Zombie Panic! Source News

We apologize for the long absence in the past months, but we've been hard at work and we're finally back with exciting news regarding another beta update. Bringing lots of improvements and major adjustments to the game's balance and performance, and Linux client support! We've heard lots of great feedback from everyone that we hope today's update should address

You can check the full v3.1 patch notes here.

[h3]v3.1 Full Public Release[/h3]
This should be the last major update to the unstable beta branch. Any more beta updates from this point on should be for smaller things like bug fixes, or balance adjustments. We'll be focusing on preparing v3.1 for full public release as soon as possible, which could be anywhere up to a few months or more. So please tell us what you think about the update, so we can make necessary adjustments before full public release.



With today's update Linux client support has finally arrived - bringing graphics fixes, performance boost, and crash fixes! We want to take a moment to thank the people from @GamingOnLinux community/staff who've been helping us to promote and assist our upcoming Linux client support. As well as a huge special thanks to our programmers, Jonnyboy and Shepard, who managed to make this all happen!

If you use Linux, then we ask that you please give the unstable beta branch a test to see if there's any issues with the game for you (information how at bottom of announcement). Please report any issues to us on our Steam Discussion Boards, or in our Discord server.





Some time ago we introduced a new recoil system into the game, similar to the one used in Day of Defeat: Source, but heavily modified. We did this to eliminate issues with our previous default Half-Life 2: Deathmatch recoil where it caused some imbalances that made some weapons a bit too over powered due to high accuracy, and others under powered because of too much random spread in the bullets. We thought it was a good improvement from the previous system, but we overlooked many of the issues with it.

Thanks to everyone who tested it and provided feedback, we were able to come up with a better design that addressed some of the issues. We've made a video demonstrating how the improved recoil works for all the firearms under some different movement conditions (standing, running, jumping, etc.);

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGG5EH62QnU

[h3]How Does It Work?[/h3]
The simplest way to explain it is that it works very similar to the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive weapon recoil. The more you shoot, the more inaccurate your weapon will be due to the recoil. There are patterns in the recoil for most weapons, each weapon type has a similar pattern with subtle differences between weapons of the same type (such as less recoil or random bullet spread).

The recoil works by utilizing several different features to create the effect;

• View punching is the effect that pushes your camera view upward and left/right whenever you fire a weapon. It's used to simulate the physical recoil of the weapon on your character.
  
• The bullet origin is the exact point for which the bullet would hit without any random spread. The bullet origin starts exactly in the center of the crosshair. But as you fire more shots, and your recoil becomes more extreme - the bullet origin will separate from the crosshair and move upward and left/right in a pattern. This is what simulates loss of accuracy control due to recoil.
  
• The cone of fire simulates the random spread of the bullets caused by movement. It's the area that the bullet has a chance to hit within around the bullet origin. The faster you move, the wider your cone of fire becomes - meaning your shots will be more inaccurate. Each bullet you fire has its location randomly generated within the cone of fire.
  
• Recoil decay determines whether or not your shots will be inaccurate due to recoil, it's what makes consecutive shots inaccurate. Your shots will remain inaccurate and continue through the recoil pattern if your recoil does not completely decay before your next shot - which is around the time your crosshair returns back into the position it was at when you started firing.
  

Movement will also make your shots inaccurate, with each movement condition affecting your accuracy differently;

1. Crouching makes your shots slightly more accurate
   
2. Standing makes your accuracy normal.
   
3. Crouch Walking makes your shots slightly inaccurate.
   
4. Walking makes your shots fairly inaccurate.
   
5. Running makes your shots inaccurate.
   
6. Panicking makes your shots even more inaccurate.
   
7. Jumping makes your shots extremely inaccurate.
   

Players have been saying that many weapons don't feel different than others of the same type for a long time, or that some weapons aren't very useful - and we agree. We recognize that some of the weapons may not feel very useful, or powerful enough - so we've made adjustments to them. Attributes such as damage, fire rate, random bullet spread, and the amount of recoil have been balanced differently for most weapons.

