News from 2006

18th December 2006

• As the city's survivors settle in for another winter in the quarantine zone, a number of them have been spotted dragging freshly-cut fir trees through the rubbled streets, and looting long-ignored plastic trees and decorative lights from the hardware stores of ruined shopping malls...

23rd November 2006

• Friends and foes on your contacts list are now highlighted in room descriptions and dialogue, and can be colour-coded to any of nine shades. There's also an option to ignore specific users, which will stop you from hearing any speech or radio broadcasts from them.

20th November 2006

• For purposes beyond the clearance of anyone currently stationed in Malton, the city's two military bases have been retaken and rebuilt. Transport helicopters from outside the quarantine cordon have helped to repair the breaches in the forts' external walls, and the internal buildings that were locked down or derelict are now back in use.

31st October 2006

• Weather warning. Malton has awoken to a thick and freezing fog this morning, reducing visibility to zero across the city. It will have cleared away by the morning - citizens are advised to stay indoors, and to ignore any strange knocking sounds they might hear on their safehouse doors today.
• The fog hides a number of minor updates: powered buildings in adjacent blocks are now highlighted, billboards have been scattered through the city, bodies can now only be dumped from buildings one at a time, and a few aesthetic changes have been made.

28th August 2006

• As the temperatures begin to fall, the undead's ability to scent death sharpens, increasing in radius and allowing them to distinguish the dead from the undead.
• The air is now clear enough for binoculars to be used from tall buildings, to scan distant streets for growing hordes or lost survivors. They're available from all good sports equipment stores and military facilities.
• The older zombies have been observed communicating and coordinating using crude flailing gestures, gesturing other zombies towards particular buildings or survivors.
• Knives are now more effective as weapons, particularly in the hands of the city's less experienced inhabitants.

22nd July 2006

• Memo to NecroTech staff: Specimen data has now been declassified for the benefit of street personnel - DNA extractions now permit a full readout of specimen information in the form of a profile link. This real-time access means that scanned specimens can now be revived immediately if necessary, rather than being lost in the crowd.

3rd July 2006

• Urban Dead is one year old today. Supply crates have been airdropped into the streets for the survivors - zombies can earn experience points if they reach and smash them first.

16th June 2006

• Some of the stronger zombies have been reported to be dragging critically-wounded survivors out of their safehouses and into the streets, either to feed the waiting hordes or to finish their own meal undisturbed. Any survivor with 12HP or less is at risk.
• Scent Fear now echoes this by displaying vulnerable survivors as "dying", and the skill has been moved back to the base of the Scent tree.
• Ransacked buildings must now be cleared before they can be barricaded.

6th June 2006

• As temperatures rise across the city, the undead begin to detect and follow the rotting scent of distant zombie hordes and piled bodies. (The 'Scent' tree has been rearranged to accomodate this new skill.)
• Broadcasting from a transmitter in an occupied building will now be noticed by any other people in that building.

3rd June 2006

• Perhaps to prevent interference with their own communications, the military have altered their radio jamming in such a way that only experienced radio operators can broadcast in the 26.00-28.00 MHz band. The 28.01-29.00 MHz range has been opened up for free public use.

1st June 2006

• The military have stopped jamming short-wave radio frequencies across the quarantine area. Handheld radio receivers previously discarded as useless will now be able to pick up broadcasts from transmitters installed in buildings, across a range of frequencies.

29th April 2006

• As the looting continues, survivors are beginning to find that powering a building makes it slightly easier to find equipment and supplies in its previously darkened rooms.
• The more advanced zombies are starting to ransack abandoned buildings, making looting them more difficult until survivors are able to clear the zombies out and repair the damage.

31st March 2006

• Memo to NecroTech staff: Your handheld DNA-extractor software has been automatically upgraded to analyse tissue samples for telltale signs of cortex damage, which we can now match to our databases, and the increased difficulty of field revives is being rewarded appropriately. We'll continue to monitor NecroNet data and aerial shots of the city, as the situation progresses.

28th March 2006

• Memo to NecroTech staff: The subjects are developing a resistance to our current antigens - syringe barrels must now be fully emptied to guarantee successful revivification, even if this takes longer and puts support staff at risk.
• As a result of revivification becoming a lengthier process, the brain-rotten dead are now able to pick up the scent trail of those who attempt to revive them.
• There was a glitch updating the database today, and all game events have lost their timestamp - this means that you'll see everything in a random order today, and might also get some old stuff from the past week. Everything will be there somewhere, it'll just all have the same, incorrect timestamp. It's a one-off thing and later events will be fine, but apologies for any inconvenience or confusion this causes.

9th March 2006

• As the feeding groans echo around the malls, the undead are beginning to distinguish the sounds of their horde from those of ferals and others. Groans from other members of a zombie's group will be heard as "familiar".

