ZPS coming to Source Engine 2013! news

Hello Everyone,
Our team has some excited and long-awaited news to share with you! After years of delays and putting the development on hold many times, ZPS on Source 2013 is finally happening!
Before we get into the details of what this will mean for the game, we must introduce our newest programmer, who offered to do the port of SDK 2007 to the latest Source Engine version SDK 2013, and is willing to support ZPS even more: Jonnyboy0719, from BrainBread2! He has been doing outstanding work porting this game to a proper build, fixing up lots of old bugs, issues and critical glitches from the old engine and making this happen for us!

So let's get to the news and what this means for the community.

Source 2013 was released awhile ago by Valve, and we were working on a port already back in 2014, which would be the release of ZPS 2.5 that never went further because of delays and other problems that the team had to face.

Now, with this new engine running on our upcoming build, we're excited to introduce the following:

• Better optimization, fixed memory leaks and multi-core rendering, making the game run smoother, faster and more stable, for both players and servers.
• Proper Linux support for dedicated servers.
• Fixes of old engine bugs and glitches that were causing the game crash or close itself.
• Better Hit-registration and lag compensation.
• Better Steampipe.
• Working achievements.

If everything goes as planned, we'll be releasing these features in ZPS v3.0, along with other improvements, as soon as possible. For now, enjoy this small teaser, showcasing the alpha state of ZPS 3.0

Meet Pedro: our newest Survivor!

Pedro was in development for a long time back in 2011, by our 3D artist EArkham. He's a ex-drug dealer from Mexico before the apocalypse started, and we'll make you guys finally meet him in-game sooner than you think! Here are some previews of what he looks like:

New Engine means major changes!

Since this is a totally new engine port, basically rewriting the game from scratch, Jonnyboy will be doing his best to make everything work how it is supposed to be working in ZPS. However, like we mentioned above, some things had to be changed, which will affect some custom content that was compiled for the Source SDK 2007.

This will affect all of the custom maps and content as they will in compatible with the new engine. The major changes on the port is a flip of the names/numbers that determine how your map reads the Teams (Human, Zombie and the Spec). Technically speaking, if any map running the entities: "filter_activator_team" and "func_ladder"; and was compiled in SDK 2007, it will be unplayable in ZPS 3.0 version.

But don't PANIC! yet. if you're reading this, are a community mapper and still active, then don't worry, the changes that have to be made are small and easy to do. We'll create a guide explaining how to do these small changes on your map, recompile it properly to be compatible and ready for the future release in no time! We're informing you now so that you have time to prepare but as we are not fully done with the build, other requirements needed to make maps work on the engine may be discovered. If so, we will inform you in due time.

New Upcoming Maps!

Speaking of maps, this update will include two old, popular community maps, made official: Zomboeing and FrozenHeart! Both objective, having lots of additional details and other changes that have improved the gameplay and look of the maps. We would like to thank Ratboy and Darb Dude for doing an amazing job on bringing back Zomboeing as an fully-fledged and incredibly entertaining experience!

And also, releasing bunch of maps improvements & fixes on other stock maps, introducing our first official Hardcore map, zph_pithole, by Xufe!

Improved Server Security - The days of malicious crashes are behind us.

One of the most important changes in this update is the solution to the age-old exploit that has been used to carry out server attacks for years. This behavior is not something we want to see carried over to the new build.

To help secure the community until the new build is ready, we've set up a Server Setup and Security threads. With the help of the community, their threads will help you secure your server to deal with the attacks to the best of the current engines ability.

When will this update roll out?

After all these information, you guys might be asking yourself: update, when!?
As we've mentioned, the build is currently in Alpha state, and our team is doing our best to bring you guys this update as quick as possible. The update is focused on bringing stability and security to the game, adding a bunch of new content is something our team wishes to do but we won't let it prolong the release date of this crucial update.
Future updates, that will introduce more new content and tweaks, will be shared with you as always through our announcements.

In the meantime, share these exciting news with your old friends through Steam, Facebook and even on Twitter! Tell them that ZPS is coming back in a more secure and stable state than ever seen before.
The next announcement will be the changelog of the ZPS 3.0 build. Looking forward to it! We sure are.

-ZPS Dev Team