Here's how some of the changes affect a weapons' role;

• Pistols:
  • Effective at short to medium range.
    
  • Able to be used for long range combat, but is not very effective due to inaccuracy and slight damage drop off.
    
  • Weaker recoil than other weapon types. Useful while running because of this.
    
  
  
  
• Revolver:
  • Effective at short to medium range.
    
  • Damage drops off quicker than before, so it can no longer be used to one-shot snipe at long distances.
    
  • Capable of long range combat, but is no longer accurate enough to be as effective for it. On top of damage drop off making it better to use your bullets at shorter distances.
    
  • Slightly faster fire rate than before. So that you don't have to rely on headshots to kill a Zombie quickly in close quarters combat, you can make three quick shots to the body instead. However, your shots will be inaccurate if you don't wait to recover from the recoil.
    
  
  
  
• Shotguns:
  • Effective at short to medium range.
    
  • Damage drop off was reduced. Meaning the range at which Shotguns do damage has been slightly extended.
    
  • All Shotguns have had their spread tightened, making them more effective at longer ranges. Winchester has the tightest spread, followed by the Remington 870, and the Super Shorty has the widest spread.
    
  • Accuracy is barely affected by movement.
    
  • Winchester is the only Shotgun actually affected by recoil (single shots). Remington 870 and Super Shorty only use view punching, because recoil is completely decayed before you make your next shot.
    
  
  
  
• SMGs:
  • Effective at short to medium range.
    
  • Very fast fire rate, useful for killing enemies quickly.
    
  • Moderate recoil. Easier to control than Rifles, but still becomes very inaccurate when fired fully automatic.
    
  • Lightweight.
    
  • MP5 is accurate at longer distances than Pistols. Glock 18C is accurate at short distance, but is more useful while moving than the MP5.
    
  
  
  
• Rifles:
  • Effective at short to long range.
    
  • Best weapon for long range combat, accurate and least affected by damage drop off.
    
  • AK-47 is stronger but less accurate. M4 is weaker, but slightly more accurate, and has a faster fire rate.
    
  • Heavily affected by recoil, shooting fully automatic is very inaccurate.
    

We're expanding upon Zombie Vision to include the glowing of more destructible objects, particularly physics props. Now objects that can either be moved around or are destructible will glow an orange color while Zombie vision is active. (This color can be customized in Zombie Panic! Options, or via their cvars.)

We've added this feature to communicate to the player what objects can be moved or destroyed. Because these props can often time be used as static props (indestructible and don't move) throughout different parts of levels. Which can waste time and cause confusion for those who are not familiar with the level. So this feature will let players know right away whether they can move or destroy an object, instead of having to spend time figuring that out.






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. Be sure to check them out!





We've added some more Quality-of-Life improvements;

• You can now bind another key to rotate your barricade board placement counter-clockwise, instead of just the normal clockwise rotation.
  
• You now have the option to choose whether Berserk is activated by Panic instead of Lunge. So you may prevent your Berserk from being wasted when you intended to Lunge. (It's still activated with Lunge by default.)
  
• Some more levels will now have their size restricted for lower player counts.
  
• Fixes for the item balancing features, improving level balance.
  
• Basically everything related to movement speed was rebalanced to be more fair for both teams. Things like movement speeds, fatigue (stamina) charge and decay rates, feed-o-meter regeneration, and panic length and cooldown.
  
• You can no longer walk while Panicking. Which would cause your speed boost to be wasted.
  
• Feed-o-meter will no longer drain while Berserking.
  
• Armor can be dropped again.
  
• Trigger_barricade was fixed so that a barricade somehow placed inside of it will be dropped on the ground as ammo.
  
• Achievements can now be earned on Custom Servers and Levels.
  

We understand the community content (maps, models, skins, sounds, etc) inside and outside of Steam Workshop are a part of ZPS's identity. It's always a pleasure to see new content being created and shared. Unfortunately, we had some hard times where we had no choice but to sacrifice some backward compatibility with the existing third-party content for the benefit of stability, performance and maintenance of the game.

