News Archives/2011

December

December 24, 2011

In the spirit of Christmas, Admin announced that everyone will get an extra +50% EXP boost until Boxing Day, so get your newly bought Corpse Grinder and grind christmas-ly!

December 1, 2011

New consumable items, which enhance your survivor's performance, have been added to the Credit Shop. Be sure not to share needles and wash hands before injecting ;-).

November

November 30, 2011

The Corpse Grinder chainsaw has been added to the Credit Shop. It will be available until Dec 31, 2011 so get one while you can!

October

October 28, 2011

Today the game has been updated to Unity 3.4 which should improve game performance and loading times. Unity Web Player should update automatically, but if this doesn't happen, you can download it here.

October 21, 2011

Survivors from all districts of Fairview have had the opportunity to see the sun for the first time in months. Weather cycles have been implemented to the game.

October 20, 2011

As of today, music is played while traveling through the Inner City.

October 15, 2011

We all know how important proper appearance during any zombie apocalypse is. That pumpkin on your head or a superhero-like cape is just the thing every survivor needs. Until now, fashion-conscious zombie fighters were forced to wear the same outfits every other day. Well, not anymore! The Corpse Carapace (Armour) and Corpse Mask (Mask) are available in the Credit Shop until November 10th!

October 3, 2011

News from the development blog:

Tomorrow evening (Tuesday 4th October 2011) from 2pm EST until 10pm EST all characters will receive 3x their normal EXP. This includes normal exp from zombies, boss exp, mission rewards and OA bonuses :)

Why am I doing this? Well we really want to see how well our servers can handle an abnormally large number of players. We want to get literally as many people online as humanly possible during that time, so we can find any weaknesses. This will mean that in the future a large spike in player numbers will be less likely to cause problems for our servers, which will make the game far more enjoyable for everyone.

So, make sure you're online tomorrow between 2pm and 10pm EST! And if you have any friends who have a DF account, be sure to tell them about this mini-event :)

Times around the world:
11am until 7pm PST (West Coast USA)
12pm until 8pm MDT (Central USA)
1pm until 9pm CDT (Central USA)
2pm until 10pm EST (East Coast USA)
7pm until 3am GMT (UK)
8pm until 4am GMT+1 (Western Europe)
10pm until 6am GMT+3 (Russia)
5am until 1pm AEST (Wednesday 5th) (Australia)

September

September 23, 2011

News from the development blog:

Just thought I'd let you guys know where I'm up to at this stage:

Right now I'm putting the finishing touches to the next batch of 40+ missions and they should be released before the end of the month. I'm also working on bug fixes, optimizations and smaller improvements to the game/site. In addition I'm going to be adding some music and day/night/weather cycles to inner city in a couple of weeks.

I expect to begin serious work on interiors/barricading in late October or early November.

Not all that exciting, but I thought I'd mention that I've commissioned a new 3D rendered cinematic intro, which I expect to be ready sometime in December.

Some of you were wondering why the beta warning was removed from the login page. I'm not trying to say that the game is finished, because it definitely isn't. I just don't want new players to feel scared that they're going to lose their account at some point, or that they're going to encounter tons of bugs, because that isn't the case. The game is actually very stable at this point.

August

August 24, 2011

Missions are now available for players without Gold Membership:

“Just a quick post to say that missions have now been released for all players. Enjoy!“

— AdminPwn

August 19, 2011

I've decided I'm no longer going to post a daily list of what I've been doing/working on. I recently explained that I had been sick for two days and that prompted certain people to post negative comments, implying that I should in fact be working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and that being sick in apparently unacceptable.

I've worked incredibly hard these last couple of months, and my 'reward' for it is yet more abuse and negative comments. It's clear that even if I was working 22 hours a day, 365 days a year a good proportion of you would still be unhappy. I should of known, because that's exactly how it's worked since I first started making this game.

Here is one thing I'd like to note. If you're not happy with the game as it stands, then please, PLEASE, don't spend money on it. You aren't 'pre-ordering' a feature that I'm going to create in the future. In addition, spending money on DF does not make you my boss. When you buy credits or a GM, you are paying for those things as they exist in the current game at this time, nothing else.

