More Zombie News

Time to post some more news on the progress of Zday as things are moving along nicely. We've created another short teaser video clip which you can see at www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BwmufYNW3I it shows the new office block thats made it into the game now, including working elevators :)


These last two weeks have been quite the drive to get things ready for the coming alpha v0.2 release this weekend (12th July), a great benefit to the game now is the patching server which we can push out any updated files directly to the testing team (who don't have svn access), this should be the last time we need them to download the full game client (hurray shouts our bandwidth).

One lesson we've learnt has been the use of textures, we've got some fantastic 1024x1024 textures that do look stunning unfortunately we kept seeing the memory usage of the game climbing up and up and some investigation has shown that although they are compressed in jpg/png format on disk once they're loaded into the engine they are in an uncompressed format and take a lot more space... one big advantage that a move to TGEA would have is the use of compressed .DDS textures which would save a huge amount of memory but we want to reach a release version of the game first, get people playing and enjoying the game and then we'll upgrade to TGEA. So for now we've having to scale down the textures and wait for the TGEA goodies.


We're also running things now on a dedicated Virtual Private Server (VPS) to initially get some ideas on how well that shared virtual environment would be of running a TGE dedicated server.. so far we've had 4 players and around 50 AI zombies running around without any issues but this weekend will be the bigger test with 25 players and 50 Zombies and should give us some good stats on how suitable that type of server will be, if it proves to be a choke point we'll move to a dedicated server instead.

There is always the problem with costs for running servers and thats where once again our community have been great and sparked a conversation to gather ideas for how those servers could be funded, for example via a small monthly subscription, purchasing downloadable content from a shop, etc. So we're confident that although we're picking up server costs whilst we're developing once we go live we will have a source of revenue to pay for the server costs and maybe even a little left over for all the developers to have a beer. The biggest question for us will be how many and how big do we need the servers to be?!?


Things have been so hectic I've not had chance to look at some of excellent resources being posted on Garagegames such as the guys at Plastic Games their Gem-a-Day resources, I've already got some great ideas for those especially the tweaker so once we're through this next alpha release I'll be sure to take a look at those. Thanks guys.

The next blog we'll include how the alpha release went so keep watching this space.