Although, not everything is broken and lost, as some content might still work without any required update from their respective author(s). We prepared a documentation to guide the community on what changed and what needs to be done to get the addons properly working with ZPS v3.1. We invite those content creators to opt in the beta and check your content to see if it works, and prepare an updated version of your addons for v3.1 before it fully releases to the public.


You can find info on how to switch your game to the unstable beta branch here.

Or you can install and manage multiple different versions of the game using SteamCMD. There's a guide explaining how to do this.

Don't hesitate to contact us directly here, on our Steam Discussions Boards, or via Discord for further instructions and questions.



We'll be hosting events, mainly on the weekends, where we are going to test the unstable beta with all of you from the community. Join our Discord server for notifications when we, or players from the community, are playing. We hope to see you around sometime!

We have a public unstable beta branch server you can play on any time;

Server Name: Official ZPS EU Server #3 [UNSTABLE BRANCH], Courtesy of NFO
Server IP: 95.172.92.228:27018



Providing your opinion on the update and its changes is crucial for us to be able to create a game that is enjoyable for everyone possible. We are always listening and taking your feedback into consideration. But please understand that we cannot always follow your requests, it depends on the situation. In some cases, we may not want to if it conflicts with other aspects of design.

Please do not be discouraged from providing your feedback to us because of this! If you want to make a difference in the game, then we need you to tell us what you think! We would appreciate it very much if you could take the time to provide your feedback. We'd prefer for you to do so on our Steam Discussions Boards - where we can go back and read it anytime, and other community members can provide their feedback too.

But please provide constructive criticism, and be sure to tell us in detail what the problem is and what it's happening with! Giving your opinion on how you think the problem can be fixed can also help to clarify what the problem is.


See you around,
- Zombie Panic! Team

Hello, happy holidays! We hope that your holiday has been going good!

Today we want to share some news with you about the status of the v3.1 patch. Development has been going well, we've been dedicating a ton of time to testing, fixing, and developing things over the past few months. We've been able to find and fix many issues with things we didn't realize were there. We've also been able to add lots of new features.

Here's a list of some of the things we've added or changed;

• The trigger_barricade entity was changed so that if you're able to place a barricade board inside of it - the board will fall off of what it was placed on and turn back into ammo. (If you don't have the trigger_barricade set to destroy boards, and it failed to block the board from being placed inside of it.)
  
• Feed-o-Meter can no longer drain during berserk mode.
  
• Lunge can no longer trigger your berserk mode (unless you enable it in Zombie Panic! Options). Now the panic key will trigger your berserk by default.
  
• Survivors can no longer walk while panicked.
  
• Armor can be dropped again.
  
• AngelScript item balancing functions have been fixed to spawn the specified amount of items if the level is designed properly.
  
• Fixed a server crash related to a model being set as a physics prop when it wasn't compiled for that (missing phys model). It will instead delete the prop and print a message in console.
  
• Added a brand new Remington 870 weapon model.
  
• The recoil system has been completely revamped to be similar to CS:GO recoil, and has much less view punch than our previous revamp.
  
• New first person and third person weapon animations.
  
• New sound effects for some weapons.
  
• You're able to select whether the scoreboard will sort by score, kills, or hide both of them.
  
• Breakable props will now be highlighted in an orange color while using Zombie vision.
  
• New playable character!
  
• And much more!
  

We've been wanting to get this patch out for months now, but due to different issues we've felt it was necessary to delay release to fix and improve things. We understand that this is very frustrating due to the many different problems you can experience on the current public v3.0.9a, and we're deeply sorry about this. But this is why we've been working hard to make sure that things are working properly in the next patch - so that we get closer and closer to the full public release of v3.1.

Currently, there's a few major issues affecting balance that we're in the process of trying to fix before the next beta patch release. Such as footstep sounds not playing randomly, and some damage modifiers to things (like doors) not working properly, to name a few. But mainly our Linux client is still having major issues that need to be resolved before we can release.


We've been able to use this time to polish and balance many things that were in need of it. Several levels have gotten adjustments to improve balance, as well as looks and immersion in some cases.

