Irritatingly, for you and us, these are also the sort of bugs that could take half an hour to fix, or two days, or a day and a half, or two days and a half, or ten minutes, or… well you get the picture. The only thing we can say is ‘Watch this space’, and assure you that we’re working all hours to get this lump of code deposited on your hard drive. As soon as we know, you’ll know.

While you’re slamming f5 on the forums and cursing our names, however, why not serenade your vigil with the third episode of the AllThingsZomboid podcast? This time round our writer Will Porter was the man hooked up to Skype – and shoots the breeze with hosts Matt and Dan on the narrative future of PZ, and the work that’s ready and waiting to be slotted into the Knox County mainframe post-update.

Meanwhile, you might have noticed little nippage and tuckage on the front page – with our various international communities now delicately placed in their own sub-section. If you’re a part of a growing foreign language community then please get in touch, as we’re more than aware that the moans and groans of the undead can be heard in dialects beyond our own. The newest addition to the family are the delightful Polish peeps from ProjectZomboid.pl, while we’ve also provided a fresh link to our Russian friends at project-zomboid.ru.

In terms of modding news it’s starting to look like we’ve found a writer willing to pick up the baton of PZ friend StinkyTiger and provide regular round-ups and guides to the wonderful stuff our community are coming up with. In the mean-time, however, we’d like to draw your attention towards Thuztor’s work in progress ‘Project Zomboid on Vacation Island’. It’s like going on holiday, only with zombies! Book now!

That’s about it for now, keep on watching the @theindiestone twitter feed for public test build R update news, plus any amusing pictures of kittens we feel should be shared.

Oh, and hey, we recorded this the other day while testing. Thought you might like a peek.

Spiffo the Community Raccoon assures you that the long wait for R will be worth it, and reminds you that two days in ‘Raccoon time’ is, in actual fact, a bit more than two days.

This was first created during the Easter break, which we decided to use as something of a left-field design brainstorm session. Our use of hand-drawn sprites was starting to be of real concern – the process was becoming unmanageable due to the sheer number of frames, clothing pieces and directions required. We were generally having to shy away from necessary animations, or resorting to ones with a mere one or two frames.

As such we’ve built a new system that uses pre-rendered 3D models that are consequently rendered into sprites. On top of that we then use various techniques to increase clarity when they’re shrunk down so we can emulate the old graphical style as much as possible alongside the crisper animations.

We recognise that some people may miss the retro-look graphics, along with the baldy alien zomboids, but unfortunately the move away from individually hand-drawn sprites was fundamentally necessary for the development of the game. Sprite and animation creation now, genuinely, takes a hundredth of the amount of time it did previously.

What’s more many, many extra features are now on the table for future updates – without us having to scale the terrifying heights of Mt. Animation. Yanking an axe from a zombie’s ribcage, decapitations, zombies with busted legs dragging themselves towards you… it’s all possible now, and it won’t be making any significant extra demands on your system either. We hope you agree the possibilities are exciting.

With all this in mind, please check out our demonstration vid. Please note that everything you see is still WIP, contents may settle during transit, this is only our first step towards a more animated world and please keep arms and legs inside the carriage at ALL times.

All this leads us to the inevitable ‘how long till the update plz’ paragraph. As you might be aware, we’re currently running public tests of our update builds on our forum. These are versions that come with their fair share of bugs and launch issues that survivors who don’t mind a rough-ish ride can take for a spin. The next build, R, should (fingers crossed) be released in around two days time – Lemmy is currently fixing the wheelie bin issue and a few save bugs that have cropped up with the changes. The new animation system will be present in the R build, as well as a tweaked approach to combat.

We don’t anticipate that the launch of the official update on our site and Desura will be long after this – although, as ever, unexpected bugs could still rear their heads. We’ll blog again when we have fresh news. Until then Knox County!

Indie Stone Towers are currently buzzing – Lemmy is putting the finishing touches on public test build 0.2.0r and Binky is pumping out animations for our new sprite system. The plan is that if the complete set of new animations is ready to go by the time Lemmy has signed off the launchers, tutorial fixes, tweaked combat and optimisation required for the full update launch then they’ll be going out with the new visuals. We should have more news on this, and videos, early next week.