4th February 2006

• Urban Dead merchandise has moved to a new premium shop so that we can offer multiple items; as well as a new black Urban Dead T-shirt, there are also some "Mrh?" badges and shirts.

3rd February 2006

• The older zombies are learning to grab onto their victims to increase the accuracy of their attacks - watch your loose clothing, and keep long hair tied back.
• As looter raids and sabotage attacks continue, the city's survivors are beginning to camp out in the larger, shared rooms of their safehouses, and even the zombie mobs seem to be lurching in tighter formation - kills and generator destruction will now be noticed by other players in the area.

2nd February 2006

• A shift in the air, or the blood, and the fresh dead flex their stiffening fingers. 5% of the Death Grip bonus has been shifted back to apply to all zombies by default, including recently-deceased survivors.

19th January 2006

• Memo to NecroTech staff: In response to the spreading epidemic, some staff are now being given access to NecroNet terminals within company buildings. These will allow employees to review the DNA-scan data for the surrounding area, manufacture fresh Mk II syringes, and use lab equipment to treat specimens with corrupted brain stems.

News from 2005

30th December 2005

• Blocked escalators and corridors have been cleared - it's now possible to walk around inside shopping malls and other large buildings. (Any such buildings that weren't zombie-controlled have had their loose corners automatically barricaded up to full.)

22nd December 2005

• Low and unsettling groans drift through the empty winter streets, as the undead begin to call to one another...

21st December 2005

• The unprecedented and conversational gathering in Whetcombe Park has thrown up some serious server load issues we've never met before; this is why the game's been lagging so badly over the past day or so. There are now a couple of restrictions if you're in a block with more than fifty citizens - you won't see all of their names (or be able to interact with them all) without clicking "list names" first, and if you speak, your words will only be audible to the "nearest" fifty players, meaning the fifty most recently active ones.

19th December 2005

• It might be a further level of decomposition, it might just be the effects of the colder weather, but zombies seem to be reacting differently to Headshot as the snow begins to fall - they no longer lose experience, but their nervous system becomes frayed and slowed, taking them longer to stand up after a blow to the skull.
• Black military helicopters have been sighted in the grey skies above Malton this week, airdropping occasional supply crates into the empty streets for the coldest days of winter.

22nd November 2005

• The military have switched the local mobile phone network back on, after a blanket shutdown during the first months of quarantine. The reception quality is only good enough for text messages, however, and you'll need a powered phone mast in your suburb to get a signal.

18th November 2005

• Electricity returns to Malton. The Krinks and Tolman power stations are still out of action, but a number of survivors have been seen carrying small petrol-powered generators through the ruined streets. Doctors with appropriate training are now able to take advantage of temporary hospital lighting and equipment.

13th November 2005

• NecroTech memo: To ensure full-time employment for staff on all shifts, the DNA-extractor uplink coordination has finally been changed to be time unspecific. Employees are advised to seek and scan active specimens.
• Group affiliations are now ranked in the game statistics.

4th November 2005

• Character profiles can now be edited to include a description that's visible to others, and group affiliation (which I'll start pulling out into stats when the data's there).

27th October 2005

• For those wondering how the living are matching up to the dead in terms of sheer numbers, some game statistics are now available.

21st October 2005

• Follow the music - there's now an Urban Dead Mall at Cafepress, if anyone wants an official T-shirt or mug or badge.

18th October 2005

• We're having the Urban Dead server upgraded again, today; it'll be offline for an unspecified amount of time, sometime this afternoon (GMT). Update: It's done. The game should be a bit healthier now.

11th October 2005

• A lot of boring back-end stuff and server-upgrading, over the past week; the game should be running more smoothly now.
• Players are given some tips for their first day in Malton when they sign up, now.

29th September 2005

• The unnoticed bodies that litter Malton, yet to stand up for the first time, continue to stiffen and degrade. Headshot now does 10XP damage for each level a zombie has beyond the first.
• New zombie skill: Ankle Grab. Watch your step.

24th September 2005

• Something pestilential is spreading and mutating in the blood and guts of the undead - NecroTech DNA scans are beginning to pick up a number of specimens who are host to an unknown pathogen. Any survivors who suffer an Infectious Bite should seek immediate medical attention.

16th September 2005

• Cranial decomposition is setting in. Headshots now only knock off 10XP for each level of the zombie, rather than reducing them to zero every time - higher-level zombies have a greater proportion of active grey cells, and more to lose when the bullets go in.

14th September 2005

• Nightly database resets were a bit late last night due to the server being overloaded at the time when the maintenance is set to happen. We've fixed things to stop it happening again; apologies for any confusion this caused.