Here's some previews of some of the changes (click images to see them in full size);











As an extra gift, we want to finally reveal our next survivor, coming directly from the lore: Larry!





We hope to have the next beta patch out sometime soon in the beginning of next year. Thank you for your continued support!

Happy Holidays!
Zombie Panic Development Team

We've shipped an update to 'unstable' beta branch focused on fixing many game bugs within the previous update, including the headshot t-pose and ragdolls fix, issues with the voting system, dedicated server stability performance, third-person animation improvements and much more.

As usual, you can read the full list of changes in our changelog thread!


The Linux Client support continues to be our top priority in the v3.1 public beta. However, we're very limited on how well our build is running for users with different distributions. Therefore, we need to be in touch with those willing to assist in this matter and telling us if the build has any kind of issue on their end. With those bugs patched, we can have a smooth public release to the Linux community who wishes to play the game.



If you want to help us with this task, join our Discord server and ping me (@Tabajara) or one of our developers to tag you with the "Linux Tester" role. Your help and feedback will allow us to ship specific and better fixes. Any time we do a Linux hotfix, we'll ping you for your help in testing it out for us.

You can also keep us updated by providing feedback in our 3.1 sub-forums!

We're very excited to finally release our third patch to the public beta unstable branch, which includes new game features, numerous bug fixes and plenty of game balance changes. We've mentioned this prior in our previous announcement last month.

This will be a huge opportunity (again) to playtest the update together with the community, so we can gather important feedback and proper results (especially with higher player counts) from the playtesting sessions. In this case, we'll require YOUR help to test out the latest changes.

New melee hit rays.
New score system (currently work in progress)
New unarmed survivor's punch and push features.
New "warm-up" round.
Adjustments to firearms and zombie arms' damage values.
Adjustments to survivor's fatigue and inventory sorting cooldown.
Tweaks to the flashlight's FOV and bright distance.
30 new Steam achievements.
Many bugs fixed.

You can read the full list of changes in our changelog thread!



The process is relatively simple. It involves having two builds at once in two directories, but having different launch methods.

1. Download ZPS 3.1.
2. Locate your Zombie Panic Source folder located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps by default.
3. Copy this directory and rename this to the name of your choosing, for instance, ZPS 3.1.
4. For this new folder, you'll create a batch file in the same directory that zps.exe is located, which is the base Zombie Panic Source folder. This batch file (create a text file initially then save it with the .bat extension) will contain:

@echo off
start zps.exe -game zps -secure -steam

5. Switch back to ZPS 3.0.9. When you want to play version 3.0.9, you'll launch through Steam. If you want to play ZPS 3.1, you'll use the batch file. It's recommended to create a shortcut for easy access.

This can also be done interchangeably. If one is currently on 3.1, they can go through the steps of copying the 3.0.9 files and launch that version through the bat file.





We'll be hosting public community events every weekend to play on the unstable beta branch together! Be sure to switch your game to the beta branch in advance, which you can see how to opt in the beta here.

Dates & Time
We'll be playing on the Official EU Server #3 and Official US Server #1 on June 2nd, 8th, 9th, 15th, 16th, 22th and 23th @ 7 PM (GMT - UTC 0) // 2 PM (EST - UTC -5) // 12 PM (PDT - UTC -7)

The last weekend of June will be the only time where we will give a pause to gather all the results from these upcoming events and direct our focus to fix any issues we may have found during the public playtesting. Be sure to voice your concerns and thoughts by leaving your feedback in our 3.1 sub-forums.


Stay even more connected with the development of Zombie Panic! Source by joining our official and public Zombie Panic! Team Steam Group. From there, you will receive announcements regarding the team's focus and plans for future updates, showcasing work in progress media and the latest news from our main group in case you miss it.



You can also follow our official Developer Homepage to catch up on every major Zombie Panic! news post and our casual reviews from games or mods you could check out!

- Zombie Panic! Team

Hello everyone!

