[Project] Survival Games / PR-Z

[Onil]

Next Beta test will be on the 11th of January.

Anyone interested in participating can PM me or contact me on TS (3dac.co).

[Murkey]

*Unnecessary video bump*

[Onil]

ahah, funny video Murkey, as always.

Thanks for recording!

[Mineral]

oh! You guys use the clivewil flying thingy

omg, I love that thing I might contact you very late to participate(the 10th, day of my last exam). Is that ok or is there a deadline you would like to keep.

[CTRifle]

I love that flying thing!!

[Onil]

We're actually working on the "other flying thing" that Clivewil made as well: the Mosquito helicopter type of thing

He was kind enough to make us an unarmed version of it. And yes they are both a lot of fun to fly around!. The only issue is that you might be deaf after that cause the engine sound is quite loud, even if realistic.

About participating in the Beta, if you show up on TS on time and we don't have enough players, you can join us for sure.

Priority obviously goes to the ones that signup but we rarely have a full server anyway.

[Onil]

Ladies & Gentleman, here's an update on what's going on:

The next beta test will be on the 11th of January, Saturday at 18h00 PR-Time. We will test our new scoring/humanity system and have a bit of fun.

In the current build we have fixed quite a few bugs, added some WIP features, added more vehicles (easter eggs) and more weapons (high value). We have also improved our Control Panel quite a bit so that the installment and update is pain free.

Another great thing is that we have reduced the minimod size from 217mb to 131mb by improving the way Dovre is loaded. This will allow us to add more maps without increasing the size too much.

The Open beta will be on the 1st of February and it will probably run for a week (at specific times of the day/night). Then, based on the feedback and participation of the community we will decide if it is worth working on more maps, features and game-modes for you guys.

The official release is scheduled to be on the 1st of March if everything goes according to plan. Initially it might only have the Survival "gamemode" on Dovre but if we had a good participation in the open beta and if we can manage to finish more work during February, we might include some more goodies.

Cheers,
Onil

[Onil]

Sooo after about 5 hours of playing PR:Z in the 3rd Beta test, I think many of the participants should have quite a bit of feedback to give.

I think that if you didn't enjoy it, you wouldn't stick around and play it for that long so I ask you to tell the guys who haven't played it yet, why you enjoyed playing PR:Z. Also, explain what went wrong, what you would change and what could be improved.

We did run into a few issues with our python, server also crashed twice and I know some features may be hard to get used to when you're playing for the first time, but I think that with time, everything will work a lot better.

Next Beta test might be on the 25th of January, depending on how fast we can fix the bugs, specially since I had hopes to have the Open Beta on the first of February. Lets hope we can get it all done and fixed before that.

Cheers & thanks to all that showed up.

[Mineral]

I started playing thinking zombie AI would be stupid. But you really did it very well and clever. Many nice mechanics working.

Vehicles should be more special though. Like I said a more complex system them would be nice if possible. There should be downsides to them, which there aren't many expect for them making noise.

Being a zombie is evenly fun as to being survivor, which I think is really good. I would say medic and ammo bags should spawn less?. They were quite easy to find. More jammed weapons should be cool too.


overall I very much enjoyed it. I can really see it work as a once a month or once two weeks.

[Rabbit]

Had a blast, its freaky when you first spawn, you constantly look around, I know someone got attacked twice right off of the spawn.

The only real downside I saw was the switch over to different teams. I feel like its exploitable, as I was waiting to ambush people, and everyone knew that who was a zombie, and if they went back to human, they could know right where I am.

Not sure how others feel about it, but I would really like to see less ammo with the weapons. I got the AK74 with optic, and I think it had a total of 60 rounds? I would much rather see a pivotal weapon like that to have something like only 15-20 rounds inside the mag. It also prevents people from doing things like camping up in the crane, and force them to move around more, which is the scary part.

Maybe I'm just an idiot, but I found the pickup system VERY confusing in the beginning, I think a friendly 3 minute whats what video tutorial would really help a lot of players.

Lighting for the level was perfect, dark but enjoyable and playable (as someone who hates night maps).

I would like to see (if possible) only local mumble in game, and its for all sides to be on the same one.

Overall I was pleasantly surprised with everything today, and can't wait for the next test.

[Onil]

thanks to both for the feedback.

@ Mineral,

AI could be a lot better to be honest but we just don't have anyone in the team that is an expert on it.

Not sure what you mean in terms of vehicles being more special and having more downsides. The way I see it, there are only 3 vehicles per map and those vary depending on which easter egg has been selected for that round. So even if you do find an easter egg flag (very doubtful) you don't get that many vehicles, that makes them kinda of special as they are rare and difficult to spawn/find. The downsides to using a vehicle is indeed the sound they make but also that you become a big target that is easier to hit. That's why there are AT kits in game. And some of the vehicles don't really protect their driver/pilot that much as you can see in the videos of the past Beta.

Regarding too much ammo and patches kits, I will consider reducing how many of them spawn per round. And yes we will increase the jamming weapons in the future as well.

@ Rabbit,

I see what you mean with getting team-switched and knowing where survivors are when you're in the zombie team and how that can be an issue. However, either those are survivors that you were already fighting against and can continue to do so as a zombie or those are the guys who you were playing with, in which case it is up to you to decide if you want to attack them or not. I also see the other side of it which is zombies helping their survivor friends or the other way around and that is unfortunately something we can't fix.

The ammo in the mags is a hard thing to balance to be honest, I tried to make so that higher value weapons had less mags but usually those mags also have more bullets than the lower value weapons. I did reduce the bullet per mag count for some but its hard to do without making it "unrealistic". Also, quite a lot of people complain of the opposite... not enough ammo. The camping issue will be more or less fixed once we implement the infection feature.

Yes the pickup system is quite complex and annoying but it is the only way to fix a major issue with the kit pickup spam and we literally got the feature ready for testing only one or two days before the beta test so we didn't have time to make any tutorial article or video about it. I think that's something you get used to the more you play PR:Z though.

I will consider the local only mumble thing but that kinda of breaks teamwork doesn't it? For the ones not already on TS and that might team-up in game. I would however love to have both teams on the same local as I think that would be a blast.

Thanks once again, cya next time

[Spook]

I'd say zombie gameplay was not boring at all. You just need to be at the right place, at the right time. Video >> 07:25

[UTurista]

Finally I played this and I like it very much , my only concern would be the Zombies AI really needs improvements, they don't need to be smart they just need to follow commander/Squad leader orders.

Would be awesome, knowing a player location and tell the bots to storm it.

[Onil]

Great video as always Spook. Specially because it shows the zombie gameplay and how fun it can be.

@ Turista, yep I know... We will try our best to fix that issue.

Thanks for the feedback guys

[Nate.]

Is it possible to remove the HUD for Local Mumble speech? You always know who is around by just seeing the voice-messages instead of actually trying to listen who is talking and what he is talking?

My point of view:

[sweedensniiperr]

Looks really fun guys.

And again I wish I could be there

[Onil]

eheh, funny moments there

Not sure about the Mumble messages though. And I kinda of like that you can identify who's talking from other squads.

[Murkey]

Nice video Nate, the music at the start really makes it

[UTurista]

Onil I think its possible to add a "BattleRoyal" system, basically would be increasing the CP radius of one or several flags and adding them a deadly trigger

[Philrow]

My footage from the first part of the test, before the server crash.