f13.net

Project Zomboid is a Zombie Survival RPG. Here are some of its planned features:

Retro-isometric style with plenty of zombie insides thrown in for good measure.

A massive city and the surrounding areas to traverse, explore and loot.

Open-ended sandbox world – survival is your only goal, and we’re sorry to tell you… you WILL die eventually.

Get infected. How will you spend your final days? Will you have a heroic moment of self-sacrifice, or end up chewing your best friend’s throat out?

Meet other survivors who you can join forces with, trade with, undertake missions for, or fight with for resources.

Loot, salvage, and build what you need to survive the apocalypse, from food and medical supplies, to weapons, even just booze to help get you through the nights.

Advanced item crafting allows you to use looted items to build weapons, traps, defenses, and many other things to help you survive.

Character progression. Learn skills and perks to help your character face the challenges of survival.

Starvation, illness, loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, insanity, trust issues. There’s more to zombie survival than shooting zombie heads off.

Join your friends and survive the apocalypse together in co-op multiplayer.

The world changes the longer you survive; power plants fail, plunging the city into darkness and making batteries and tinned food prized commodities. The army rolls into the streets to perform ‘clean up operations’ and other gamechanging events occur the longer you survive.

Play in your browser, or stand-alone, on PC, Mac and Linux.

I played the demo a bit as well and I thought it was pretty good.  The crafting menu was buggy for me, were you able to craft things properly?    I managed to board up my windows and pilfer some food from the neighbors, but I could manage to actually cook it.  I think it will be fun single player, but co-op is obviously where the game will shine if they pull it off.   Anyway, definitely promising enough to keep an eye on.  I'm going to keep an eye out for when they release the not-free client again (apparently there was some issue with updating, and they've taken it down until further notice).  For 8 bucks its probably already worth it.

However, cooking is where I burned down the house!

Am I just not supposed to get past cooking? ( Demo )

Turn off the stove before you go upstairs.

Yeah just figured that out, I was leaving it on as I did not know when it was "Done".

Also:

Can't get the damn tech demo to download. Bah!

Just takes awhile. I thought it was frozen the first time as well. Just go make a sandwich or something.  :grin:

I've got it working.

I'm never quite sure what the controls are - to bandage myself, do I click on the bandages, have the bandages in the icon then myself, double click, etc?

Also I found that if I played on full screen mode the crafting window wouldn't open, so windowed mode it is.

Jesus christ, its amazing how easy i turn into "retarded horror movie guy" when playing this.  See a bunch of zombies milling about as soon as you step outside? run back in and board yourself in! ok, now they are beating at the door and i have no way out and no food...

Managed to last 4 days before getting boxed up and trying to fight my way out. Perhaps I should have run through the zombies, but I wasn't sure if that was possible.

An 'escape through the window' option could have saved me.

In a number of ways I think this is a bad demo for the game. If I hadn't heard that things got better once you learned to play, I probably would have scrubbed it off my hard drive for not explaining to me how to do the basics.

Dealing with the demo:

The other obvious benefit is to morale and a sense of normalcy. The feeling of having a treat will do wonders for your group’s morale. When looting a building you may be as excited to find a spice rack as you are to find shotgun shells.

Cooking skills will allow characters to get more portions from less ingredients, and may also allow for more ingredients to be used, or more unorthodox combinations to be combined without it tasting revolting.

At its heart Project Zomboid is a sandbox game, and as such having random and unscripted game-play experiences is paramount to its ethos.

HOWEVER.

We can’t ignore the fact that clearly our method of story-telling in Project Zomboid has gone down extremely well, and we’d be fools not to explore it further.

...

So… our plan is to expand Kate and Baldspot’s story into a more meaty tutorial come story mode. Project Zomboid Stories, if you will.

This will be an alternate game mode selected from the main menu, which will remove the random start position and character creation elements and thrust you into the role of Baldspot (and maybe one day Kate, who knows? Even co-op 2 player?) The tutorial as it stands now will be expanded into a more substantial story, introducing other characters and quests to give these two the adventure they deserve.

Make sure your java is upto date. You could open the java console and see where it got stuck.