I'm going to continue working on missions, fixing bugs and adding new ones until the end of this month. Then in September I'm going to work on fixing the other major long-term flaws with the game such as lag, mutiplayer sync, high memory usage etc and convert the project from Unity 2.6 to 3.4 whilst implementing non-browser caching for faster loading times.

After that I'm not making any promises. I'll probably work on interiors and barricading, but I'm not going to post an ETA. It'll be done when it's done.

August 15, 2011

Monday:
Missions
Yet more bug fixes.

Tuesday
Bug fixes

Wednesday
Not feeling too great so took today off.

Thursday
Same as Wednesday, though starting to a feel a little better. Should be able to get some more missions done tomorrow.

August 8, 2011

Tuesday:
Expecting to have enough done for GMs to play by sometime this evening.

Tuesday Evening
Just a few minutes away now. Thought I should mention that the final artwork is not yet ready, so you will see a lot of ugly placeholder stuff. That of course will be sorted as soon as the final artwork is done. I'd also like to note that we literally only have 6 missions at the moment, 2 at Nastya's, 2 at Fort, 1 at Precinct and 1 at Dogg's. Of course many more will be added in the next few weeks. Due to the small number of missions you'll only be able to do one per day for the time being.

Wednesday
Mission bug fixes and improvements

Some people are complaining about bugs, difficulty/balance and some issues with seeing your briefing etc. Rest assured I'll be addressing all of these problems. Remember that this is a brand new feature and is likely to have these kind of teething issues for the next couple of weeks or so.

Thursday
Missions

Friday
Went on an assault course activity day with Ian (Xaelath). Managed to dislocate my right arm again. Went to a hospital where instead of slowly manipulating the arm back into the correct position (like they did the last two times), the doctor decided to violently force it into place as quickly as he possibly could. It didn't work, and the end result was the worst pain I've felt in my life (despite being on 10mg of morphine), and judging by how my arm feels today they did some extra damage in the process. In the end I had to be sedated for them to get it back in. I'll make sure not to go to that hospital again.

Luckily I can still use it enough to continue adding missions.

Saturday:
Missions
Yet more bug fixes.

Sunday:
Missions
Yet more bug fixes.

August 1, 2011

Monday:
Missions

Tuesday:
Missions
On Friday I'll be going away with Nastya for a long weekend. I was originally planning to release missions for GMs before then. Even though I think that's still possible, it would be pretty risky. I wouldn't have time to thoroughly test everything so there could be a lot of serious bugs. Normally that's not a big issue because I'm around to fix problems as soon as they occur. But being away will make this impossible (Nastya will kill me if I spent our weekend working!). So I've decided it'll be better to wait until I'm back. The ETA is now sometime Tuesday (or possibly Wednesday) next week.

July

July 27, 2011

Today, a glitch happened on the Marketplace, which paralyzes the Selling section of the Marketplace. It has been fixed.

July 25, 2011

Weekly updates:

Monday:
Missions

Tuesday:
Missions

Wednesday:
Random bug fixes
More anti-cheat stuff

Thursday:
Woke up today to find my hard disk had died. Luckily I have everything backed up online, but it's still going to delay me a bit. Have to wait until tomorrow for a new disk to be delivered, and once that's in it's going to take a while to download all 51GB of data back on to it. There are still some bits a pieces for missions I can get done while I'm waiting however.

Friday:
New hard disk eventually arrived (was supposed to be before 9am but didn't get here until 3pm). Since then I've been fighting with the stupid online backup service's data restore process. Got the first 10GB of data, only for the software crash. After restarting the restore it went right back to the beginning >.< I'm now attempting another restore method. At this rate I probably won't have all my necessary files until the end of tomorrow. Unfortunately all of this is beginning to cut a serious hole in my schedule as there isn't much else I can do until my files have been restored. So looks like there is going to be a delay on the missions being released.

Saturday:
Managed to get my most important DF files downloaded overnight so was actually able to get quite a lot of mission stuff done today after all. Aiming to have something ready for GM's in the next few days.