10th September 2005

• There may be some server downtime tomorrow while Urban Dead is transferred to a new machine; it shouldn't last long, but bear with us when it happens.

8th September 2005

• Advance warning: The large building functionality is due to be reworked soon, so that if you're inside one corner of a mall (or cathedral, mansion, stadium or power station) and move to a different one, you remain inside. But it'd obviously be horrific to suddenly enact this overnight - if any teams of survivors are currently using a corner of a large building as their base, they've got at least a couple of days to either relocate to a smaller local safehouse, or reinforce the other entrances.
  Update: Didn't have time to implement this, in light of server issues, and it's been pushed back down the queue since.
• A new feature for the Contacts List: If a someone on your list has died and later turns up again in a pile of bodies or crowd of zombies, you'll be able to recognise them.

7th September 2005

• There's now a Wiki running on the server - there are a few disparate guides and analyses on the mailing lists and forums and other random pages around the web; having an official Wiki for this sort of thing might help coordinate it and make it easier for everyone to find.

6th September 2005

• The FAQ's been updated, if anyone's in need of a frequently-given answer.

3rd September 2005

• It looks like the NecroTech helicopters were spraying something they hadn't told the military about, or leaking it... a few revivified survivors will notice darker patches of cortex having healed up, a few zombies will have forgotten some distant life skills. (This was a bug rather than a feature; the effect is permanent, but won't happen again.)
• NecroTech memo: In light of the wasteful re-deaths of patients undergoing post-revivification recovery in such an unexpectedly dangerous environment, re-engineered syringe stock has been airdropped to all NecroTech buildings.

20th August 2005

• Everyone now has a Contacts List that they can add other characters to; it's very skeletal at the moment, but will blossom out into reciprocal listing, attitude-flagging, mobile phoning, linked-GPS feedback and all sorts of things, in the future. To add people to it, just click the "add" link at the bottom of their profile.

15th August 2005

• And zombies with battle-calloused fingertips can hone the art of Rend Flesh for increased combat damage.
• Survivors with itchy trigger fingers can now spend their time developing Advanced Training skills, for the pistol and the shotgun.

14th August 2005

• Either the zombies are weakening, the survivors are learning where to hit them, or there's something in the air... it now takes 10AP for a zombie to stand up after being killed. As ever, safety in numbers is the key to not being killed in the first place.

13th August 2005

• Server now optimised! The game should be even faster than it was in the early days, now. We've rewritten huge swathes of the game to speed it up, so there might be a few bugs or quirks that we hadn't caught during local testing - post them to the NecroTech dev list if you see any, and we'll get onto them.
  
  Thanks again to everyone who's helped to support the game during the last couple of weeks.

12th August 2005

• Just to let people know; the optimised version of the site is looking good, a lot faster and kinder to the server, and should be in place over the weekend, if all the testing goes well. We're also looking at getting a dedicated server sorted out, which should help keep things running even if we're hit by heavier traffic. Finally we'll be able to go back to spending development hours implementing fun things, after weeks of not having time to. Thanks for your patience and support.

8th August 2005

• We're still in the process of overhauling the scripts and the server, but as a temporary gesture to those who've donated to support the game, they can have access to a game view with a higher load cap, which shouldn't overload so often.

7th August 2005

• Tagging Mission Over. The streets of Malton had twenty instances of "an eye", thirteen identical comments about "ME" smelling, and twelve of "BAD WOLF". The eyes have it, and tagger Ben gets 200XP.
• Weather warning: Heavy storms are currently sweeping the Malton area - citizens are strongly advised to remain indoors until the storm conditions pass, to avoid being trapped on the streets in poor visibility. (Server load has been getting worse, again, recently, with early-morning and mid-evening EST seeming particularly bad. Survivor-players are probably better off sitting tight in a safehouse until things calm down, rather than risking being stuck outside and getting a couple of minutes of "server overloaded" errors in the middle of a zombie horde.)

5th August 2005

• Tagging Mission: Whichever piece of graffiti is most prevalent on the outsides of buildings across the city at an arbitrary tallying-up time on Sunday night will earn its tagger a one-off 200XP respect bonus. (If several people used the same graffiti, the most prolific tagger gets it. And multi-character abuse rules still apply, obviously.)

1st August 2005

• Urban Dead was linked on Metafilter today, so bear with us if the server starts to creak under the load and slow the game down, over the next couple of days (or longer if there's, you know, a spreading infection pattern). Any full-blown outages should only be temporary - it's up to you whether to fight it out or just lie low in a safehouse until the streets are cleared and the sun breaks through.
  (Development time is being sunk into boring optimisation stuff, to save the server. Won't be any new in-game features for a while.)

