Update 25/04/2016 (To Version 1.0.34.52a)

Update 25/04/2016 (To Version 1.0.34.52a) This is primarily a hot-fix release, nothing hugely exciting right now, sorry!

Added:

Steam controller support.
Russian community language pack.
Brazilian Portuguese community language pack.
Dutch community language pack.
Chinese (Simplified) community language pack.
Japanese community language pack.
Option to scale/turn-off controller vibration.

(P.S. If you want to contribute to the community language packs and get them in a more complete shape, head over here - http://ukserver.zombiegrinder.com/projects/zombie-grinder/main-game/)

Modified:

Upgraded steamworks SDK to latest version.
Improved performance to various mod-creation functionality.

Fixed:

When dropping weapons with different ammo modifiers the ammo count was not correctly preserved on pickup.
Added additional sanitization to profile loading to ensure we can't end up in a state where we load profiles with invalid item slot combinations.

Have fun! - Tim

[ 2016-04-25 18:48:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Update 25/04/2016 (To Version 1.0.34.52a)

Update 25/04/2016 (To Version 1.0.34.52a) This is primarily a hot-fix release, nothing hugely exciting right now, sorry!

Added:

Steam controller support.
Russian community language pack.
Brazilian Portuguese community language pack.
Dutch community language pack.
Chinese (Simplified) community language pack.
Japanese community language pack.
Option to scale/turn-off controller vibration.

(P.S. If you want to contribute to the community language packs and get them in a more complete shape, head over here - http://ukserver.zombiegrinder.com/projects/zombie-grinder/main-game/)

Modified:

Upgraded steamworks SDK to latest version.
Improved performance to various mod-creation functionality.

Fixed:

When dropping weapons with different ammo modifiers the ammo count was not correctly preserved on pickup.
Added additional sanitization to profile loading to ensure we can't end up in a state where we load profiles with invalid item slot combinations.

Have fun! - Tim

[ 2016-04-25 18:48:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Update 25/02/2016 (To Version 1.0.33.28a)

Update 25/02/2016 (To Version 1.0.33.28a) A few new things, various fixed things and some modified things! Side effect of this update is controller-bindings have now been reset (sorry!), as a lot of the controller input systems have been heavily modified.

Added:

Ability to drop weapons and coins.
Support default bindings for a huge number of controllers, controller support should be a lot more wide now. All controller configurations have been reset.
Local hosting option to lobbies, ticked by default. Handy if you don't want to wait for dedicated server searches.
Along with the above we've added additional button names / icon sets for the main controller types (ds4/ds3/xb1/xb360).
Support for manual control of enemy spawning.
Support for oval-paint tool in editor.
Compass pips showing the position and state of other players.
Various new gib types for destroyable objects.
Dead tag next to player names when they are dead.

Modified:

Nerfed the floater zombies firing interval and attack radius.
Increased per-round score bonus, reduced per-damage score reduction, reduced per-death score reduction, increased per-revive score bonus.
Reduced gib counts for a lot of different effects, reduces visual clutter.
Love pylon and turrets have far higher base health.
Enemy drops and player drops now dissappear out of existance after a while, get them while you can! Time depends on drop source, usually 2 minutes.
Disable various vfx processing when running as a dedicated server with a null renderer. Should reduce dedicated server CPU usage a lot.
Heavily changed item drop rates so rarity is a bit more evenly spread out.
Further balancing of fire damage.
Actors tag/event linking is now many-to-many, lot nicer when hooking up events in maps! Shift+Click on to several objects also quick-links them.
Maximum zoom out when sharing the same screen is reduced. This mainly effects campaign maps and is mainly a base for some of the future campaign maps.

Fixed:

Ensure players are spawned on round change in wave modes, even when the intermission is short.
Some text typo's.
Country flags now correctly show up in dedicated servers on the scoreboard.
Some HUD elements not desaturating when the player they refer to is dead.
Prevent overshooting the pathing target of zombies when they are moving at high speed (smooths out some of the jerky behaviour at very high waves).
Some indestructable weapons (namely screwdrivers) not being consumed when used.
Being able to equip a few passive skills that you shouldn't be able to.
Cheater achievement not unlocking correctly if user gains last level by purchasing any of the +1 level skill items.
Potential negative values for challenge's time-remaining.
Loss of items when going to further levels in dungeon.
Crash when disposing of render targets on GPU's without framebuffer-object support.
Turret damage not correctly contributing to turret challenges.
Not being able to change reference values in the editor property grid.
Now force fmod to emit stero format audio, rather than whatever the OS default is. Should fix some audio bugs people have had.