Sunday:
Missions

July 18, 2011

Weekly updates:

Monday:
Missions

Tuesday:
Bug fixes

Thursday:
Tweaked exp again
Bug fixes
Missions

Friday:
Missions

Saturday:
Missions

Sunday:
Missions

July 17, 2011

The EXP requirement to level up has been increased significantly (up to 2 times the old EXP requirement, starting from level 30). Level 200 players also have been granted permanent access to the Elite Shop.

For more, see Development blog

July 11, 2011

Weekly updates:

Monday:
More bug fixes for anti-cheat

Tuesday:
Mission artwork specifications
Started mission programming

Wednesday:
Mission system

Thursday:
Mission system

Friday
Mission system

Saturday
Mission system

Some of you asked about an ETA for the missions. I expect to have the core system finished sometime around the 25th of this month. Although, we wouldn't have any proper missions created, so I'd expect another week after that before we would have enough for things to be playable. So GMs should have access to some missions at the start of next month, and everyone else will get them a couple of weeks after that.

Just in case anyone is interested, here is a rough mock up of what the mission/event briefing screen might look like:

July 8, 2011

There has been a new update involving player kills. When browsing through either your or other members' profiles, it is now possible to view that player's PvP kills via the "Show Player Kills for this Week" link. This new page shows you various information on that player's kills for the week, mostly consisting of:

- Name Of Player

- Confirmed Kills

July 7, 2011

There have been confirmed reports of Instant Reloading being removed. It is unknown whether it is a bug and will be fixed, or if it is a permanent update.

“I did intend to make reloading slower, but not as much as this. The plan was to make the minimum amount of time to reload a gun as 0.25 seconds. Obviously there is a bug which I will aim to have fixed by tonight.“

— AdminPwn

July 4, 2011

Weekly updates:

Monday:
- Anti-cheat continued

Tuesday:
- Anti-cheat continued

Wednesday:
Anti-cheat finished =)

Thursday:
PvP kill logging

Bug fixes for Anti-Cheat

Friday:
Bug fixes for Anti-Cheat

Saturday:
Bug fixes for Anti-Cheat

Mission system planning

Sunday:
Bug fixes for Anti-Cheat

June

June 27, 2011

Weekly updates:

Monday:
- Anti-cheat overhaul continued

Tuesday:
- Anti-cheat overhaul continued *yawn*

Wednesday:
- Anti-cheat overhaul continued

Friday:
- Anti-cheat overhaul continued

Saturday:
- Anti-cheat overhaul continued

Sunday:
- Anti-cheat overhaul continued

Looks like anti-cheat is going to take a few days more than expected. So, might not be able to start on missions until around the 4th of July. (I said "start on missions" but actually I'm not doing it from scratch - I already did about half of the code for it earlier in the year)

June 23, 2011

Weekly updates:

The Development blog has been updated, revealing a large list of improvements that Admin will start working on:

Monday:
- Finalized contracts with UltimatePay
- Planned anti-cheat overhaul

Tuesday:
- Started work on the anti-cheat overhaul

Wednesday:
- Added new payment system to replace BMTMicro (UltimatePay)

Thursday:
- Anti-cheat overhaul continued

Friday:
- Anti-cheat overhaul continued

Saturday:
- Anti-cheat overhaul continued

June 9, 2011

Today, the Wraith attacks on Fort Pastor ended. It is Possible that the attacks were a glitch, an experiment or Admin Pwn simply got mad again.

June 7, 2011

Today, Fort Pastor has been overrun by zombies, including Bosses (mainly Flaming Wraiths). While less experienced survivors fled to safety, the veterans remained to hold the fort with a grin on their face and a "bring it on!" attitude. Little is yet known if this infestation is only temporary or permanent.

May

May 28, 2011

A handful of minor appearance tweaks in the game have been noticed. Most notably character names are now highlighted in red, equipped Corpse Blasters now show their unique design on the character avatar.

May 21, 2011

Dead Frontier page went into Maintenance Mode for an update. One known part of the update is that after a stat reset, stats don't have to be distributed in batches representing each level up. Instead, all the available stat points can be divided in one turn. Additionally the 577 Rex and the Vulcan have been re-skinned.

