Major Changes

• The workshop is here! It supports custom maps and addons packaged as VPKs.
  
  • During the beta, users will need to opt in by joining the workshop group: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/nmrihworkshop
  
  
• 15 new achievements are now unhidden and available!
  
• Fixes of the game's networking internals including lag compensation
  
• Improved demo recording/playback support, with additional features such as auto-record (see ds_ commands)
  
• Over 100 changes and bug fixes to the game
  
• Various UI changes including a new background and new loading dialogs
  
• Starting with 1.10.0, Mac and Linux client builds are being moved to a limited support policy. These builds are untested and may contain bugs. We will no longer provide troubleshooting support for these OSes. To report any issue, please be sure that the problem is caused by NMRiH and not your runtime environment or the source engine. Issues outside the scope of this policy will not be serviced.
  
• Staring with 1.10.0, running the game under dxlevels lower than 90 is unsupported. An override will be required and a warning will be printed at the top of the screen.

Cal, the man of many words, starts us off.

What do you do for the team?
Programming. My area is mainly working on gameplay, but we're too early into this so nothing specific on that.
What excites you most about NMRiH2 and it’s future?
Having a proper co-op FPS game to play especially where teamwork actually matters.
Does pineapple belong on pizza?
Does it belong anywhere? (Pineapple lumps, are the exception, not the rule)
What’s one thing you aim to accomplish in the next three months?
I don't have an answer for this one, I just can't think of anything.

Muit, our fancy boy with extra hands.

What do you do for the team?
I focus on gameplay systems and narrative development, that's what I'm most comfortable with, but sometimes extra hands are needed for other tasks, and I have no problem doing those too!
What excites you most about NMRiH2 and it’s future?
I have worked with a lot of genres, but never got in touch with zombies. It's very exciting to work on a game that does this very well and knows how to entertain millions. I think that's a big enough reason, isn't it?
What's a cringe-worthy thing to happen recently that you can share with us?
Well, not recently, but a few years ago I gave a talk about Unreal Engine, and said "fancy" a couple hundred times in half an hour For me, that is pure cringe. (Note: Actually, that's more or less what cringe means right? Haha)
What’s one thing you aim to accomplish in the next three months?
Implementing the narrative system for story progression. That's the main task I'm working on and subdivides on a lot of smaller systems so I will enjoy it a lot.

And finally, Hawk. Our resident birdman.

What do you do for the team?
I’m an Environment Artist, I create art assets and do the world building. The tricky part though is making everything feel believable, giving it that good ‘lived-in’ feeling. That’s what I strive to do, bring a bit of storytelling to the environments, so when players get a breather from battling the undead hordes they can have a look around and piece together what happened in the location they’re standing.
What excites you most about NMRiH2 and it’s future?
A replayable horror experience is something I’ve long dreamt of. I think we’re finding that sweet spot between the often aimless open world survival where you wander around without a real goal and eventually get bored of surviving and that of a crafted linear experience where everything is great, but you would probably never replay it since you know all the beats. And for the future, I am excited about the community getting to play it, sharing their feedback, and helping us finely tune the game to find that perfect balance.
Would you rather have to wear socks that are eternally wet, or would you rather eat only cold hot dogs for the rest of your life?
Bring on the wet socks! I love pizza too much (as my Adonis-like figure demonstrates) to possibly go on eating only cold hot dogs.
What’s one thing you aim to accomplish in the next three months?
Within three months, I would like the Night of the Living Dead map to be in a fully playable state. Not necessarily final art, but something we can test and get a proper feel for the game and the art.

Hawk, being the good-looking man of the environmental arts that he is has treated us with a few shots of his latest work to keep you all on your toes.

Hey! I'm Parker, one of the animators for No More Room in Hell 2, and I have some animations I wanted to show off. I mainly wanted to show the "unload" and "single cartridge insert" animations, with the Sako 85 being a great example of taking from. Hopefully, these unload animations will immerse the player more than the original system in the Source game, which had no animations whatsoever. That certainly confused me the first time I found the key and found the slide of my handgun instantly locked back, but hopefully, this animation system should make things clearer in the sequel! I'll see you all soon, with more to show off by then!

