Friday, January 3, 2020

Contagion updates breaks HotZ and my time to work on TWZ

Oh yes, this will be a rant post! What a great new year :) My plan to work on TWZ on my holidays are completely destroyed by the heavy update changes from Contagion. They manage to get JonnyBoy0719 who fixed their abandoned mod Zombie Panic:Source on their Team to fix Contagion. The good thing is that I worked with him on Braindbread II and that updates are coming, but the updates are as always... doesn't consider the modding section...

Also those updates are focused heavely on coding. It seems that JonnyBoy0719 wants a heavy overhaul on all sections which in return affects the mods in the workshop. So, what are those problems you ask? Let me list them up:

Wwise Sound System Update
He updated the Wwise Sound System to a newer version to fix a memory leakage, resulting in missing ambient sound files for all the custom maps out there because the directory structure has been changed! This update rendered custom sounds outdated. You can't hear any custom sounds on HotZ anymore. I don't have the original soundfiles anymore nor the project for Wwise. I had to rip out the sound files (thx to Reborn's help) from the encrypted bnk file and reconstruct the whole soundlist events plus setting each individual sounds with the correct 3D settings. This hotfix has cost me to 2 fulltime days which I could use it on TWZ.

Missing textures
I got a report from someone on my friendlist that there are some missing textures appearing in HotZ... Those where old textures from the old models they didn't get rid of, but it seems they have already got rid of them, but didn't shipped the update out since JonnyBoy0719 didn't know about it. This also required a hotfix that wasted me the whole day.

Broken Hammer Editor
So this is the worst part. Those updates messed up hammer editor pretty bad... it didn't even worked on the first update. I'm forced to give feedback to JonnyBoy0719 since I have to use the hammer editor to work on my project. This also cost time and it's annoying to encounter all those bugs that stops me from working on TWZ! The main problem atm moment is that I have problems at clicking stuff. The cursor doesn't pick the things I want. Also another problem is that I can't open Hammer Editor and Contagion at the same time which slows down my workflow! So for now I decided to do a workaround... I have to install the old build somehow and try to seperate it from this current broken build until things are on better places.

Lack of Playtesters
I only listed the bugs I currently facing while working on the project, but there are many more bugs in general when you play the game. This can be avoided if they had internally tested it out, but it isn't the case here so I assume that there is a lack of playtesters or the priority is so low that JonnyBoy0719 has to rely on feedbacks from the community... yeah, there might be some people on the their discord which I never visited but I bet there ain't many there and the forum is still not very active so he doesn't get enough feedback to detect all the bugs and each update might create more bugs...

So overall my holiday is almost over and I haven't done much for TWZ thanks to those... let's say "new features"! Yes, I'm pretty pissed atm. It was a mistake to work on TWZ. I should have gone as fast as I could when I was done with HotZ and invest my time on something more meaningful, but this is the reality now... :(


No comments:

Post a Comment