Hi everyone! I'm 'Tabajara' (team lead & coordinator) and I'm here on behalf of the Zombie Panic! Team for this announcement to talk about the future plans for the game, what is coming next for the franchise as a whole, and how this involves the community. Let's dive right into it!
What is the plan?
The team is currently in pre-production working to migrate ZPS to the TF2SDK update-branch. This will bring lots of game features and improvements to the game that will benefit both the dev team and the community as a whole in the long term. Everything discussed below should be considered as a work in progress and subject to change, being scrapped, or being delayed during the porting process due to development reasons.
The 'TF2 SDK' update includes the following:
64-bit Support - Moving from 32bit to 64bit architecture allows the game to utilize your system resources more efficiently than just 4GB of RAM. This should result in smoother gameplay, fewer game crashes, and potentially higher frame rates on modern hardware.
Networking Optimizations - There are a lot of prediction fixes included in this update, resulting in less hit registration errors and a better game-feel. This will be a longer process to fine tune it, so we will require your feedback in the forums.
Steam Networking (Peer-to-Peer) - Players will have the ability to host their own local server and play with their friends or anyone without needing to join a community server or install a Dedicated Server just for the occasion. This is soon to be tested if can be implemented into ZPS.
Miscellaneous - There are a bunch of other important backported changes, engine related bug fixes and very minor miscs from the 'TF2 SDK' update that will all be properly included in a future patch and documented, stay tuned for it!
What else is in the 'to-do' list?
Barricade System Enhancements - To be frank, I wish to improve our barricade system overall to be more user-friendly and less chaotic without breaking any updated custom maps. We'll be discussing more in another announcement or through Steam forums.
Police Station Rework - This reworked version, created by the community-member Sethen, has unfairly been "on-hold" for years. The plan is to bring it back up and ship an objective version specifically for this map, rather than replacing the original Survival Police Station. Players will be able to playtest in advance and provide feedback before it goes public.
Updated Scoreboard - I want to add specific changes to our scoreboard and the round end panel that could result in a better understanding of your game. One is to rework our 'score point system' according to player feedback. Concepts and further discussion will happen in the near future.
UI/UX Improvements - There are a few issues with the game UI/UX that we've been struggling to fix over the past few years (one of them related to higher resolutions). Perhaps during this port, we may finally be able to solve lots of those VGUI problems once and for all. Time will tell!
Special Gamemodes - Over the past years, the community has come up with a vast variety of custom gamemodes (PvP, PGM, The Hidden, Combine vs Humans etc) that have been well received and played many times to this day. According to the latest survey, new official gamemodes aren't a high priority, but we hope to see additions at some point. I can not promise anything at the current time but to continue pushing improvements to Angelscript for the custom ones.
Back in October, the team shipped an update with some of those changes from the TF2SDK update with other game balance tweaks per community request, which you can find the announcement here!
Now, I want to reserve the next part of the announcement for projects which are fully managed by members of the community, who are willing to support ZPS in some way by volunteering their experience and work at specific areas where the game is lacking the most. Let me introduce you to those.
Contributor Projects
New Animations
This project aims to improve the ZPS player character models and viewmodel animations, making them high-quality up-to-date standards with fluid movements, which will also save time and effort for the animators and any modder who wishes to create custom assets for ZPS.
The team behind this project are: TexasSteve, HardyNerdy and Silent. They will be required to create a completely new skeleton rig that will be used in all player models for consistency. Steve already shared a work-in-progress on some weapons which you can check out in the video below:
[dynamiclink href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id9lteYPgss"]
New Weapons
New rig also means the possibility of new guns. Our first brand-new weapon soon to be added into the ZPS arsenal is a Lever Action Rifle - a Winchester 94. Created by the talented Alvaro Vidal. This rifle will be very powerful at long-range, use the .357 magnum ammo type, have low clip capacity, and a slightly longer reload time than a Revolver but better firerate. All brainstorming for now. More news will be shared in the future detailing when it will be released and what's next. Images below!
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Characters Overhaul
Once the team has the new model rigging completed, Mage will resume his 'character overhaul' project and rework the rest of the character models with better quality and performance in-game. He plans to totally recreate the models from the ground up for both teams, together with concept arts being made by the 2D artist LucaBuca2000. Here is a preview of the new upcoming Carrier design:
You can follow Mage's new Carrier development progress up close in his WIP Gamebanana page here.
Zombie Panic! Sequel/Source 2
Our official FAQ and the ZPS sequel threads have some detailed information about this topic. To recap:
Source 2 port of ZPS is out of the question. We have NO plans to port ZPS to the new engine without breaking all of our custom content and fully rewriting the source code again. Not worth it.
There isn't any fresh news about Monochrome's Zombie Panic sequel in UE4. However, JonnyBoy did say he has plans to move the project to other game-engine platforms where it runs on a heavily modified version of Source 2. There isn't much to discuss right now besides that.
A reminder that the Zombie Panic! Team has completely no involvement with the Zombie Panic! sequel in UE4 or any future games under the Zombie Panic! franchise (unless we announce it). If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the sequel, join the official Monochrome Discord server.
Zombie Panic 1 coming to Steam
With the recent increase of community game nights and renewed interest in playing the original Half-Life mod, the team decided to give a bit of uplift to it. JonnyBoy did a complete code rewrite to be compatible with the Half-Life 1 25th anniversary update, including major gameplay fixes, a bunch of quality-of-life changes, and a few welcome improvements to make things easier and more stable for players.
Since we were going through all the trouble with it and wanted to let as many people know about the update, I'm very excited to finally announce that Zombie Panic 1 is coming to Steam Store! Featuring everything discussed above, plus Steam Achievements and Workshop support. Wishlist now and tell your friends!
[dynamiclink href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vqcN8pN6AM"]As a bonus, the GoldSrc mod is now opensourced and source code is available in the GitHub!
ZPS Mapping Contest
This is a personal wish I always had when we first conducted the "Spray Contest" on GameBanana back in 2018 as an experiment for community contests. Map makers within the community have been asking one for this for years, so I'm in the talks with LambdaGeneration staff to organize and push this idea forward in the near future with a theme and prizes in mind. Stay tuned for that!
"I want to donate/support!"
I'm always flattered to hear people asking where and how they can donate for the game. Even though the former team stopped accepting donations long ago, I strongly recommend to shift your donation wishes to the dedicated team working on those projects above or support your favorite community servers by donating to them directly!
Don't worry though, you still can give your free support for the game by sharing ZPS with your friends, playing it with others and leaving a review on Steam! You have no idea how much it helps!
If you would like to hang out with other players just to play some ZPS, the people over at Zombie Dome have come together to host community game nights every Friday at specific times. Check out this thread for more info and to suggest other dates or different timezones for upcoming events. You can also check out other ZPS communities to connect with others.
Lastly, I want to give a huge thanks to all the contributors leading these projects, the dev team working on the migration port, and to all the community playtesters who will help us shape the next updates. That's all for now, if you have any questions, let me know down below or through Steam forums!
A reminder to also join the Official ZPS Discord server if you would like to hang out and play either both the GoldSrc and the Source games together with other players! https://discord.gg/zps
Take care,
Tabajara and the Zombie Panic! Team
