch very soon! Details here.

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 28th of January, 2014

 

Hello everyone! Last weeks Mondoid was good wasn’t it? Wasn’t it lovely, all those multiplayer revelations? Do you think we can get away with a really really lazy one this week? We hope so!

 

A good portion of the Indie Stone, old and decrepit as we are, are nursing the seemingly obligatory 2 day hangovers after a wonderful evening in Newcastle meeting a whole bunch of lovely Zomboid fans at SpiffoBeer 2013™

You can see some photos and chart the rapid escalation of our blood alcohol levels as the night progressed here:  http://imgur.com/a/F8Qrl#0

 

Everyone was lovely and we were blown away by the turnout, and are looking forward to doing it again when Rezzed 2014 comes around. Hopefully the hangovers will have subsided by then!

 

In other news, multiplayer testing continues and we’re currently trying to track down some strange apocalyptic bug that begins to occur on higher player counts, that results in doors flapping open and shut like they are possessed, and continues to the point of breaking the server. This is rather frustrating, but armed with packet sniffers and all the latest network debugging contraptions, we hope it won’t be long before its resolved, and the remaining multiplayer bugs should be rather quick to resolve once it is.

 

In better news, PZ multiplayer is now compatible with Linux and Mac, and all platforms can talk to each other, allowing Windows, Mac, Linux and therefore also SteamBox Zomboiders all to play together. Which is lovely!

 

That’s all there is to say really. We’re riding the coat-tails of last week’s Mondoid, and hoping that people understand we’ve just got to plough through the remaining issues so we can get a public MP test on the go as soon as possible. We’ll hopefully get some more videos or streams on the go before that happens, so stay tuned!

 

Wish us luck! And thank you to everyone who came to see us on Saturday night, you were all amazing. We hope you had as great a time as we did.

 

Love,

 

Indie Stone

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 3rd of February, 2014
 
Howdy survivors. Time to talk MP shenanigans and update plans. Let’s go, go, go. Pick up planks, hammers and as much food as you can. We’ll meet you at Twiggys. If you’re not there by nightfall we’ll assume you’re dead.
 
Build 22 (23)’n
First of multiplayer will not be in the ‘next’ build. The next will be the aforementioned ‘Build 22′ (now, ahem, called build 23 since build 22 didn’t cut it, and us having a series of build 22′s was driving the testers crazy!) , which will be released to Steam beta as soon as humanly possible. Multiplayer, whenever is is released, will be released in a separate branch initially, and will likely have single player disabled in the short term, as its home to the still unfinished new meta spawning system. It’s almost certain that the next SP will hit before MP, however this should be a sign of MP being close not the next build being far away.
Yup build 22 is taking its time, we’ve still got issues to resolve, particularly some save compatibility issues we’re concerned about breaking older saves with. It’s in the works though and despite the push for MP a new version of build 22 (now called 23) has been in testing over the weekend, and we’re hoping the next one will be able to go out for wider testing – we’ll let you know.
 
Multiplayerin’
We’ve got a slightly wider player-base for our internal tests running at the moment, the fruit of which you can see in Mathas’ recent videos. Click thru for part 2 because ads + awesome youtubers /streamers is a nice combo:

If you’d like to see what happened next at Knob Mansion and the continued zany adventures of one Flachzang, you can see more on Twiggy’s later MP playthrough here:

As well as many enjoying watching the videos in preparation for the release, a few have expressed frustration at seeing the game being played by others and not having access yet. We know it may be frustrating to not have access to the build yet, but hopefully you can see there are still issues to resolve and something as big as multiplayer we want to make sure it goes out with no server instabilities or need for the clients to log and relog every 5-10 minutes. As of right now we’ve kind of fixed the black loading bug, and the build is generally looking really stable for periods.
However there are still clearly deeper problems where connections are seemingly occasionally getting mixed up and the map streaming goes bananas, and it can have some nasty consequences for the world:
 
 

 
We’re so close we can taste it, and after fixing the black border bug up, were hoping there was a chance we could have been releasing a public test today until this issue popped up. As soon as we have the server solid as a rock, it’s more or less time though, so trust us that it IS close. There’s no telling how long this will take to fix however, so can’t offer any solid dates. We can’t put this out there with server destroying bugs in there, but the list of things we need to fix before it’s considered ready for the public are down to the 1 or 2.
 
On the whole (except a disastrous day Saturday where about 20 things decided to go wrong in a new test build at once, almost all resolved now) the tests have been remarkably close to a releasable state. We have farming and fire synced up now, as well as sounds, meta events, rain and rain barrels. It’s really exciting to see it all come together so fast!
A few common questions:
 
How will sleeping work?
A lot of people have asked how the sleeping will work, and while the first version will likely just forgo sleeping completely, future builds will have a ‘nap’ option that will allow you to take a short sleep that lasts just a bit longer than a single player fastforwarded sleep would. The actual sleep option will be used as a way to log off safely.
 
How will we deal with PvP and anti-griefing
PvP, as you can see from the videos above, is having its first tests, and it works pretty great! We have some solid ideas for once the NPCs go into the game, that if a multiplayer has them turned on (and we hope they most often will be) the existence of NPCs, the initial ambiguity between human and AI, as well as having to deal with the NPCs reactions and personalities, will help curb griefing to the point where PvP could almost always be left on and unrestricted. However as we’ve stated, the default for the server will be co-op, and PvP will be something a server admin needs to activate. This is as much a statement about co-operation as it is a practical choice. As we develop the system further we have plans for a ‘safety’ button to avoid accidental friendly fire, which is all too possible in the current build, as you may see from the videos!
 
Loot / Zombies
Another thing that’s become extremely apparent is that both loot and zombies don’t take long to diminish in Muldraugh, at least, and we may need to extend a few areas of the game earlier than we originally planned in order to keep the servers sustainable in the short term. Note by ‘we’ this for the most part will not include Lemmy who will be busy on NPCs at this stage!) Since we’d reach the stage where the towns are picked clean and any other food has been eaten or gone bad – spawning new items / zombies in the world is not something we want to do – and since farming is currently the only source of sustainable food at that stage, we will be bumping trapping and hunting up the priority list in the coming month. This will also have serious ramifications for the types of mods that will be makeable, adding support for modders to add AI driven entities to the game. Suddenly those total conversions adding mutant / special infected / dalek types aren’t too far away.
 
Another potentially huge benefit to players, particularly 32bit people with a good amount of ram on their PC is the ability to host a server through the game and effectively play single player with a local dedicated server running. Due to the requirement for the entire map to stream in/out for many players, and to be leverage to use more memory to do this, it will be able to make zombie migrations work in a much more realistic way, where areas of the map are streamed in around huge hordes as they travel from the sides of the map to up the zombie populations. Seeing one of these roll through town is pretty scary, and they would obey all laws of construction everywhere on the map.
 
We will be looking to integrate this new map streaming system into the clients at some point in the future, the main issue being potential performance hit that a non relative streaming map would cause (server only runs at 12fps by design so can deal with it) but this is an options for those who want a more persistent world until that can happen who may see further performance improvements even over build 22.
 
NPC phase initiatin’
We’re already prepping the ground work in the multiplayer branch to begin porting over the NPC code to work with new ‘NPCPlayer’ types, who will derive all their behaviour from the multiplayer/network communication enabled player. Once this is done we will be able to transmit NPCs behaviours easily over the internet, as well as automatically gain everything implemented for players with the next iteration of the NPCs. We can feel it all bubbling away again, and with the new meta-manager (Sadistic AI) and various other things are starting to feel the NPC train running again!
 
 
Rezzin’
Although we won’t have a stand at Rezzed this year, we will be in attendance and organising community meet-ups on as many days as we can. If you’re coming along then post in this thread and we’ll get some cool Zomboid fun going on down Birmingham way. Can’t wait to meet you!

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 10th of February, 2014

 

Evening all, bit of a general update-y Mondoid this week. Apologies for the lack of bells and whistles.

 

 

Build 23
This is available for testing on our forum, although you’d be advised to wait a little while until we push it out properly on our Steam beta channel. We’ve updated it four or five times since it’s gone live and it’s almost ready for a wider audience. It should only need a few fixes, namely a savegame location bugbear, and then we’ll give you a wave to let you it’s on the Steam beta. There are lots of happy voices from peeps who’ve played it, largely because of the FPS improvements, so that’s always nice.


Multiplayer
In terms of gameplay, internal testers have been having a industrious time over the weekend – creating a camp called NeoHaven and organising their loot forays when they’re outside the game. It’s fascinating to watch, and we were so convinced by their japes that we were gearing up for a wider release that would help us track down an elusive bug that persists on occasionally stealing chunks of the server map… (Can you tell there’s a ‘but’ coming?)
…But unfortunately, simultaneous to the reports of goodness, several testers have flagged some streaming issues that’ll definitely require some love. This is a bit of a bummer, but we’re on the case. Keep your eyes on the forum for news as and when it happens!

 

 

Bunnies
We feel a bit bad about the lack of NEW STUFF in this Mondoid, so here’s a sneaky peek at what we’ll be talking about in future Mondoids. Watch out for your carrot crop…

 

 

Amaze-o maps
Finally, and we’ll be doing a proper Mod Report to underline how amazing these are, we’ve been bowled over by the user map content that’s being built on the forum. We’ve got 0.15 map recreations, a replica map of DayZ’s Cherno, the glorious return of RingoD’s Mega Map, Thuztor’s Gutrot island and all manner of hotels, restaurants, apartment blocks and other exiting soon-to-be-zombified domiciles. Thanks so much for building so many cool things for the game!

