Duration: 18:41

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FAQ

Q - Wait, so I can play online?

No. This is only split-screen, local support at the moment.

Q - Is this an XBox version?

No. It's PC/Mac/Linux. We're just using the XBox button prompts.

Q - So why were you working on this when you could have been...

As we stated in the video, this has been an ongoing thing for many months, and all in all has had much less time spent on it than anyone could possibly imagine. The main body of work was getting rid of all the single player specific code, and that all happened as streaming was being implemented. This is the first stepping stone to online, but we're still a way off.

We've literally spent about 4-5 hours on this in the past 2 weeks, and that time was spent largely sorting out button prompts, scaling the UI, and allowing multiple online inventories to be possible. We've been sitting on this for a long time and there have been frequent inter-team pleadings to show it off over the past month or two. If it annoys you that we've spent any time on this during the past few weeks, even 4-5 hours, please consider that we are massive geeks and stuff like this is what we do for fun to relax after a hard day of work.

Also, after 008 the evidence this existed would have been abundantly obvious from the Lua files, and last thing we'd want is for people to discover it was in progress before we could announce it and make a big deal about it. Especially since people would likely assume the Lua clues pointed to online play, and then be disappointed when we did reveal.

Also consider that multiplayer, in some form, is far and away the #1 requested feature, so if you aren't interested yourself, it is important for a lot of your fellow Zomboiders.

Q - I don't care about local multiplayer - why didn't you make it online?

Online is a million times more complicated, dealing with lag and server/client architecture and all the rest of it. This was relatively straightforward to add, and was the quickest way we could provide multiplayer functionality and start getting the game ready for online. Besides, there aren't enough 'sat in front of TV' split-screen games out there, and we're proud to have it in the game.

Q - Xbox pads? Really?

The game will support any joypad (with dual stick controls) but may require some tinkering in the initial version until we figure out how to support all pads out of the box. It was our (perhaps ill-informed) understanding from our own experiences with joypads that many PC games tend to use Xbox button graphics as a standard, but we'll look to providing alternates for Logitech / PS3 pads etc. XBox pads are awesome though.

Q - NPCS!?

We haven't forgotten, and they are on their way. Our goal is to get Kate and Baldspot back for Rezzed, and the Sandbox NPCs shouldn't be too far behind them.