Beta 5
It's spooptober once again, which means we're here with another release. Oh boy, do we have a bunch of great stuff for you today.
The new boomstick
The biggest change in terms of gameplay is the new addition to our arsenal; the over-under shotgun. The shotgun is a high damage, low fire-rate and penetrating alternative to the normal shotgun. You can easily clear a bunch of zombies, but need to wait a long reload animation to dispatch more zombies. This makes it perfect for objectives. We hope this weapon makes the survivor gameplay more varied and interesting.
Over-under shotgun modelled and animated by Yeckoh
New Effects
Atmosphere in a zombie game is important. While we're not going full horror, small things go a long way.
The stock Source engine rain is, very much so, garbage, so we decided to take some notes from Alien Swarm. All pre-existing maps with func_precipitation will use this new rain effect.
The thing you'll see in every map, is the new post-processing effects. Giving the image more contrast and desaturating it a bit gives it that horror feel. Some may call it "the shit filter". If you are one of those people, do not fret, it is toggleable through the options.
Particle system rain
Post-processing effects
Weapon Sounds & New Textures
You might have heard some differences in the weapon sounds in the trailer. Dat1Guy decided to release his custom weapon sounds in secret on our ModDB page. Well, we noticed, and decided to just include them in the mod as they are. They're that good.
The Renegadist has been working on the item crate and arm textures for like a year now. You better like em. Not because I said so, but because they are actually pretty awesome. The shotgun textures really needed some improvements, so Renegadist did his magic there as well.
Weapon crate textures by The Renegadist
Player model specific arm models
Shotgun textured by The Renegadist
Music
We were contacted by Rhett Dahl, an awesome composer that wanted to do music for us. We said "hell yea!". You'll hear some of them in our main menu in Beta 5. Here's one of them. All the tracks can be found here. Thanks to Compelx who also did a few tracks for us. Unfortunately we didn't include his in this release, so stay tuned.
The work of keeping alive a mod this old really shows how passionate you people are. Great work!
I love that you try to keep this one alive, that being said:
-The double barrel shotgun seems to fall out of line with the other weapons in terms of visual style (realistic vs stylized / early HL2). Also: what is it's role? Every weapon in ZM has a distinct role, is the double barrel a one hit killer? An easier to use alternative to the long-rifle?
-The labeled ammo crates are a great idea, but the logo being a screenshot of the model screams lazy execution. Why not use a simple stylized logo of the ammo type instead of a literal screenshot of the 3d-model? Meh.
Looks very interesting. Finally, Zombie Master is back thanks to you, guys.
Keep the good job!
About Beta 5, I liked the ammo boxes to be anonymous, you couldn't tell whats inside, it added a mystery to it but I also guess that those boxes's content were always the same so the more you play the map the more you will know whats inside and so wind away the unknown of it but I still prefered all of them to be the same, neutral. If you want to them to be recogniseable, maybe remove the picture of the actual ammo, reduce by ALOT the size of the font so that you really have to be CLOSE CLOSE to know whats inside
There is a bug or something going on with the new sounds, when triggered they also play a massive noise to it
The new pistol (edit: the black one) sound is too much for it, it doesn't fit, would fit better for a weapon that is more powerful/bigger, not this one
Can you in the option also give us the choice using between the original weapon sounds and the new ones ?
Good to make those filters optional, did not tried the weapon, don't know how balanced it is but its good to have more weapon variety so awesome
Overall from patch notes it seem pretty good, so awesome again
Will there be any assault rifles like M16 or my personal as well as others favorite AK47?