 

Love y’all. Don’t get bit.

 

 

TIS x

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 17th of February, 2014

 

That’s right kids, it’s APZDTISA time again! Better known within more informal circles as ‘Ask Project Zomboid Developers The Indie Stone – Anything! First though, we have exciting developments afoot. So…

 

 

Multiplayer!

In case you didn’t spot it, over the weekend, we’ve finally put out the first ever online version of Project Zomboid out to the public! We snuck it out to get the worst of the issues resolved before the Mondoid, and early indications are really promising! There’s people running Roleplay servers, PVP servers, public and private. Mostly everything is functional, from farming to carpentry (though there are likely bugs still) and people are having a great time!

 

In the short term until we add trapping, hunting and some other late game features (that are on their way!) it can become a little difficult when joining a server that’s already had 100 people in the past 2 days stripping Muldraugh clean, so server ops may be tempted to reset the world fairly regularly until then. There’s plenty of balancing and bugfixing still to do but what’s there feels pretty complete!

 

The multiplayer version is currently in its own Steam branch, so if you want a try then you’ll need to follow the instructions here!

 

Remember you will need to have access to a server, which you can either set up yourself, or look around in the Servers forum for public ones you can join, or private ones you can apply for a user/pass for.

 

 

Build 23 Released!

We also released Build 23 proper this weekend to the stable Steam branch! This update is immense and fixes a ton of issues, as well as providing a significant FPS boost. You can read details on the build here.

 

 

And so onto, APZDTISA 3!

 

Q. Are mods supported in multiplayer? (vesainen)

A. Not currently, but they will be. We need to work out a good system for syncing clients / servers mods and it is currently still up in the air as to the best way to do this. It’s certainly a must have feature though so we’ll make sure it gets there sooner rather than later. (Lemmy)

 

 

Q. Hello! My question is: why LWJGL? I am an aspiring game developer, and I love java! Are their any reasons I should devote some of my time to learning how to use the library? (DuhbleB)

A. We wanted to make the game in java to increase its portability, and LWJGL seemed like the best choice. We are very impressed with it and for all Lemmy’s java misgivings not one of them have been LWJGL related. Highly recommended!  (Lemmy)

 

 

Q. Have you tossed around the idea of some real survival tools recently? It’d be nice to see a machete, hatchet, and a combat knife/pocket knife since those are really the true basis of wilderness survival and still found commonly in or around the home. Curious to know if we’ll see anything like that soon. (Rathlord)

Expanding the range of weapons/tools is definitely high up on the task list, if for no other reason than to make certain ‘essential’ survival items a bit less ludicrously scarce, particularly now we have MP servers where everything good gets immediately looted! In other words, having multiple objects which have the same function although with differing levels of effectiveness and endurance will not only open up gameplay, but will also provide variety. A hacksaw should not be your only method of turning a log into a plank, for example. (Andy)

 

The survivalist stuff is something we’re planning on massively expanding going forward, especially due to the situation with food scarcity on multiplayer servers. First on the list is trapping. (Lemmy)

 

As Lemmy said, more survival stuff is on our list. In one of the next updates trapping will be added, I already started to code it, but we have to focus on bugs. So, how it’ll work? You have to create different traps, using different skills (trapping and wood work), then place the trap somewhere. The area is very important, you won’t catch a lot of rabbita in a town area. Try to put your trap in forests, and then find the correct bait. Oh, and don’t forget to check every day if you caught something. The bait won’t be fresh forever!

 

On a note, we can’t add Raccoon as animal… Really, who wants to kill a Spiffo ?! (Romain)

 

Q) Romain, when will your fishing mod be incorporated into the game? (EnigmaGrey)

We already talked about this with the team, and Mash already made some of the fishes and fishing equipement icons, so I need to re-code it to fit with this version, also add the multiplayer sync on top of it. But as we probably need new animations for this, don’t expect it right now (trapping should be out sooner!). (Romain)

 

Q. Are there any current gameplay mechanics/features that you intend to overhaul or modify significantly to make them different to how they are now? (Pintlasher)

A. One that springs to mind is the health system. At the moment people are either scratched or bitten on a body part. We need to add stuff like infected wounds, broken bones, bullet wounds and other types of injury that behave differently. There’s a whole lot of depth we would like to add to the health system to make medical skills much more relevant to the game. (Lemmy)

 

Q. Are NPC survivors in a nice-ish enough state that we could see some action of them? If they are, could we see it sometime soon? (Footmuffin)

A. NPC work is always going on in the background, and we are gearing up with it all the time. But now these builds have gone out, we’ll be able to look into more focused development and get it out as soon as we can. Not going to lie though, it’s still not imminent. A big reason for this multiplayer push is ironically multiplayer has become a stop gap while the much more involved NPCs are implemented, despite us once thinking multiplayer would be the steepest hill to climb.

 

NPCs have been tough, but one of the reasons people are looking forward to them so much is we’re trying to do something we’ve not seen done to this level so far, and it’s going to be a challenge until we get there. That said, people have seen the videos, and we know we’ll get it finished off. The problem with showing more videos of them in action is they get people hyped up, and unless they are around the corner (like MP was, once we finally came clean and announced it) just end up frustrating people when it is delayed. We’d rather try and keep the hype down until they are really close. (Lemmy)

 

Q. Will there be new craftable items appearing soon? For example, traps, electric/electronic gadgets,wiring, carpentry items, and the like. (Rorschach)

A. It’s not imminent, but we have big plans for all these. We want to ultimately end up with a circuit board like advanced crafting that you could connect different items with wire, making noise makers, security systems and so on. (Lemmy)

 

Q. What wildlife can we eventually expect to encounter in the forests? Will we ever see birds and will they be huntable? (Viceroy)

We’ve got a bunny being prepped for the game right now – the plan is to have as much of the wildlife you’d expect to see in the rural woods of Kentucky present in Zomboid. My cursory Google investigations in this area result in things like, the American Black Bear (woo!) and Red Bear, deer (multiple types), squirrel (roasted), elk, stuff like that. Birds are (slightly) problematic in-so-far as they fly, and sky isn’t something you tend to see in a top-down isometric game.  That said, you could feasibly show ground shadows from overhead birds and birds have to land from time to time, so there are plenty of ways they could be added too. (Andy)

 

Q. I know there are no vehicles, but why are there no garages?  Where I’m from, every house has a garage. Is Kentucky different? (Mightylsis)

A. To be entirely realistic, yes there should probably be more garages in Muldraugh (West Point has loads).  However, due to the size of tiles, having a garage built into the house makes the houses look quite large, which didn’t fit the Muldraugh look we wanted and would also create less of a visual difference from other areas of the map. (Mash)

 

Q. Are there any current mods that are being looked at to be brought into the game? (sfy)

A. We have no immediate plans, these things just sometimes happen in certain circumstances, if its right for the game and right for the modder. It is something we’ve done before and would be open to it in the right circumstances. The erosion mod has certainly caught our eye! But it’s nice to have a mod scene and not just swallow up mods, so at the same time we don’t want to trample over other people’s pieces of Zomboid. (Lemmy)

 

Q. The map tools for modders are amazing.  It sounds like the upcoming NPC and metagame behavior will be somewhat map dependent (for example designating rooms in buildings, storylines, etc).  Will there be map independent features of NPCs like AI behavior, canned dialogue, relationship status, etc.?  Has Indie Stone considered releasing NPC tools for modders to create original NPCs or will these all function within the map tools? (Jatta Pake)

Q. Also how complicated will it be for modders to add in custom npc content once their system is in place? 

 A. Anything (apart from source code, decompiling aside) The Indie Stone have at their disposal, we would like for the modders to have! As far as NPCs there is only really one addition people will need to make to their maps (assuming the rooms etc in buildings are correct and the modders use tbx files, not tmx, for their buildings) and that is to ‘zone off’ parts of the map into ‘group of houses’ or ‘road’ segments, to give NPCs and zombie behaviours the concept of areas to allow for more intelligent AI and realistic zombie migrations.

 

When the time comes though, it was only an hour or two work to do the entire of West Point. Muldraugh not yet done but we expect not much longer. EasyPickins has also created an NPC scripting editor that ties into the meta-game, so once NPCs are released people will have all the tools at their disposal to do their own NPC meta-game events, scenes, or entire stories that happen on their own map. (Lemmy)

 

Q. Are there any plans to incorporate freezers into the game as a way to preserve food? This would pave the way for several other items, such as ice, ice trays, and coolers. Plus, we would have a way to keep our ice cream from melting!

Yes certainly. We figure that most fridges are fridge-freezer these days, so will probably make fridges preservation of food 100% until the power goes out at some point.

