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MP Status Update


nasKo

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THE BAD NEWS

This week we have been playing the MP build extensively, to try and get a clearer and more solid idea how much work would be required to get it into a state we’d be comfortable releasing, and have increasingly become aware that it’s not good enough. We have been too optimistic, and for that we are extremely sorry.

 

Advances have been made, and the quality of where it is going is clear from our many tester testimonials and gameplay sessions, but since the (vital) transitions to zombies on the client it is not even close to the quality that the game or our players deserve, even for a beta. Furthermore, the deeper we’ve looked into it, the more systemic issues deep down have reared their heads.

It needs more time in the oven. We simply cannot release it half-baked. You don’t have to look far in gaming to see what can happen when you do.

 

We recognise that (especially in the past two weeks) we have been making cautiously optimistic noises – but put simply the more we played, the more we became aware of deep-rooted issues that it would be near-impossible to fix in a ‘live service’ situation. 

 

Project Zomboid has every chance of being extremely popular when we release MP – it’s something that we’ve read from people everywhere, and increasingly something we’ve quietly believed ourselves. As we’ve said multiple times in the past, the multiplayer release of 41 is by far the most important build in Zomboid’s history, and if we don’t stick that landing it would be bad.

 

As it stands the MP build we’re playing internally isn’t robust enough to cope with potentially huge floodgates being opened upon it. Support requests, tech queries and bug reports would simply drown us – and the player and community experience would be poor in the absolute extreme. 

 

We had a big meeting with General Arcade, and went through everything that could (and should) still be done to make PZ a MP game that could both stand the test of time, and a huge launch day. Something that would keep multiplayer servers populated and not result in disappointment for our community that have been so patient for so long.

 

This will likely be a much longer wait than we’ve been hoping, and particularly in light of the last two weeks of misguided hopefulness over improvements that while exciting, in the cold hard light of day still are far short of what we would dare release. 

 

We have long shied away from giving any form of ETA, but in the interest of ensuring we are not stringing anyone along with vague notions of a timescale Thursdoid after Thursdoid, we have agreed with our MP team that anything up to six months should be the ballpark we’re now aiming for when it comes to getting a Build 41 MP release into player hands to a level of quality we’ll be confident it won’t blow up in everyone’s faces. 

 

We know this will be of disappointment for many — and we’ll likely receive some flak for this decision — which is understandable, especially given the noises we’ve been making in the Thursdoids recently. 

 

But we ask those that are upset by this news please to bear in mind other recent releases that people were begging for, and getting increasingly hyper-frustrated at the frequent delays — only to finally have it in their hands, as they facepalmed and asked themselves why the hell this wasn’t held back further??

 

That’s what we’re doing — because we’re lucky enough to be in a position we’re able to do that, both financially, as well as without marketing spends or boardroom pressure forcing our hand, and we are committed to the fact that while we feel the pressure from the community’s frustrations at the wait as well as our own desire for it to be ‘done’, we will not allow that to blind us to putting something out that will end badly for both us and our community that want to see the game grow. We may get a bloody nose for delaying it further and for this long, but we’ll take that gladly to ensure that doesn’t instead happen on release–as that’s a bloody nose we might not recover from.

 

This has been an immensely difficult week for us — people sometimes forget that we want this build out there too. It’s not just a game to us but our daily lives, and the march toward a multiplayer release — the moment we’ve desired to see for so long vanishing away months into the distance, and the prospect of continuing that climb for another six months is heartbreaking to us. 

 

Nonetheless, it’s 100% the right call — we will not waver, and when all is said and done and multiplayer has been out for months and everyone is playing it, we promise everyone — ourselves and our community — will be glad we made this call, instead of releasing in a soon forgotten whimper. 

 

We may take our time, but we get the job done in the end. Hopefully the almost unanimously positive reception to the long awaited animation update proved that to be the case. I honestly believe we wouldn’t be where we are today if we weren’t just as strict back then on what we put out, when everyone was chomping at the bit to play it, bugs and all, and couldn’t fathom why we were being so careful and protective for such a long time. Now people have had it for a long while, no one would want to go back in time and have us retroactively release the anim build 6 months earlier than we felt comfortable doing so, and risk it crashing like a lead balloon and damaging the game’s reputation and future. Our caution led to the most success Zomboid has ever enjoyed. We know the same will be true about multiplayer when people are finally playing it.

 

We’ve discussed with GA about getting two more internal QA engineers the MP team will have direct access to day to day while working, to allow them to more quickly diagnose and test stuff with more players outside our TIS internal tests. 

