March To 1.0

Fear Not, For It Is Not The End

Firstly we need to stress that any talk of 1.0 is not talk of us hanging up our Zomboid boots. This needs to be stressed with underlines and bold, so I will go back and do that right now. Now there is part of us that always gets a bit confused when some people complain about ‘how long the game is in alpha’ as if perpetual updates were a bad thing, however it does feel at this point that PZ being an alpha in-development game is becoming increasingly a burden on the game in terms of popular opinion, and we’re eager to free it from those shackles. It’s also about drawing a line under our promises when we started PZ. Right now there are several things outstanding that underline Project Zomboid’s incomplete state: 1) NPCS 2) Vehicles 3) Map Completion These are the things that we promised going into the game that have not yet been fulfilled. There is also one gaping hole in the survivalist gameplay which needs to be addressed: 4) Hunting

NPCs

Yeah, they are coming. Lemmy has made some awesome progress this weekend in particular, and while they aren’t imminent we feel very confident in their recent progress and Lemmy has ceased waking up in cold sweats about them. Due to the evolution of the game the old in-development NPC system needed a lot of ripping apart and transplanting / revising since the last batch of videos, and its been a very stressful and arduous task. However things are running at full steam again, and we are currently planning a way to deal with releasing NPCs in stages, starting with Kate and Baldspot, then a release of sandbox NPCs with a smattering of meta-game / group mechanics, followed by a fully functional release, and finally multiplayer support. Holding back it all until completion is starting to feel like a bottleneck and while we may get a few who don’t read the Mondoids throwing their shoulders up and ‘is this it?’ at the early release stages, if it gets NPCs out there sooner and eases development it’ll be worth it. There is a massive body of code and behaviour scripts and in entirety the is still a bunch to be done before it all works in harmony, truth be told months and months still likely remain before the entire system is ready for release. But it is relatively trivial for us to pluck the still flaky chunks out to stablise it for a Kate/Baldspot release, and a phased release of NPCs where the behaviours and meta-events can then slot in in subsequent updates. That said we’ve still got some work to bring Kate and Bob up to speed and finish off a few things, so don’t take that as ‘KATE AND BOB TOMORROWS’!

VEHICLES

These are on their way too. EasyPickins has taken up the work while Lemmy cracks on with NPCs. They will use bullet physics which means a few challenges for the map streaming, in constructing a physics world along with the PZ game world, and there may be some multiplayer challenges to meet, but it’s on its way! More details