 

Q. Will we ever be able to craft basic tools/weapons from wood or bone? (Warp)

This is something we’ve all talked about a lot, especially now multiplayer is a thing. The potential for tools to be completely used up or gone should not completely preclude using certain features. So some kind of craftable tools are a must. We need to keep it as plausible as possible though. (Lemmy)

 

Q. How is the quarantine going to work when the military is in the game? Are you going to be able to move to West Point at the start of the game? Or Muldraugh and West Point are going to be the main quarantine zones? If both are under quarantine, is there going to be a perimeter of outposts in the area?  A gigantic wall perhaps? Outposts? (Blasted Taco)

Both Muldraugh and West Point will be inside the quarantine zone, and the PZ canon will have it that in the earliest days of the infection the rest of the world is as yet unaffected. Quite how we’re going to physically represent this in-game (outside of radio broadcasts, dialogue and meta-events) is as yet undecided and something we’ll need to nail down – this said, it’s also something that we can’t really cover until we have military camps in-game – and maybe the military themselves. So watch this space, basically. (Will)

 

Q. How is farming going to work in multiplayer in terms of water levels when you log off? (Seabass82)

Right now, we have a server option “PauseEmpty”, which mean the server will continue to live even if no players are on it, you disable it so if no one is around, your plants won’t die alone, they’ll wait you, patiently. (Romain)

 

 

Q. Any plans to re-balance gun/shooting mechanics? (Seabass82)

A. Yes, certainly! At the moment even a level 0 in firearms will one shot any zombie, obviously this isn’t as designed, and we’ll be looking to rebalance shooting to coincide with hunting! (Lemmy)

 

Q. I love PZ and the idea of emergent storytelling from intrinsic game play. What have you learned from creating the meta-verse events, and do you think this could be applied to other types of games? I’m mainly thinking “god” games, Sim City, Black and White, but is there scope for this kind of storytelling in FPS as well?

A. I think that the thing we’ll be able to do with the metagame and the NPCs (and what big AAA games generally can’t because it’d end up with a gigantic pricetag in terms of animations and ultimately an outright desire to put everything possible directly in front of the player throughout the entire game) is create dialogue that covers even the most unlikely of scenarios. When something amazing happens we want to have something in there that says ‘Hey, we know this can happen too – mental isn’t it?’ and in turn make the player feel special, as what they’re experiencing could potentially only ever have happened to a handful of people. It’ll be a lot of work, but ultimately all we need is dialogue to cover all the potential boxes that could be ticked. (Will)

 

Q. Can I hug you all individually at rezzed or would time be better spent in a group hug, like a giant developer/tooks sandwich? (Tooksie<3)

A. We’d prefer one big group hug, but we can’t tell you how long it will last because it’s our policy to never give ETAs. (TIS)

 

Q. When NPC’s are inserted, will they be able to tell what loot is valuable if that loot is part of a mod? (sfy)

Mostly. They will score the items based on their stats, though mods may have to add some additional modifier or something to more specialist and uncategorised items. If a mod were to add a remote control that called an airstrike, an NPC would not inherently value that item, but a different type of gun/food/ammo would be easy. We’ll provide modders a way of influencing this anyway.

 

Q. How are Mash’s guinea pigs doing?

Sadly, Lola passed away late last year. She is greatly missed, but as it’s not good for guinea pigs to be alone for too long, Hugo now has a new lady in his life: the brawny Heidi who had, until she was paired up with Hugo, refused to share her living space with another guinea pig. She couldn’t resist his chubby charms!  If you’re in the Southern Ontario region and are considering having guinea pigs as pets, please check out Piggles Guinea Pig Rescue http://pigglesrescue.com

 

Q. Has there been any progress on Kate and Baldspot and their tutorial? (Armaretta)

A. From a scripting angle, not recently. We’ve been working on an NPC scripting editor that will make it easier to develop and mod the NPC behaviours, and the tutorial needs transplanting into the new system. Once that’s in we should be able to fly through the tutorial to get it to where it was. As NPC development dials back up this is pretty much top of the list. (Lemmy)

As before, the conclusion of the opening K&B story is in the can, apart from changes that’ll have to be made for tutorial reasons given that the game has changed so, so much since the first tech demo. Away from that we’ve got plans for what they’ll do and where they’ll go next, but the particulars of exactly what they’ll be doing will very much be dependent on what we need as a tutorial at the stage of the game when they’re created. You could certainly expect one that covers survivalist/hunting stuff if it’s in the game at that point, for example. (Will)

 

Q. What are some of the major bugs holding you back from releasing the 3d sprites? (Armaretta)

Well from a code perspective its that they aren’t showing weapons, a few anim bugs, that overall detract from the models enough that it’s better to go without it for now. But more notably it causes crashes on some people’s machines randomly during play and this certainly needs to be resolved before it goes out..

 

There’s also a few clipping issues to resolve which weren’t an issue with the current models-processed-into-sprites technique since we could extremely tightly control the way they were rendered without worrying about the effect on performance. It’s not an insurmountable problem by any means, it just means things have to be modelled a little more carefully. Of course, the benefit in terms of animation scope is so huge that it’s worth this additional cost. (Andy)

 

Q. If TIS were a band who would play which instrument? and what would you sound like? (Egg Bandage Boy)

A Robert Johnson tribute band ! Mmh, I may have to talk with the team though… (Romain)

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 24th of February, 2014
 

Hello hello! Blimey, it’s Monday already (where the heck do these days go, anyway?) which means it’s time to panic about not having written a Mondoid yet and then write one.
 
This week, as well as a few little updatey nuggets, we’re going to do what we’ve wanted to do for a while and shine the spotlight onto one half of our support team and Mac aficionado, Drake “I’ve not checked whether he has a nickname” Barron (follow him on Twitter @Rathlord)! Wooo!
 
We gave Mash interview duties so it’s quite likely there’ll be questions involving either guinea pigs or pancakes *checks transcript* it’s pancakes. That’s a spoiler.
 

THE INTERVIEW


Drake wearing a hat

 

Mash: So, “Drake Barron”: has anyone ever told you (besides me) that that sounds like a superhero name?
Drake: …

Mash: I mean their real identity.
Drake: It’s been brought to my attention a few times before; I’m not sure if my manner is mild enough to be called an alter ego, though!

Mash: Describe your thrilling back-story… in twenty words or less! GO!
Drake: Oh my! Well, I live in the U.S. (originally from the south, now hailing from the frigid state of Iowa) and I’ll be 23 tomorrow. I’m a massive hobbyist – I hunt, I mountain bike, I’m a gearhead*, I love (American) football, I’m the geekiest geek you know (World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons, tinkering in programming, the whole nine yards!), and I write poetry and fiction in my free time. That’s me in a very quick nutshell!

* Editor’s note: Urban dictionary defines “gearhead” as “someone who is, like, totally into cars and that” (slightly paraphrased)

Mash: *Gasp* You’re only 22? I had no idea you were so young! Also: HAPPY EARLY BIRTHDAY [party emoticon]
Drake: Heh, yes I tend to give the impression of someone much older. I’ve been kind of an old man since I was about 17 (I read the newspaper). And thanks!

Mash: What brought you to PZ? Are you a big zombie fan?
Drake: I am a big fan of zombies as a rule. I love the lore and I feel zombies bring something to the table that no other monsters really do quite as well- a fear of our own humanity, and how much we terrify ourselves. As such I try to stay up to date on zombie movies and games, though before I found Zomboid I had been a bit disappointed by the games. When I first found PZ, I downloaded the demo and it was just instant love. I loved the crafting, I loved the visuals (thanks Mash!) and I loved the abject horror that PZ brought to the player. I didn’t register on the forums until late 2011 (I was busy playing until then), but when I joined I found a friendly community and awesome devs, and I just haven’t been able to pull myself away since then!

Mash: With all your hobbies, you seem to have a headstart on some survival techniques!
Drake: I’m a bit of a survivalist, too! I keep a kit around the house and I’m armed to the teeth. If push came to shove I could probably live in the wilderness for the rest of my life as long as I had a sharp knife with me (not that I relish the thought). I love being in the woods- it brings an overarching sense of tranquility that I don’t find elsewhere, and that’s driven me to be as passionate about hunting and survivalism (that’s actually a word?) as I am. I also owe a lot of my love for the outdoors to my father and grandfather; they took me hunting and fishing when I was young and taught me to respect and enjoy the woods. That’s a debt I’ll never be able to thank them enough for! I’ve also worked on a ranch, so dealing with nature is a bit of a must there, too.

Mash: You’ve mentioned being a big gamer before, yet you are *gasp* a MAC GUY. Make your case for the Mac as a gaming platform!
Drake: Haha, here we go then! I wouldn’t exactly recommend OS X for most gamers, but if you’re tech savvy and like a slick OS it can be a really good experience. I’m kinda weird in that I enjoy the stimulation of porting games, so having technical difficulties is always a challenge more than a problem for me.

Mash: Speaking of technical difficulties, what’s the one tech question that constantly comes up in the PZ forums that you’d like to answer here and now so that it will NEVER APPEAR AGAIN?
Drake: Ooooh such power! I’d have to say the problem some people have where the game world appears black. Thanks to the excellent EasyPickens, this problem is now dispatched quite simply by turning off Zoom in the options!

Drake: Can I interest you in a Macbook Pro?
Mash: Never!

Editor’s note: The IndieStone would like to clarify that we very much like Macs every bit as much as proper gaming PCs

Mash: I guess as a tech guy, i should ask you to display your specs.

Editor’s note: Phwoar!

Drake: Well I’ve got a couple of computers floating around the house, and I’m probably about to build another more gaming oriented computer, but the one I use most often is a MacBook Pro:
OS X 10.8
2.5 GHz Intel Core i5
8 GB DDR3 RAM
And a silly Intel HD 4000 graphics solution!