Maxx here with an update on various art things, in particular, my work on Brooklyn Heights. Last time I did a progress update on here I was working a set of apartment interiors. This time around I'll be showing a couple of shots of a new office building interior Work in Progress. The lighting here is only for testing purposes and is on low settings. I have been continuing the work of building the pieces necessary to complete these new interiors. The goal as always is to build a space in an efficient manner where I can get the most out of each part I make. In the case of a building like this, I can model things like wall panels, ceiling overhead light boxes, decorative doorways, etc. and reuse them with each subsequent addition to the interior. This cuts down on the manual work I need to do which frees up time used for creating new assets and dressing an area. When an area is "dressed" with props and decals, it's often done in passes. A pass usually starts with the large pieces like props used for cover, or large pieces of furniture, and it works it's way down toward small decorative things like a calculator on a desk, a cutting board on a kitchen counter, a calendar on the wall, etc. I can, however, take the props we have and put together ready-made pieces like a desk with a computer, some papers, a telephone, and I can simply drag and drop it wherever I’d like. Often I take an area, and I'll start to define a couple of rooms with more props to "sell" what the intention is. At a later date, I loop back around to some of these areas and continue that motif with all the new props, textures and decals that I have made to support it. This all starts with me finding some interesting examples of interiors and design styles on Google or in books, and then I see where my creative instincts take me. It’s one of the best parts of being an environment artist!

David ‘Dman’ here, I wanted to share a little bit of insight into our ‘HERA’ logo you saw on our first story document released a while back. HERA is largely inspired by the real-world homeland security/FEMA logos but also a hint of the old lesser known US Civil Defense insignias from WW2 era. As an agency in our universe, their designs will have a strong color palette with minimalist logos that are sharp and clear, keep an eye out for future story docs and later on in the game!

I think what fuels my direction when composing music for NOTLD is the sheer sense of beauty all around the player when in the environment. The trees sway in the night breeze while the moon illuminates the corn fields. Leaves are falling off the trees, and you get a sense that it's a beautiful fall night. It's deceptive how peaceful it can be at times when you stop to appreciate it, which is what I try to capture in the ambiance. Even while experiencing something as horrific and terrifying as zombies chasing you, any moment of rest or seclusion is to be capitalized upon, and that's where I come in.

Hey! May as well give you a quick update/content as I just joined and all — my names Eric, and I've just joined the NMRIH2 dev team for prop/environment art! So far, I'm just going to be helping create and push environmental assets out, and later build some more focal props down the line. Started tackling Night of the Living Dead assets, mainly the gas station area - Modeling/UV'ing some vital environmental props such as gas pumps, light posts, various signage, and typical environmental clutter.

Recently I have been developing fundamental systems to house the Dynamic Music System (DMS)in No More Room in Hell 2. In modern titles, adaptive music is fairly common, but the original No More Room in Hell was one of the earliest games/mods to take advantage of combining game states and music, dynamically. NMRIH2's adaptive music system improves on the original game's music system in many ways; using a very advanced audio engine (Wwise) we can mix music on-the-fly, applying seamless transitions between Low, Medium and High-intensity pieces of music without disrupting the flow of the soundtrack. The music in the original game was a big contributor to the feel of the game, so it has been very important to expand on this while maintaining the mood that it provides. One of the issues with the original DMS was that when the gameplay changed intensities, the music engine would select a new piece of music with the appropriate intensity at random, then play it from the start. This meant that when the gameplay intensity was changing frequently, the player would hear the start of the same piece of music over and over again, never reaching the end. Wwise has a feature called Random Entry Cues, which means we can place many cue points throughout a track. Wwise will randomly select a cue point when it returns to that track, meaning that over the course of an entire game you should hear an even distribution of each section within a piece of music.

Hey, guys nay0r here, just a quick update on what’s been happening recently. I’ve continued to work on our 3rd map the Stockade mall, which is going tremendously well. Since our last update, I have made tremendous progress on the layout, which includes an exterior/corridors/shops and an underground car park. Working on this map on my own I feel like progress has gone super well, over the coming weeks I plan to keep on adding size to the map's layout, then shortly after it will set dressing and working on lighting.

Lately, I've been trying to get a lot of the more complex animations for our zombies ready. Once a zombie spots you in NMRIH2, their arms will be raised in "pursuit" mode. The animations will be a more natural way to identify if the zombie horde has spotted you! We've also made some attack animations to be blended into zombie movement, meaning that zombies can now walk AND attack which should make it a bit harder to abuse their AI. I've also been focusing on adding level-of-detail meshes for the zombies for performance so we can stress test the max number of zombies we can get on screen before a negative performance hit.

