Firstly, there are some issues with people using old versions of Desura where the cache has become invalid due to the sheer time and scale of the changes between 0.1.5d and 2.9.8. If you have trouble running the game after a Desura update, uninstall and reinstall, and it will work just fine from now on. Future updates included.

Next, as everyone should know, we’ve had great trouble with hosting of late. Due to the cost of hosting, the size of the download, and the planned frequency of updates, we simply cannot afford to host the game on Amazon S3 servers due to the cost. This means we will be relying more and more on Desura to host our game, as well as Steam once the time comes.

As well as the auto-updater, we’ll add standalone downloads to the PZ game page on Desura too (this will be required for Mac anyway, since there is no Mac Desura client as of yet), which can be downloaded here: http://www.desura.com/games/project-zomboid/download but this is slow and cumbersome by comparison to maintaining the auto updater, and so may be updated afterwards with a delay as it involves countless complete uploads and an approval process. So if you want to stay up to date, we strongly advice you to install Desura to get the latest builds as quickly as possible. Although you may complain about having ‘another distribution service’ installed, this means if we make a patch you will be downloading 10kb or similar instead of 200 meg each and every time, since it only downloads the bits of data that have changed.

Why Desura Client?

Desura is also a treasure trove of alpha-funded games and obscure indie and commercial titles that are nowhere near well known enough to break into Steam, so you may find some wonderful new indie games to play while you’re there (seriously, have a browse).

And don’t forget we, and therefore you all, owe Desura a great deal in their support over the past couple of years as it’s helped the game out tremendously. And in this day where Steam is getting into the alpha-funded arena, there’s never been a better time to show support and give Desura and the games there some love, for the sake of one little icon in your task bar. You’ll also get auto-updated with the latest PZ version the moment it goes live, just like Steam.

That all said, we WILL continue to provide standalone versions, but they will require at least a desura user/pass to access.

If you’re a PZ user/pass person who bought pre-desura, you can convert the game by typing your PZ log-in details at the following page:

http://www.desura.com/games/project-zomboid/activate

The advantage being that now we release on Desura, there will be no login / pass to worry about (more below), and your desura user / pass will be changeable finally. Also it will much ease the process of distributing Steam keys when the time comes. If you’re interested in getting a Steam key, we strongly recommend you do this now to save massive delays when we hit Steam since there will likely be a rush of forgotten PZ or Desura account details to deal with when the time comes.

Once we’re on Desura and everything’s hunky dory, we’re going to begin to implement the Steam SDK. At this point, we’ll go on Steam. Not on the store or on Early Access just yet. Just redeemed keys, getting the update service, start work on achievements, implementing steam workshop maybe? and all the rest of it in preparation for a proper launch, which at quickest will happen once Kate and Bob are in, but more likely once the NPCs have gone in fully.

NPCs and bugfixes will obviously remain our primary focus despite this goal.

DRM Free

Since it’s not possible to download versions of the game from Desura without having bought it, and since the login system has provided no end of problems and support and account emails over the past couple of years that we’d very much like to be free of, and since it’s so fundamentally easy to crack our game given java decompilers and our lack in time or motivation to complicate it, and given how fast pirated versions appear anyway, and given our own views on piracy, (and given it didn’t seem to hurt Prison Architect!), versions of the game on Desura do not require logging on in the same way as previous versions.

This means that while we appreciate the support of people mirroring the Desura versions of the game for those few who for whatever reason (parental filters / work firewalls etc) cannot access desura.com, would be distributing DRM free versions of the game to everyone. So please refrain from doing this and we’ll look into a solution for those remaining people ASAP. Probably involving maintaining a separate version that we put up with a torrent as soon after updates are deemed stable as possible. This is far from ideal for us but if it’s necessary we are willing to do it.

Hosting offers

Since our bandwidth issues came to light, we have had countless wonderful offers from kind people offering their bandwidth and server space to us. While we appreciate this massively, as well as the DRM issue stated above, if you rent or have access to a dedicated server with advertised ‘unlimited bandwidth’, so do we.

