Hello Bloggers and Readers and Survivalists and Gamers! I see you have found your way to Watch Survival. This web space is all about my favorite genre of video games. What you will get on Watch Survival is News and Updates on Current and Up-coming Survival Games.
The game has been in testing for a little over a week now, and we’ve
already had 5 versions and multiple hotfixes, eliminating a whole slew
of map bugs, crashes, and making huge strides in optimization and
reducing the memory used by the game.
While we still have a bit to go, we’re feeling really confident with
the progress. The game isn’t at the stage we can call it truly playable,
but each build sees testers being able to play for longer and longer –
before a game ending issue strikes. As every bug reveals itself and is
quashed, the testers get deeper and deeper into the game. As such, we’re
super-excited to see where the game will be in a week or two.
Although we’ll release when the game is playable and fun, we’ re also
going to be intent on trapping as many of the ‘game ending’ problems
that plague the 0.2.0 versions as possible before the build is set
loose. It’s no fun surviving for 3 months to have your game ended by a
bug. The build’s getting there though, and we feel confident and
comfortable to talk about the release being in a matter of ‘weeks’.
(Still no promises on exactly how many weeks at this time!)
As everyone knows, the music will make a return in RC3. The looping
bug that caused music’s removal has finally been taken care of, and its
wonderful to be able to run around hearing Zach’s awesome music
completely uninterrupted. Mash is continuing extending the map up until
the last moment, so we can make sure the game world is as big as humanly
possible, Binky is continuing creating animations that will further the
game’s immersion and polish, Romain and Lemmy are killing off the
remaining bugs and adding those features that slipped through the net
while the game was unplayable.
We’ve also got some intense backroom fiddling from EasyPickins going
on – who is continuing to refine the map creation tools that we’ll be
releasing to the mod community post-launch, while Stormy is also back on
board updating his reloading system for our lua-enabled mod system.
Latest from Romain is that he’s working on a new character info page
which will list the character’s professions and traits (with tooltip
descriptions, etc) which is important to see now since many of what were
skills in 0.2.0 have now been moved to being dynamic traits that are
gained and lost due to the player’s actions through the game – for
example becoming overweight through eating too much and not having
enough exercise. (Please note that the following image is a mock-up, but
what ends up in the game won’t be a million miles away.)
People may remember a long while back we implemented a new particle
driven blood system, which hugely improved the gore of the game. Sadly
the method we used required way too much memory once blood accumulated,
as well as breaking in numerous circumstances and resulting in bright
glow in the dark blood. It was labelled as unworkable and removed from
the game. That all aside, the tiled blood on the floors looked really
naff (mainly due to some tiling issues) so it needed to be fixed. Well,
we came up with another method to improve blood and were really happy
with the results. Behold!
As stated in the annotations, ignore the ridiculously over the top
bleeding at the end of the video. We’re currently balancing that. Even
so, we think everyone will be happy to see the levels of gore we had
back in the days of 0.1.5d (and improved gore at that!), another thing
we missed dearly in the 0.2.0 days.
Finally, we want to thank everyone who bought a copy of the game
during the 3 days we were collecting for Chloe’s indiegogo. We raised
$4,030, which was quite incredible. Thank you everyone!
Hello and well met everyone. It is now 4am my time, but I am done with overhauling the Survival Games List page. I hope everyone enjoys the new layout and finds it easy to navigate. Leave some comments and let me know what you think! Keep Surviving!
The Dead Linger has released a new update for us! The 008 build is now live for everyone who has purchased the game. This update was really cool and included a lot of good stuff. Convenience stores are now included into the world generation. Infection is now working inside the game and has to be managed and looked out for. Zombie spawn rates have increased, A lot of the item stats on gear is now working, Flash Lights distance has improved. Zombies now follow into houses and building correctly. Foliage is in around the world. All kinds of good stuff. Read the Blog below for more information and a video. Patch notes also pasted below.
The Swerts Convenience Store has returned, it’s back and better than ever!
Huge changes were made to loading and saving. Furniture and moved
objects should now save in their proper location from now on. Your hay
bale forts are now safe. (That said, we are still in Alpha and things
can be unstable. We ask that no one get too attached to their worlds and
inventory saves at this time.)
The ground in fields, farms, and forests is now filled with fantastic, fancy foliage.
Slightly increased the frequency of prisons.
We have increased the frequency of hills and mountains in the world. The world is generally less flat now.
Zombie Changes:
Massive Feature: Zombie pathing has been substantially updated in the following ways;
Zombies will follow you in and through buildings.
Zombies will properly stop to attack doors and windows, and they will break them.
Zombies can now climb through windows, over obstacles, and pull themselves up ledges.
Zombies should no longer twitch up and down when at the edge of a 1 kilometer terrain block.
Increased zombie density in most areas.
We are reworking the sound design of the zombies. There are new
zombie moans, groans, screams, and general zombie noises to be heard.
Zombies will now hold position while attacking a door or window, and they have a new animation for this action as well.
Gameplay Changes:
Massive Feature: The Infection system has been added to the
game at a basic level. We will be improving this system further. Here
are the basics, though we’ll leave much of it for you to discover;
Infection Risk now shows in your inventory as a bar, much like
Hunger, Battery, and Stamina. The lower the Infection Risk bar, the
lower your Infection Risk is. Keeping it low should be a high priority
for survivors. There is always a very small chance to be infected, even
if the bar is empty.
When you respawn from death, your Infection Risk is reset.
When you are attacked by a zombie, kill zombies in close range, or
interact with infected material, you will gain Infection Risk. To avoid
gaining Infection Risk, get items that reduce it, or avoid too much
close contact with the undead.
When attacking you, zombies now have a random chance to bite you instead.
Every time you are bitten, you have a chance to become infected.
There are a few tell-tales when this happens, if you’re paying
attention.
If you are infected, you will soon know, and you will begin dying.