 

They are also on the lookout for additional resources for the coding team to speed things up. Though it’s worth pointing out that this will require some significant time to learn the codebase and get up to speed for any new developer, which is why it was never a practical solution before our decision to commit to this longer delay with which to capitalize on another coder. 

 

We hope with the changes we make, along with many organizational changes to improve our internal workflow with GA, we can deliver something sooner, and will of course continue looking for new avenues to speed things up — but for all intents and purposes we’re committing to this period of delay to make sure it is definitely achievable and no one should be under any illusions of expecting it sooner. 

 

 

THE GOOD NEWS

It’s not all bad news however. This longer and more defined schedule of getting MP up to scratch makes it clear that we can’t just continue this release drought in the meantime. 

 

Therefore we are going to start releasing IWBUMs builds with new content in the interim, rather than holding back until the MP build is complete as was our original plan.  

 

We will be removing MP elements from the current trunk code that would interfere with the single player game, and releasing a six month backlog of changes, fixes, optimization and upgrades waiting to go into the game. LWJGL 3 and java 15 upgrades in particular that will improve performance and compatibility, not least a new fancy garbage collector we’ve never had the opportunity to use before that should all but eliminate any periodic pauses that have plagued our game in the past.

 

After this, we will be starting to release additional content builds to tide the community over in the wait. We have to be somewhat careful on the style of content we add, so as to not make the MP work more complicated and hold it back further, but stuff you should be able to look forward to in the coming months include:

 

  • Noiseworks sound overhaul. Noiseworks are due to provide the first complete version of their ‘round 1’ additions to the game, replacing all sounds in the game, for testing and feedback from TIS. Those keeping up with the Thursdoids will have a good idea of what this will bring. After some testing, and adjusting sounds to tester and community feedback, we’ll be getting this out to you as soon as we can. Noiseworks will then be continuing with adding additional sounds, and a procedural music system, which will bring even more atmosphere to the game.
     
  • Map updates. We’re pushing toward a release of Louisville, which nears completion outside some zoning work and bug-fixing. It’s unclear how much time remains to polish this up to releasable standard, but it seems very likely it will drop before multiplayer. Non-90 degree roads with curves, improvements to the existing map, and even perhaps beyond our original scope of the map now our mapping team has grown.
     
  • Several other really cool gameplay features. We’ll talk about them in the coming Thursdoids when we can feel confident they will drop in the interim period.

     

THURSDOIDS

Speaking of Thursdoids, a primary piece of feedback we’ve had from the MP team has been the detrimental effect that the weekly cycle of blog updates on MP progress has had on the development process. 
 

A weekly development sprint, where results are desired to show off or talk about makes it much harder to work on longer term improvements. To be honest this is not the first time this has been brought up or felt by the TIS team, the weekly blogs have always stacked a lot of pressure on our shoulders, only ever being 7 days away. But we are both immensely proud of our weekly blogs, and have found them to be a huge part of keeping our community content and informed. Truth be told, we have also been somewhat nervous that reducing their frequency suddenly may be perceived by our community as some kind of winding down, rather than something that would improve development in any way, and so have long been resistant to change.
 

However, in the interest of aiding the MP team in having the time to do longer and less interrupted work on features without the pressure to provide small incremental improvements that clearly haven’t been enough to make the leaps to release that are needed–we are going to make the following changes to how we release Thursdoids over the coming six month period.
 

  • We will be doing bi-weekly Thursdoids (that’s every two weeks). These will likely be more content-packed, and have more time spent writing them. They will hopefully provide much more bang for your buck and less likely to have us repeating ourselves.
     
  • We’re only going to focus on multiplayer development every other Thursdoid, allowing the team to have a solid month to make longer term, deeper and more substantial improvements without worrying about us coming knocking for stuff to show or test. The alternate Thursdoid will focus on the single-player interim updates, features and fixes coming in the shorter term. That all said if we do have cool MP stuff to talk about, we’ll be sure to let you know regardless of what week it falls on.
     

We’ll see how these Thursdoids go down over the coming months, and will decide based on that what to do once multiplayer releases whether to go back to weekly Thursdoids or to carry on with bi-weekly.
 

Thanks for reading, and apologies again for the major misstep in our recent enthusiasm. While we did state it was ‘cautious optimism’, we regret letting short term improvements and perhaps a bit of wishful thinking colour our blog updates. Sometimes you just get lost in the weeds and an uptick one week is deceptive to how much work really remains. We hope the firmer date will give solace to those who check week after week to frustration, who are largely only interested in multiplayer, that they can safely put our game aside for a while, and when to start looking again. And to everyone else, we hope getting fresh content again will help the time pass that little bit quicker.