For the a full and more personal run-down on the current PZ state of play then you could also be advised to check out the latest episode of AllThingsZomboid – the new community podcast helmed by Chicago-dwellers Matt and Dan. Here a sleepless Lemmy, at around five in the morning UK time, discusses the new systems, the update launch and all manner of modding palaver. You can find it on iTunes here.

Next up is the news that most of The Indie Stone will be present at the Eurogamer/RPS Rezzed PC and Indie gaming show this July in Brighton in the UK. Zomboid Writer TheWillPorter, Lemmy and Binky will be giving a talk on the ups and downs we’ve experienced throughout the mental year that’s gone by, and we’ll also be doing a bit of a Zomboid meet-up if enough Community-types fancy it. So check out the official Rezzed site for further details, and indeed watch this space.

Last, but not least, meanwhile are the results of the Community Screenshot Competition. Now, we’ll be running another one of these once the new animations and sprites are in the 0.2.0 build – people had put so much effort into the competition it would’ve been unfair just to ask you all to start again!

We also found that some people were entering super-artistic shots that weren’t so much about the update’s new features -  and some were focussing on the public test build’s new features (as, indeed, they were being nudged towards). As such, we’ve doubled up on winners. Without any further ado then, here are the triumphant six community members.

The Indie Stone Award for Screenshots that look Nice and Arty

First Place

RonaldAniban

Second Place

Ominus

Third Place

Baron

The Indie Stone Award for Screenshots that Show off Update Content

First Place

Finnceapmann

Second Place

Macbeth5

Third Place

Ontogenesis

Honourable mentions go out to Acex222, BedBanana, EkarusRyndren, LifeIsWeird, SooS and Series^ for their sterling efforts as well. The judges’ decisions are final – but if you think you were hard done by then another chance to win will be coming about very soon! We’ll be getting in touch with the winners via PM and sending prizes out as soon as possible.

Thanks everyone!

Spiffo the Community Racoon thanks you for your continued being loveliness.

Podcast!

First on the agenda is (fanfare) the All Things Zomboid podcast. Everyone at The Indie Stone is rather excited that there are people saying real life words about our game, and even more excited that they’ve decided to trap those words in an MP3. As such we dispatched Captain Binky to Skype, where he mulled over Zomboid with lovable ATZ hosts Matt and Dan.

You can get the podcast from the All Things Zomboid site, or if you’re an Apple kinda person then it also lurks deep within iTunes. All very exciting.

Zach Beever Remix competition

Second item on the agenda is the grand final of the PZ forum’s Zach Beever remix competition, a contest organised by the wondrous Pixelface in which survivors took to their virtual mix-desks to reform our The Zombie Threat track. Zach himself judged the contest, and the entries were hugely impressive. The following three, however, stood on the podium.

First place: How To Become A Zombie by ibyabyg
Second place: The Zombie Threat (Allsworth Remix) by markallsworth
Third place: Project Zomboid vs Tron: Legacy by esgimusic

Thanks to everyone who entered, and even bigger thanks to Pixelface for organising the contest!

Last week for screenshot entries!

Just a quick reminder that The Indie Stone are running a screenshot competition for the public test versions of the 0.2.0 update. If you take a decent grab (we recommend Fraps as a decent tool to take these with) then post it up in this thread – and if you’re in our top three you’ll be sent a package of gaming swag that The Will Porter has picked up on his travels as a games journalist. All entrants, meanwhile, could find their images being part of the prestigious Project Zomboid press kit…

Get in touch!

If there’s something you’d like to see covered in future Community of the Dead blogposts then please get in touch. Either mail us, tweet us or shout from the forums. We’ll be doing these whenever there’s enough fun stuff to chat about, basically, so the more you do – the more we’ll say that we love you for it!

"Spiffo the Community Raccoon says 'Thank you!' for doing Community things! Just PLEASE stop dying in his restaurant, as there's blood EVERYWHERE and he's fed up with mopping it up. Thanks!"