Here is what to expect:

1) Craftable doors. Smashed doors have a chance of dropping hinges and door knobs.
2) Open doors now block vision/collide at their new angle.
3) Professions and traits – initial character customization.
4) Cooking food. Fully functional ovens.
5) Food now goes bad. Refrigerators slow down the process. Eat consumables first!
6) Chance of illness if eating spoilt or uncooked food.
7) Bored and depressed moodles. Read books or magazines or go for a stroll outside to relieve boredom (more later). Eating cooked meals also reduces boredom / depression.
8 ) Curtains. Block view into building without needing barricades. Sheets can be used to make makeshift curtains.
9) Various bug/crash fixes. Notably no more fire crashes.
10) Burglar alarm on a couple of random buildings on the map.
11) Barricading and crafting etc now takes time to complete. Alterable by different traits.
12) A few more foods and cooking apparatus / crafting recipes.
13)  Customizable characters. Most of the legwork for the NPC update already done due to this.
14) Sandbox mode / Adventures of Kate and Baldspot
15) Moddable items, moddable crafting recipes, moddable item distribution, moddable maps, moddable costumes / characters.
16) Rain gets you wet. Colds. Get a cold, coughing and sneezing draws zombie attention. Tissues will mute the sound you make.
17)  Wearable clothing.
18) Jukebox – at moment with some old PAWS tunes. Convert your music to OGG to play tunes in-game. Will add walkman to later update.

Any word on the maps? I hope they won't be static.

18) Jukebox – at moment with some old PAWS tunes. Convert your music to OGG to play tunes in-game. Will add walkman to later update.

OGG? Really? I love this game and it's getting better all the time, but that's just going full neckbeard.

PLEASE NOTE – DUE TO PIRACY ISSUES, AT THIS TIME THE PAID ALPHA IS NOT AVAILABLE. DO NOT BUY UNLESS YOU’RE OKAY WITH WAITING UNTIL THIS IS RESOLVED.

I want to hear some cunt bitching about how much DRM sucks right about now.  :oh_i_see:

So this is another update on what’s going on.

We’re not sure what to say on it to be honest, but a lot of people have been clamouring for information on how the update is coming along.

There’s no extra features added beyond what was in the previous update post, as was said in that post we’ve stopped adding features now the external stuff has come through, and it’s just been a case of catching up with the moved goalposts of the added features. There have been various other issues that have delayed the team but they are of a more personal nature and are exempt from our usual complete transparency on what is happening.

However we’ve been progressing on all of this stuff and it’s in a stage of ‘almost done’ness that will hopefully not last too long. Again we’re refraining from giving any dates, and stress again this was a one off nightmare update that had so much baggage attached to it, and early adopters will know generally we have frequent smaller updates, it just wasn’t really possible for this one. Unfortunately the majority of purchasers came after the majority of these updates were released, and as such have only seen the ‘dark side’. We look forward to showing them what life was like in PZ-ville before all this happened.

The lack of posts updating you on how things are going are generally because… well, all we could say is this, which is pretty much 100% saying the same thing we said last time, except that we are now closer to having it out than we were when we posted this same information last time.

Okay, actually. We can address one of the comments from our previous post here:

This game is very good but sadly the developers, their PR and way handling the community is very bad. You never explained us correctly why the update takes ages. Your only reaction was pointing out how poor you are and how bad the community is to you.

First off I’d like to point out we refered to a ‘very vocal minority’ ruining the forums FOR our community. We’ve never claimed anything but our community being wonderful.

So these are the reasons for the delay, in black and white. Looking back on previous posts, we’ve literally mentioned all of them previous to now, but here they are in one place in a more detailed manner. We hope this makes people feel more informed as to what’s going on at the moment.

The update is taking ages because of the following reasons:

1) Due to us supporting Linux, it required us to have our own version separate from the kind offers of Desura and Steam. As much as it’d have made our lives easier, frankly, to rely on them 100%, it wouldn’t be fair to our Linux customers to abandon support for them, so it took some considerable time to write a new authentication system that would allow us to distribute the game via FilePlanet, make it reasonably robust, and also not rely on the cloud system that was exploited before. – Summary: We were delayed due to trying to be fair to Linux users.

2) Desura, as it stood at the time, did not allow for us to get hold of people’s email address. Therefore people who bought from Desura would only ever have been able to play the game through Desura, and would not have gained any benefits, present or future, that would come with being in our user database, including but not limited to ultimately getting a Steam redeem code. Since Desura would be the only mechanism for the vast number of people who only have access to PayPal as a payment mechanism, and Desura were kind enough to develop a system that allowed for the user to request their details be passed onto us, this was well worth doing. – Summary: We were delayed due to trying to be fair to PayPal/Desura users.

