Thought i would give a small history lesson into our community for those who would like to know when and how it started, linking to our latest ZPS News.
We have always been known as the community with upgrades, all the way back to 2007! It all started with Sammy’s 2007 upgrade script, which I played 24/7 (sleep was not an option) along with the game Zombie Master (Which upgrades & points linked between the two games). This lasted almost a good couple of years until the servers went down for just over half a year.
In the fall of 2008 however, it was relaunched with a new script, zps-upgrades (which i actually still have along with its stats) this lasted for about 2 years, and within this time, RPGMOD was also created by Sammy and Portalcake. zps-upgrades also had a point reset mid-way (it became very unbalanced fast) and I had no knowledge of scripting at that point to play around with it too much. With ZPS updating a fair amount back then and Sammy giving myself control of the servers, things started to break due to the ZPS Updates and incompatible upgrades.
My first script was to fix the HP of zombies, as spawning in the ground with 0 HP was starting to become a huge problem. Unfortunately this did partly break the HP upgrade ( as i did not have the sourcecode to fix correctly ), alongside the pushback. In the end, as most of the upgrades where either broken or temperamental, I decided it was time to learn sorucemod and make my own working upgrade system (Hello Fungrades!) with a small rtd plugin (and teletubbies skins for VIPs, of course!). It was a huge learning curve by which I learned a lot and for those who played since release knows a lot was added over the 3 years Fungrades ran for. Within this time, I also remade the RPGMOD, Sammys original needed an exp reset ( lack of players and balancing problems ) and I thought, let’s do a brand new one, adding a few more events and round achievements and to link the current PP system into both mods.
There have been many scripts made since then, old ones being Kings Mod (Which is similar to what we have now built properly) where you defend the king, if he dies, you all die. Humans respawn just like zombies. It was a fun mod, but not viable for the public. All the way to the wonderful Kill The Boon, where you.. kill boons ?.
However, it is now time for another public release of a brand new mod, which is completely different to anything I have previously crafted. But do not worry; JXMOD is not going anywhere… yet.
The idea was to create something brand new that was far more balanced and fun than any upgrade system can be for both new players and long term players. Upgrade systems are fun, but long term systems without a reset can be hard for new players to keep up and enjoy, and long term players generally do not want resets. This specifically has always been a hard issue to resolve, but I believe this mod will resolve the majority of balancing issues we currently suffer from. The mod is in a state of how all games are now released, in “Alpha”, with the DLC on its way ( hue) … and would like to schedule a test run this or next weekend.
But without any further introduction, I am announcing our latest creation Class-Mod. For the last couple of months, both Xerox and myself have been working on the mod which now includes 10 Human Classes and 7 Zombie classes, all scripted in and briefly tested working (alpha ftw). Each class has its own special ability and upgrades for their class, an example for one is the doctor, we have redesigned the medic from fungrades/jxmod which now places a medpack on the floor that automatically regenerates health to nearby players. We also have a class for those who like to blow ‘stuff’ up for the human team called the DemoMan, who specifically can regenerate Grenades and IED’s. A few examples from the zombie team includes Brute, who has the most health from any other class, and who also has an 'ability' to create a temporary barrier that reduces damage taken for a few seconds. And Dread; the class that can slow humans down in a radius. And don’t worry; we have also included a stealth class which I think a lot of people will have fun with too.
For clarification and better understand of what this mod does, each class will have its own stats, upgrades and abilities, which means, you can no longer have 5000 HP with 1000 damage and move at the speed of sound, from a single class. We have also introduced a new command / bind to use with most of the classes which is where this mod makes them different to any other mod i have done before, which will add so much more variety & style along with tactical of game-play to all game-modes and maps with each different class. The mod is being designed to try and force team-play, mixing human classes for the best survival, or to bring a quick and painful death upon the living.
I will either schedule a test this weekend if enough people can make it, or the following. The test will be done to find any bugs that may occur with the script and the classes directly, we have kept the vip system and skins currently separate to identity bugs easier in this current script.