You’re reading a webpage hosted on one right now. Like fair use policies in your supposed ‘unlimited’ broadband contract to cater for more extraordinary usage, the reality of the sheer bandwidth requirements these updates have required (many many thousands of gigs within a few days, to sometimes hundreds of concurrent return users each and every update) would cripple most servers and probably anger the hosting company rather quickly, or at best offer 0.1kb download speeds to people on update day and cripple any other services on that server. This is why Amazon S3 exists, as it provides raw bandwidth power and massive through-put unparalleled by any fixed cost server, and is the reason it is pay per gig and at such a premium.

So while we much appreciate your generosity, unless you’re in a unique position of owning or running extremely powerful and massively expensive server clusters not available to most general people, if it were possible to host the game adequately using such servers, we would be using one ourselves. But thank you, we love you for your offering to help us.

Post Steam

Since all three platforms will then be covered, we won’t have direct downloads any more. It’s just too much hassle to maintain, potentially costly, massively increases the number of account support emails we have to deal with per day, and impedes our ability to fix stuff and update quickly. Please note to those who are skeptical of installing distribution services, we’re not doing this to be awkward it’s just something we feel will help us focus on development going forward.

Hope this doesn’t disappoint anyone, but really with our bandwidth issues and the hoops we have to jump through to update the game, it’s required for us to provide as efficient updating of the game as possible and provide you the best game we can as quickly as possible.

We’re just putting the 008 build through some vigorous last minute testing, and expect it to be at some point today. It’s a biggie, for more reasons than you’ll realise. We’re hoping, a few minor bug fix updates aside, this will be the one that ultimately ends up going onto Desura proper. A few points about what to expect from it.

Memory Usage

We’ve made some massive, massive improvements to this. On 32bit systems with on-board graphics cards, where before we were seeing memory bloat to 2 gig and crash the game, you can now expect to use a maximum of about 800 meg. This will make it a close call for 1 gig systems (though we’ve had success at the game running then even so) but we still have ideas to bring this down further, and will be able to update the version quite quickly with more compacted character sprites and further memory optimizations. Computers with graphic cards with dedicated memory can expect to see the game running in 4-600 meg maximum, depending on what’s going on.

We think we can get the game to run in about 600 meg even in the worse case scenario machines, possibly further, which will hopefully leave no one out in the cold with 008.

Other annoyances

Things like the alarms resetting on load have been sorted out at last. No more loading your game and drawing the attention of every zombie in Muldraugh to your safehouse. There are numerous other vital fixes that we hope will please people. You can read about those here.

Hurray!

But that’s not all. We’ve had something in the pipe for a long long long long long time which we were dying to get into the first test build, but sadly slipped for more pressing matters. It’s been rather agonizing not to be able to share, but it’s finally going in. So here’s a ‘Lemmy and Binky explain badly’ video about it, which features a special guest star!

It occurs to us post-recording that weapons have been significantly rebalanced with the help of the test group since 007 to make horde killing more difficult, and axes in particular have taken a nerf, so it makes us feel a little better about our AWFULNESS at playing.

FAQ

Q: Wait, so I can play online?

No. This is only split-screen, local support at the moment.

Q: Is this an XBox version?

No. It’s PC/Mac/Linux. We’re just using the XBox button prompts.

Q: Is it possible to play with two keyboards / mice

Sadly not. There may be ways to hack it with third party software, but it’s unlikely. PCs just aren’t made to support multiple independent mouses or keyboards.

Q: So why were you working on this when you could have been…

As we stated in the video, this has been an ongoing thing for many months, and all in all has had much less time spent on it than anyone could possibly imagine. The main body of work was getting rid of all the single player specific code, and that all happened as streaming was being implemented. This is the first stepping stone to online, but we’re still a way off.

We’ve literally spent about 4-5 hours on this in the past 2 weeks, and that time was spent largely sorting out button prompts, scaling the UI, and allowing multiple online inventories to be possible. We’ve been sitting on this for a long time and there have been frequent inter-team pleadings to show it off over the past month or two. If it annoys you that we’ve spent any time on this during the past few weeks, even 4-5 hours, please consider that we are massive geeks and stuff like this is what we do for fun to relax after a hard day of work.

Also, after 008 the evidence this existed would have been abundantly obvious from the Lua files, and last thing we’d want is for people to discover it was in progress before we could announce it and make a big deal about it. Especially since people would likely assume the Lua clues pointed to online play, and then be disappointed when we did reveal.

Also consider that multiplayer, in some form, is far and away the #1 requested feature, so if you aren’t interested yourself, it is important for a lot of your fellow Zomboiders.