Xenon here again with a small update from the AI side of things. So the AI timeline has looked something like this in the last month and a bit. Work on first pass player zombification when infected and death by infection or other causes. Next was some minor code changes/reworks for internal use. Then finally we come to what I've been working on recently which is the second pass on the zombies. This has mostly been adding new functionality to characters such as a buff/debuff system and an attribute system to manage stats of the characters/items. Things that I've yet to get to, but is on the chopping block are improved zombie pathing and a second pass of the stimuli system for more consistency. Plus a second pass on our soldier AI, as well as a second pass on our gore system!

What is VAC?

• Using chat programs like X-Fire, Overwolf, Discord, or IRC
  
• Macro programs like AutoHotKey and those that ship with keyboards/mice
  
• Server side plugins like SourceMod
  
• Using sv_cheats on a local server or a server you own
  
• System hardware configurations
  
• Updated system drivers, such as video card driver

How can I ensure I don't get VAC banned?

When making these animations, I want to make them entertaining to watch for casual players, but also a treat for gun nuts to appreciate. Barrels wobble, optics jiggle, and bolts rotate. I'm getting to work on a lot of different guns in first person games such as the CX-4, DT-11 and other civilian firearms. I want to get these weapons to feel as stable as possible concerning animation, and I know it'll pay off by the time NMRIH2 ships!

So this past couple of months I began work on our third map, a mall map based of the Palisades Center based just outside of NYC. The map is already taking great shape even after only a short period developing it. I’m super happy with how it’s turning out, and it will be a great addition to have in the game which we sadly lacked in the first game having any kind of mall map In the upcoming months I can’t wait to show even more progress on the map.

I've been hard at work on our Brooklyn Map! Since the new year, Louie and I have switched places to liven things up, so I'll be slamming on this map for a while. I've been working on the interiors of some apartment buildings, bringing new life to some of our previously existing buildings. The goal here is to build seamless meshes for the interior which reduce lighting errors and improve performance and then beginning the first pass of placing lights and props to start to build up a feel or "texture" to the world. I've been building props to decorate the exteriors of the buildings to begin grounding them more and bringing a bit more life to some otherwise bare walls! Environment art can be tedious a lot of the time, but when you get to the stage of placing props and decorating a space, it brings back memories of a kid, playing with action figures, living out a story. A map like Brooklyn is a big task, but it can also be some of the most fun you get to have as an environment artist. For that reason, I think this map is going to be an exceptional experience.

Just a small update in terms of zombies and AI this month from me. So over the holidays and into January, we've started a rough first pass of zombie gore, and things are shaping up nicely! We hope that in the next few months we'll be able to show you the full system functioning in a dev blog with all the fixings of gore, chunks, blood and limbs being blown off those lovable zombies.

I went through and made blueprints for all the lights editable from the blueprints using construction script to make it so the important variables can be edited by level designers. These critical variables are the lights intensity and temperature (the scale used in real life for the orange to the blue scale of lights) and Attenuation Radius which is how far the light effects the environment. Using this, I could make sure that every lamp could be set as stationary so that it could affect both dynamic and static objects. Casting dynamic and stationary light. These kinds of lights need not overlap 4 or more times, so the radius is essential for this.

This soundtrack is still a work in progress that is likely to be further changed and played with, but I thought I would share. Imagine entering Brooklyn heights, and as you get deeper into the city, you get a real sense of the sheer loss.

• Featuring nmo_broadway2, the sequel to the first map
  
  • We thought that we had gotten away from downtown broadway, only for our getaway train to breakdown on the tracks. Those of us that remain went to some apartment building to barricade ourselves in while we figure out what to do to escape this never ending hell. We think we might have seen signs of unlooted supplies to the south so that’s a better place than any to start.
  
  
• nmo_suzhou has been added
  
  • The old city of suzhou has seen much in its centuries of existence, but the shambling army of the undead is a first. The city police force made an effort to screen and evacuate the people present in the city. Their efforts were not sufficient and the dead overran the living, packed evacuation centers became slaughterhouses, what few survived resigned themselves to death on their own terms. The evacuation centers by the Grand Canal are now silent... save for the whistling wind and the moans of the dead. Perhaps someone is still out there on the waters. One can only hope they are listening.

• nmo_boardwalk by Dr Hammer, Demo, and BillionLioe
  
• nmo_quarantine by Coolz
  
• nmo_shelter by Fersigal and Atheist
  
• nmo_underground by Atheist, Extragamer, and Drunk_Steep
  
• nmo_vertigo by Ulreth
  
• nms_camilla by Atheist and Extragamer

• Playerclips have been fixed

• Skybox has been adjusted