The Dead Linger has been indefinitely postponed.

Click here to read the blog post.[www.thedeadlinger.com]

Welcome survivors to another edition of The (Insert unit of time) Dead! Past weekly deads were skipped because updates were close to release. Speaking of updates being released, we've released 2 updates in this past week!

Update 4 was the inclusion of barricading, and was talked about in a vlog containing information about both Update 3 and 4.
You can view the vlog here

The patch notes for update 4 posted for posterity's sake.
Update 4 Patch Notes:
- Barricading is in, in basic. Hold middle click (or C) to grab a 2x4 board. With a hammer equipped, click to nail it to a surface.
- Various fixes to the way inventory works with networking
- Potential fix for a footstep sound bug

We hope you are boarding up your windows and doors. It won't save you, but it may buy you time.


Update 5 was released this week as well. A very small update adding scopes to scoped weapons and some bug fixes. Patch notes as follows.

Update 5 Patch Notes:
- Scoped rifles now have visual scope overlays
- Some very small bug fixes related to aiming/zooming with scopes and various rifles.

2 updates in one weekly dead is pretty meaty I'd say. I mean, we got a whole game mechanic, and an immersion feature in one week!

As always, be sure to follow us on twitter @TheDeadLinger for more development news!

Linger on, Survivors!

Hello Survivors!
Update 5 is live on Steam!

Change Notes:
- Scoped rifles now have visual scope overlays
- Some very small bug fixes related to aiming/zooming with scopes and various rifles.

Linger on, Survivors!

The Dead Linger - UE4 Update 4 is out now, with a dev vlog covering both 3 and 4! Check it out here!

Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H7HOet6yzc

*NEW* Update 4 Patch Notes:
- Barricading is in, in basic. Hold middle click (or C) to grab a 2×4 board. With a hammer equipped, click to nail it to a surface.
- Various fixes to the way inventory works with networking
- Potential fix for a footstep sound bug

Full Patch Notes for Update 3 and 4:
http://www.thedeadlinger.com/archives/5992

The Dead Linger is 33% off for the duration of the Halloween sale!
If you haven't picked it up yet, now's a good time. Be quick though, the deal only lasts until November 2nd.

Hello survivors! This week's Weekly Dead is just a reminder since something big happened recently.


3 days ago update 3 on the Unreal Engine version of The Dead Linger was released. You can read the change log in the blog post we posted that day.[www.thedeadlinger.com]

Today, we've released it to the live build. So even if you chose not to opt-in, you will have the same build that the opt-in survivors have. As always, if it doesn't download, verify the integrity of your cache, and restart steam. Sometimes steam needs a little jarring to make sure it works correctly.

If you haven't been following the opt-in updates, it's worth it to read the various change logs starting with the Opt-In Survival Guide[www.thedeadlinger.com] and then the change log for update 2[www.thedeadlinger.com].
It's also worth it to check out Geoff's forum post on the Unreal Engine build going live[www.sandswept.net] which I have also hijacked as the forum post for The Weekly Dead this week.

If you want to see some of the zombie death and animation improvements, here's a video of that from awhile back.

As always, be sure to follow us on twitter @TheDeadLinger for more development news!

Linger on, Survivors!

Hello Survivors!

Sorry for the wait. Update 3 has been released! This is a rough cut, but we decided to throw it out there and let you guys enjoys it while we tidy up some more and get barricading in for the upcoming Update 4.

If you have chosen to opt-in to B15-UE4, you should receive the latest update. Restart Steam to acquire the update if it does not download automatically. If you need information on how to opt-in, check out the Opt-In Survival Guide![www.thedeadlinger.com]

Opt In Update 3 Patch Notes can be found in their entirety here[www.thedeadlinger.com], as steam won't let us post that much text in an announcement.

Thanks to all the survivors who reported these issues. The majority of issues fixed in this patch were reported by the community. :)

Please continue to report issues in our bug report forum so we can track them and fix them; http://www.sandswept.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=25

Linger on, Survivors!

There is no weekly dead this week. We have been heavily into debugging this latest build (in addition to Richard getting the tile load order working correctly) so we have nothing to show off for this week.

This is the hard part of game development. It's really boring, but extremely necessary. See you all next week!

Hello survivors and welcome to another edition of The Weekly Dead!