Q: I don’t care about local multiplayer – why didn’t you make it online?

Online is a million times more complicated, dealing with lag and server/client architecture and all the rest of it. This was relatively straightforward to add, and was the quickest way we could provide multiplayer functionality and start getting the game ready for online. Besides, there aren’t enough ‘sat in front of TV’ split-screen games out there, and we’re proud to have it in the game.

Q: Xbox pads? Really?

The game will support any joypad (with dual stick controls) but may require some tinkering in the initial version until we figure out how to support all pads out of the box. It was our (perhaps ill-informed) understanding from our own experiences with joypads that many PC games tend to use Xbox button graphics as a standard, but we’ll look to providing alternates for Logitech / PS3 pads etc. XBox pads are awesome though.

Q: NPCS!?

We haven’t forgotten, and they are on their way. Our goal is to get Kate and Baldspot back for Rezzed, and the Sandbox NPCs shouldn’t be too far behind them.

And in case you missed it, we blogged earlier today about appearing at Rezzed in Birmingham this year. So make sure to read that if you’re interested in stopping by.

That’s all for this week, and we’ll do our utmost to get you your 008 goodness today. If not today then very very soon afterward.

So, hopefully we’ll see you there – but if you’ve taken a bite, please keep your distance. Thank you!

Hey everyone, sorry for the late and also rather barebones Mondoid this week, but it’s been a busy day at Indie Stone towers and given everyone’s eagerness for this build to get fixed up, we’re sure everyone would prefer we were hard at work than agonizing over the contents of this weeks Mondoid!

We’re still hard at work trying to figure out some strange memory issues on some 32bit systems causing the memory usage of OpenGL to 2gig and crashing the game, which is at this stage largely the cause of all remaining incompatibility issues.

Since build 7 is largely considered, relatively speaking, the most stable and fun build we’ve had in a long time (despite some issues with containers which does cause a lot of people problems) we would rather not put out updates immediately that risk upsetting this until we’ve solved this last remaining issue.

On the plus side, it’s lead to some significant memory optimizations to try and minimize the issue, but at the same time the memory bloat is happening on a subset of systems deep in the openGL dll outside the debugging eyes of the dev team, so it’s been a tricky one.

We’ve not been idle in other areas. A ton of bugs have been fixed, and if sorting this last problem out does end up dragging on much longer, we will put out another release with bug fixes from our frozen code after we’re satisfied it’s stable. We’d rather have this issue sorted first though, but just so you know if it drags on we won’t let it lose us momentum.

So we’re not leaving you totally without anything beyond ‘just trying to get it done’, here is a stress test of the streaming system (an old version of the map) to determine how fast vehicles could feasibly go.

Which hopefully shows how prepared we are to add vehicles into the game when the time comes. Not until after RC3 though, but this gets us excited!

There are some other things we’re dying to share, but want to hold off a little more before we do that until they are ready. Let’s just say that there is a lot to be excited about in the next month or two for us and Zomboid fans alike.

So stay tuned!

What’s more, to trumpet their return Matt and his new co-host Ashley hoodwinked Mash and Andy into appearing on the show. Their chat took place before the release of RC2.9, so it’s the perfect way to discover just what we were all up to during our recent (many) months at the coalface. Well, when you’re not cowering from zombies in-game of course…

So, yay! Click here for audio love. More soon we hope!

We’re continuing working on getting the game working on all graphics cards. There is some work yet to do on this but we’re confident we can nail it soon.

Assuming we’ve not fixed all of them by next release, we will otherwise introduce a ‘safe mode’ executable for the game (and a command line param) which may have success on some cards in the interim by forcing the off-screen buffer that many have issues with not to be created and disable both shaders and double size. Truth be told it should do this anyway, but we suspect the device capability checks in openGL may not be picking it up properly. Speaking of double size, we’re sorry this has fallen by the wayside of recent, there have just been so many issues to address it’s been deemed lower priority since the option of a smaller full-screen res is there in the meantime. This goes for any feature that has similarly not gotten the love it’s owed. We’ll get to it, promise!