Mash: We all know you play Project Zomboid, and as you’re a DM in the community D&D games (linky), you seem like an avid RPGer in general. What draws you to these types of games?
Drake: Well I owe a large chunk of my original interest in them to my parents; they read me The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings aloud when I was just old enough to understand them, and I’ve been fascinated with fantasy ever since. RPG’s tend to really scratch that fantasy itch in all the right ways. It’s also really enjoyable to be able to jump into someone else’s shoes, and games like PZ and D&D really hit the spot for that. You get to experience what they’re experiencing, feel what they’re feeling, and I find that not only entertaining but also intellectually exciting.

Mash: Pancakes or Waffles?
Drake: Waffles of course. They’re like pancakes with better texture and perfect pockets to hold your syrup and butter. No contest!

Mash: Anything else you’d like to say?
Drake: Just a big thanks to The Indie Stone for keeping me around this long, and to the awesome community members who make my time here fun and exciting!
Mash: Aww!

And there we have it! Woo!

3D Model Update
The last few cosmetic bugs with the realtime 3D characters have now been fixed – basically, what we were seeing in previous versions were a lot of “skin poking through clothing” issues. This was a result of the fact that with the current sprites, the models get quite heavily processed before becoming game-ready and because of this, it was not necessary to be too careful with the way the base models were set up. Rendering these models in real-time, however, and all of these short-cuts taken months back become visible in-game.

There are still occasions when a teeny tiny bit of the skin can poke through, but it’s insignificant enough to not really be an issue – the only way to fix it would be to increase the polygon count of the assets which we don’t particularly want to do if we can help it. You can see the sort of extent of the issue as it is now below:
 

Arrow points at skin poking through shirt, not really a big deal

 
 
Multiplayer Update
The upcoming build 25 contains (amongst other things) some rather natty controls for administrating multiplayer servers. There’s a whole bunch of commands for controlling the game, as well as ways to administrate users. It’s worth reading the forum topic for further information (Linky), but for a sneaky-peaky at the sort of stuff you can expect, here’s a picture (click to enlargulate):

 

Woo! Ban! BAN! Ban them all with your mighty ban-hammer!

[nasKo]

Hello peeps! Time for another updatey Mondoid.

Build 25

We’re currently testing a new version of the upcoming build 25, which will see multiplayer and singleplayer unified into a glorious whole and mark the proper release of multiplayer, as well as a ton of new fixes and additions.

There are a few issues left to resolve before we could possibly release. Worst thing we could do now is put out an update which breaks the pretty stable multiplayer so we’re being very careful to make sure the next release is a good ‘un.

We apologise to all the Mac players out there still waiting for a version of MP that works for them, but the only solution is to get 25 out there and if we rush it out to get Mac people playing and bugger up, then we’d risk losing the traction the game has gained with the multiplayer. It’s frustrating but we’re so close that any particular version we upload to the testers could be the one we can put out. We’re still waiting for feedback on the latest update so who knows? It could go either way. But soon.

You can read the full patch notes here.

And read on for more details. Important additions to MP in build 25 are:

 

Admin Tools

The next release of Zomboid MP will have a bunch of sexy new admin features to help administrate servers. Of note is the ability to have your server open to all, and auto add username/passwords used to get into the server to the whitelist. This will allow server ops to cast a net out and grab as many people as they need to keep the server busy, then close the doors once their numbers are up, at which point they will be able to remove the no-good griefers and cheaters and have a large player base without all the manual time consuming white list editing. Also banning by username / IP features, and all the other features you’d expect from a player run server.

 

Soft Reset

Server operators are now able to ‘soft reset’ their server. This resets everything in the world, such as zombies, loot, blood, characters. But it leaves any map changes in effect. so zombie fortresses will still be standing, and (now much less likely) kitchen fires will still leave their mark on the world. But water and electric will return, blood stains on the walls, zombie bodies in the street, will all be cleaned up. Zombies will walk the streets again as they would in a totally fresh game.

This will hopefully allow for servers to evolve and change over time, yet for people to be able to play the early Zomboid game more often without total resets.

In future it is our hope that, along with mods, for example RingoD’s in-progress Bedford Falls…

 

 

…the game world on most servers, will before too long be so gargantuan that running out of loot or zombies on a server will take a ton more time. That along with migration systems (still in progress) trapping/hunting that are incoming, and plans for fresh spawn random profession related ‘survival kits’ there will be enough late game gameplay to keep servers running unreset indefinitely and still provide fun gameplay.

Safety!

Another key area we’re working on is the ‘safety system’, which is an optional server setting that provides friendly fire protection, as well as a way of discouraging shoot on sight. Or at least to warn of shoot-on-sighters. It’s our spin on the ‘bandit’ system other games have toyed with in one way or another.

Due to the small character sprites, its impossible for us to reflect the subtleties in characters actions to provide someone with sufficient warning that a ‘friendly’ is about to pull their gun on them and shoot them dead. We want to provide a way to simulate this, to provide some level of protection to the non-aggressors in such situations.

Namely a HUD button that defaults to ‘safety on’, and means any attacks will not hit other players. This provides safety against accidental hits when trying to help your buddies in combat. A player can switch their safety off at any time (though there is a short delay before it is disabled) at which point they will get a skull next to their name which any other player looking at them will see. Since the skull appears immediately after clicking, this means anyone looking at your character will see your malicious intent. Your body language, you reaching for your gun. Visible tells impossible to convey on tiny characters. Any character with safety turned off can be hit by a character with it on. Only two mutually ‘safety enabled’ players are safe from each other, so this enforces a moment of vulnerability to the aggressors (unless they just come in safeties off, all guns blazing of course, in which case their intent is clear from the get go and can be avoided or defended against)

Viewers of The Walking Dead should think of the scene in the bar in season 2 (kinda sorta vague spoilers). Just because someone isn’t openly hostile doesn’t mean that you can’t start to feel uneasy and anticipate a hostile move. People hoping to gun down their companions will need to be clever, wait for a moment when the others have their back turned, to give them the second or two it takes to turn safety off, without their skull icon betraying their intent. It gives you a safety net against those you don’t trust. If you never turn your back, or lower your gun, for a second, you’ve got a good chance of putting them down if you’re careful. This in itself gives a slight safety net to players to not have to ‘kill on sight’ just in case.

Server option variants will allow for usernames not to be displayed when your safety is disabled. Like privateer ships sailing skull and crossbones to hide their nationality, this system could be optionally used as a more in-depth PvP system, with players able to travel incognito as raiders without their usernames being known.

It won’t be for everyone, and we fully imagine ‘hardcore servers’ having it disabled, but hope it will provide for a nice mix of PvP and co-op where you’re able to rely on your character’s perception skills to alert you to hostile PvP intent and encourage ‘cold wars’ with two hostile groups inhabiting the same place without necessarily shooting at each other (until the moment it all kicks off).

Only thing we’ve got to work on now is making the feature’s functionality clear to new players. Speaking of which:

 

Tutorial Incoming!

Kate and Baldspot are not ready to re-enter Muldraugh yet, but even so, the ‘tutorial’ they provide is, out of necessity of keeping the narrative nice and interesting, very vague and high level. We don’t want to interrupt the story with a million pop-ups explaining every aspect of the game. We have however decided that we clearly need to do more, beyond the Survival Guide that no one reads, to guide players through their first game of Zomboid.

As such, we’ve been working on a more solid tutorial which will take place on the Last Stand map, that takes a player hand-by-hand through looting, eating, drinking, climbing through windows, combat (STOP MOUSE SPAMMING!) and other things.

This is still in progress, and may not hit build 25. But it’s not far off.

 

 

That’s All Folks

Not much else to say, apart from to thank everyone for their support, and that the reaction to multiplayer has been phenomenal. To all those who aren’t interested in multiplayer, just know that its addition has clearly opened many doors to the Indie Stone in terms of potentially expanding in the future to bring those single player features you crave a lot faster. The game and development team have never been in a more stable place or better state of mind and there is no doubt that getting MP out was anything but the best move for the future of the game generally.

It’s also becoming clear that levering the system set in place for supporting multiple players is going to be of great benefit to finishing off the NPC system. We’re still light on details about NPCs because we don’t want to create buzz about something that’s still a long while away. But long while away or not, NPCs and meta-game have never been closer than they are right now, and hopefully MP’s swifty addition to the game as well as the build becoming more stable and polished, shows that we’ve managed to pick up pace a lot in the past few months and we intend to do that moreso going forward.

Love you all!

Indie Stone

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 10th of March, 2014
 
Hello everyone! This week something a little different, as we invite the awesome Mathas to ringlead an informal dev chat with Lemmy, Binky and Mash as they discuss various topics related to the past week of development, as well as some tasty Mondoid morsels about the future of Zomboid.

 

 

We would love your feedback on this (though be nice!) as we wonder whether we could make this a more regular occurrence. We hope it will provide a much more in-depth look at what’s going on with Zomboid development than a blog-post can ever cover, us talking freely and loosely about stuff instead of trying to plan and think of what to write about every Monday (which usually eats up a considerable amount of the day for at least one of us), as well as making the whole Mondoid process a little more fun–though obviously we are aware that it’s a little more difficult for non-English speakers, but then we’re not sure how many non English speakers keep up with the Mondoids, so we’d love to hear from you.

 

Last week we did a Reddit AMA and were blown away by the loveliness of everyone that took part. We answered a whole bunch of questions there, so you may want to check it out.

 

We also finally got a new bug tracker, this time integrated right into the forums, and we promise to stick to it this time. If you find bugs on PZ we would much appreciate you taking part in posting bugs there to help us log and systematically destroy them.