Have fun! - Tim

[ 2016-02-25 22:56:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Update 25/02/2016 (To Version 1.0.33.28a)

Added:

Ability to drop weapons and coins.
Support default bindings for a huge number of controllers, controller support should be a lot more wide now. All controller configurations have been reset.
Local hosting option to lobbies, ticked by default. Handy if you don't want to wait for dedicated server searches.
Along with the above we've added additional button names / icon sets for the main controller types (ds4/ds3/xb1/xb360).
Support for manual control of enemy spawning.
Support for oval-paint tool in editor.
Compass pips showing the position and state of other players.
Various new gib types for destroyable objects.
Dead tag next to player names when they are dead.

Modified:

Nerfed the floater zombies firing interval and attack radius.
Increased per-round score bonus, reduced per-damage score reduction, reduced per-death score reduction, increased per-revive score bonus.
Reduced gib counts for a lot of different effects, reduces visual clutter.
Love pylon and turrets have far higher base health.
Enemy drops and player drops now dissappear out of existance after a while, get them while you can! Time depends on drop source, usually 2 minutes.
Disable various vfx processing when running as a dedicated server with a null renderer. Should reduce dedicated server CPU usage a lot.
Heavily changed item drop rates so rarity is a bit more evenly spread out.
Further balancing of fire damage.
Actors tag/event linking is now many-to-many, lot nicer when hooking up events in maps! Shift+Click on to several objects also quick-links them.
Maximum zoom out when sharing the same screen is reduced. This mainly effects campaign maps and is mainly a base for some of the future campaign maps.

Fixed:

Ensure players are spawned on round change in wave modes, even when the intermission is short.
Some text typo's.
Country flags now correctly show up in dedicated servers on the scoreboard.
Some HUD elements not desaturating when the player they refer to is dead.
Prevent overshooting the pathing target of zombies when they are moving at high speed (smooths out some of the jerky behaviour at very high waves).
Some indestructable weapons (namely screwdrivers) not being consumed when used.
Being able to equip a few passive skills that you shouldn't be able to.
Cheater achievement not unlocking correctly if user gains last level by purchasing any of the +1 level skill items.
Potential negative values for challenge's time-remaining.
Loss of items when going to further levels in dungeon.
Crash when disposing of render targets on GPU's without framebuffer-object support.
Turret damage not correctly contributing to turret challenges.
Not being able to change reference values in the editor property grid.
Now force fmod to emit stero format audio, rather than whatever the OS default is. Should fix some audio bugs people have had.

Have fun! - Tim

[ 2016-02-25 22:56:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Update 24/01/2016 (To Version 1.0.32.87a)

Update 04/01/2016 (To Version 1.0.32.62a) This update is fairly boring for the most part, it's just fixing some small bugs, and make some buffs to support players:

Added:

New item - Love Pylon - Place like a turret, provide fast automatic healing to nearby players.
XP bar on the HUD.
Option in gameplay settings to show numeric values for things like health/stamina/xp.

Modified:

Significant increase in XP gained through healing other players.
Some less abrasive cuco sounds.
HUD popups for turrets/players/etc now fade out when obscuring other pawns.

Fixed:

Various rendering and scaling issues with parts of the players HUD.
Crashes when firing weapons with -100% accuracy.
Chat sometimes disappearing unexpectedly.

Have fun! - Tim

[ 2016-01-24 00:26:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Update 24/01/2016 (To Version 1.0.32.87a)

Update 04/01/2016 (To Version 1.0.32.62a) This update is fairly boring for the most part, it's just fixing some small bugs, and make some buffs to support players:

Added:

New item - Love Pylon - Place like a turret, provide fast automatic healing to nearby players.
XP bar on the HUD.
Option in gameplay settings to show numeric values for things like health/stamina/xp.

Modified:

Significant increase in XP gained through healing other players.
Some less abrasive cuco sounds.
HUD popups for turrets/players/etc now fade out when obscuring other pawns.

Fixed:

Various rendering and scaling issues with parts of the players HUD.
Crashes when firing weapons with -100% accuracy.
Chat sometimes disappearing unexpectedly.