I'll bet you are wondering, what happened last week. Well, Geoff was stranded without internet due to a recent move, as were a few others. The one who stayed, Richard, was knee deep in code for loading, storing, spawning, and dropping. Given that everyone was moving, moved, or in the process of moving, we decided to skip last week's update for the most part.

So this week Geoff got his internet back, tweaked with the damage of a few weapons, fixed a few bugs, and things of that nature. You didn't hear it from me, but he may, or may not have also been working on a devlog.

Richard has been doing something insane. He's been digging around in the code of Unreal Engine 4 so that it could be made to work with our level load order. The less fancy way of saying that is we're doing some custom engine-level stuff to ensure our sub-levels (the levels holding loot and furniture inside a given block of buildings) always load after the building itself. Since UE4 doesn't natively respect the order you load levels, sometimes you'll load in the entire build worth of furniture and it will all fall to the ground, because, well, the building didn't load in first.

Fun stuff! In addition to that, the guys have also been on bug fixing duty, trying to get everything cleaned up for the most reliable build of The Dead Linger ever released.

The least visual friendly work is often the most important.

As always, be sure to follow us on twitter @TheDeadLinger for more development news!

Linger on, Survivors!

Hello survivors and welcome to another edition of The Weekly Dead! A spindly update this week but it's important that everyone knows we are still at work every week. These kinds of weeks happen because game dev.


Once again, code and under-the-hood tech is where the meat of the week has been sizzling.

A lot of the work that went on this week was once again on multiplayer and how we store data in the world, and there really isn't much to say about it. At least not from me. Here's what Geoff has to say about it.

Hello Survivors! Geoff here.

Right now Richard and myself are are deep in the muddy multiplayer trenches. There isn't a whole lot to show visually, but I can talk about it a bit. One of the major improvements we're working on right now is focusing on load times and getting you into the world and playing as rapidly as possible. As we continued to build and improve the Pepper Valley region, we found the loading times were getting increasingly longer, when they really didn't have to be. So, what we've gone and done is move a lot of content (interior stuff, mostly) onto little sub-levels for really fast loading, and better general management of how your PC loads, stores, and processes all the content in the world. Better framerates, much faster load times. We've seen a couple examples of 2 to 5 minute load times shortening down to about 15 to 30 seconds. So that's nice. Hopefully everyone will experience that sort of load time so you can jump right in and go.

Some other stuff we're doing involves tying up everything that needs to be tied up in multiplayer. Vague? Sort of. There's a lot of small stuff, from inventory to the way zombies are handled around the world as you move about. If players split up, it requires even more computation on the server side to run all the AI they might encounter in the world. We have been doing some really good crowd optimization, and have up to about 100 zombies actively doing something without having too much effect on your framerate. Framerate and consistency are the name of the game. We want every player in the game to be seeing (mostly) the same thing as the other players. This is how adventurous coop play and tight, fun PvP play can take place.

Richard's been heads-down on the level loading and storing code, both so the game keeps track of details like door states, furniture, and loot being moved, saved, and spawned. That's easily one of the most important systems in the game, and also takes into account the next update after this one, which will contain the most-wanted free-form barricading.

In my "free time," I've also been getting the vlog ready, which requires a lot of audio and footage to get, all while still coding and testing in order to wrap up this build. We'll launch it the very moment it's ready.

Back to you, Howell.


Out there, somewhere, or multiple somewheres, some places have been set up in Pepper Valley. Not finished, some new areas to explore have been created. As of this Weekly Dead, we aren't going to show it for now (Geoff wouldn't let me), and we will let you check it out when you get your hands on the update. We hope you enjoy it.

"Grant On Skype" lähetti viestin:

Comitting...
-Survivor animation changes
-New fist idle animation
-Sandstone Rifle pose and socket in survivor skeleton
-New right arm basic punch

Grant's been creating some new first person animations and idles for the survivor, to better work with our new UE4 rig, and in general, to make things look right. Here's a quick glance at those improvements.

[i.imgur.com][i.imgur.com]Ignore the fingers, we're still tidying up weights from the Unity-to-UE4 rig transfer.

That's all we've got to talk about this week.

As always, be sure to follow us on twitter @TheDeadLinger for more development news!

Linger on, Survivors!