 

Other things of note. If you pine for the original PZ alpha-map, and are running the experimentalbuild 25 (which should be going live proper soonish) check out the forums and you will find the first test version of RingoD’s new map mod, Bedford Falls (points to those who get the reference, and it’s not It’s A Wonderful Life) – It’s not just the alpha map (carefully reimagined by bobheckling), but a whole slew of new cells containing a lot of community buildings as well as a ton of RingoD’s own work. Nostalgia abound, we’re really excited to see it finally out there.

 

As usual, you can get Mathas’ dissection of this week’s Mondoid tomorrow, where this week he gets to comment on a Mondoid largely including himself. What fun!

 

That’s all folks!

 

Lots of love,

 

The Indie Stone

[nasKo]

Mondoid , 17th of March, 2014

 

Happy Mondoid wanderer. This week has been an exciting one as it’s been Mash’s annual visit to Newcastle. Having arrived from the icy wastes of Canada, it’s now traditional to fend off her jetlag with wholesome water while others partake of caffeinated beverages. Also on the table: while excitedly talking about Zomboid’s future, including NPCs, the metagame, and a UI overhaul (all of which we will get into in Mondoids to come). It’s also here that we extol the culturally significant virtues of Northern culture, like having a Greggs on every street corner.

More of which later – first though, the house keeping!

 

BUILD STATUS

A new version of build 25 is currently in testing, with not only 3D models, but a whole host of fixes and polish to both single and multiplayer. Finally features such as quitting to main menu are fully integrated into the game. Now it’s just a case of seeing nothing is broken, before we bump the new build to the I Will Backup My Save branch, and hopefully onward to a general release. Since people are playing a reasonably stable version of multiplayer, and because of the risk of segregating players on various branches into different servers, we just want to be extra careful that we’re not breaking anything.

For numerous reasons, we’ve set ourselves a cast iron deadline that both Steam official and Desura must be updated before we head down to Rezzed. That’s the closest to an actual ETA you’ve had from us in a while.

 

REZZED

The Indie Stone will be at Rezzed this year – and will be hugging players and strangers alike between 27th and 30th March at the NEC in Birmingham. (Well, a few miles outside of Birmingham next to the airport really.) We will be doing a talk/panel with Dean ‘Rocket’ ‘Day Z’ ‘Nice man’ Hall on the Sunday, while on the Saturday our very own Will Porter will be sitting in front of a worryingly large audience to chat horror gaming alongside lovely Dean (again) and Al Hope the Creative Director of Alien: Isolation. It’d be lovely to see you there, and if you want to meet up we’d really, really like that.

 

COOKING REVOLUTION

There’s been a lot of English vs. French cooking outrage this week between Binky and Romain (“You use eggs in burgers?!”) as they discuss and design the new cooking system that Romain’s been beavering away implementing this week. We never knew that making a zombie game would demand so much bechamel discussion. Nevertheless, Zomboid’s culinary advancement is well underway.

 

1) The new recipes!

Now, as an example, to make a soup you’ll need a pot with water, and can add all kinds of ingredients (either raw or cooked), each affecting hunger reduction.

For example, if I want to create soup with some Chicken, it’ll be a soup with 15 hunger reduction. The Chicken I use will decrease by 15, meaning I can add Chicken more than once (Chicken has a base hunger reduction of 40). If you have a Chicken with only 5 hunger reduction left, you can still use it, but it will only reduce the soup’s hunger reduction by 5, and will count as 1 ingredient.

Every time you add 1 item, in addition to hunger reduction, you’ll get some happiness/boredom reduction, but if you keep adding the same ingredient, you’ll remove the bonus and in fact create unhappiness/boredom. The bonus depends on cooking level: a better chef will be able to add more ingredients, and more of each ingredient without negative effects.

 

2) More Cooking skill effects!

Cooking skill doesn’t affect the hunger reduction of recipes, but will affect how much is “used”. For example, a skilled chef will be able to use a smaller portion of chicken to yield the same amount of recipe, simulating how they can cook with less wastage. Similarly, cooks at a sufficiently high level will be able to cut away rotten parts of food, and so be able to use small portions of rotten ingredients.

Cooking skill will also influence the time to add ingredient in your recipe.

So that’s it! You can soon look forward to baking pies and making Dagwood sandwiches in PZ.

Until next time!

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 24th of March, 2014
 

Yes, we’re trying to juggle between getting packed for Rezzed this Friday (though we’re arriving on the Thursday to meet a whole bunch of awesome people prior to the show itself), trying to think of something to say on our panel with the DayZ folks on the Sunday, and getting the IWBUMS branch of the game to a state it can be released proper.

As such this Mondoid will be another quick and dirty affair. A few quick points:
 

IWBUMS 3D Model Branch
We’ve finally got the first version of the 3D models out, currently residing on the I Will Backup My Save branch (IWBUMS), and can be found here. The feedback has been very encouraging about the 3D models, with much less controversy than the drawn sprites to pre-rendered model transition so long ago and no notable FPS issues or compatibility issues (except a few exceptional cases which we’re confident we’ll resolve).
As the name of the branch suggests, if you’d like to try this out, then please back up your saves, or otherwise accept the consequences. We’re getting close but there are a few remaining issues to iron out. As we said before it’s a must that we get this out officially before we head off to Rezzed, so that pretty much confirms a release before Thursday. AN ETA? With my reputation??

Other Stuff
Make sure you pack your phone charger this time.

Oh, train tickets. Damn it I knew there was something…

Sorry, got sidetracked there. We can’t wait to see all you amazing folks who are headed down to Rezzed. Sorry for the rather silly and mind-bogglingly small Mondoid this week, but as you can probably tell we’re up to our ears in things to do, and since there is a pretty new version of Zomboid available, we don’t feel too guilty about it.

Lots of love,

Indie Stone

[nasKo]

Mondoid, Day of the Tassel, 2014
 
Hi there Mondoider. As this is being typed the Indie Stone and various much-hugged community members are scurrying home from Birmingham – to Newfoundland, to Wales, to Brighton, to Finland, to Germany and all manner of other far-flung locations. Even Newcastle.
 
It’s been a great few days, but more of this later as first we’ve got an apology to make.
 
As we’re sure you’re aware the plan was to elevate the latest build from IWBUMS testing and into the official Steam download before Rezzed. Sadly, although it’s still free for anyone to test out, there were still some compatibility kinks that needed a fix at the tail-end of last week – so this didn’t happen.
 
There’s still a few (very few) graphics cards that get bamboozled at the new player and zombie models, and making the build official would have been silly indeed while we were all away, not to mention during a Steam Daily Sale.
 
As such, once the team has recovered from Rezzed, getting this fixed up and both Steam and Desura updated will be our priority.
 
In the mean-time why not entertain yourself with some fun and games from Rezzed? One of the best things about the show this year was our team doing some survival bonding with our friends in the Day Z team. We even did a panel with Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall about our thoughts on zombie-kind.
You can give it a watch here:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=8jqfWDbVNJ4#t=4159
 
Elsewhere our very own Will Porter was on a panel about fear and horror in games alongside Dean Hall (recurring theme, this one), Dying Light developer Maciej Binkowski and Al Hope of Alien Isolation fame. You can give that a squiz too, if you like.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=x0wXUQb2zSs#t=712
 
The Indie Stone’s personal highlight, however, was witnessing long-time PZ supporter and survivor extraordinaire Twiggy streaming Zomboid live from the show floor alongside Chris. This was on the main page of Twitch, no less, and seeing our favourite Newfoundlander taking his rightful place among the great and the good of Twitchkind was amazing. Our eternal thanks to everyone who made it possible. You can give his stream a peek here! We pop up at the 2:52:30 mark!
 
http://www.twitch.tv/twitch/b/515602827
 
Thanks to everyone we met at Rezzed! you were all amazing. See you again soon for Tooks Day 2015, we hope!
 
PS: Please pay attention to our twitter feed tomorrow for an exciting series of April Fools tweets!
 
PPS: Sorry Romain for chopping your head off, we’re too tired to mess about with that damn header image any more! So here it is in full:
 

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 07th of April, 2014

 

Happy Mondoid Zomboiders. This week we’re still badgering away trying to get a version of build 25 that we can finally get out to the wider public. A new version is going into closed testing tonight, and we’re hoping to get another I Will Backup My Save (IWBUMS) version out soon after assuming nothing explodes. It seems Easy may have sussed out the troublesome crashes a ton of people were getting. (Damn stencil buffers!)

To while away the time until that happens, we thought we’d throw a few questions at NPC scripter, map modding Geordie extraordinare RingoD123, aka Paul Ring, who can be seen here posing with some fella we met at Rezzed (<3<3<3) in a picture we stole off of his Facebook page!



 So, for the uninitiated, what is Bedford Falls?
Bedford Falls is the first community map mod for the latest version of PZ. Its a rather large town/city that also incorporates the “original” map from much earlier versions of PZ that people have been clamouring to see back in the game.
 

Oh, and also for the unititiated – who are you Paul ‘RingoD’ Ring?
Well, my name is Paul (RingoD over the interwebs) and I first got involved with PZ back in the first alpha tech demo. It was the first game which inspired me to start a YouTube channel, and also the first game I ever made mods for. After speaking to and meeting the team a few times I was lucky enough to be asked to join the team to help with NPC’s and Stories, taking the awesome dialogue created by the spiffing Will Porter and scripting it up to be usable in game, as well as the many scenarios/events you can expect to come across in the future.
 