After running through seventeen iterations many of the test build’s bugs and eccentricities have been ironed out. This said, the primary tasks that remain before we can put it out officially on the PZ site and on Desura are to take delivery of (and finalise) our universal PC/Mac/Linux launcher, put our fire mechanics back in and reintegrate the Kate and Baldspot tutorial in the rebuilt engine. There’s also, of course, quite a few remaining bugs and balance issues to hammer into place.

So this, essentially, is a quick message to say ‘Watch this space’. We’ll be making a big press push when the update arrives, so hopefully you’ll witness some Zomboid fanfare amidst all the yelling, screaming and shots aimed directly at the brain.

For those who haven’t been around recently – the big news is that we’ve got ‘save on quit’ into the game, while this is another unexpected arrival:

 
We’d also like to flag up the exciting arrival of the AllThingsZomboid podcast. They’re recording their first show very soon, so be sure to join in and check it out. Thanks guys!

In the run up to the public release, we’re now in a position to release videos again. Mainly because a lot of bugs that emerged during optimization that would make videos a mess are finally being quashed.

So to help you survive the last few days before you can finally get your hands on it, we’ll release a few additional videos to whet your appetite!

First of all is a feature that started out as an accessibility thing, when it was pointed out on our forums that our game was impossible to play by people who can only use a mouse. As its transpired it works super well, and in our opinion the best way to play. It will also hopefully make the game more intuitive to newer players.

Introducing, mouse control!

Next feature doesn’t really need much introduction, beyond the fact that it is a much requested feature for the looters out there. With the new lowered carry capacity it became ever more a necessity to be able to dump your load from time to time.

We’ll post more as we go, but we’re getting close now!

Just a quick blog update to say we’ve gone into closed testing of the update, and things are progressing very well. As soon as the serious bugs are resolved we will open the update up to public testing on our forums. The end is nigh!

In the meantime, here are some comparison shots of low graphics settings (traditional lighting) and the new lighting system.

With the task countdown now at three, we thought we’d give you a brief run-down on what we’re up to at PZ Towers. Currently on Lemmy’s agenda is to fix a few bugs that have cropped up through recent task completions (there’s one to do with breakable windows, for instance, and another with grumpy furniture that refuses to budge despite the best efforts of the zombies), but we’re almost there. The remaining tasks aren’t minor ones, but blue sky is visible. Lemmy hasn’t seen daylight in weeks, and won’t until we’ve kicked this thing out of the door…

Annoyingly, something else that’s cropped up is a nasty lighting bug that means any videos we take will look horrid – meaning that we wouldn’t really want them propagated to a mass audience on YouTube. In the absence of a play-through vid, then, we thought we’d share some good news that we were saving for after the update.

In short, the PZ team is going to expand a little. Famed Zomboid mod hero Ringod (aka Paul Ring) is going to helm the scripting part of PZ Stories – working alongside The Will Porter to further the adventures of Baldspot and Kate, and indeed the raft of new characters who will follow them. Lemmy, meanwhile, will be able to concentrate on engine and gameplay development – and of course that all-important save system.

Paul lives and works in Newcastle, and is an entirely spiffo sort of guy – you might know him from his excellent PZ modding videos on YouTube. We’re really excited to officially welcome him to the development team, and not just because of his charming regional accent. His impending work means that we’ll be able to punt story and dialogue updates out far quicker than we would have done had Lemmy been their sole custodian.

We’ll likely have further staff announcements to make after the update has been released, as well as our plans for a PZ meet-up in Newcastle, but until then we can’t afford to remove our nose from the grindstone.

To celebrate and alleviate the wait-pain, please take this picture of a sign of Spiffo the Raccoon (mascot of independent Knox County fast food chain Spiffo’s and star of PAWS, the cancelled Indie Stone platformer) with our love.

Oh, and here’s a few screenshots showing a couple of the new weapons/recipes going into the update. Here we have survivors waving knives, using a saw on a shotgun to create a sawn-off (or ‘sawed-off’ as they’d say in Muldraugh), and said weapon being used to dead some zeds. Thanks everyone!

Well, sort of. Thanks for your ongoing patience everyone, we’re now down to five tasks that must be completed before release, and some nightmare pathfinding issues have been resolved with the help of countless gallons of coffee.