Hosting

As you may already know, our latest version had to be taken off the servers due to them being rather more costly than we anticipated compared to the 0.2.0 builds, and risking putting us seriously out of pocket (Amazon S3 is charge per gig, and we shifted a surprising amount of gigs last week!) – we already have several routes we can hopefully follow, and things are progressing great in that department, and rest assured we’ll get an official download in place for as soon as build 7 hits. In the meantime, if you go to this thread you may find mirrors or torrents that have been set up to get the latest build. If you feel you’re up to a wait, then we would suggest considering waiting for 7 as we feel on the whole it will be a much more solid game by then.

Zombie / difficulty changes

We’ve made big changes to the zombie distributions to hopefully make them more balanced.

1) All player spawn locations have been moved to the east side of the map, where the zombie density is lowest. While it’s still possible to be unlucky, you should find it a bit less immediately dangerous.

2) Zombie densities have been made further lighter in the east. Or rather the chance of spawning a horde and the size of that horde is more closely capped by the zombie density. So hordes should be rarer and less sizable in numbers. There are still enough zombies around to prove deadly if you’re not careful. Remember: Sneak is the most powerful weapon you have now.

3) Loot spawns more strictly follows zombie densities. Staying in the east may be safer, but you will struggle to find enough food and supplies. Trips to the west highway and the shops and houses near that will reap much greater rewards but at more risk.

4) As well as something that we’ll save for a rather alarming surprise, we’ve introduced a few shades of the NPC meta-game to provide reasons to justify mass horde migrations. Please note this does not mean that NPCs are back in to meet and interact with, but the meta-game events that interact with the zombie hordes will be, as we feel it will much help the zombie situation in-game. While at the start of the game you have a relatively easy time sticking to the east, over the days that follow events will start attracting hordes from the horde packed down-town area to the west, leaving stragglers as they go. Over a few weeks these events will render once quiet areas in the east of town very dangerous. By the time this happens, you may find things more difficult and may be pushed further out of town. Hopefully by this stage, you’re more prepared for that when it happens.

5) Various bugs with indoor zombies and hordes have been fixed which means zombies should feel thoroughly persistent.

6) There were some rarer cases where zombies would erroneously hang onto the player as a target long beyond when they had left their field of vision. This probably explains the otherwise confusing ‘bloodhound’ issues some had with the game.

Container Saving Bugs

There are circumstances currently that result in the contents of containers not saving out correctly. Obviously this fits into the DANGER category of game breakers so we need to get this resolved ASAP and want this resolved before build 7.

Map

Work on the map thunders along. As well as continuing to decorate Muldraugh with pot holes and grime and other polish, and continuing [REDACTED] but with a well there and low zombie counts, it’s worth it! We’ve also been adding additional trees around the suburbs of Muldarugh. Since sneaking has becomes such a key strategy in the game (in RC3 future with sneaking animations and peeking) it’s important to provide places to use as stop gaps when moving from one house to another.

Due to numerous people finding transversing the forests extremely frustrating, another change we’re flirting with is making tree tiles slowly transversable, even adding a rustling sound as you do so. So now you have both the potential to squeeze through thick trees to escape the horde. Or perhaps you’re in a clearing surrounded by trees and hearing rustling coming from around you?

Sound

As a side note, with a sound system fix, we’ve fixed the issues with positional sound in the game, so now with stereo or even better surround sound you can better hear the location of zombies, thumping, smashing and bush rustling. Or something else?

When is build 7?

Soon. We never anticipated the seriousness of the zombie spawning and density issues, and feel that although some hard-core players may find the numbers fun, there are a lot of people who find it frustrating. It’s important to come up with a solution and implementation that can keep both groups happy (although Sandbox is an option). In addition we’d like our next build to make some headway in getting the incompatibility issues fixed as we cannot let the pressure to fix serious game issues stop us from fixing the very issues we made this forum release to solve. All in all we want 7 to be ‘a good one’ so are using the current server issues, and the necessary time to arrange alternatives, as an opportunity to really get 7 in shape before it’s released and address as many issues as humanly possible. In the next few days at most it should go live hopefully, but you all know the ETA score round these parts.

What about that other thing?

There are plenty of things we need to resolve in these builds before we’ll be satisfied to be starting on work on the NPCs, and there are many more fixes not mentioned in this Mondoid. These are just the main points, and hopefully we’ll have whatever issues you’re personally having sorted in build 7. If not, we’ll get to it soon after. We won’t be satisfied with anything less than the most bug free version of Zomboid to date since day 1 as overall polish and quality is our main driving force for this version.