There is no obligation to tell other survivors, and there is no cure.
When a survivor dies from infection, their corpse will return as a zombie shortly after.
Multiple new stat modifiers now work on equipped items. They are as follows:
You will move faster (walk, crouchwalk, and sprint) with items that
increase Speed, (Example: Hi-Tops Shoes) and move slower with items that
decrease Speed. (Example: Football Helmet)
You will reload faster with items that increase Reload Speed,
(Example: Magazine Vest) and reload slower with items that decrease
Reload Speed.
You will gain less Infection Risk with items that reduce Infection
Risk Gain, (Example: Welding Mask) and gain more Infection Risk when
wearing items that increase Infection Risk Gain.
You will steadily decrease your Infection Risk over time with items that steadily reduce Infection Risk. (Example: Gas Masks)
Huge fix to inventory: The inventory should now properly save
between sessions, and backpacks should no longer be dropped or lost when
reloading a scenario. (There can still be save corruption and some data
can be lost during crashes, or if you ALT+F4 out of the game without
allowing the game to save.)
Death sequences have been improved some.
Death messages now show on the death screen, depending on cause of death.
Survivors should no longer spawn high up in the air when entering a world.
Climbing speed on ladders has been increased by about 25%. You can
also hold shift to quick-climb a ladder, but this uses stamina.
Stamina now recharges at half the rate while on a ladder, instead of not recharging at all.
When a survivor leaves a game, they are now properly removed from the player list count and scoreboard
Potential fix for a certain crash that sometimes can occur when eating food items.
The debug “d_player” now properly shows “100” as the value for maximum HP.
Fixed some issues where survivor’s dead body would set to their new
respawn point before they were finished with the death sequence.
The Flashlight now projects about 10 meters further than it previously did, making it more effective outdoors.
Fixed a commonly reported issue (Thanks!) where survivors would sometimes get stuck and unable to move for no apparent reason.
Aim-Down-Sights (ADS) Sensitivity can now be changed in the Gameplay
Settings menu. This allows survivors to have a separate aiming mouse
sensitivity from their regular look mouse sensitivity.
Survivors will now experience themselves collapse onto the ground if they starve to death.
General Changes:
We have made dozens of fixes to performance and world save/load. You
will find better framerate, less jittering, and less hiccups while
traveling through the world.
Some graphical performance improvements on the backend. (Fancy complicated programmer stuff!)
Strange or abnormal characters in the server list will no longer crash clients. The characters will appear as a ? instead.
There are a couple new musical tracks in the game that will play during gameplay.
In the Audio Settings menu, the audio level sliders should no longer
take control of the mouse cursor and should work properly now.
KNOWN ISSUES:
Weapons will sometimes use the wrong hand pose when swapping weapons
using the new Weapon Set system. Walking or reloading will generally
correct this.
Weapons will sometimes not drop properly, or float near the player
after removing them from a weapon slot in the inventory screen. Swapping
weapons again will generally fix this, but the dropped weapon may be
permanently lost.
Multiplayer play is still somewhat unstable as we develop the game.
Multiplayer play will always be receiving hotfixes and other updates as
time goes on.
Grass foliage will sometimes appear on top of roads.
Eating a food item can sometimes crash the game. We are still investigating the cause.
Zombies can be hit while climbing through a window or over an
obstacle, but it is unreliable. Survivors will sometimes have to wait
for the zombies to fully finish climbing before they can be killed.
In 009, we’re planning to add multiple new buildings, increase
activities to do in the forest regions of the world, add fall damage,
tidy up multiplayer play, focus on improving the visuals of the game (as
well as adding more graphics options) and begin the start of
barricading. There are also rumors of some new weapons on the way…
Linger on, Survivors!
Dayz and Rocket was also at Pax 2013 and They did an awesome developer panel showcasing all the newest and latest features of Dayz Stand-alone. The website http://www.fpsguru.com/ covered their panel and put the video up on YouTube. It's almost an hour long and gives us a lot of information and is pretty cool to see. Check it out below.
State of Decay was at Pax and there was a lot of coverage there. Most of the information has been rounded up for us by the State of Decay team. Check out all the information below at the State of Decay Official blog or read copy and paste.
<edit> I also found a 20 minute video that has some good video coverage.
While most of the team toiled away on the last details and bugs
(and if you want to know how those efforts might be related to the
release date process, the answer is in our regularly updated FAQ),
the intrepid team of Brant, Gronk, and me went to Boston for PAX East.
If you were following us on Twitter or Facebook, or hanging out on the forum analyzing every single blurry cell phone picture, then… thank you! If not, read on.
Microsoft’s booth was our home away from home for three days.
As far as we could tell, this was all there was to PAX.
We had a good neighbor – a team from a studio in Copenhagen, Denmark.
They’re making a nifty platformer called Max: Curse of the Brotherhood.
After three days of seeing the other team’s demo, we became mutual
admirers.
State of Decay gear makes everyone happy.
The line to try out State of Decay was never less than an hour long,
and all of our players were incredibly understanding and enthusiastic.
Your passion for what we’re trying to do has always been the thing that
kept us going, but during the PAX marathon, the energy of our players
was the ONLY thing keeping us going.
We had to remember that we were representing the whole Undead Labs
family back at the office. Fortunately, there was a reminder of the
office in the game:
Hey, what’s this?
Mostly we came back to the hotel and collapsed, but one night, we
were fortunate enough to meet some future players in the hotel bar. A
bar, mind you, that was a mile from the show and not near any public
transportation. At 8:30 on a Friday. The attendees were hardcore! Sadly,
I didn’t think to take the pic until the very end of the evening after
some people had left. I won’t identify the people in the picture (they
can out themselves if they want), but I will say it was a real joy to
meet some of the people behind very recognizable names.
That is a fun group. I would expect no less.