It's been a while since our last beta update which was focused on melee weapon improvements, balancing, and other tweaks. We've heard a lot of great feedback from all of you and we are finally ready to share more improvements to the game's balance that you all have been asking for, and some that we felt were necessary! We've got a lot to talk about regarding today's changes, therefore stick with us until the end of this announcement and be sure to share your thoughts in the comment section down below! Keep in mind that some of these features are still work-in-progress, and everything is still subject to change before release.



After every map change, the first round will be a warm-up round which works in the same way as the "test mode". Players will be able to walk freely around the map between 30-60 seconds while everyone waits for the rest of the players to connect. This can be adjusted via CVAR by the server administrators to meet their players' preference.



We hope this will help address the issue of the first round being heavily in favor of the Zombie team due to players taking a little longer to connect and joining the round late.



We've been working on designing an improved score system that rewards players for most of the actions that they can perform. Gaining score is still primarily focused around killing or doing damage; that's because it is the most important action to helping you win on either team. However, now other actions such as healing a Survivor teammate or completing certain objectives will give you more points than you'll get from a kill. This will encourage players to help their teammates more or complete objectives instead of camping for kills in objective maps. Our intention is to encourage players to perform these actions more often by rewarding more points for completing those actions.

One necessary change with this new system was that the amount of points rewarded needed to be inflated to allow us to implement more diverse rewards, instead of everything rewarding between 1-10 points. The point values will be much higher than you're used to, but this does not diminish their value. Every action that rewards points will be balanced depending on things like their importance, difficulty, and frequency at which they can be performed. We will not be discussing the exact values we have planned at the moment, because these will be adjusted before release. Although, we will say that it would be possible to get thousands of points within one round with the new design.

Certain actions such as placing barricade boards and sharing weapons or ammo have been excluded from rewarding points. Rewarding these types of actions would result in things like Survivors using barricades boards on a wall where it's useless, or constantly sharing items back and forth unnecessarily, all in order to farm the most points. We feel that it was necessary to restrict those actions from rewarding points in order not to encourage that type of behavior.

Here are some of the actions that will reward players with points;



Currently we are in the process of implementing the new design, then we will move into testing and balancing. It's important to remember that this is still a work-in-progress, and it will be adjusted as we test the new system to see how it functions. With all of that in mind, we appreciate any feedback you have regarding this new system!



We were aware that it has been a little difficult to play as a Survivor in situations where your arsenal wasn't very useful against a horde of Zombies. We did minor adjustments to their damage hoping to fix this small issue. We had lots of fun during our internal playtesting in the past weeks and we hope you all feel the same with these changes!

This update also includes small tweaks to all melee weapons' attack range, making them act according to their model measurement. For example: a hammer will have a small range compared to a golf club or a machete. With minor changes such as these, we hope to maintain fair and balanced gameplay.


Survivors could become extremely slow after depleting their stamina when carrying the default spawn loadout (a pistol, 10 pistol ammo, and a melee weapon). So slow that it would give you no chance to run away and survive.

Therefore we've decided to make some adjustments to Survivor fatigue, so that they don't become extremely slow when they're not carrying much. The intention is to make it so that a Survivor can run away from Zombies to stay alive for a while longer, but when they run out of stamina they will eventually be caught.

These adjustments are still subject to change after more testing, but basically, how it currently functions is that you'll run about 5 velocity slower than a normal Zombie when you've depleted all of your stamina and you're carrying the default spawn loadout. Once you are low on stamina, the Zombie will eventually catch back up to you if you can't panic or defend yourself in some way. This will give Survivors a chance to run away and hide, or find something to defend themselves with. But in the end they will be eaten if they cannot find a way to save themselves.



Have you ever found yourself completely defenseless when having no weapons, perhaps a Zombie blocking the doorway? While unarmed, Survivors can now brawl with Zombies using their fists. However, fists deal an extremely low amount of damage and is only intended for last resort purposes.