3) Due to the aforementioned two delays, expectations risen, and we did spend a lot of time where we could have just sat back and waited. Instead we continually rose the bar of what would appear in the update. Also the pressure for the paid version to ‘ship’ with enough above the demo version to be worthwhile and worth the money is not to be understated. And since we had all this time we continued adding and adding to make sure that the delay would be worth the wait. Of note is the modding capabilities. The amount of work in this feature is immense in itself, and while it’s frustrating that there’s been this massive delay, this modding functionality would likely not have existed for a year or two were it not for this delay. The amount of content available to players not too long after this update ships should vastly outweigh the amount of content that would be available if we’d never had these delays and had kept up with the frequent updates. Understand this update, the first ‘paid’ version since the demo was released, will have nigh on 100% modding capability and opens up the possibilities for complete story modes to be created by the community. We weighed all this up and decided for the time it would take to implement it, the gain for the community would be immense, so we implemented it. – Summary: The update is delayed because we decided a longer delay was less upsetting than a delay and disappointingly small update, and this additional functionality would be much better for the game and community in the long term.

Of course now the Desura stuff is sorted (Steam is still ongoing, but that’s primarily because it needs a lot more time from us than we have at the moment, so it’s Steam waiting on us, not the other way around) we have to finish off all the stuff that we committed to for this update. True we could have abandoned all the half finished things and left them for a subsequent update, but truth be told the delay had already been substantial, and having a few curtains and being able to select a few character traits didn’t seem enough to offer for the time and would likely have received a lot of criticism in itself, and we genuinely feel that the potential for the user created content would give you far more far sooner and is worth the additional wait. So we could choose between a long delay and a disappointing update, or a longer delay and a content rich update. We’d already lost a lot of points for the delay as it stood, and by finishing off the modding stuff in particular we’d be offering a great deal to the community in terms of potential hours of gameplay it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Again, the offer of a refund is still there, should anyone want it.

Also re: ‘pointing out how poor we are’. We did that back when we were poor, in March, on our personal blogs, before and on the day we announced the game. Never since then have we said we’re poor. Not once. People have assumed we’ve been struggling, despite us being quite open about our sales figures when asked. We’d not have the cheek to claim we’re poor when we’ve sold 16,000 copies of the game. There were hairy moments when Google/PayPal were being funny about our money but they were resolved.

We’re not poor, we just have a crap-load of work to do, and while we apologize for not spending time on the blog reporting daily that we’re working on the update, we’re spending that time working on the update.

Let us not forget that we’ve in the past received criticism for blogging too much when we should be working on the update.

Oh and that brings us nicely to:

4) Given the amount of sales, we’ve had a shit ton of business stuff to deal with. Legal stuff that has to be dealt with that takes up a massive amount of our time (specifically 50% of the coding team’s time). Accountants, lawyers, the Tax Man, the VAT Man. This is all stuff that’s of massive importance to deal with, has all needed dealing with fairly rapidly due to the sudden influx of purchases, and as frustrating as it is to deal with, we’d be fools to let it slide as it could cost us everything. This is before accounting for the hundreds and hundreds of emails we get daily.

Thanks for your patience and apologies for the ongoing delay.

Love,

The Indie Stone

It's cute that they support Linux but not OSX.

AFAIK, OSX and or apple is depreciating java support. Its not even going to be in future versions of the OS.

I'm kinda nervous, I apologize.  I'm English and I'm quite drunk.

It's a bit confusing sifting through the differences between the two versions.  Can you expound?
Also, the game is built around MP, so where the heck is it?  Timeframe?

This is why I'm moving pretty much every IP-related thing I have to "the cloud."  I don't even like working offline anymore.
But hey, maybe this will create a backlash of support for the game and it'll release even better then it was originally designed to.

In this day and age, that's really, really, really clownshoes stupid.

Maybe they dont want it to recover.  Maybe they'd be better served to take their alpha money and run (how much have they made thus far btw?).  Maybe the whole thing was actually staged so they could beat a hasty money-laden retreat whilst they move on to other projects or a real job.

Of course, his explanation actually makes more sense to me than 'Software Company Without Backup or Version Control.'

Like inviting Edward the Longshanks into your country to run the place so you can focus your full attention on arguing over who gets to be king.

Tortoise SVN is free. No need to shell out for Perforce just to have some kind of revision control and backups.

Tortoise SVN is free. No need to shell out for Perforce just to have some kind of revision control and backups.

Not sure if anyone has been keeping up with the game, but it looks like they didn't lose as much progress as they thought. It almost seems like it motivated them a bit more and the person writing the updates is actually doing a good job of keeping people informed on their progress.

Boo!

Well, makes sense but hard to give them money after the debacle.

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.