Hello folks! Truth of the matter is the PZ team, more than ever, are cast to the winds visiting family, last minute shopping and all the other things that get in the way of posting blogs. As such this has been tapped out onto the touch screen of a mobile phone, we’ve quite literally ‘phoned this one in’, so forgive the brevity though we don’t want to break the year plus tradition of Mondoidin’.

This week and next week will be quite the bare bones Mondoids. Not much substantial to report about the game itself. Binky has more or less wrapped up the cross platform shenanigans and hopefully that means we can look into a tool release before long. Romain has been fixing up problems in the build, not least of all the PERPETUAL THUNDERDOME that is Kentucky at this point. Lemmy be carrying on fixing up the meta-game system for NPCs that we detailed last week, amongst some other stuff which may turn out to be pretty interesting but he’s saving shouting about it until he’s positive it’s doable. Mash meanwhile has been painting some really cool Zomboid related stuff (think what we don’t have yet with regards to Steam specific features). We also have to apologize for the tardy Desura build. It’s sucky but we’ve not forgotten anyone, we wanted to get the build right first since the process of updating is longer and we’d run the risk of leaving a broken build up there too long. We’re pretty close tho and the next incoming hotfix should wrap up the last issues and we’d feel comfortable calling it a super proper release. Truth is we’d have held back on the official Steam build the same, but with the Steam flash sale last week we needed to get the launcher out there to stem the potential masses of support questions.

Easy Pickins

For those who follow the forums, you may see a bit of cheeky copy pasting in effect, but given the circumstances we’re sure you understand, but we wanted to make sure to shout from the blog about some exciting news for the team.

The mighty and ridiculously talented Tim Baker, aka EasyPickins, is now a fully fledged member of the PZ dev team. Hurrah! It’s been on the cards for a while, since he’s done such wonderous work on the tools (that you lot have yet to see but you’ll be amazed), but after he revealed his ‘side project’ which basically amounts to PORTING THE MAJORITY OF PROJECT ZOMBOID TO C++ (missing the lua integration particularly, which mean in itself this isn’t something we can run with without abandoning the modding) his ridiculous talent and genius needed snaffling up proper immediately.

He’ll be the official tool and engine honcho at Indie Stone towers, and will be working toward making a C++ native rendering engine using the stuff he’s been working on, that in the short (ish) term will hopefully provide a tasty FPS boost, and in the long term will pave the way to the new 3D engine, as well as continuing his amazing tool support, and hopefully generally contributing to the usual bug fixery and additions to the game if it tickles his fancy.

Congrats EasyPickins! Or should we say, congrats Indie Stone! Our bad luck with events and set backs with the game are more than compensated for our ridiculously good luck when it comes to talented people falling onto our lap, from Zach, Paul, Romain, Kirrus, nasKo and now Tim, and that’s before mentioning all the modders and moderators and everyone else who make us what we are.

Thats all, hope you forgive the short Mondoid once more, we’ll have another shorty next week but hopefully have some cool things to report the week after. Stay tuned!

So now all we have to do is pick an image for the blog. Since a graphics package is not at hand, how’s about a lovely pic of Romain from the archives? Let’s hope the blog title doesn’t obscure his sexy face.

Happy Holidays everyone!