Survivors also now have new shove animations when pushing physics props. This will be helpful in indicating to Survivors if they're actually moving something.

https://youtu.be/heLk0Q3fxjU


The distance and field of view of the flashlight has been slightly increased, improving visibility in darker environments. The field of view has been increased from 45 to 65, and the distance has been increased from 750 to 1000.



These changes were made because Zombies could be hard to see in very dark areas when they were coming within a dangerous distance of a Survivor, which made dark areas unfair for Survivors. Now Zombies should be easily seen when within a pistols' effective range.



Besides fixing some bugs we found with the inventory, we've decreased the inventory sorting cooldown by 0.25 seconds to make interactions faster and less tedious.

How Survivors obtain barricade planks from a pile of barricades has also had minor changes. Rather than picking up the entire stack of barricades, Survivors will be able to take a single plank at a time.

We're also considering adjusting the weight of items to more properly balance them in compliment to the fatigue adjustments. But this has not been completed yet, so we cannot speak about the specifics of this change.

The Biotec anti-virus has been given a new model;




The effect of the Green Inoculator has been changed so that it heals over time for a small amount, temporarily increases resistance to infection, and will temporarily pause infection state and delay turning into a Zombie.

The Panic effect was removed from the Green Inoculator because we felt that it wasn't very useful except in very specific situations. We think that such a mechanic would be better suited for a different item we're considering adding in the future, with some adjustments to the effect.



Lastly, we've reduced the voice commands cooldown to 3 seconds. We've also established a priority list so certain Survivor sounds have priority over other sounds, such as the hurt noise having priority over voice commands.



We've made a very minor change to Zombie damage where some body areas would do slightly less damage than others, preventing Zombies from killing unarmored Survivors in the usual four swipes. It should work as intended now.



The rate at which feed-o-meter regenerates has been increased so that it takes about 40 seconds to regenerate the whole bar. This change was made because Zombies could not be as useful to the team in the time it took them to regenerate their feed-o-meter back. Now they will be able to use their abilities more often, which should make playing Zombie more enjoyable.



We've made jumping a bit more penalizing to Zombies who spam it continuously. Each jump will increase your fatigue (reduce your velocity) by 10, stacking up to a maximum of 80, with the minimum velocity you can be reduced to being 80. When you stop jumping you will gradually, but quickly, regain your speed. This is to discourage Zombies from jumping too much, and to encourage them to use their lunge more often.



We realized we overlooked an important factor in random infection replacing starting Zombies: the fact that it would only replace one single starting Zombie. It's now fixed so that multiple Survivors can be randomly infected to meet the required number of starting Zombies depending on the current player count. This will maintain proper balance when at larger player counts.



The player collision for recently turned infected Survivors has long been broken and abused by players to keep their victims stuck in place. Now the recently turned Survivors' collision will be temporarily disabled until they're no longer standing within a Survivor. This can make it tricky or confusing to deal with a recently turned infected Survivor, but it will at least give you the chance to run away instead of being stuck.



Cinema is undergoing some major changes to improve balance and design. We've got some previews for you, but remember that these are still work-in-progress.





We're still unsure of when we will release the next beta patch, but it is getting closer and closer. The plan is to get the new scoring system implemented, perform some internal testing, and address any remaining major balance issues, then beta patch 3 should be ready to be released. However, things don't always go as we anticipate.

Issues regarding level design will take us a longer time to finish, and therefore not all level related issues will be addressed in the next patch. We will make these level changes over a longer period - after a process of testing, designing, and repeating until things are right.

After the release of beta patch 3, we'll be focusing on preparing v3.1 for public release. The major reprogramming has been finished, and most of what is holding v3.1 back from release is testing and balancing. Although, it's important to remember that there's the possibility that other major issues could pop up that could delay release longer. We have no estimated or planned release date for v3.1 yet, but we will say that it's just about ready.



As always, we appreciate all feedback you have for us! Thanks to the community's input, the 3.1 beta has been shaped into a positive direction, heading towards an enjoyable, balanced environment. We will also be scheduling weekly playtime events to garner interest in 3.1 and to provide an opportunity to try the latest build. We look forward to playing with you!

- The Zombie Panic! Source Team