Another task that’s now pretty much mission accomplished has been optimization. There’s much more complicated stuff going on in the world now: making it more persistent with hordes that persist as real zombies instead of virtualised versions, and who always collide with each other to prevent stacking problems, had been pushing up the minimum spec of the game far too much. When you factor in NPCs capable of navigating to any point in a more substantial map and new features like pushable furniture there was a real danger that we’d start to lose a large chunk of the bottom end of our current customers.

While we’ve warned that this may happen, it felt like we were in a danger zone: too sudden a change for the customers who’ve waited so patiently for us to sort our shit out and get them their much awaited new dose of Zomboid.

So in the recent parts of the task-list some heavy duty optimization offensive went into effect. The thing is that, as any programmer will tell you, optimizations are a mixed blessing. Sure, they speed the game up a lot – but on the flipside making odd changes to the code to eke out extra performance can lead to obscure and messed up bugs. In the recent tasklist slowdown we fell victim to this: new and deadly bugs had to be fixed. Stuff that was working perfectly well in our demonstration videos as CPU hogs subsequently needed more attention.

We’ve now pretty much broken through this barrier. A massive part of the tasklist has been these bugs: some taking days of head-scratching to sort out. Still, optimization has been an ongoing concern. With a lot of people complaining of lagging in the current version, in all honesty it’s been borderline terrifying.

In recent days, however, we’ve had an epiphany. We’ve realised exactly why speed and CPU power have been such an issue, and with it has come a solution.

See, unlike most games, PZ has been more taxing on your computer for one reason alone: fast forward. Having to process the entire world 3,600 times each frame to achieve the required speed to wile away the long nights barricaded in your safe house meant that even one CPU hungry process could knock the fast forward speed down to depressing levels. THIS is why we’ve had such a problem (more so than many other games of our ilk) so instead of breaking the code with optimizations that would be dangerous to our stability we’ve decided to approach it from a new angle.

You know in Skyrim where you choose to ‘wait’? The task we’ve almost completed is us doing that. Instead of processing the world a million times a millisecond, we’re going to cheat massively** and hopefully achieve a comparable effect. Let’s say you’ve snuck back to your safehouse and hammered up a plank of wood, you’re not tired and you’ve decided to sit it out until morning. Clicking the new ‘wait’ icon and the game will go into ‘ULTRAWAITSUPERMODE’ (TM),

‘ULTRAWAITSUPERMODE’ (TM) will persist until you unclick it, or you make visual contact with a member of the living dead. In this mode we’ll only draw the frame once per hour or so, speeding up the clock and day to night cycle essentially fast-forwarding time. We’ll make people get hungrier or sleepier faster, we’ll make zombies and NPCs walk and run much faster, and basically supercharge everything in the game. In terms of you playing the game time will be perceived as being sped up, when in actual fact its just things in the world moving at ridiculous speeds, while the computations required are still only happening as they do at normal speed, massively reducing the strain on the CPU. This won’t be a perfect simulation by a long shot and may have some side-effects in itself, but will hopefully (as early tests indicate) be imperceptibly different to actually fast-forwarding time properly as it currently does.

Yes, it’s technically a massive cheat **, since per hour technically the AI is capable of doing a fraction of what they would be able to normally. But they’ll do it all at ridiculous superman speeds to compensate, and that will massively free us up from the shackles of optimization for this update, and all updates to come.

While this is technically an ‘extra task’, one of those other remaining tasks is ‘optimization’, and trust us when we say that task has taken about 100x the time of any other task and probably would continue to do so without this solution.

On a decent spec PC we can now fastforward through an entire night in about 20 seconds, compared to the couple of minutes it previously took (yes, eek indeed). This has been a massive part of our tasklist, and we’re overwhelmingly relieved that we’ve worked out a way to keep the low-end PCs of PZ players happily infected when the update comes around

Thanks for reading everyone! We’ll make some new videos as soon as this part of the code has been beaten into shape!

** We should clarify at this point that the word ‘cheat’ should not be confused with it being a hacky crappy way of doing things unique to our game. All games ‘cheat’ massively at every possible opportunity. For example, it’s highly unlikely that Skyrim’s wait mechanic runs the game at 1000x speed while you’re waiting. Just fast forwarding time was never initially intended in the game, and the way the feature was added and evolved meant this approach didn’t happen from the get go, as it perhaps would have done if the feature was pre-planned before development.

