KZmod is not dead. Read why in here.

Sure there is. We have a tutorial as well. Look here in the server section of the kzmod part.

Also it seems news hits me that Spanish XJ is supporting 2 servers...abhop/kz and a surf.

It's not up quite yet

Can someone please lend me some time so I can play this awesome game!

Nice to see stuff happening :)

kz mod, the best game ever created (except for TFC), sorry.

i cant update my pc for the full enjoy on this game :( , sorry.

Originally posted by SoUlFaThEr

I would like to thank everyone who posted something in this thread again. It really is motivating to me and Raptor to know that yes, there was some love for it, there was some hope for it and that the downfall this time wasn't 100% our fault and at the same time was :D

As we port to the 2007 Engine version, we are noticing some highly irritating things disappear mentioned in this thread that were engine code related we unfortunately had 0 control over. One of them being laggy demos and movies. That, has an ending with the 2007 engine. And when IceVIP tested it...he was screaming swear-words one word per line until finally saying I can't believe it....it's smooth as butter. Coming from a guy as exact as he is with everything we can feel confident telling you this.

We also hope this move to 2007 will also kill the Tab out Valve crime against all 2006 engine games (Hidden:Source had it too ofc).

Anyway peace :D

didnt wanted to comment on this thread but now i had to.

i wrote it over the past serveral years to upgrade to the newer sdk.
because of the stability and the better networkcode.
even the graphic hasnt changed but the 2007 src sdk has alot internal advantage on graphic improvements which gave you stable fps and more. in the past where cs:s was not been updated with the newer base it had worst fps than tf2.

src sdk 2006 runs on the first release of hl2/cs:s and got only a small amount of time updated. hl2 and cs:s were released with the tab out bug.

soon after tf2 got released the engine was stable and alot of new internal improvements had been added and weeks later of the initial relase of tf2 the src sdk 2007 was released for modders which had a good response because everything which had been mention in the mailing list had been fixed from valve without crappy mod workarounds.

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i find it quite funny because i wrote it serveral times and got answers that its too much work to port it to the newer engine.

also to support server admins get cygwin when you guys don't own a linuxbox and make a cross compile on windows to get linux binaries for server admins.

dEMolite, there are more concerns for porting than simply "it's a better engine". At the time we had other concerns with gameplay features and porting to the new engine wouldn't have fixed enough to make it a better choice over adding new features. Now that the game has the majority of the features we wanted in it and pretty good movement, we can take the time to port it now.

The SDK 2006 engine runs on code from HL2: Episode 1. At the time, it was adequate for the mod's needs.

@Scary Sorry if I misread your points in your post, after reading it again it seems I did. At least what I said is still valid for XJ!

Sidenote: stop giving all the credits solely to SoulFaTher.. Raptor programmed the majority of the mod while SoulFaTher put another shit load of effort into different things (just like Raptor though) and programmed nearly a half of the mod. I really know little about kzmod's history and who did what but be fair.. both of the guys deserve credits.

When do you guys want to set up more servers?

Just read through this thread. The rise and fall of kz_mod has a lot to do with demographics and history. Now is a good time for revival, and if the cards are played right, and there's a bit of luck, now's a good time for mainstream popularity. Here's the situation:

In 2008, half-life 2 modding was the hottest thing to ever hit the PC gaming community. Just about everyone everywhere who made games was building the mod they had always dreamed of. And while it was a good time for mods, they were finally getting some mainstream gaming coverage etc, modding was far from mainstream, and the money was still very much in the hands of AAA developers in the world of gaming. KZmod was born into this environment, one mod amongst many others. Why did it fail there?

In order to succeed at that time, KZ mod would have had to do one of two things, it needed to either appeal very widely to the existing jump map community, or it needed to build a new community based on the HL2 mod fans. It was an interesting mod, and people played it, many loved it, and it was good in a lot of ways, but it alienated it's two main audiences. For the HL2 modding community it was too heavily targeted on CS1.6's existing kz community. If you were a fan of, for example, Day of defeat, and you came into KZ mod, suddenly you were asked to learn and understand air strafing, rebind all the movement keys you're used to to accommodate a mouse wheel jump (something we still haven't fixed), and learn a host of relatively quite difficult movement techniques. Of the maps the game was released with (correct me if I'm wrong soul-father, there was something like 14 maps on release?) the vast majority of them, even with checkpoints, they were just too difficult if you didn't already understand the basis of half-life movement glitches, so there were really only 1-2 maps you could actually even do, and if you didn't know which ones to look at you'd be pretty frustrated. Bugs didn't effect completely new players as much, but they did effect them.