Please be patient and understanding in the meantime, as the game has had a massively extended period of development and no play testing for a long period and this is to be expected, but as closed testing went on into the third week, we just didn’t want to deny our forum users a chance to play any longer and need to get these card incompatibilities licked soon.

Thanks again everyone, and the response has been overwhelming and reminded us how much the work is worth it.

Love,

Indie Stone

It’s been designed by our good friends at Modular, and through it we hope we’ve created a fun place to filter development news, modding activity and community shenanigans directly into your soon-to-be-infected brains.

Much like Zomboid itself, this website isn’t the final product. We’re going to go back to the Modular peeps in a month or two to address the niggles we, and you, discover – always doing our utmost to explain the game to newcomers, as well as catering for our regulars.

So, we hope you don’t hate it too much basically. Love you!

First off, please read these points before starting to play.

It’s not clear in-game but E opens doors / windows, HOLDING E will climb through a window, and HAMMERING E will smash the window.

1) This is not an official stable release. This version has some known problems, but as far as we can tell all serious issues risking save games are resolved. However, this does not mean that save bugs are not lurking. Using this build you accept the possibility that it may not be stable.

2) The main focus of this public forum release is to figure out the issues we are having with some Intel graphics chipsets. We’ll also be making sure Mac and Linux builds work, and will upload those shortly (as in today). There may be other compatibility or performance issues, but we’ll resolve them asap and will be our main focus of bug fixing.

3) There may be a few hotfixes required to deal with any immediate issues. Bugs can crop up between any versions, so please be patient if there are any problems as we’ll quickly resolve them and upload a hotfix for any serious problems asap.

4) The game will be released on Desura as soon as the intel bug and any other undiscovered serious issues are resolved.

5) Things missing: Fire, NPCs. Double size. They will be dropped back in as soon as they are sorted. In case of fire and double size, that’ll be very soon. NPCs after Desura version.

6) Known issues, a few weapon sprites are missing, a few minor map issues. Various small issues with UI. All hopefully relatively trivial. We’ll work on anything that crops up. Restarting / reloading the game is often the best way to solve any glitches with for example the inventory stopping working, though hopefully these will be very rare and/or fixed.

Some other general extra information here: http://www.theindiestone.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=12875

Make sure you have Java installed: http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp 64bit for 64bit OS’s, 32bit otherwise. This also defines what exe you launch. If you crash loading texture pages then this may be related to the Intel bug or a similar incompatibility.

http://www.theindiestone.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=12854&p=178077#p178077

If you can’t play right now, look see what’s over here perhaps? All Things Zomboid returns! With CaptainBinky and Mash as guest hosts.

Have fun!

Before we start a link dump of the many hours of RC3 footage, we will discuss all of the current issues in the build, only one of which completely forbid a release. Little of this Mondoid will likely be news for forum regulars, I’m afraid, but this is for everyone else. Hopefully the streams and videos are doing more than a Mondoid ever could, anyway.

Excluding more trivial stuff, we still have a few more serious problems to resolve.

Save bug – For some unknown reason, the testers saves are getting corrupted very regularly. They will go to reload a world and their world data will be garbage. This will likely be something massively trivial, one byte of data getting saved but not read, or read but not saved, somewhere buried deep within the Zomboid code. This is the one show-stopper that means we refuse to release, since the danger of people losing hours of game-play (remember that loading and saving happens all the time as you walk around the streamed world) or worse a zombie fortress they have spent 30 lives building.

More a cosmetic thing, but still seriously damaging to the atmosphere (even if many find it entertaining) is the moonwalking zombies. Seems that when zombies are reused (a memory / garbage collection saving tactic) after being killed off, they cease to be able turn to face the direction they are moving, leading to humorous but massively wrong looking results.

Only the first (and, out of vanity, possibly the last) bugs are stopping us from considering a release, but obviously we could not consider a Desura release until the second is fixed too. Desura members with intel cards may not be too happy to find Desura auto-updating them to oblivion. We should point out if we do do a forum release prior to Desura, damned if we’re falling into the same trap as before. We’ll get the intel stuff sorted, and get on Desura as soon as possible. It’s not fair how long those lovely people have had to wait for an auto-updatable version.