Why’ve you called it Bedford Falls? Is it because Will is from Bedford, and that’s a cool market town just north of London with a badass Nandos?
Unfortunately Bedford Falls isn’t named after a cool little market town with a badass Nandos! My favourite TV program of all time is Red Dwarf, and in one of the Red Dwarf books (Better Than Life), the boys from the dwarf end up stuck in a computer game (without knowing) where the world is built using the players own subconscious. As it happens, Listers’ (one of the Dwarfers)  favourite film is, Its A Wonderful Life, so the game re-creates the town from the film, which is called Bedford Falls, and was the first name to pop into my head!
 

How has it been constructed? Who’s been involved?
The map was constructed using the Mapping Tools available on the forums ( http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/4674-map-tools/ ). I based the road system on my previous map mod that was made for an earlier version of PZ. Then, with the help of awesome forum members, BobHeckling and Japer, we went about converting all of the buildings from the old map mod to work on the new version, which included adding proper room names to every room so that the correct loot could spawn and NPC’s could recognise what kind of room they are in once they are back in game. By the time this was done there had been somewhat of an explosion of new buildings on the forums from various forum members (956Texas, BeastlyBeans, BobHeckling, DoctahWong, DoubleBrain, Grivcin, Japer, Jinja, LeoIvanov, Liva98989, Maklane, Mendonca, NeutralNZ, Phex, Pridelost, RSDWorker, Sieben, Thuztor, Veged and Viceroy to name a few) meaning I now had a rather large pool of buildings to draw from to build the town with.
 

Make us on a tourist tour! Which places do you think PZ survivors would most want to visit?
(coming into town from the North) Out of your right window you will see Kate and Bob’s original neighbourhood, while in the distance, out of your left window you may recognise the Mansion from the original Resident Evil, which has lovingly been called Bedford Manor over on Blindcoders awesome, fully zoomable map ( http://pzmap.crash-override.net/?desc=BedfordFalls ). Heading further south sees us enter the town/city centre, where there’s a lot of loot to be had if you can navigate around the hordes of zombies.

Futher south again is Bedord Universities’ botany building, the first building in Bedford Falls to feature a sky bridge over a road, and after a hard day’s learning, why not whet your whistle at “Cherno’s” corner bar just outside. If we headed East and/or South from this point you would see rather large residential areas, which make up a large portion of the population of Bedford Falls. Travelling West from the Uni building however eventually brings us to Bedford Falls 5 star hotel, which even has outdoor pools and a garden, with a small police station and all too familiar fire station close at hand.

Travelling west again leads us to Bedford Falls Industrial park and then on to another large residential area just before you leave town. Just south of here is the part of town that has a lot of horror stories attributed to it, thanks to Bedord Falls’ Insane Asylum, a massive, now abandoned asylum for the mentally ill and unstable. Running around here at night will almost certainly see you having many a sleepless night after the fact!


 
Thank you Ladies and Gentleman, this concludes your tour of Bedford Falls, if you’d like to find your way back to Muldraugh, head west 2 or 3 kilometres from the Asylum, or alternatively, West Point is located about the same distance to the north west of town.
 

What’s your favourite place in Bedford Falls?
That’s a hard one, I would have to say its between 3 places. I love the Resident Evil mansion and how it has a nice long driveway and is hidden behind some dense trees. Then theres the 5 star hotel which looks absolutely beautiful, and last but not least, the super scary asylum, which is actually the size of Kate and Bob’s whole original neighbourhood.
 

What next for the Community Map project? How big is it now, and how big is it going to get?
I’m currently working on Version 2 of Bedford Falls. I am replacing some of the buildings I have used more than once (mainly houses and some shops etc) with new buildings from various map modders on our forums as well as quashing any bugs with buildings etc that I have come across so far. I am also ”fleshing out” the 4 empty road cells that lead north from Bedford Falls with new military buildings/areas from the forums.

The current version of Bedford Falls is 25 cells big and has 700 buildings with around 7500 different rooms. V2 currently has about 780 buildings with about 8700 different rooms and should be ready for testing in the next few days. Once testing is (more or less) complete I will then be creating the Mega Map Mod, which at first will be incorporating both Bedford Falls and the awesome Dreadwood ( http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/7027-released-dreadwood-16/ ) alongside Muldraugh and West Point (that’s 34 extra, full cells!). Then, as more full cell or full town mods are created they will also be added.

The next full town I will be building, with help from the community, is called Newtown, a 100 cell (4 times bigger than Bedford Falls) dense city surrounded by large industrial areas to the east and west and huge amounts of residential to the north and south ( http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/6834-newtown-wip/ ). Because of the scale of this city it will probably take a while to complete, so you can probably expect to see a couple of smaller towns/areas in the meantime too, not just from me, but also from the wealth of talented building/map makers on the forums.
 

How can Zomboid players who aren’t that mod-minded get to play Bedford Falls? Is it in both SP and MP? Step by step instructions please!
Anyone interested in adding Bedford Falls to their game can do so by downloading the mod from the following thread: http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/6672-bedford-falls-test-v1/ and following the instructions to install. The map works both in SP and MP. If you want to start a MP server with Bedford Falls installed, simply install the same way as you would in SP and then start a new server.
 

How can people join in with the community map-making effort?
Anyone who is wanting to contribute to the community map mods can do so simply by creating buildings and/or full areas and posting them on the Mapping part of our forums ( http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/forum/64-mapping/ ). There are already some great tutorials both in text format (http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/5075-mapping-guide-v02/ ) and YouTube videos ( https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP83OxbJU9-HvB16MC2wmIdoFsryXsYeF , https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP83OxbJU9-G3Pb23LgRz_NJsKZGPikE7 ) made by map mod maker extraordinaire to help people get started with creating single buildings or even full maps.
 

Anything else you’d like to add Paul ‘RingoD’ Ring?
Look out in the near future for Bedford Falls V2 and also for The first iteration of The Mega Map Mod which will include, for starters, Bedford Falls and Dreadwood alongside Muldraugh and West Point. Oh, and for those saying Bedford Falls is quite easy going in terms of zombie numbers, V2 will change that so don’t get too comfortable!

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 14th of April, 2014

 

Welcome to the Monday Zomboid newsburst!

 

A fresh internal testing build was put out last Tuesday, with RJ’s fishing system entering test procedures on Friday. EasyPickins has been thundering out fix after fix and things are really shaping up well. We really need to find a way to get a nice text list of SVN changelists to really show the gravity of this stuff as the changelist for the next build should be flipping immense.

 

Mash has been continuing on her work on the next major map expansion, so while you may not hear much from her side of things, when it comes around it’s going to be a huge deal. Though she is perhaps starting to sympathise with all those times she was all ‘Andy, have you got those cells yet?’ now she’s in charge of 100% of the process of map creation. Andy has been using his map-free time well, busy with some new combat animations with which we hope to drastically increase the feel of combat in the game, making it more intuitive and visceral.

 

Finally Chris is back in the world of NPCs, where he shall probably remain for some time until we’re ready to start showing stuff, and is preparing a whole bunch of stuff to hand over to RingoD and Will, along with EasyPickin’s awesome NPC flowchart scripting tool.

 

In terms of features currently being fed into internal testing, though, let’s turn to Romain and his exciting fish-based adventures. (Please note – all Romain’s Frenchisms have all been Englishised by an untrained translator. Though some early screenshots may have escaped this process!)

 

 

First things first, what’s happening with the new cooking system that you’ve been implementing?

The first feedback from the testers was pretty good – the system’s way more fun and a lot easier to use than the old one. With a little creativity you can make a lot of cool stuff. It’s not perfect, and there’s still a few bugs I need to eradicate – but they’re fairly small ones. Next up I’ll be adding in extra recipes like pasta, sauces in pans, pizza… with the new system it’s all pretty easy to implement, and something that modders can add recipes to easily.So I saw you wondering about doing hunting/trapping next, how come fishing got the nod?

 

Did I mention I’m now on twitter? [Editors note: He is you know! @rj_pz] Well, after a little talk on Twitter, I decided that fishing would be way easier and faster to code than trapping. That said, a lot of work on trapping is already in the can – it just needs a fair amount of extra work that’s mainly due to the multiplayer. In terms of hunting, well Andy has worked on some new animations but we’ll clearly need to implement animals with their own behaviours first. Chris has developed some lua driven animal behaviour code that is a part of the NPC scripting system which we will be able to use for such a thing.

 

So yeah, fishing! What a lovely morning activity during a zombie apocalypse! Grab a beer, prepare your bait, smash a zombie’s head in and ready your fishing rod…

 

 

So many questions: How does it work? What do you need? How long will it take? Is it the same as your old mod?

Well that’s why it doesn’t took me long to code it! I took the old mod code (which was never released by the way!) and then I adapted it, because it was originally built for good ol’ 0.2.0q. Then I added MANY new things.

 

So basically, first you have to find a fishing rod (or craft it), grab some bait (worms, little fish, plastic lures) find a lake/river (so, near West Point basically) and start fishing.

 

How long will it take to catch a fish?

Well, it depend on your luck, it’s quite hard to determine and that’s one of the main things we’re testing for at the moment. It needs to take a while, but not too long to be boring – but not too short a time for it to be an over-powered food source.

 

I like to think about the Zelda’s fishing system, in Ocarina of Time. I remember that being really cool, and in itself it reminded me of my childhood fishing : a cool moment ! No zombies back then though…

Oh gosh, I wish we had zombies back then…

 

So yeah, currently in testing until it’s fun – and once it’s releasd we can work on fish nets, different sorts of fish etc.