Overall, it was a fantastic show. When you’re working on a game, you
get so you only see the flaws – and you get really nervous wondering if
the ideas that seemed so great are going to turn out to be fun. Watching
person after person get excited and walk away pumped about State of
Decay, well, all I can say is that we are psyched. We can’t wait until
all of you can play, give feedback, and post your own images.
Thank you for sticking with us this long. Not much longer, now!
At the end of the show, we were still standing. Barely.
If I missed any (and I know of a half dozen more still in progress!) please drop me a line at sanya at undeadlabs dot com.
Thanks again, and keep your eyes on the FAQ!
The Monday status update for Project Zomboid is out! This confirms more about closed testing happening and what all is going down. According to this post the zombies have increased in difficulty by quite a lot. Performance for most of the testers appears to have improved over the older versions as well. Check it out below at the link or read the copy and paste.
Yes, it’s true. As of 01:27 AM this past Friday morning the RC3 build (as discussed last week)
entered closed testing. No, that’s not an April Fools gag. It’s a thing
that actually happened. (Our April Fools jape comes toward the end of
this blogpost and has been conveniently highlighted by the use of
italics.)
So, yeah. We’ve got a small gang of hand-picked testers beavering
away in Muldraugh and spotlighting everything that’s standing in the way
of the revamped RC3 build being a fun and stable experience for
everyone to gorge upon.
Early indications are looking good. Our main fear was that of
performance – and thankfully we’re seeing better results than any 0.2.0
build ever had. Seeing as we haven’t implemented an option to turn off
the shaders yet, this should hopefully trickle into a substantial
performance boost for those who use low graphics settings.
That said, as expected, there are some clear issues we need to
resolve. We’ve got a few crash bugs, music issues, a bunch of map
niggles and a fair wedge of loot balancing to wade through. We’ll likely
need to make some minor tweaks to the revised mouse-driven combat too –
which doesn’t seem to be as immediately intuitive to established PZ
players as we’d hoped.
Add into this the various new systems that were 90% completed but
waiting for testing so we could balance and finalise them, and you can
see that there’s still plenty for us to be getting our teeth into.
Work has been intense throughout the Easter weekend – we’ve had three
internal test versions already and are due to release a fourth on this
cherished Mondoid. It’s after the next couple that we should start to
see more prolonged gameplay, and start balancing it up to a fun quota
that’s acceptable in terms of widening the process to the whole
community. It’s all terribly exciting.
We’re confident that the wait until release won’t be that long, but
we’re certainly talking in the scope of weeks rather than days. The
build needs to be enjoyable and as free of serious bugs as possible:
after everyone’s long wait and the patchy nature of the 0.2.0 builds we
need to be bang on the money.
So now, a bit of a video from internal test build number four. While
we’re not quite at the stage where a full playthrough is possible, we’re
celebrating going into closed testing by leaving all the bugs in the
footage instead of editing them out or chopping together tiny videos.
See if you can spot them all! We’ll look into a more in-depth gameplay
video as soon as we can. (We see no reason why that won’t be possible
next Mondoid.)
Now, some random, albeit random with a positive bias, quotes from a
few members of the tester group. (Please note that surrounding these
there were an awful lot of posts saying stuff like: “Exception:
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError thrown from the UncaughtExceptionHandler in
thread ‘Main’”).
“Zombies now have fast enough attack speed to make running through them a very bad idea!”
“I’m running the game on 1280*800 and I’m getting between
40-55 FPS with a lot of zombies on screen. So compared to RC 2.5, I’m
getting about 5-15 more FPS with a lot going on.”
“There is no pausing or desktop popping on my Radeon 5700!”
“The warning and menu layout? Awesome.”
“The details (mailboxes, flowers .etc) Awesome!”
“It’s good to see shadows… it looks really different
aesthetically. Also, I haven’t seen much of the map yet, but I’m digging
what I’ve seen so far! It really looks like an American town with the
flag poles and motel-like buildings… and grills in the backyards. Even
graffiti. Loving it.”
“Performs 100000000% better than RC 2.5”
“Was just attacked by a small group of zombies while opening a window and MURDERED. Zombies are now finally a huge threat!”
“New night-time effects are incredible. And REALLY dark. (A good thing.)”
“The amount of zombies you have onscreen is pretty darn
fun. It was great, trying to make my way out of the horde’s midst
before nightfall while exploring the new homes. And look, washing
machines! And kids’ rooms! (Why, I remember a suggestion on that just a
few days ago…)”
“The extra strike on downed zombies looks and feels great. “
“Getting solid performance, it’s ridiculous! Possibly the
best performance wise of any build so far, so gratz on the
optimization! I’m getting around 60-75fps on general, full screen and
res is 1920×1080 (my native). Then around 45-50 with a truckload of
Zombies.”
“I got nom-nom’d by a zombie while moving some bandages
from one bag to the other. Zombies feel really dangerous now – tough
enough to cause the end of the world.”
So it’s time for our exciting April Fools joke! Wait for it… We should let people know that due to the performance issues with
lots of zombies, we’ve decided to offload some of the complex
computational work for the zombies pathfinding onto the cloud, but as a
by-product of that it means PZ will have to be connected to the internet
at all times during gameplay. Hope you don’t mind.
So, did you fall for our April Fools joke? Do let us know in the
comments. (As a further April Fools joke we’ve neglected to mention that
comments are disabled. You’ll probably have to head to the forum.)
More as it happens Zomboidateers.
Hello everyone! Just wanted to post a quick update to let everyone know that Closed Testing for the awesome update for Project Zomboid has been confirmed and is underway. The Thread can be found below. This should mean that a public release shouldn't be to far behind.
Survival indie game Live Hard has released a small plot storyline for us today to help flesh out the game Live Hard currently being worked on. It is a simple yet satisfying begining.
It's time to tell you a bit more about the plot.
Our hero's name is Ivan. He's a factory worker from Syberia where he
worked all his life. One day, while he was watching a TV program about
tempting and mysterious far away islands, something ticked in his head!