So what about the existing KZ community? The problem was really bugs. Movement took a while to catch up to good enough compared to 1.6. Sticky walls were a MAJOR problem for us on release. Demo's didn't work entirely properly (and they still don't). The new movement mechanics were a bit half baked, and it was frustrating to be asked to speedrun maps that allowed bungee for example, because the map would be completely dominated by needing good bungeies since it was BY FAR the most speedy movement technique. The other major factor was that, at that time, cs1.6 for jump mapping really had it's shit together. XJ was doing a great job getting us demos and maps, there were some REALLY solid servers that gave us some great communities. KZ mod at the time to us looked like what we already had with only marginally better graphics, and much less of the things we liked from CS, like random newbs wandering into our jump servers and being retarded, already solid communities, and world record demos galore! If demos were really solid we might have gotten over some of the other problems, but demos were the breaking point. Demos were what made CS KZ 100%, without those we didn't have xj, we didn't have world records, we had moderately interesting jump maps. Demos made us legitimate at that time. They were the technology that allowed us to brag about our cool community to friends and newbies that wandered into our jump servers. Ultimately, we all tried it, but we tried at different times and said "I'll come back when it's more polished". But the lack of a consistent adoption meant over time communities didn't form and we always felt there was something missing in comparison because of it.

Ok, so that's history, why is now a good time for KZmod? This time it has to do with 3 communities, not just the two.

1. New players: We're in an indie game renaissance right now, and KZmod is solid enough that it could mainstream as an indie game in the near future. Someone said "get on green light". I can't recommend that highly enough. If you don't like the idea of charging people money for it, do a free to play model and sell hats or something. That way only people who love you pay for anything, and they don't feel angry about it. Get news sites talking about KZmod again. It's got polish now. It will still be hard for new players to pick up without familiarity to HL movement mechanics, but we've got something now to address that problem that we didn't before...

2. Old jumpers: CS1.6 is starting to feel really dated. We really haven't had something new come along in the last 6 years that offered us anything fresher than KZmod. CS:Go's movement is shit for jump maps. The 1.6 community isn't bringing us newcomers any more, the masses have moved to better shootey games for the most part. We're one of the most alive and well branches of what's left of the 1.6 fan base. The limitations and problems we have with 1.6 are not going away any time soon. Sure, our plugins have been able to make jump maps feel really legitimate and polished. But we're still dealing with silly map download times on servers, silly low polygon count limits, ugly textures, crappy lighting, the complete inability to do dynamic lighting. Hell, KZ is a game about vertigo inducing climbing up huge cliffs etc, and the HL engine is ass for rendering things in the distance. All we really have left is a really solid movement system and cool world records. If there's something out there that can offer us that, and take away most of the other annoyances and restrictions, most of us are willing to take it more seriously now.

3. Youtube and Streamers: In the last 4 years, we have seen speed demos archive move from "the site that hosts that really cool halflife 2 done quick speedrun" to a million+ user website. They did a charity fundraising stream that topped out at around 40,000 concurrent viewers and raised over a million dollars for charity in about 24 hours. Gaming is not just about playing games any more. I have played about 5-6 hours of starcraft2, I have watched probably about 500 hours. I have never played F-zero in my entire life, but you better believe I enjoyed watching the best player in the world play the game with commentary. People are completely and totally willing to watch a beautiful difficult game played well by someone even if they suck at, or don't like to play that game themselves. KZ mod doesn't need a lot of players, we only need 1-2 good streamers and popularity spikes. Pizza could be making legitimate money for his skills. That obstacle of "the game is too hard to play" doesn't prevent people from becoming serious dedicated fans any more. KZ mod can TOTALLY be one of those games, it continuously provides more and more interesting content, it has those ups and downs of suddenly falling on the perfect run, there are many maps for which a good run lasts 15-20 minutes, which is long enough to keep people entertained on a stream (it sucks watching the same 1 minute of gameplay over and over 100 times). With all of 10 minutes of playing yourself on a difficult map you immediately begin to appreciate while watching another jumper. There are definitely people who hate jumping puzzle games, but there are people who love them dearly as well. Look at the success of games like Portal or the new interest in Against The Wall, the popularity of minecraft jump maps (even though movement is SHIIIIT in that game). Especially with our world record runs, you're offering an interesting compelling content that can catch on to mainstream viewers.

TLDR: what I'm saying is that everything that has already happened makes sense when you think about it, and that being said, there is very real hope for the future right now.