Have fun! - Tim

[ 2016-01-24 00:26:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Update 04/01/2016 (To Version 1.0.32.62a)

Until now our detailed change-lists have been distributed purely in a text file that comes in the games install folder (its called changelist.txt in the Docs folder if your curious). The text file just contains a dump of all our change-lists from our codebase. At the suggestion of several members of the community, we will also be posting update notes for the larger updates here as well! (For smaller hotfixes keep an eye on the changelist.txt file)! So anyway, without further ado, the following changes were made in the most recent update.

Added:

New weapon upgrade system. Gems are now used to upgrade per-weapon upgrade trees, that modify the stats and abilities of each weapon. Each weapon can have 10 stats increased with gems, further stat upgrades have to be traded off by reducing other stats, which should work out to be nice and self-balancing. Skills are no longer activated with gems, but recharge with enemy kills.
All steam inventory weapons now come in several varients. Each of these varients have unique upgrade trees that are pre-upgraded, and focus on individual stats, going higher than the increases that can be achieved from generic weapons. Several versions of the weapons have special attributes, for example firing in spread patterns. The weapon variants can be identified by the adjective attached to their name, eg. the "Harmful Uzi" variant has high damage output.
Ability to unequip items in the inventory when using a controller (the equip context menu item will now change to unequip if item is equipped).
New item - Screwdriver - Broken items can now be repaired to full durability with this, rather than just flat out destroyed when they break.
New accessory - Cutie Eyes
New hat - Afro
New hat - Beret
New hat - Big Sis
New hat - Paint Can
New hat - Colbydude
New hat - Cowlick
New hat - Builder Bob
New hat - Football Helmet
New hat - Frog Hat
New hat - Jo-Jo
New hat - Meguca
New hat - Messy Bun
New hat - Moe Mop
New hat - Edge La Edge
New hat - Jake Boxton
New hat - Slenderbag
New hat - Rina
Support for intro/outro mini-cutscenes on campaign levels, rather than just poping in and out of existance. Added some basic ones to c1_s* maps.
Further support for FMV cutscenes.
Sort order support for player starts, so spawn points are more deterministic in campaign maps.
More attack sound variations for enemies.
Support for scrolling using mouse wheel to various UI elements (primarily in the editor).
Handlers for SIGINT/SIGTERM and the equivilent callbacks on windows. Should allow slightly more graceful shutdowns of dedicated servers or the game when run through the terminal.

Modified:

Huge amount of changes to improve connection management. Should no longer recieve as many timeouts, and servers should always relinquish their lobby reservations quickly.
Skills are now recharged by enemy kills, rather than through the use of gems.
Gems are no longer purchasable in the shop, but are still dropped in abundence in game.
Halfed number of giblets spawned when fodder/chaser enemies are killed, it was a bit overbearing before.
Various steam inventory items have had their drop rates and rarities modified.
Various optimisations to path finding and inventory management, should save a fairly sizable amount of cpu time.
Various tiling issues fixed in c1_s2 and c1_s3.
c1_s3 now loops back to c1_s1 when finished for now.
Equipped items are now highlighted in inventory.
Hide moderate button if no reports are in the users queue.
Improved atlas batching to save draw time.
Properties in editor are now sorted in a somewhat more sane way.
Parellised the GC mark phase to save CPU time.
Disable gpu query objects used for retrieving gpu time for profile graphs. Seems to stall on some nvidia cards, and not of much use to the end-user.
Modified task manager to prevent delays in worker threads picking up pending tasks. Prevents minor stalls on the main thread.

Fixed:

Secondary coop characters not being able to modify their characters correctly (selecting modify character would put them in the primary users inventory).
Infinite loop when calculating broken items.
Being able to select invisible elements in the UI.
Being able to disable navigation if certain popups are shown during UI transitions.
Various issues with inventory sizes not representing actual inventory space remaining.
Ensure user has a valid hat equipped if the current one is removed.
Crash when upgrading weapon then going back to inventory when gem and weapon are on same inventory page.
Exploit to do with equipping hats.
Ammo modifiers running out too fast with unlimited ammo weapons (pistol).
Dedicated servers revert out of editor mode when no users in server anymore.
Moved some slightly questionable connection code back to the main thread, should prevent some race conditions that were causing crashes.
Lobby hosts searching for dedicated servers will no longer leave zombie connections open before connecting to reserved servers.
Ranking list views not centering on players rank.
Item_Archetype::Get_Archetype returning an object instance that has an invalid base class type-id.