May 17, 2011

The weapon damage stats for new weapons have been updated to official values. The damage per hit values now indicate the average hit damage (dps / hits per second) as opposed to the previous maximum hit damage (regular damage x 5).

May 15, 2011

Weapon proficiencies now have a cap of 110. New weapons have appeared in the Credit Shop and the Elite Shop. The new weapon statistics on the wiki are currently just ESTIMATES. Once more information is available the articles will get updated.

May 12, 2011

A game update occurred. Most noticeably, various Inner City objects including lootables, have had their location changed.

May 1, 2011

Easter Eggs have been removed from the Credit Shop.

April

April 11, 2011

Today new Limited Edition holiday items appeared in the Credit Shop. Until May 1st, players may purchase an Easter Egg containing one item from the "High Level Equipment" section of the credit shop for 200 (150 for gold members) credits, or an Elite Easter Egg containing one item from the "Elite Equipment" section of the credit shop for 850 (750 for gold members) credits.

March

March 22, 2011

Artwork found on Greg Taylor Art has people speculating on new weapons/armor in the future. Check here for the discussion

March 9, 2011

As stated in the Development blog:

“New zombies and boss loots are out! Please note that they are probably unbalanced and there may be some bugs. Of course I'll fix these problems up over the next few days. Enjoy!“

— AdminPwn

March 5, 2011

Yet another awaited update from Adminpwn's Development blog:

“Yes, it's been way more than the 'few days' I originally quoted. Sorry about that everyone. The update is coming soon. Part of the reason for the hold up is that instead of just adding a couple of new enemies I've decided to add them *all*, along with all their special abilities. Aiming for mid next week now. Please don't kill me.“

— AdminPwn

February

February 24, 2011

More updates from Adminpwn's Development blog:

“Okay, it looks like I'm going to be unable to get the non-browser caching finished so soon after all. I'm having a lot of problems with it. Going to add a couple of new enemies instead.“

— AdminPwn

February 21, 2011

Information from Development blog.

In a day or two I'll be releasing an update containing the following things:

- Boss loot

- Tons of bug/glitch fixes (think I got them all this time )

- Non-browser caching

That last one means that once you complete the loading screen once, you won't see it again unless an update happens (which from now on will probably be roughly once every month) or you decide to manually clear your Unity cache. This should make the game a lot more enjoyable for those with slower connections.

New enemies will follow shortly after that.

February 13, 2011

Scrap prices of Courier packages (2D) have been changed down to $15.

February 3, 2011

Scrap values have been changed. OAs have been shortened. ( OAs would go on for 2 - 7 minutes )

January

January 9, 2011

Credit Shop prices have been lowered today as they were "significantly reduced across the board", stated in Admin Pwn's blog. So its now even cheaper to buy new weapons, armor, stat resets, etc. for those looking to get more bang for their buck. The GAU was also removed from the Credit Shop for unknown reasons but is said by Neil in his blog that "It may come back at a later date, but for now it is 100% unavailable for purchase". It might be some time before it can be available for purchase again. The Forsaken Titanium Blades have been renamed to officially as "Titanium Blades" and both the Titanium Blades and Rebellion can now be bought in the Credit Shop for 3000 credits each (or 2500 credits for Gold Members). The EXP bonus values for gold members have also been doubled instead of +25% per kill, while the costs to GodCraft weapons/armours with credits have been cut in half. Also Assault Rifles and Heavy Machine Guns have had their damage Boosted slightly.

Additionally, the wiki weapon damages were changed and updated to now present all weapons with their respective Damage per Second values, including the average DPS with the maximum critical chance factored in.

January 4, 2011

An "Arena" option has been added to the outpost. A PvP labyrinth with exits at the top and bottom. The purpose is to provide a fun PvP experience without the hassle of healing and repairing. Now when you upgrade to gold membership when you die in the arena you only have to wait 5 seconds before being revived. Go fight to the death!

January 1, 2011

Happy New Year everyone! Let's hope for a full release and recover from our hangovers!