We've taken a long break from development in the months since Beta 5 released, working at a comfortable pace, and took time to discuss our future plans and ideas for the update based on your feedback provided on the forums, as posted in our '3.1 To-do Plans' thread. We highly appreciate each one of you who took the time to voice your concerns about the game's development. Hopefully, your requested changes are here in the list below, where we'll also take a moment to recap all the major features and highlighted changes in the update. We do also have some other topics to share so stick around until the end!
3.1 Highlights
Linux Support
After 12 years, Linux client support for Zombie Panic! Source is arriving in the v3.1 update for Ubuntu and SteamOS machines! This is a huge, long-awaited step, opening an important door to another OS besides Windows! All thanks to our programmer, Shepard, for accomplishing this challenging task! We're very aware that there is still more to do to continue support and fix it for other distros. Be sure to report any Linux visual bugs or crashes in our sub-forums! Unfortunately, Mac OS X support is still out of our reach, and not in our plans at this time.
Special thanks to all Linux enthusiasts out there who assisted us debugging and fixing the bugs reported. We also want to give a huge shout out to @GamingOnLinux!
Player Hitboxes Improvements
This may have gone unnoticed in the past, but we've made huge improvements to our player hit registrations, synchronizing them with the player's client model much better than before! Special thanks to Mehis, programmer for Zombie Master: Reborn, for helping us with this issue! It's recommended to try out the changes in a low latency server for best results. Here's a little comparison:
Melee Hit Rays
We've implemented an interesting feature for our melee weapons called "hit rays" to improve their attack range and accuracy, making combat against multiple targets more viable. Each swing will create an arc of line tracers in the player's FOV according to the melee weapon's range. You won't be able to 360° swing hit.
This means you will now be able to hit multiple targets depending on how well you swing the melee during battle. After the first hit on X target, it will deal the same base damage on the next one. It works in a similar fashion to many modern zombie games in which you can mow down multiple targets with one swing. During the beta, we made the hit registration instantaneous (no longer has a delay) for better gameplay.
Zombie Teammates Glow
An important zombie feature has also been added to improve the team's communication and create better tactical ambushes against the survivors. Zombies will be able to see their teammates glowing through nearby walls, but with a minimal range that is more limited when compared to the Carrier's roar glow - without consuming any of the Feed-O-Meter.
Feed-O-Meter Adjustments
The Feed-O-Meter will now auto regenerate itself when not in use. The regeneration process is very slow and you still should use your feed bar wisely. The Berzerk, on the other hand, now has its own bar separated from the normal Feed-O-Meter bar. This will make the zombie's life easier while allowing them to manage which feature they would like to use without affecting or wasting a single berzerk bar while lunging. The Berzerk function remains untouched beyond that.
New Zombie Panic! Options
We've updated and added some optional features and in-game commands that you can configure to your preference in Zombie Panic! Options. Those include: ability to change the color of the item's glow, sort the scoreboard by score or kills, choose the destructibles color in Zombie vision, and more.
Steam Workshop Enhancements
We've made significant changes to the Steam Workshop support, forcing players to only download the current map running in the server they're joining, instead of downloading the whole Workshop collection of the dedicated server (32bit integer to 64bit integer). We also improved the items mounting in your game client, making easier and faster when launching the game, and added a new "Addons" menu where you can manage the Workshop items you're currently subscribed to.
This is a great opportunity to search through our Workshop Hub and subscribe to your favorites!
New Community-Made Content
Speaking of Workshop, we've been paying attention to a few specific community-made items based on the quality and effort put into them, worth being added as official content. We got in contact with those authors and we're starting this experiment with the following Workshop item being implemented into the game: Characters Update Ultimate - by Mage and Silent! Hopefully you guys welcome these changes and let us know what you think! In case it gets well received, we may consider adding more custom content like this into the game for everyone via public surveys.
Steam Rich Presence
We've enhanced the capabilities of our rich presence system to show more about the games being played by your friends, displaying extra information about their game in your Steam Friends activity. You can now easily see what gamemode, map or server they're in with Steam Rich Presence.
Localization Support
It's now much easier to support different languages in-game. We have reached out to our community contributors in the past who volunteered their time to translate Zombie Panic! Source into their main native language to update our localization files in the upcoming update.
You will be able to read objective lists, phone messages, storylines, tips, in-game beacons and game texts in your language of choice! We've reworked our entire localization system (still developing a better-easy system), making it easier for volunteers to translate the game in their own native language by using a translator application, which is available in the Zombie Panic! Source Mod Tools. We currently support the following in addition to English: French, Simplified Chinese, Spanish (Spain), Swedish and Russian. You can set your game to use one of these languages via Properties > Language tab.
There are numerous new features, adjusts and fixes to list here. Check the full list of changes for more!
v2.4 Legacy Steam Build
When the 3.0 update released back in Dec 2017, we created a Steam beta branch for ZPS v2.4 to be stored safely in case people wanted to play whenever they feel like. As we've stated in the past, we didn't have any plans to keep supporting it, and the build started to become unplayable until players couldn't even launch it anymore. However, a few people from the community got together and made an external fix out of the Steam version to make v2.4 playable once again. They've been using this fixed version for since the beginning of this year and reunited lots of veterans with it.
We've reached out one of the authors of the fix, asking if we could grab these files and use them to fix up our current Steam build. They worked perfectly as expected! Then we took the time to prepare a working build of v2.4 (Win and Linux DS) containing these fixes and we're releasing it today! Players will be able to opt-in to the Legacy 2.4 beta branch and play the old version again normally through Steam. We're leaving some extra info regarding the availability of the build in our Store Page too. We are also brainstorming some ideas and planning to discuss more solutions for v2.4 with the community in our forums soon. See more here.
v3.1 Release Date
Lastly, it's finally time to announce the long-awaited release date of the upcoming major 3.1 update. We've been listening closely to previous community feedback, making huge adjustments and tweaks based on what you all have been requesting for a long time. A lot has been taken into consideration, ideas and features were changed or scrapped for their own good, future plans were revised and the build is ready to be rolled out for everyone! We're scheduling the release for the first weeks of October - somewhere between Oct 8th and 15th!
We're currently making a few minor adjust, debugging the code and polishing up the build to be sure nothing gets left behind. In case something big happens, we'll unfortunately push the release a bit further.
See you soon,
Zombie Panic! Team