So that’s the situation. We’re so close we can smell it, but there’s that one last hill to climb. We’re overjoyed at how the videos and streams have been recieved, and moreso were even surprised ourselves how much it’s come together since testing began. It also only goes to show we made the right move holding it in testing as we did, as comparing the 24th build with the 1st would be quite eye opening (maybe we can do that for fun post release?)

So when? We know some rumours were circulating that it could have been today. Well sadly there’s no way we could comply with that, as much as we’d loved to have. Next week’s Mondoid? It’s possible. NOTE: It’s possible, not yes. It could be the week after. But yep, we’re really down to talking about these kinds of time-frames now. This is super exciting for us, and the last couple of weeks have been wonderful after a very long year. To see people’s reactions to the new builds has reminded us why we’re doing this and what all the work is for. It’s a happy time.

So now the update is out the way, let’s get onto the video link dump! We would recommend giving all these lovely peoples a subscribe, a follow, or whatever the equivalent is for twitch as they are all wonderfully nice and entertaining to watch. A word of warning though: There is a LOT of footage here, so firstly you’re guaranteed to see a lot of moonwalking zombies, or pieces of the universe mysteriously vanishing. You’ll also see a lot of Zomboid RC3 content laid bare. You may want to save it all as a surprise, or you may want to watch every minute of it. It’s your call.

Youtube

RingoD:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB7Op5iFUng
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wmWJbp1xLw

Mathas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTzyOlJQ4M8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwYdWCYpoJI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqKVbZm-kzU

Ecky:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4D_IPUm1fo

Twitch

MiddleAgedBob:

http://www.twitch.tv/middleagedbob

Ecky:

http://www.twitch.tv/eckyman

dThunder:

http://www.twitch.tv/audthunder

nasKo:

http://www.twitch.tv/nasko_zomboid

There are probably other streamers or Youtubers we’ve forgotten, not because they weren’t wonderful but because, erm, there’s been a fair few of them. Apologies if so: let us know and we’ll add them to the list.

Oh, and if videos are a bit too revealing for your tastes, there’s also a nice cache of screenshots over at Watch Survival.

Well this Mondoid we gave keys to the twelfth internal build to two of our most trusted YouTube commentators – our very own RingoD123 and, the creator of the very concept of Mondoid, Mathas.

As far as testing progress goes, there are still game ending bugs and other serious glitches to resolve – but it’s getting more and more like a fully playable game each and every day. As you can see, we finally have something where it’s possible to video for any amount of time in an actual ‘gameplay’ style.

When you watch the videos please bear in mind that, obviously, there will be bugs visible. Please also bear in mind, however, that if you can’t see any bugs – then please be assured that RingoD and Mathas know what to avoid! What’s more, regardless of how fun it all looks over 30 minutes, the build can still potentially die horribly, crash to desktop and destroy your save after 40 hours of investment.

It’s also worth saying that both RingoD and Mathas will be posting up RC3 test builds from now until release so, if you haven’t already, it might be worth your while giving their channels a quick subscribe. (Their uploads won’t necessarily be on a Mondoid, but we’ll be sure to include them on our weekly blog all the same.)

Without further ado then…

Here’s our own RingoD:

And here’s that wonderful Mr Mathas:

As we hope you can see, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that our goal of reclaiming the gameplay and energy of 0.1.5d has been successful (despite a game loading bug rendering Mathas’ zombies blind). Liberated by the sandbox options, the survival game can be tweaked back to 0.1.5d levels without leaving anyone out. What’s more with the larger map with more remote locations it means that, even in survival, you can find a somewhat safe haven. Combat is miles better than the somewhat haphazard 0.2.0 builds too.

While we’ve been tackling the bugs this week, we’ve also been fiddling with the looting system and UI on the side. Looting is much less fiddly, then, while some big changes to interior lighting has made navigating indoors much easier. Save bugs aplenty have been nuked too.

So the list of ‘missing stuff ‘diminishes quickly, as the bugs are following suit. Still left to do though is the somewhat gaping hole that zombies are once again unable to climb through windows. This will hopefully be fixed today, but was way too late in terms of Mathas and Ringod123 to do their magic.

We still have some ways to go, and bad things could yet crop up, but it’s looking good. We’ve got release butterflies hatching in our belly from long dormant cocoons – which is a very good sign we’re finally on the final final straight. Even though, finally, we’re aware that we’ve used that phrase (almost there!) once or twice in the final straight’s past.