The idea of living on an inhabited island seemed wonderful! Shining sun,
deep blue ocean, fresh exotic fruits.. and all of that for free! It
sounded like heaven on Earth! And so he realised that his life dream
would be to live that way. No job, no responsibilities... only a
neverending vacation!
To be continued.
The new monday post for Project Zomboid is up! Closed testing is apparently starting very soon for the new update! This is wonderful news. We also learn that with Steam's new Early Access section that Zomboid may be heading to Steam more soon then you think! Read the copy and paste below or click the official post.
Hello survivor. Let’s talk RC3 plans – as, as hinted last week, we’re going to shake things up a little.
In order to finalise work on NPCs and the NPC metagame we needed to
bring the overall game back to working order – integrate the new map,
look at balancing, knock out gameplay bugs and essentially get the game
up and running before our little survivor chaps could sprint around
their apocalyptic playground. As regular Mondoiders will be aware,
that’s what our coders have been up to these past few weeks in the
build-up to a closed test.
The natural course of development, then, is going to leave us with a
build that (with some polish work, launcher fiddling and whatnot) would
be fun without NPCs, packed with new features and (in all likelihood)
far more stable than the 2.5 releases. Given the ongoing PZ drought, and
the fact NPCs die out so soon in RC2.5 they are hardly a factor, it
struck us that we’d be pretty daft not to release it after the closed
test, and finally give everyone something to play.
This won’t have any effect on the date of the final metagame/NPC
delivery (we’d like to underline this – if people want to wait for the
full release the overall goalposts aren’t being moved) – but brings the
benefits of, in the mean-time, us being able to get the modding
community rolling again with the release of EasyPickins’ mod tools and
launching our spangly new website sooner than hoped. We’d also be able
to get the new build delivery system going – releasing regular bug fixes
with the efforts of our two coders combined.
SO WHAT’LL BE IN IT?
A lot. The vast new map (covering pretty much all of Muldraugh, and
more besides), the roots of the meta-game system that cover zombies and
zombie migration, map streaming, farming, the new skill and trait
system, carpentry, female characters, better character customisation,
loads of new animations, new shaders, new lighting, sandbox options, the
new front-end, the new UI, the backpack system, the modding system and
all the bug fixes that 2.5 has been crying out for – for so long. Plus a
bunch of stuff we’ve probably forgotten about.
(A clear omission would be the K&B tutorial – so we’d explain the
situation and the current NPC status to non-Mondoiders via an on-load
screen.)
SO WHAT’S THE CURRENT TEST BUILD STATUS?
We had a blood curdling zombie pathfinding issue that completely
rendered zombies unable to work indoors (which we discussed last
Mondoid) which was finally resolved last night after seven days of
intense zombie/doorframe fury.
That delayed us, but now the things left on the Closed Test (without
NPCs) ‘To Do’ list are: fix a memory problem that manifests in 32bit
versions of the game, nix some small save bugs, update to the latest map
version and make our release builder work with the new version of Java
we’ve upgraded to. This work will, one would hope, be completed in the
next day or two – after which Closed Testing will begin.
As mentioned previously, however, we’ll let everyone know the second
the build is entering testing via our @theindiestone Twitter account.
SO CAN I BE IN THE CLOSED TEST?
Unfortunately the testing group is small and handpicked. You’re also
really, genuinely, not going to be missing out on anything. We’re
looking for game-breaking, system-crashing and 100% non-fun stuff. We’re
very much intent on getting the game to a high quality bar before
release in terms of show-stopping bugs, but once we open up the test to
the wider Zomboid community the issues that everyone can help us with
will be issues that crop up on your particular system, things that
happen after lengthy survival times, getting people’s opinions on zombie
counts etc.
SO HOW LONG WILL CLOSED TESTING LAST?
Well, that’s the million dollar question. Another patchy release
patently will not do for us or our players, so if the build needs to be
kept in the oven till it’s ready – it’s going to be kept in the oven.
There are also always unseen dangers in testing when it comes to game
performance – this is where demons may lie and will be the danger when
it comes to desktop game development. There are many different types of
machine out there, and it’s hard to specify until the build has run on a
bunch of them.
This said, we now finally have two coders able to bash through bugs,
so we anticipate that any undiscovered issues with the game to be pretty
fast to sort out. The best policy will probably be to get the game into
testing first, see how things go down – and keep you informed via
Mondoid blogs, @theindiestone and the forum. We’ll also, clearly, be
able to supply a lot more screenshots, videos and whatnot once the
process begins.
The same closed testing process will then later repeat once the NPC
metagame overlay has been completed. (The work for which, let’s not
forget, is already 80% done.)
SO, ALSO, I NOTICED THAT ‘STEAM EARLY ACCESS’ THING
That was the ‘announcement’ we alluded to last week, and we’ve had a
preliminary chat with Valve about it all. One reason we’ve been
historically cautious about going onto Steam was that there’s a certain
level of quality, completeness and polish that’s needed to avoid risking
a lot of bad feeling when appearing on the Steam store, as some notable
releases of recent times have shown us.
While we would have been careful to make a clear point of PZ’s
in-development state, one thing we’ve learnt is that no matter how
clearly you label something in text, sometimes people miss this
information. That’s all seems to have changed now with Steam Early
Access. They are clearly advertised as ‘in-development’ within Steam
itself, and therefore we would be a lot more comfortable going in there
sooner than we originally planned.
All this said, it’s clearly not our priority – which is fundamentally
to our current players and to our builds on Desura. Our entrance to
Steam (early access or not) will only be when we’re in the groove of
releasing regular updates and fixes, the game is bug-free, NPCs are
running around and the meta-game is in place. Above all, we need to
ensure our existing audience’s happiness moodle is showing before we go
chasing around trying to widen it.
That’s all for now survivors. More as it happens.
