The Future of Zombie Panic! Franchise

Hi everyone! I'm 'Tabajara' (team lead & coordinator) and I'm here on behalf of the Zombie Panic! Team for this announcement to talk about the future plans for the game, what is coming next for the franchise as a whole, and how this involves the community. Let's dive right into it!

What is the plan?

The team is currently in pre-production working to migrate ZPS to the TF2SDK update-branch. This will bring lots of game features and improvements to the game that will benefit both the dev team and the community as a whole in the long term. Everything discussed below should be considered as a work in progress and subject to change, being scrapped, or being delayed during the porting process due to development reasons.

The 'TF2 SDK' update includes the following:

• 64-bit Support - Moving from 32bit to 64bit architecture allows the game to utilize your system resources more efficiently than just 4GB of RAM. This should result in smoother gameplay, fewer game crashes, and potentially higher frame rates on modern hardware.

• Networking Optimizations - There are a lot of prediction fixes included in this update, resulting in less hit registration errors and a better game-feel. This will be a longer process to fine tune it, so we will require your feedback in the forums.

• Steam Networking (Peer-to-Peer) - Players will have the ability to host their own local server and play with their friends or anyone without needing to join a community server or install a Dedicated Server just for the occasion. This is soon to be tested if can be implemented into ZPS.

• Miscellaneous - There are a bunch of other important backported changes, engine related bug fixes and very minor miscs from the 'TF2 SDK' update that will all be properly included in a future patch and documented, stay tuned for it!

What else is in the 'to-do' list?

• Barricade System Enhancements - To be frank, I wish to improve our barricade system overall to be more user-friendly and less chaotic without breaking any updated custom maps. We'll be discussing more in another announcement or through Steam forums.

• Police Station Rework - This reworked version, created by the community-member Sethen, has unfairly been "on-hold" for years. The plan is to bring it back up and ship an objective version specifically for this map, rather than replacing the original Survival Police Station. Players will be able to playtest in advance and provide feedback before it goes public.

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• Updated Scoreboard - I want to add specific changes to our scoreboard and the round end panel that could result in a better understanding of your game. One is to rework our 'score point system' according to player feedback. Concepts and further discussion will happen in the near future.

• UI/UX Improvements - There are a few issues with the game UI/UX that we've been struggling to fix over the past few years (one of them related to higher resolutions). Perhaps during this port, we may finally be able to solve lots of those VGUI problems once and for all. Time will tell!

• Special Gamemodes - Over the past years, the community has come up with a vast variety of custom gamemodes (PvP, PGM, The Hidden, Combine vs Humans etc) that have been well received and played many times to this day. According to the latest survey, new official gamemodes aren't a high priority, but we hope to see additions at some point. I can not promise anything at the current