Q. When did you first get interested in writing music? What instruments do you play yourself?

I actually didn’t listen to any music up till a little over three years ago. It’s hard for me to believe that now that I’m pursuing a career in music composition, but it wasn’t till I took piano lessons in the fall of 2008 that I became more interested in music.

One day, about half a year after I started taking lessons, my teacher told me how he loved the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. He played some of the piano reductions for me and I was blown away. Since then my interest in different genres and styles of music has branched out, but that initial feeling I got when I heard the Fellowship theme inspired me to learn how to compose.

As for instruments, I only play piano, but I love it. I have nearly as much fun performing a piece as I do writing one.

Q. What new tracks have you written that are being included in the next PZ update? What was your approach to writing them?

I’ve written eleven new tracks since the last Zomboid update, though two may have their appearances postponed until a later date. Of the nine that I know will be in the next update, six are ambient, two are fighting and/or escaping, and one is “Oh shi…”

My approach in writing them is similar, but I think there’s a difference in maturity between these pieces and my first. Not to say that I don’t like the first group of pieces I wrote, I do, but I improved a lot in the break between updates. In fact, I’ve improved just as much between the time I wrote the newest batch of tracks and now, so I’m excited to experiment and see what I can do with future requests from the team.

Q. How did your fate and that of The Indie Stone find themselves intertwined? What attracted you to Project Zomboid?

I talked to a few guys in the game business in early 2011 and they all told me to do the same thing: find a project that needs music and jump on the opportunity. I was sending out a few messages to various solo developers over on the tigsource.com forums when a friend of mine, Olli Laine (who writes some kickass music and puts it on his Soundcloud account), told me to send a message to the Project Zomboid guys.

I had actually seen the thread for Project Zomboid on the Facepunch Forums earlier that day, but I figured it was too big of a project for a first time composer like me. Nevertheless, I sent Lemmy an email telling him that I’d love to do the music for PZ and since I’m a start-up, I’ll do it for free. I wasn’t expecting the best news, but it couldn’t hurt.

Signing into gmail, I found multiple emails from Lemmy later that day telling me I could come on board and write the music for the game. I was incredibly surprised and excited. Hell, I’m still excited to have this great opportunity, especially for a game like Zomboid. The team has even paid me, which is more than I ever expected and I’m extremely grateful for it. I don’t know how many times I’ve talked with my friends about how it’d be so great to play a true zombie survival game – I never thought I’d be working on it.

Q. How do you write and record the Zomboid music?

There are actually no live recordings in any of the tracks for Zomboid, though that would be awesome. Instead, I use a sequencer (first it was FL Studio, but now I use Pro Tools) or Finale to compose the music and a lot of EastWest products and the Vienna Symphonic Library Special Edition to ‘record’ them. EastWest and VSL are basically a huge collection of recorded instruments that I can tweak and use however.

Q. What’s the creative process when you’re writing a piece of music for PZ?

I love improvising, and a lot of my ideas come from just sitting down at the piano and playing while thinking about the situation I want to compose for. After I get the main theme for the piece down on the piano, I orchestrate it. Again, I keep thinking about the situation I’m composing for and orchestrate accordingly.

Q. Do you know exactly how your music would be used in PZ? Or do you leave it to Lemmy and Binky?

The guys will usually ask me to write a piece, or a few pieces, for a specific part of the game, so I know what each of my tracks will be used for. That being said, I don’t know exactly how it’ll be implemented, but I trust the Zomboid team with that.

Q. What are your career plans? What do you hope to do over the next few years?

I’d love to write music for film and games while having the freedom to explore both concert and avant-garde music. Over the next few years I hope to get into a four year university, get a few new composing jobs, and learn as much as I can about music.

Q. Do you ever tire of people saying how AWESOME your music is? And how much The Indie Stone LOVE you?

Haha. I really appreciate the kind comments towards my music, but I make sure I don’t get a big ego about it. All I want is to do is immerse people into the Project Zomboid world – when people tell me I’ve done that for them it makes me incredibly happy.