Don't Starve has released a new trailer recently previewing their newest update titled "Doorway to Adventure" You can see the trailer below as well as a link to the forums where everyone always tries to find the little hidden information they always release with these preview trailers.
Thought I'd post a quick update to let everyone know I've been working on Watchsurvival some. I've added a Contact page to make it easy for people to contact me should they wish to do that. I've also added a subscriber gadget for news readers for people who like that kinda thing. I also added a Labels section so you can sort through posts you wish to see more easy.
Last but not least I've removed the middle advertisement under the blog posts for those who view the site without Adblock installed. I was ok with the middle advert at first because most the time it seemed to be a gaming advert and I was ok with that, but today I was browsing my site and updating with Ads enabled to check them out and I seen a dreaded advertisement with a green "DOWNLOAD" button and I said "OH *^# NO" I can't stand that stuff when I'm browsing the web and I don't want my fellow gamers and survivalists putting up with it either. While this may make the website revenue go down I could care less. I do this website for the gamers not the income. I would love for this website to become my full time job but I'm a realist and know it's simply wishful thinking. I've kept the side advertisement for now and I want to thank all of you who help support the site, but I want you guys/girls/aliens/zombies to know it's all about the gaming and it always will be.
Zargo
PS. Almost forgot! I'm also going to be updating the Survival Game List Page here soon with (hopefully) a much better layout and better format that is easier on everyone with a little more information. I'm still thinking about how I want it and still working out the small details though but that will be happening soon for sure. Stay safe gamers!
The popular indie survival game NEOscavenger has recently released new update information for everyone. Check out all the info below. It includes fixes for the editor and working on encounters.
I rewrote the editor's save routine
this morning to work in batches, which allows me to save a larger number
of encounter nodes before the process conks out. Once that was in
place, I was able to rebuild the encounter structure pictured yesterday,
and copy+paste the text for each node back in. By the time lunch rolled
around, I was caught up with yesterday's work, plus the remaining
portions of the node tree.
After lunch, I decided to switch gears. The writing/node-mapping was
starting to get pretty tedious, so I started work on the encounter
illustration. I looked at reference materials, collected those that
seemed relevant, and started blocking in the image. Most of this early
work is a matter of getting the lighting straight, perspective lines,
composition, and using flat colors to denote areas of light and shadow.
Then, I'm able to move things around, and play with the composition
until it gets to a point where I'm happy enough to commit to shading. As
of this evening, that's about where I am. I think I like where the
image is going, and most everything is in place, but unshaded.
So tomorrow, I'll look at it with fresh eyes, and see whether it
needs any tweaking or not. If all goes well, it's time to start shading
and detail work. I'll probably need to add a little ruin and destruction
to it, too :)
That's all for today. Have a good one, all!
The Dead Linger has released a new teaser trailer for us to watch for their upcoming update. It looks pretty cool. Zombies can now get through windows and infection is able to spread. A Gas station has also been added into the mix of building templates that spawn. Check it out below.
The weekly Monday blog for project zomboid has been posted. We get some cool info in this one. We get to see information about the release of the update. We get to see new animations for windows and see talk about the context button which is used to interact with the environment. Pretty cool stuff. Check out the full info below or read the copy and paste.
Roll up, roll up and welcome one and all to one of
those conversational blog posts we sometimes do. This week we discuss
test build machinations, windows and all manner of control malarky. So
hold those horses, as chit-chat commences between Chris ‘Lemmy’ Simpson
and Andy ‘Binky’ Hodgetts.
A: HELLO CHRIS
C: Hello Andy
A: So, what are we going to talk about?
C: Hang on, I’ll tip the Mondoid update mail-sack upside down and see what falls out.
Release Plans
A: Oh no! What’s that doing in there?
C: Yep, work continues on getting the game ready for testing. We’re
tantalisingly close at this stage, but not quite there. We did, in fact,
think that we’d be announcing the closed testing period on this Mondoid
– but events conspired against us, mainly some zombie pathfinding
building interior issues that made recording the video we’ve linked
below so nightmarish. I know we’ve said this time and time again, but if
this were Return of the Jedi we’d be at the point at which the
Millennium Falcon is preparing to shoot the core of the revamped Death
Star – with only the thrilling escape to follow.
We also have some plans on how to reduce the wait a little, which
we’ll announce on the day the build goes into closed testing (so keep
tabs on our @theindiestone twitter). It’s not what we’d want to do in an
ideal world, but we owe it to those who already have the game and are
in vital need of some stable build love. We’ll leave it at that for now,
as we’ll have a lot firmer stuff to tell you once the build is ready
for testing. In short though, we’re not talking super-imminent – but we
are saying that we should be getting the update out to people at least a
month earlier than we previously anticipated, perhaps even more than
that..
A: How annoyingly mysterious. It’s also worth reminding people that
the sooner we get the build out, the quicker our intended new
development strategies can chime in. Development will be back in front
of the curtain, as it were, and the waiting between updates will be far
less painful and ice-agey.
C: There is something else brewing that’ll be of note for PZ players,
but we’ve got to wait until there’s been a big announcement elsewhere
before we can discuss it. So, watch this space I guess. We heard the
announcement was today, so we’ll see.
Windows
A: Windows? Is that a question? Ooh, right. Well. In my opinion, one
big feature of the 0.2.0 builds was windows finally factoring into the
game-play, the player and zombies alike being able to climb through
them. Well, we say “climb”, but we really mean “walk through them a bit
slower than normal”.
C: You’ve just stolen my line, you sod! I was then going to go on to
say that apart from looking a bit naff, this had some worrying effects
on the gameplay. Zombies being able to get through windows is great for
ramping up the difficulty. But having ten potential escape routes from a
building undermined a lot of the most terrifying moments in 0.1.5d
where a horde was breaking down the one exit/entry point of the
building. Players would instead, generally, just slip quickly out of a
window to safety. Zombies at the windows didn’t provide enough
additional danger to offset this – and wouldn’t unless we started
cheating and spawning additional Z’s at every window.