30th July 2005

• Citizens with the new Construction skill are now able to barricade buildings from the inside.
• NecroTech memo: Some of the specimens are now reaching an advanced stage of decomposition - revivification techniques don't appear to work on those with Brain Rot, and your DNA extractors may have trouble reading their genetic signature.

29th July 2005

• Game messages are now timestamped, after a few requests for this.
• The IP limit's gone back down to the original 160; we've been getting a lot of multiple characters exploiting the temporary 500 range, and the server load's been generally higher today. The FAQ's been fleshed out a bit with guidelines for AOL users. Players who have donated are unaffected.

27th July 2005

• The Zombie Hunters are coming. Check the Skills Tree.
• Some zombies have been observed using a primitive Death Rattle ability to communicate more complex noises than their earlier groaning.

26th July 2005

• A new civilian skill - Tagging - gives XP bonuses for spraypainting certain buildings.
• As a thankyou to the players who've donated to support the site, they've had the hit-limit lifted to a sufficiently high number, for the character that they specified with the donation. I'll be doing the same for any future donations above $5.

25th July 2005

• Dead bodies can now be dragged out of buildings if you're worried about them reanimating.
• Hm, I've upped the access limit to 500, for today, while I sort out the problems with shared ISPs. It'll be going back down to 160, afterwards.

24th July 2005

• Spray Paint can now be found in buildings you'd expect to find it in, and can be used to leave messages on walls.
• The site now an access limit. In order to keep the server running smoothly and to prevent people from single-handedly controlling large hordes of zombies or player-killers, players are now only allowed to hit the site 160 times from a single machine, per day. This is enough to maintain three characters if you don't reload the page; if you've been running more than three, you might want to move the others into safe buildings and let them go idle, to resume play with them later on.
  (There's more about this in the FAQ.)

23rd July 2005

• Zombies are now able to develop the Scent Trail skill, which allows them to sense the locations of survivors who have attacked or otherwise come into contact with them since their last turn.
• A change to the Consumer class - the Shopping skill now lets customers choose which of several stores to loot, when searching a mall. The search-bonus has been moved to Bargain Hunting.

21st July 2005

• The undead have also slowed to lurching - it now takes 2AP for a zombie to walk to an adjacent block.
• Something in the air is stupefying the zombies. They can no longer open doors to enter buildings unless they have the new Memories of Life skill. Citizens are advised to lock their doors.

20th July 2005

• Unwanted items can now be dropped. This doesn't mean that other people in the same block can pick them up, though.

19th July 2005

• New players of the game may select the Corpse character class, to sidestep all that tedious suicide business.
• Memo to NecroTech staff: reports are coming in that infected subjects are beginning to develop significant phenotypic differences, over time - please start filing daily DNA samples so that the situation can be better monitored.
• To clear up the map, any player who hasn't logged in for five days now becomes hidden (considered to have spent a solid five days doing nothing except securing a shelter), which effectively removes them from the game. They'll reappear in their previous location whenever they log back in.

17th July 2005

• In response to the spreading infection, NecroTech have issued all staff with DNA Extractors and are requesting that infected specimens be located and logged.
• A new Miscellaneous-class skill is available: Body Building.
• NecroTech staff with the Lab Experience skill will now be able to use a newly-added item of zombie-related equipment. It can be found in NecroTech buildings. (Untrained citizens won't be able to operate it.)

16th July 2005

• Forgotten passwords can now be automatically retrieved through email.

14th July 2005

• First-Aid Kits can now be used on other players.
• Hit points are no longer displayed in user profiles.
• The Scent Fear skill has been tweaked to show wounded survivors in nearby blocks.

13th July 2005

• Citizens' date-of-death is now tracked.
• Flare Guns can now be used as inaccurate but powerful weapons.

12th July 2005

• There are a couple of new combat skills in the Zombie Skills Tree.

11th July 2005

• To discourage in-fighting, survivors now get only half combat XP if they're attacking another survivor; zombies get half XP if they're attacking another zombie.

10th July 2005

• A few zombie skills have been added.
• Skill purchase has been implemented - characters can spend 100XP to buy a skill from the new skills tree, with cost modifiers for the Military and Science classes.

9th July 2005

• Players who are tired of life are now able to jump from the windows of tall buildings.
• Players caught creating multiple characters for game-abusive purposes are now having those accounts disabled semi-automatically.

7th July 2005

• Wirecutters now have a use.

6th July 2005

• Zombies are now able to make zombie noises, to communicate with one another or to threaten the living.
• Two new mailing lists now exist: urbandeadzombies as a support group for the recently deceased, and necrotech for analysis of the game's structure, and for bug reporting.

5th July 2005

• There's now a urbandead-ic mailing list, for players who want to discuss the game in-character.

4th July 2005

• Added a 'Speak' button, allowing survivors to communicate with others in the same block.

3rd July 2005

• Urban Dead goes live.

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