Have fun! The weapon changes should certainly make for some intresting play! - Tim

[ 2016-01-06 23:05:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Update 04/01/2016 (To Version 1.0.32.62a)

Added:

New weapon upgrade system. Gems are now used to upgrade per-weapon upgrade trees, that modify the stats and abilities of each weapon. Each weapon can have 10 stats increased with gems, further stat upgrades have to be traded off by reducing other stats, which should work out to be nice and self-balancing. Skills are no longer activated with gems, but recharge with enemy kills.
All steam inventory weapons now come in several varients. Each of these varients have unique upgrade trees that are pre-upgraded, and focus on individual stats, going higher than the increases that can be achieved from generic weapons. Several versions of the weapons have special attributes, for example firing in spread patterns. The weapon variants can be identified by the adjective attached to their name, eg. the "Harmful Uzi" variant has high damage output.
Ability to unequip items in the inventory when using a controller (the equip context menu item will now change to unequip if item is equipped).
New item - Screwdriver - Broken items can now be repaired to full durability with this, rather than just flat out destroyed when they break.
New accessory - Cutie Eyes
New hat - Afro
New hat - Beret
New hat - Big Sis
New hat - Paint Can
New hat - Colbydude
New hat - Cowlick
New hat - Builder Bob
New hat - Football Helmet
New hat - Frog Hat
New hat - Jo-Jo
New hat - Meguca
New hat - Messy Bun
New hat - Moe Mop
New hat - Edge La Edge
New hat - Jake Boxton
New hat - Slenderbag
New hat - Rina
Support for intro/outro mini-cutscenes on campaign levels, rather than just poping in and out of existance. Added some basic ones to c1_s* maps.
Further support for FMV cutscenes.
Sort order support for player starts, so spawn points are more deterministic in campaign maps.
More attack sound variations for enemies.
Support for scrolling using mouse wheel to various UI elements (primarily in the editor).
Handlers for SIGINT/SIGTERM and the equivilent callbacks on windows. Should allow slightly more graceful shutdowns of dedicated servers or the game when run through the terminal.

Modified:

Huge amount of changes to improve connection management. Should no longer recieve as many timeouts, and servers should always relinquish their lobby reservations quickly.
Skills are now recharged by enemy kills, rather than through the use of gems.
Gems are no longer purchasable in the shop, but are still dropped in abundence in game.
Halfed number of giblets spawned when fodder/chaser enemies are killed, it was a bit overbearing before.
Various steam inventory items have had their drop rates and rarities modified.
Various optimisations to path finding and inventory management, should save a fairly sizable amount of cpu time.
Various tiling issues fixed in c1_s2 and c1_s3.
c1_s3 now loops back to c1_s1 when finished for now.
Equipped items are now highlighted in inventory.
Hide moderate button if no reports are in the users queue.
Improved atlas batching to save draw time.
Properties in editor are now sorted in a somewhat more sane way.
Parellised the GC mark phase to save CPU time.
Disable gpu query objects used for retrieving gpu time for profile graphs. Seems to stall on some nvidia cards, and not of much use to the end-user.
Modified task manager to prevent delays in worker threads picking up pending tasks. Prevents minor stalls on the main thread.

Fixed:

Secondary coop characters not being able to modify their characters correctly (selecting modify character would put them in the primary users inventory).
Infinite loop when calculating broken items.
Being able to select invisible elements in the UI.
Being able to disable navigation if certain popups are shown during UI transitions.
Various issues with inventory sizes not representing actual inventory space remaining.
Ensure user has a valid hat equipped if the current one is removed.
Crash when upgrading weapon then going back to inventory when gem and weapon are on same inventory page.
Exploit to do with equipping hats.
Ammo modifiers running out too fast with unlimited ammo weapons (pistol).
Dedicated servers revert out of editor mode when no users in server anymore.
Moved some slightly questionable connection code back to the main thread, should prevent some race conditions that were causing crashes.
Lobby hosts searching for dedicated servers will no longer leave zombie connections open before connecting to reserved servers.
Ranking list views not centering on players rank.
Item_Archetype::Get_Archetype returning an object instance that has an invalid base class type-id.

Have fun! The weapon changes should certainly make for some intresting play! - Tim

[ 2016-01-06 23:05:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Zombie Grinder
TwinDrills

Developer

TwinDrills

Publisher

2015-10-16

Release

Action Indie RPG Adventure Singleplayer Multiplayer Coop EA