 

 

How easy will it be to fish, won’t it be an infinite food source? How scarce are items you’ll need?

It’s ‘easy’ in that it doesn’t require any player skill, it’s RPG stylish so you don’t need to press a key when you hear a sound to catch something. It’s a timed action, and you wait. It’s also made tricky because your line can break (depending on your skill, luck and the size of the fish), and on top of that you’ll have to craft fishing line for your fishing rod.

 

Items you can use to craft your own rod won’t be that rare – some wood, twine (or fishing twine : more resistant), bait (paperclip, nail…) and lure.

 

As for the ‘infinite food source’ issue, I plan to add some kind of “fish population” in the area, so the more you fish, the less chance you’ll have to find a fish. You’ll have to wait for the fishing population to come back. It’ll be probably changeable with the sandbox option though!

 

 

So is Fishing a skill like Carpentry etc?

Yes, this fishing skill will affect the chance of catching something with a plastic lure, the chance of the fishing line breaking, the quality of the crafted fishing rod etc. As for developing the skill, well you’ll get points by… wait for it…. Fishing! But even a fish that gets away will give you some XP towards it.

 

 

What sort of fish will we all be catching?

All the varieties of fish you can find in Kentucky, with different sizes/weights to add a “fishing contest” feel to it. Who will catch the biggest pike? Will you cook it, or keep it as a trophy? When it comes to cooking, you can cook the fish straight away to fight your hunger (hunger reduction will change according to the size/weight of the fish) or maybe cut it into fillets so you can use it in multiple recipes. The list of fish going into the first iteration includes the following: Catfish, bass, trout, pike, walleye and crappie fish. And yes, a crappie fish is a real fish! Google it!

 

 

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 21st of April, 2014

 

Hello Zomboiders! First of all, we have an I WILL BACKUP MY SAVE branch of Project Zomboid available as of right now!

 

Build 26!

Build 26 is ‘kinda’ here and we’re hoping to push this one to official if at all possible, so please let us know how you get on. As usual, you can read how to get in on the IWBUMS branch as well as read the changelist here. And as usual, remember to backup your saves, and if you partake in testing this build you accept the consequences.

 

Where did the branch go?

When we ‘retired’ an IWBUMS version, to save people having server incompatibilities or losing their games, we started making new branches for them such as build25a, build25b etc.

Problem is we forgot to password those ones, so a bunch of people found these branches and did not know they were unstable (despite the description ‘UNSTABLE’) and got a bit angry. As such we were forced to push these branches into the same password as IWBUMS to try and stem the complaints from those who happened upon the branch without typing in the password. If you have found your build has reverted to default and are wondering why, then this is why. Please go here and read on how to get at the branch again and apologies for the inconvenience.

 

What are people up to?

The usual. Lemmy be NPC’in, Mash be mappin’, Binky be animatin’ and toolin’ (and it’ll be his birthday tomorrow! weeee!), Romain be trappin’ and Easy be fixin’. At the moment we’re all just plugging away, so sorry if some of us have been a bit quiet on the forums as of late. We’re really eager to make some big pushes forward, and there’s some very exciting stuff in the distance that we’re eager to get closer to.

Here’s a little list of stuff we want to get in in the near, medium and long term future. A lot of these we’ve experimented or started. Some we’re close to finishing, some we’re not so close, and some are just an idea:

 

 

NPCS – Obv. As usual these are the most complex and the most anticipated, so they will be out when they are out. We’ll try get them to you ASAP but it’ll take as long as it takes.

 

Professions Overhaul – These have remained static for so long now, it’s about time we started filling out the character creation with more professions.

 

Trapping - Very very much in progress by Romain and probably not long until its out there.

 

Hunting - A little more complex than the above, but Chris has written a lua driven library for use with NPCs that will hopefully make this a quick one to implement.

 

Vehicles - We’re making plans and have done a few experiments, and there is very little except time to implement to get in our way of implementing these. This will likely be the off ‘break’ task by Chris and Andy to be done in bits and pieces over the next couple of months.

 

Final UI Overhaul - As much as we’d love to just call the UI done, it still draws way too many criticisms and frustrations. We have some big plans for the inventory which should make the game both more in-depth inventory management, yet more intuitive to use. We’ll see how it goes. It’s still in the design stage at the moment, as we don’t want to risk falling into any of the same traps we fell into with the last UI revamp.

 

New Combat - With 3D models, we’ll be able to do a lot more with the combat system. Think different swing angles, physics based hit mechanics, better hit reactions, potentially rag-doll etc, less focus on ‘charging’ and more on positional and timing to keep depth but make more intuitive and visceral / attractive combat.

 

Sneaking - The planned sneaking mechanics will transform the looting gameplay dramatically. Imagine back to wall, peeking around corners, crouching behind walls, running between cover, all to avoid the horde’s attention.

 

Map Expansion - The next map expansion is going quite the distance to the north! After this massive expansion is done, we will be finishing off all the blank or road layouty sections of the map, and try and get the entire map feeling complete, and with plenty of stuff to discover in every direction.

 

That’s all for this week, so why not give build 26 a try?

Oh wait, you did. Hello? Anyone there?

[nasKo]

Mondoid, 28th of April, 2014

 

It’s time for another Mondoid, and due to unlucky circumstances, it falls to me, MashPotato, to interview… MashPotato. Yes, it’s a Mondoid of talking to myself!

 

Mash: So, how are you Mash? Long time no talk!

Mash: Yes, it’s been a while! I’ve been fine, it finally stopped snowing last week–

Mash: No one cares about your weather!

Mash: : (

Mash: So what’s happening with the PZ map?

Mash: Well, I’m currently working on a pretty sizeable expansion of the map. Unlike the west Point expansion, this is more of a diffuse addition, with several new areas, generally east and north of West Point. I’ll call it… New Points? We haven’t come up for a name for it all yet, so I’ll call it that for now.  New Points is a mix of locations that would have both high and low zombie population densities.

Mash: How annoyingly vague!

Mash: When it comes to map stuff, annoyingly vague is how I roll, baby! I like to keep map stuff under wraps until release, so people can discover new areas for themselves. However, I will say that some of the new areas are in keeping with RJ’s recent addition of fishing (which you can read about here ) and our future plans for hunting.

 

 

Mash: Wow, a pic! And I didn’t even ask for one!

Mash: And here’s ANOTHER!

 

Mash: So you can see (it’s the interviewee talking now, by the way) just from those two pics that there’s a mix of locations in New Points.

Mash: What are you most excited about seeing in-action?

Mash: In general, I’m just looking forward to seeing the map get bigger so people have more of a reason to migrate from one place to another, especially now that it’s possible for players to survive for longer periods. More specifically, there are some places that have more nooks and crannies and alleys, which I think would be a great location for battles between survivor groups in multiplayer. It will be cool to see that play out!

Mash: What sort of place?

Mash: You’ll see!

Mash: Well, That’s all the time we have for this week’s Mondoid! Join us next week when hopefully I won’t be talking to myself–

Mash: IT’S A MALL.

[nasKo]

Happy Bank Holiday Mondoid everyone! [Foreign types: on some days of the year in the UK the banks all shut down, so everyone else is forced to have a day off. Unless of course you work on a zombie game, or if you work on the London Underground. Although the latter does give it a good go.]

Quite a ‘getting on with it’ update this week. Mash is continuing to prepare for the ‘Other Points’ map expansion which may or may not contain a Mall. (It does!) Chris continues with NPC work, and Andy’s animating all manner of new moves for zeds and survivors alike.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing of note in Mondoidton.

Build 26
Build 26 is now part of the beta branch on Steam – so no IWBUMS password is required. We still have some compatibility issues on a teeny tiny subset of cards for EasyPickins to build a trap for and ensnare, but once their tiny necks have been wringed we’ll be in a state to push it to stable on Steam – and update on Desura.

 

Humbly Desura-y Widget-y business
If you’re already part of the PZ crowd then this information’s a bit redundant BUT this week there are two new ways to buy Project Zomboid. Huzzah!

First off there’s our spangly new direct purchase Desura widget on our website:

http://projectzomboid.com/blog/buy-download/.

This is an awesome thing to see from Desura, and we’re really excited to see if this will bring a lot more people Desura’s way, ’cause we love those peoples! You can buy direct for our page with just a slight detour Paypal’s way, getting a steam key and direct download links right away.  So if you talk to any indies, please let them know this is a thing now, as it may tempt a few devs to jump on Desura — something that’s good for everyone and that we’d love to see.

 

Second off, after community demand and a few chats with the fundamentally lovely chaps at the Humble Bundle, steam keys for PZ will be available for purchase on the Humble Store imminently. Please watch our twitter, or their website, and we’ll tell you when we hit!
 
Exciting times and many more opportunities to tempt survivors to their certain deaths in Muldraugh, KY!

Trapping and murdering Kentucky wildlife
Finally, over to Romain with news on his trapping system!

“I’m continuing with the survivalism features that we’re adding: trapping.

“The way it works is that you have to build traps (snare, cage, bird trap etc) or find one ( like a mouse trap), and then set them in the area of your choice. Depending on the area you choose (town, forest, deep forest) you’ll then catch the relevant animals. So good luck trapping a rabbit in a town zone, for example!”