However, as well as making the experience much more aesthetically
pleasing, our new animations also bring back this terror in new ways.
A: Curse you. I should have stolen more from this not at all
pre-arranged block of text written not over the weekend. But yes, it’s
one of the more exciting things about our new-fangled ‘enshrinkulated 3D
models turned into spritey whatsits’ we’re using now. It’s a lot
quicker and simpler to add new animations, so we can add anims which add
a lot of flavour to the scene and ramp up the drama which we otherwise
may not have been able to justify given the time requirements. I’d like
you to picture a scene, if you will…
Zombies have broken into your safehouse blocking your exit to the
door! You run to the nearest window, your character visibly struggling
to lift it open. It’s sticking in the frame and your panic levels are
compounding the situation. The zombies stumble closer, almost within
grabbing range, you panic and quickly throw yourself at the window
smashing it, slashing open your arm in the process, before hoisting
yourself onto the windowsill as zombies lunge at your back. You’re in
pain but safe, and the arm which will now require bandaging is a small
price to pay for avoiding being chewed on by the undead.
C: Yes, Andy. That all sounds very exciting. If only there was a
better way to describe that scene for those who have difficulty
visualising such things in their head, like HAVING A VIDEO:
C: Yes, I have the goods, I don’t need stupid letters and words to
paint a scene! I win. Though I should apologise for the short length of
the video. I’ve learnt an important lesson which is ‘Don’t work with
children or animals… or zombies.’ That video must have taken literally
about 100 takes and I was very close to a murderous rage by the time it
was ‘in the can’. The zombies were being right awkward buggers. The
amount of times I got to a window and there was a bloody zombie at the
other side, or I’d notice a backdoor immediately next to me rendering
the daring window smashing escape rather ridiculous. The various
glitches and pathfinding issues I need to clamp down on for the closed
test build limited the length of the video, sadly.
We should talk a little about some of the new design philosophies
that feed into this system, particularly when it comes to the controls
of the game. Hang on I think I had a title header lying around
somewhere.
Gamifying the Controls
A: Don’t worry Chris, I’ve added it. One thing we’re conscious of
when we’re designing is that it’s all too easy to bloat the control
scheme. In the initial version of the game we relied on right-click
popup menus for everything and, while we’re bringing that back so that
the game can be played using just a mouse, we also want keyboard
equivalents for these actions. What we don’t want, however, is a
bazillion keys – so it’s important to streamline these controls and have
context-sensitive actions. Not only will this make gameplay more fun
and accessible without sacrificing any of the depth, but it will also
lead the way to Steam Big Picture mode and more easily implementable
joypad support.
C: Yep, it occurred to me when recording the video showing off your
pretty shaders how much of a clart-on it was to equip the flashlight. Of
course our game has a ton of inventory items, and it would be
ridiculous to have a key for each one. But how do you use a flashlight
in EVERY SINGLE GAME EVER MADE WITH A FLASHLIGHT? You press F. Of course
you press F.
A: Imagine we implement maps in future. You have a map in your
inventory. How will you get the map up? Our bets are on the M key. And
so on.
C: Yep. We chatted away and as well as adding more common ‘FPS’ style
keybindings that would do sensible oft used things quickly, we came up
with the ‘SUPER CONTEXT BUTTON’ idea, which even though I do say so
myself I think is bloody brilliant.
A: It’s also worth noting that while ‘F’ will equip a flashlight,
that means *anything* which serves as a flashlight, prioritising the
most sensible option first. So if your only means of illumination is a
candle, that’s what will be equipped on pressing ‘F’. (Not that candles
lights are implemented at this time)
C: Yep, Romain is currently working on a weapon selection system
which we’ve been somewhat inspired by (ripped off) Half Life, involving
categorizing weapons and using say 1 for all swinging weapons, 2 for all
stabbing weapons, 3 for all firearms. But yes, let’s talk about the
‘SUPER CONTEXT BUTTON’.
Super Context Button
C: So yeah, basically we have the lovely ‘interact’ button that’s
used in pretty much every FPS game ever, and is usually bound to E. Of
course, Zomboid has a lot of ways to interact with the environment, so
this only takes us so far and the mouse and context menus will always
have its place, but for things like opening doors and other common
actions you want to do quickly, it’s ideal.
We also came up with a way to get maximum mileage from that one key
(read: one day, a joypad button too). Pressing it quickly will do one
action, and holding it will do another. In the case of a window, for
example, pressing the key will open or close the window. Holding it,
will also climb through that window once it’s opened. Every action can
still be done using the mouse, and the context menu (no more
curtain/window woes!) But it doesn’t stop there as our interact key has
another interesting function…
A: Indeed! Let’s remember that video we have all just watched. You
ran to the window, pressed ‘E’ to open it but what happened? It wouldn’t
open – it was jammed or locked. As a player you’re starting to panic
just like the character and so you start frantically hammering the ‘E’
key (which is, as all elevators know, code for, “HURRY UP!”). Zomboid
recognises this and promptly activates the “open this blasted window NOW
using any means necessary” action. This will trigger smashing the
window with a weapon or, if you have no suitable weapon, your own body.
C: Exactly, and even though there are no anims for it yet, you can
imagine the same philosophy applied to locked doors (which will be
making a return with a vengeance at some point post RC3) and a myriad
other things as we further develop the game.. So we’ve basically got
three distinct actions possible from a single key and we’re rather
excited about how that will make Zomboid play much more immersive and
exciting.
A: Well, I’m excited. Is there anything else we’ve forgotten to mention?
Dead State has new information! Doublebear have been pretty hush hush about their game mostly. I do try to post information when I can about their awesome turn based survival game Dead State. I do enjoy the game from what I have seen so far. This video was a nice taste of what the Game has in store for fellow survival zombie fans.
