Just wanted to make a quick update to let you know things are progressing nicely with DE. The lack of updates lately was due to me taking a month off over the Xmas period, but I have since been working hard towards getting you something nice to look at as a reward for hanging around. Anyway so as soon as the alpha build of the first level was completed I set straight to work on the second level. What you see here is pretty much only a few weeks work which is kind of exciting, now I have established a base set of textures ... More »

Please stand by… This is a test…

Over the past few weeks I’ve been concentrating on filling out the rest of the exterior of the retreat area with details such as an old garage, woodshed, barrels, foliage, chicken coops – you name it, it’s probably there! I’m pretty much satisfied with the work done on this area as a first pass and now researching reference imagery for the next area I’ll be working on; a small abandoned train depot. It will be part of the old abandoned mining town on the north east of the map, which will offer a nice balance of urban exploration alongside the rural ... More »

Progress has been going well; I’ve been working on a number of different things over the past couple of weeks, starting with some research into VTFs and light bounce. I remembered reading a while ago about how VRAD determines light bounce and colour based on a value in the VTF’s header info which is calculated when you save the VTF. As most of my level will only be illuminated by the sky light I realised I could potentially have a lot of very dark areas, which can be good in moderation, but at the same time I don’t want to ... More »

Well it’s been a while since the last update, been so caught up in working on the mod it hadn’t dawned on me to post an update, so while my brain is engaged I think I should probably do so now to avoid an information overload. More Zombie Customisation: The first thing I did after the last update is sort a few minor annoyances with the zombies which, for me, were destroying a lot of the basic immersion in the game. I started by putting in a bunch of new (albeit temporary) sounds for each class of zombie which are now more ... More »

So i’ve been fiddling around with a lot of stuff this week, firstly R_Yell got the first pass of Ironsights into the game which is awesome! He made a system where I can just position each weapon manually via the console and then when I have a it looking good, I simply enter the values in the weapon’s .txt file and the position will be remembered the next time the game loads. We still have a few minor things to sort out such as having a cvar which controls the ironsight zoom (fov) for each weapon, and also which weapons to enable ... More »

So with the code shaping up nicely and almost complete, I have been concentrating more on the gamplay side of things again and brainstorming objective ideas and finally got down to some level design. Here is what I have so far:  Game Objectives Main Objective: Gather Supplies to repair your boat in order to escape. The area surrounding the retreat is filled with zombies and is an extremely dangerous place. Escaping on foot is not an option, the limited ammo and supplies available would be exhausted within hours. Your best option is to take to the water using the boat you have been restoring on the side whilst writing ... More »

This is a quick video to better show off the features implemented in the mod thus far and showcase the optimisations made to the zombie NPCs. In this demo you will see the following: Regenerative player health Proper Regional Damage (headshots) Incremental Zombie health (stronger the more are killed) Damage affecting player speed (NEW – See below for details) Zombie optimisation (over 500 zombies in the world running at 150fps max details!) It also give an idea of draw distances and environment setting although the models shown here are only placeholder and do not represent the final art style. *Click the video to go to youtube and see ... More »

Been meaning to write an update on the progress of the mod for a while but have been engrossed by tests on the Source engine which I will explain later. Anyway for now I will give an update on some of the great progress that has been made so far. 

When the idea for this project first bubbled to the surface of my imagination, I knew I would need to make some essential modifications to the Source Engine before I could even contemplate the idea. So before I started making any kind of art or maps for it I needed to explore the optimisation possiblilities within the source engine, for this I have the help of two very talented coders: Jacob Hendricks and R_Yell or Rebel_Yell as he’s known.