The current coding mission is in restructuring the engine to make it work with NPCs that play the game in the same way that you do. We don’t want to give automated survivors any more information than you have (we don’t want to let them cheat, essentially) so it’s vital that the back-end is rigged to support the NPC overlay. This optimisation is the primary time-sink in terms of coding the update
Path-finding and line of sight are very ‘expensive’ (in coder terminology) if we’re having individually motivated NPCs. This expense is multiplied profoundly when you mix it in with the game’s potential
for having hundreds of zombies shambling around the map – each of which needs a line of sight check with an NPC or the player. As such Lemmy’s task as of right now is to put pathfinding and vision onto the separate thread of multicore computers – meaning that a separate CPU can take on the processing burden. (This doesn’t mean owners of single core processors should worry, however, as the next job will be to organise processor timeshare more effectively.)
The art team, meanwhile, are beavering away pixelling sprites and prepping art assets for when Knox County expands beyond the borders of the current map. As mentioned previously they’re also playing around with a few of the new weapons, objects and recipes that we’ll be included alongside the more social NPCs. I’m sure we’ll include a few sneak peeks of them here on the blog a bit later down the line.
In the meantime we’d like you to thank you lot for your continuing patience during this long walk to freedom. StinkyTiger, the newest addition to The Indie Stone collective, will be posting a series of
blogs quite soon detailing how to play some of the awesome mods that are appearing down in the depths of our forums. (Although probably not the Naked Kate one). Hopefully that will help people to suck the bones of the current PZ build dry, while we continue to hammer away on the next one. Cheers all.
Do handstands! Take a breather! Also, welcome StinkyTiger!
Make easter eggs. Lots and lots of easter eggs.
i could have sworn that the cost was lower last wk.
Yessss <3 Thank you again guys.
Thank you for the hard work!
You guys are awesome. Thanks!
nice!
Take a break! you clearly outdone yourselves!
After hearing what happened sometime ago, i was really sad and it was unfortunate for you guy's.
hope everything is fine now!
Goodluck!
Please add OpenJDK support as well. OpenJDK does not seem to work with the Desura release.
Surely that's OpenJDKs problem? It works with Java Standard.
Just tried the demo and this is looking very good. Combat seems a bit skill-less at the moment, with the bat at least, for my liking but everything else is looking very nice. Good luck with future development. And sorry to hear about the burglary :( scumbags.