Minecraft has released a new official update titled the redstone update. A lot of good redstone features are obviously included. An update to this update is already rolled out into the form of a snapshot as well to help fix a few things. Most official information can be found below.
The moment we've all been waiting for is finally here - the 1.5 Redstone
Update is now live! Now, I know you want to jump into this massively
awesome update head-first, so let's see what was added!
1.5 Features:
Added Redstone Comparator (used in Redstone logic)
Added Hopper (collects items and moves them to containers)
Added Dropper (similar to Dispensers, but always drops the item)
Added Activator Rail (activates TNT Minecarts)
Added Daylight Sensor
Added Trapped Chest
Added Weighed Pressure Plate
Added Block of Redstone
Added Nether Brick (item)
Added Nether Quartz and ore
Added Block of Quartz, with half blocks and chiseled variants
New command: /scoreboard
New command: /effect
Containers and mobs can have custom names
Inventory management has been changed, for example you can drag-place items over slots
Texture packs now have separate images for each block and item, and can have animations
Nether Quartz Ore now spawns in the Nether
Smooth lighting now has three settings (none, minimal, maximum)
More detailed death messages
Some hostile mobs now are harder in Hard difficulty
Please note: There is a scheduled 1.5.1
update in the very near future, to iron out some of the few remaining
issues with 1.5, and it will be coming soon. Tomorrow's Snapshot will
reveal more of what is to come, so keep an eye out!
You might be wondering where to start, or what sort of indescribably
cool thing to create first. With so many new items, commands, and
blocks, it's almost impossible to know where to start first! I don't
have any good advice for that, except to show you something SethBling made with the 1.5 assets in the pre-release:
Rocket golem, or gassy golem - you decide!
The 1.5 release is a big one, and there is so much to do! What is your favorite part of the update? Tell us about it!
Don't Starve has recently released a new major update. This update comes to us with a ton of content and a few various bug fixes and changes made to the game. We get rain and weather effects, a new adventure mode and new monsters and a bunch of new items. All around a pretty large update that looks really fun.
The
latest Don't Starve update is now live and it's one of our largest to
date. We hit a few snag today while Steam irons out a few issues. Please
make sure to read the two important notes below. Important Note:
Steam seems to be having some technical difficulties in sending the
update to some computers. If you encounter problems, you should be able
to fix them by uninstalling Don't Starve and then reinstalling it. You
may have to validate files after you do this in order to force the
update after that.
This should just be a temporary problem. Valve is usually pretty quick to fix these things! Second Note:
Settings.ini has moved! If you have made changes to your settings.ini
to turn off steam cloud, you will need to move them over to the new
location in your mydocuments\klei\donotstarve directory.
Release Note
New features
Rain comes during the summer to ruin your fires and dampen your spirits. Watch out for lightning strikes!
Sandbox custom mode sliders are all unlocked. You can make the game really, really hard now.
Pathfinding works over long distances
Day length changes throughout seasons
Modders can bring up an interactive lua console with the ~ key
Adventure mode
Put in very rough sketches of the actual adventure levels. It’s
very rough at this point, and the ‘story’ bits are missing, but the
basic structure is in place.
Added lots of little setpieces using new objects that try to impede your progress.
Project Zomboid Monday Update is here! It was a pretty good read. We get to see information about the lighting system. We get to see how we can change our controls. We also get a little info about rooms and Idle Zombie animations. Hopefully this update comes soon cause I'm definitely ready to play it.
Hello survivors, Lemmy here!
Once again we have a week where the coders are buckling down getting
all the features of the game working in preparation for a closed test of
the game (without meta-game). As such we’re getting to the point now
where it’s increasingly difficult to show ‘new stuff’, and until we get
to finishing the meta-game that’s unlikely to change much. Though there
may be little prezzies from Binky, Mash and Romain in the meantime.
So for a while, a big part of Mondoids will be more about what’s working again,
what areas we’re getting close to finished in, moreso than what is new,
just to give everyone an insight into what’s left to do. We will try
and be as thorough as possible to give people plenty and hopefully it’ll
be interesting and/or satisfy on some level. There is some new stuff to
report too, however. A few highlights from this week include: Lighting
Since streaming was implemented, as well as the new map and a
necessary tileset reorganization when going to the new map, the lighting
system was completely kaput and needed redeveloping to fit the new map
format. Such was the intense effort to get the meta-game complete, this
got put to the side for a long time, though had remained a niggling
worry at how it would be implementable without costing a ton of CPU.
This was not only losing the gameplay associated with lighting, but
meaning despite the awesome new map, videos and screenshots have all
been rather less pretty than they should and we could certainly never
release with the lighting broken in the game.
Behold!
Finally we have our beloved lighting system back, this time improved
to get rid of any glitches (including that infernal flicker effect
plaguing the 0.2.0 builds) and improving the ‘fog of war’ effect inside
buildings you’ve not been in . A nice addition to this is that now the
distance you (and anyone else) is stood from a window, along with the
light difference between you and what lies through the window, will stop
visibility through, which not only means that running past buildings
will often not reveal anything of the interior, but buildings with
lights on will be lit up like a Christmas tree. While zombies already
take light into consideration in the chance of spotting you, this will
further magnify this effect, meaning lights on at night without
barricaded windows is potentially very deadly, where wandering out with
them off will be more or less safe (noise aside). Rooms
Again, due to the streaming support, we had to rethink how buildings
were defined since it was entirely possible for half a building to
exist, sliced down the middle at the edge of the loaded area. This
information is doubly important for the meta-game, since buildings way
out of the spawn distance need to be in the game for the meta-game to
work. Also, this is vital for making lightswitches work by calculating
where the bulb should be What was once an automatic (but slow) process
on game load, we’ve now had to move this to the map data to be loaded
independently of the map.