“To attract an animal, you have to add bait to your trap – whether it’s carrots, peanuts or anything in-between. (Not Spiffo!) It’ll be up to you to find out which bait works the best for the different sorts of animals you can capture – rabbits, birds, squirrels, mice and more.”

“You’ll have to check your trap every day to be sure your bait is still fresh, and still there! Or, of course, that you’ve caught something and it’s not already escaped, or been taken by another survivor!

“Oh, and of course all this comes a brand new skill: Trapping! (Surprise!)”

 

 

 

 

REMEMBER, YOU CAN NOW SUBSCRIBE with several options to receive either release notification e-mails, unstable test release notifications, and even receive Mondoids right to your e-mail every week!

Click here to sign up!

[nasKo]

It’s, errr, out. EEEK! We mean proper build 26 actually out on Steam right now. It’s been a while since we’ve done that, so we’re preparing for fireworks one way or another. As such this will be a short and functional Mondoid, we’re afraid!
If you want to find out what is in Build 26, please look at the changelist here.

 

Desura
We’ll be looking to get Desura updated tonight, providing nothing completely explodes in fireballs. Hurrah!!!

 

Propane Tanks
Fancy a barbecue but the power no worky? EasyP has you covered!

 

Maptastic Testing!
The new map area is now being tested! Isn’t that exciting? Well, it’s not quite there yet. We’ve still got to lay down the item distributions and fix a few more bugs before its ready for everyone so people aren’t falling through escalators at the mall and finding bags of gravel in all the stores. We’ll let you know when we fix this stuff up and people can no doubt get to play the new map cells pretty soonish!

 

Office Plans
We’ve finally decided to gone go and do it! After over 3 years of bedroom coding, arting and writing, the PZ Newcastle team are looking to set down roots in an office building some place! This is very exciting, as it means much more regular collaboration between the Newcastle team, and less lonely development, which can only be good for the game! Especially NPCs, since Lemmy and RingoD will be in the same room like every day talking NPC scripting and whatnot. Hurrah!

We’ll post more on this when we know more, as at the moment we’re still in the hunting phase. One thing’s for sure, and that is as far as coffee machines go, no expense will be spared!

[nasKo]

OH NO it’s a Mondoid written by your least-favourite Mondoid writterer, Binky. Sorry but, you know, we have to share this stuff out occassionally to give the only person actually qualified to write words which don’t compile (that’s Will, in case it wasn’t obvious – Lemmy’s words mostly compile just fine) a break from time to time.

 

The Indie Stone, United Kingdom

So. Hmm… right, yes. First thing – we mentioned we were getting an office, but this Mondoid I can present photographic evidence. Quite how much this affects our status as indie developers is a little unclear at this stage. There are glass walls, so I imagine working in our underpants is a little inadvisable – at least in the short-term.

 

Forgive the mess but we’ve only just got the desks built – also, this image is a rare opportunity to see what Paul looks like when he’s not wearing a hat. He looks mostly the same except without a hat, surprisingly. The room definitely needs more Spiffo, but we’ll get to that in time. Still, it’s pretty awesome and we’re chuffed to bits.

The Indie Stone, France

Romain has also been beavering away expanding the trapping stuff BUT before we get to that, there’s something MUCH more important to discuss. Yes, if you thought we’d already devoted way too much time to the “Pancakes vs Waffles” argument, the “should you put egg in your beef burger patty mix?” discussion (the answer is yes) is giving it a run for its money.

Romain, however, has two important characteristics which impact heavily on this debate. Firstly, he’s French (I’ll leave it entirely up to you to decide if and how that’s actually important). Secondly, he’s in control of implementing the recipes into Zomboid which means he can sneakily decide to omit eggs and not tell us about it.

So given that he has, frankly, horrifically abused his recipe-implementing priviledges AND only today openly mocked us via Twitter by asserting that Spiffo burgers themselves do not contain egg, I thought I’d abuse my blog-writing priviledges to retaliate. So HA! HA, Romain, HA! I have included evidence below:

 

 

Where was I? Oh yes, trapping.

So, when Romain isn’t ruining perfectly good recipes he’s implementing trapping. We covered this fairly in-depth a couple of Mondoids ago but we’d like to show you a screen showing you the way that the “zoning” works. Zones are used to identify what sort of thing should be where – it’s a similar system to the way that distributing loot works in that you need control over kitcheny stuff mostly appearing in kitchens and not bathroom cabinets.

So on this picture of Muldraugh you can see the wildlife zones as they exist so far. In the more built up areas (more red) there’d be less wildlife. The sorts of zones we have in the game include town, road, forest, vegetation, deep forest, trailer park, etc. If you intend to make a map mod, you’ll need to place these zones in the World Editor.

 

The Indie Stone, Canada

Once upon a time, we had items physically displaying on shelves and while that was quite nice in theory what it actually resulted in was a bit of a mess. The inventory items weren’t really designed to appear on shelves so you ended up with weirdly positioned items which weren’t scaled particularly accurately relative to each other (the icons are designed to be readable in your inventory screen so all occupy similar space regardless of physical size). It was also messy and fiddly to click. So we ditched that with the result that the world felt a little empty. You’d click on an empty shelf to find it chock full of books, boxes of nails, etc. Clearly we needed some way to tell empty shelves from full shelves at a distance.

What we’ve decided upon is multiple versions of the container assets – empty, half-full, full – so that you can tell the difference between well-stocked and unstocked containers from a distance, even if the items displayed aren’t exact. While it would be nice to see everything 1:1, as I’ve said this results in a bit of a mess in practice whereas this way, Mash gets to draw nice neat alternate assets and everything looks a little swankier as a result. You can see an image of this from within the game below:

I should note that in that image, we’ve deliberately set the buildings to have a large amount of loot. Buildings will not tend to be as well stocked as that in the actual game.

Other News

Thanks to everyone who bought Zomboid during the Humble Store Spring Sale, we were invited to participate in the “review sale”. If I’m honest, I’m not 100% sure what a “review sale” is, but that’s what they called it in the email and I don’t suppose it really matters. What *is* important is you can snap PZ up for less *and* support charity for another day or two. Hooray!

You can find the Humble Store here!

 

The final thing I’d like to say is a gentle reminder that our swanky e-mail announcement thingummywhatsit is up and running so you can get a notification of when we do stable builds, unstable builds, Mondoids, etc tenderly deposited into your favourite e-mail delivery system.

[nasKo]

Good Heavens, it only feels like a microsecond since I wrote last week’s Mondoid and, if I’m honest, that one was a bit of a struggle. Yep that’s right, it’s Binky again. I’m sorry.

It’s been a bit of a “stuff’s been happening but it’s all a bit behind the scenes”-y this week, which unfortunately means it’s a little bit tricky to go into much depth and I’m pretty much screwed in terms of finding an appropriate image to use for the blog header. Hence this one.

Tease #1

Romain is hard at work developing an in-game multiplayer server interface, so that you’ll be able to find public servers easily and also get a little bit of info about them before you attempt to connect, such as whether it’s an open server, how many players are connected – that sort of thing. We’ll go into more depth next Mondoid by which point it might be ready to release, although this will need to get tested thoroughly before we release it so delays are possible.

Tease #2

Work continues on the ol’ map expansion. The zombie density map has been produced for a fairly sizeable new region which includes the part with the mall in it. Quite how much of this new region will be in the next map update remains to be seen and there’s still no fixed date on exactly when it will be released. But it’s getting closer, step by step.

Tease #3

There’s been a fair bit of discussion on The Indie Stone and Steam forums about possibilities in character customisation now that we’ve got real-time 3D models in-game. We hope to get the 3D models into the character creation screens reasonably soon, so that it’s not necessary to squint and use a magnifying glass in order to decide what your character looks like. Also, the topic of much discussion was the possibility of visible backpacks.

This is something we’d definitely like to add and although it seems entirely cosmetic, there are gameplay reasons why it would be nice, certainly in multiplayer where you might want to “liberate” the backpack from another player – a backpackless character almost certainly carries little of value and might therefore be somewhat more safe wandering about (apart from all the zombies, obv).

This, and more clothing variation is something which I’m going to spend the next few weeks working on since for too long have you had just the choice of vest or sweater, trousers or skirt (if you’re female). We’ve got lovely big clothing stores in the new mall and it’d be a bit rubbish if all they stocked were the same sweaters. We’re also keen to enable female clothing on males and vice versa since, well, why not? More clothing types also means that we can start implementing more clothing effects (currently limited to “sweater makes you hot, vest cools you down”). Practical clothing choices in terms of minimising scratches is an important yet currently horribly under-developed aspect of the game.

The bit at the end where we plug stuff

I’ll end this Mondoid with a plug for SockThuggery’s “Mighty Tactical Shooter“. We played it at this year’s Rezzed and thought it was flupping brilliant although it did lead to one of the more awkward experiences of the year when we decided to head over to the Game Jam section in order to attract the attention of ‘The Mighty Git‘ (that’s the Twitter name of the designer / programmer – I’m not being outrageously insulting) and failing miserably.

 

We ended up standing on the perimeter like lemons while every now and then the other half of SockThuggery, @Pipsissiwa, glanced up presumably getting increasingly freaked out that some weirdos were staring at them constantly. Eventually we let out an embarrased cough, waited until they weren’t looking, and ran off.

 

So anyway, their game is terrific and there’ll be a Kickstarter for it soon – but in the meantime, why not pop over to their Greenlight page, check out the vids, and consider clicking on that big friendly “yes” button?