I *swear* I'm not dead! Also, new download soon! news

Man, I really need to keep y'all better apprised of happenings with the mod.

Anyhoo, v8.0, with its new nickname "Not A Sinclair Product" (in reference to the Sinclair ZX80 computers), is well on its way, and might see release within a month, if not sooner. All it needs is for me to finish and integrate the last of the new monsters, and final testing. Massive changes and additions over v7.3 are included, hopefully all for the better.

ADDITIONS and QoL

In addition to the changes that earlier releases touted, there's...a couple more things to look forward to now. Firstly, a new addon, "Classier Bastards", is now part of the kit. Taking a touch of inspiration from its progeny QuakeStyle Unbound, this variant of the loadouts addon adds a new twist: unique starting weapons for 19 out of the 21 available classes (barring the standard "shotgun and pistol" starter and the "vanilla" pistol starter). These weapons cannot be dropped or traded among players, and are only available should you load the addon.

Next, the mod, at my great reluctance, now has its first ZScript aspects. Namely, the updated Tilt++ camera-tilting system by renowned Doomer Nash Muhandes, a massive upgrade and fix over the old QTilt system by the same guy, and the DAMNUMS submod by Xaser Acheron and Major Cooke, which, if the player desires, causes little Borderlands-style numbers to fly off of damaged enemies.

The mod's ACS scripting has also been cleaned up a LOT, and also made more modular and adaptable in the process. This has minimal, if any, effect on gameplay or performance but I'mma tout it anyway because my mod, my rules. :-P

Quality-of-life changes are abundant-- for instance, you can't waste armor repair kits anymore if you've got more than 300 points of a given armor type.

Also, there will be 11 new monsters in the mix, all zombies. They will be carrying weapons that before were only available by finding them in the maps-- plus, among this new crop of the possessed are civilians, scientists and some zomb-ettes.

FIXES

In Bugfix Land, oh BOY are they legion. #1 is that the Bolognese gore addon should work a fair bit closer to how it's intended to; it's not 100% there but the old Nash Gore blood the Zorasoft mod lineage (yes, even ZAGE) still uses doesn't want to work with it 100% of the way. Still...it's close enough.

Next, on TBG's advice, about 90% of the mod's projectiles have had their hit radii reduced. Now, this may sound like something that makes the game harder somehow, but it most certainly ain't. If you're playing with freelook, jumping and crouching enabled-- y'know, like ZX is intended for-- these smaller projectiles actually are far easier to hit correct targets with; they're not clipping corners or hitting some decoration that's just a wee bit too close to the line of fire.

There's been some rebalancing of the weaponry, and some fixing to said weaponry as well. Namely, the Vortex Rifle was broken to Hell and back in v7.3, because I'm a stupidface who doesn't know how to balance explosive splash damage sometimes.

REMOVALS

As stated earlier, v7.3 retroactively does *not* support deathmatch gametypes anymore, and the same is true of v8.0. Because of some odd quirk in the Unreal-like double-tap dodging script, in deathmatch-- and *only* deathmatch-- the power of the dodges is massively increased, allowing players to hurl themselves around the map without a care in the world. Plus, ZX really isn't suited to DM play anyway, what with the extreme amounts of RNG which are integral to the game experience.

PATCHES

Lastly, there's a couple of new patches for certain levelsets-- namely, D64D2, a "what if Doom 64 looked and played like Doom 2?" levelset I absolutely adore. There's a patch for that, as well as a patch for my buddy silentzorah's special "Autoload Edition" of the levelset.

That's all for now, folks-- fairly soon, ZX v8.0, its most polished iteration yet, will be live. Just gimme a couple weeks to shore everything up, then, hopefully, we'll go live once again.

-Xterra