EasyPickins has done wonderful work on the tools to deal with this
for all future buildings made, but this has however meant any of the new
map that was created before the tools were developed will need room
definitions put into the map manually. This process is underway (and was
done to a limited amount for meta-game development) but for looting to
be completely working across the entire map this is a slow, rather
mind-numbing task (sorry map modders! ). One thing this has made us realize is there’s a lot of flipping buildings! Super-size me!
One of the most requested things to add was something taken out of
0.2.0 because of a limitation with the new lighting system. Double size
mode is back!
It may have a few limitations though. Due to the way the lighting
system works, there are potential issues with the high graphics settings
on lower end machines using double sizing, as graphics cards will need
to support ‘depth buffers’ on the offscreen bitmap that’s used to
upscale the graphics. That’s technical jargon that means ‘might bugger
up on low end cards trying to do high graphics mode and double
size’, though it’s unclear how many low end cards that would have this
issue would be capable of high graphics settings anyway. In fact this is
a similar reason on 0.1.5d sometime cards struggle with the double size
mode and bomb out when it’s clicked, and all solutions we’ve had to
this are rather graphic card dependent sadly.
It should be perfectly fine to do low graphics mode with double size
on any card that supported it in 0.1.5d at least, and we’ll try and make
it as compatible as possible. Zombies
We now have an idle animation! Hurrah! Zombies without any stimulus
will generally just stand around, though there will always be the odd
wanderer or ten. This makes the zombies much more authentic feeling. It
was RingoD that first noticed (within the team, at least) that in
previous versions you never ever came across a group of zombies just idling around, and how odd an omission this was for zombie fiction.
Furthermore, sometimes hordes of zombies will generally be stood
around facing the same direction, the direction of the last thing that
distracted them. Especially with the new strafing / sneaking mechanics,
means stealthing it past a bunch of zombies is now a feasible (in fact
very very much recommended) tactic. All it takes is one zombie to spot
you, however, as their agitated noises will alert nearby zombies and
start bringing more and more toward you. This results in the more
natural staggered effect of more and more zombies peeling off a horde as
they are alerted.
Done but not implemented yet are anims for zombies turning to spot
you, which will hopefully make for even more tension and creepiness when
trying to sneak past a massive horde and one’s head starts to turn and
oh no!
We’ve also done major rebalancing to the zombie’s default senses,
memory etc though this is still WIP and will likely go on until release.
Our hope is this will make stealth a much more important to the game. Shaders
Since an offscreen bitmap support is required for the double-size
feature above, and because there is already a backlog of animations to
get in, and because Binky was probably getting bleary eyed looking at
Bob in his underpants day in day out, Binky has been experimenting in a
bit of shaders programming for the high quality settings, meaning he can
add saturation effects to let the sun radiantly shine and at nighttime
bleach the colour out of the world and blue tint in a much more
effective way. Even a bit of dawn and dusk tinting!
The hope is that it will make RC3 much more atmospheric on higher
settings, as well as hopefully help us catch more eyes looking for
pretty things when we’re sat on a certain store! The potential to expand
this in future would open up a lot of opportunities for screen effects
to improve the look of the game or give feedback to the player.
Again, we’d like to stress that any additional things like this are
not impacting the release date at all and are worked on concurrently to
getting the game ready, and are ways to try and maximise the quality and
people’s enjoyment of the game for release (and make further amends for
its delay
) while vital tasks are completed. We would cut any such extra feature
should the other work be completed, or switch back onto vital things as
they crop up.
So here is a video showing a bit off one of the map cells, which also
shows off the new zombie behaviour / sight, shaders and of course
remind us all what a legend Zach Beever is. Please consider everything
WIP, particularly that all light sources have not yet been placed so a
lot of the map is still pretty damn dark.
(Please note the version of the game this is running on doesn’t have
some of Romain’s latest work in, as well as some flirtation with the old
inventory system at one point after accidentally shutting the new one
down.) Key-bindings
Yep, you can now edit the keys in the options panel! Yippee! Finally
you can select any key combination you want, just like in a proper game!
This is stage one of a bigger overhaul that will be happening post
RC3 where we plan to add macroable ‘actions’ that can either be dragged
onto hotbars or associated with a key on the keyboard. In the meantime
though this will hopefully make a lot of people’s lives easier.
That’s all folks! Also, Darkwood looks pretty sweet!
Minecraft released a new snapshot for us to play around on. Snapshot 13w10b. Containing bug fixes and more bug fixes! This post also tells us to expect the pre-release snapshot of 1.5 sometime today most likely as this snapshot and information was released yesterday, Once pre release 1.5 comes out instead of making a new post I'll just update this one.
The 1.5 pre-release is expected tomorrow! In the meantime, help test out the latest round of Snapshot goodness!
Notable changes:
Dispensers and droppers will now only fire once when
they receive a redstone signal. To fire again, the signal must be
turned off and on again. (Previously a dispenser would fire whenever it
had a signal and a nearby block changed.)
Redstone and components stay powered after unloading chunks
Dispenser and Dropper shooting out when updated
Server crashes if spaces are input on the console
Night Vision Potions that are edited to last longer create a potentially seizure-inducing flashing sky background.
Furnace interface occasionally closes when adding fuel, deleting all items in the furnace
Named Mobs Don't have Named Babies
Getting into a minecart with a mob in it crashes minecraft
2
Hoppers funneling unstackable items into a 3rd Hopper at the same time
cause the 3rd Hopper to not funnel items into a container
Dispensers continually shoot/use certain items like water buckets and flint&steel
Comparators still giving off power when hopper inventory is empty
Animals can breed over distances up to almost 8 blocks when only seperated by fences
Message "THIS TOO" in console
Full hoppers feeding into full hoppers causes the forward hopper to stall
Adding items to brewing stand using dropper does not change state of comparator
). One thing this has made us realize is there’s a lot of flipping buildings!
) while vital tasks are completed. We would cut any such extra feature
should the other work be completed, or switch back onto vital things as
they crop up.