 

Much love
 

The Indie Stone

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Without a doubt this update is none at all disappointing. With so many EA games out there that give BARELY monthly updates, you guys have been absolutely killing it. I cannot be any more excited to play the MP when its finally (sorta) shaped and shined into the gem we all want. Wasn't here in the beginning but damn ill be here for the rest of the ride picking up hitch hikers along the way. You guys rock!

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TBH, this all looks good to me. We've all seen what happens even when good game companies make the Big-MistAAAke of rushing things out to please their players, fans or soulless investors, so I actually see the decision you guys are making as 100% good. In the same way, if after those six months (I'm still shocked you actually GAVE AN ETA... what's next? GabeN counting to 3?), you guys feel it's still not enough, don't be afraid to delay it further. Always do as Shigeru Miyamoto said, not as Todd Howard does....

 

Also, not being one who cares much about the MP, I am quite pleased to hear that the stuff I DO care about (Noiseworks, Curves, Louiseville) is actually getting pushed forward before the MP. So that's a big plus to me.

Edited by Blake81
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I prefer playing a release game because I want a complete game experience.

 

So after I bought this game, I have wait for release version about 2-3 years. Today I want know some news and read this article.

 

Very appreciate your guys' endeavor. Hope you all plan can be succeed. I would like to wait for that day.

 

Please don't give up.

 

A player from China.

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I mean, that sounds perfectly rational. It's disappointing but I for one as a consumer do appreciate that kind of transparency and honesty, it's def not common in the gaming industry these days. I obviously don't speak for anyone but myself but I don't really mind a wait, plus the announcement of Louisville is actually cool, I'm curious to see how well my computer could handle it. 

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Long time lurker and player, and whilst my group have been looking forward to Build 41 MP dropping for sometime the decision made by the team is absolutely the right one and I appluad it.

 

I'd much rather get my hands on a complete and stable build than one riddled with bugs and issues that could potentially put people off and whilst I love the Thursday updates, being an analyst myself I understand the pressures of having to constantly release project updates taking time and resources that could be better spent doing the work required.

 

Great decision by a great team. So glad I backed this game from day 1 and looking forward (6 months or more if it takes it) to get my hands on the Build the team feel ready to release. Keep up the good work it will absolutely be worth it in the long run!

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I'm coming back here only to express my full support to the team. I love your game, and I still find amazing how much the game evolved in the good way since the first releases. The evolution is slow, but massive and so pertinent. So, I don't care about the delay, I really don't care even if I wanna play with my girlfrind to the 41 :) Take your time, be strong and know that I, and many others, just love your work for many years and are happy to still love it in further years :)

Cheers from France !

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I've been following PZ for a number of years and TIS has never failed to impress me. You're a breath of fresh air in the gaming industry - you're transparent, honest and unafraid to make the difficult decisions for the best of the game. We appreciate your efforts to maintain the fantastic level of communication you achieve.

 

I've never posted here, although in this instance, I feel compelled to voice my support in an effort to negate the expected flurry of negative comments from disgruntled community members itching for the MP release. They'll thank you when a stable MP 41 is available.

 

Thank you, and Keep doing what you're doing!

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Honestly, I'm glad for you guys that you've made this decision. I'd much rather you take your time instead of crunching to please the masses. Those that would complain about a decision like this aren't in PZ for the long haul or the right reasons. You guys have never let me down so far and I trust your judgement.

 

*stands on desk*

 

"O Captain, my Captain!"

 

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Everyone remembers how good a game was when it was released or during its existence, no one remembers the delay.

 

You made the right decision, and your communication is exemplary. We are inevitably (and the dev team too) all disappointed, but it's for a brighter future!

 

GL&HF
 

 

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Y'all what IS this community. Any other game makes even a positive announcement, and negative nellies will pile on about things that don't even have anything to do with the post. Here the devs literally say "we're going to move the timeline back 6 months" and there's nothing but support?!!

 

Kudos to the mods and whoever makes this dark magic happen.

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Unfortunate that most video games these days need to please the shareholding investors more so than the end usersers they're marketed to. Modern capitalism at its finest.

 

TIS doesn't have that problem; the beauty of croud funding at work, not to mention the added capital of early access scales. Having a small dev team doesn't hurt.

 

 

Appreciate the honesty, and can't wait for new sp content.(whatever happened to the new fire system yuri was working on?)

Edited by Papa Juliet Whiskey
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