The future of ZK

what is the plan for ZK? What is the vision?

From what I have seen the vision seems to be of a well balanced, fast and accessible game with a large player base that will be popular for a long time. How is this to be achieved though?

How would you go about setting a roadmap of voluntary contributions?

What Mauran said.

Aside from all our balance and design guidelines, our longterm goals are essentially to get more players and increase the stability of the game and the engine (Pathing, desyncs, performance, ATI bugs etc).

Getting more players is essentially about throughput and retention: Getting more views and then turning those views into players. To do this, we need to: Get featured on blogs, news sites, review sites, aggregate sites, etc. Improve the quality of the website to offer a visually appealing, positive impression of the game. Have more and better produced video content. Ensure the install process is streamlined and easy for all users (Linux, ATI, etc). Improve the look of the lobby, so that it doesn't look like windows. Have a robust singleplayer experience with tutorial-through-play, a campaign, voice acting, etc. At some point get more money through Kudos (Or maybe Kickstarter, but really both) so that we actually have a revenue stream we can do something with (Very few game development companies work with $0 on advertising etc- but we need a way to figure out how to use it best as well).

Zero-K has won the war on being popular for a long time. We've been around for years, Spring has been around for longer, I'm proud of our longevity. Few obscure online-only games don't last more than a couple of years before their servers are all empty, if that long. What we really want is to go viral, get the kind of attention that PA, DF, Overgrowth, etc get. Even modest success here would swell our playerbase.

Go to the Zero-K bugs forum. At least half of the posts are about a user who cannot install the game, or get ZKL or Zero-K to run properly, they need drivers or their .net is not installed properly, and many problems under linux. For every user that posts, 100 others never get that far.

Linux users expect a higher degree of troubleshooting than others, and several of the forum posts help with this, but it can be better. ATI is a big one, having to go hunting for a specific set of drivers to run Zero-K (Or just having a buggy game) is pretty bad.

More trivially, the installation interface should look professional, with as few pages and clicking through as possible, and no need to go to outside sources or manually download anything else (Like drivers or .net). We're already pretty good with this, you no longer need to get engine, map, mod, lobby etc separately. But it could still be better. The player experience should be only a few clicks and allow them to get into the game as soon as possible.

A lot of this is about improving the stability, hardware support, attractiveness and user-friendliness of the website, lobby and game.

Look what we currently have. I think a terminal install would be a huge step back from that.

The fact that ZKL auto-installs content as you need it is really great. I don't think mappacks are that much of a help. Any improvement of content installing is basically going to be done through an improvement to ZKL: To make the downloading process and what those bars at the bottom with the big red X's mean more obvious to the player, to make clicking through to the first time they start the game up more intuitive (So that they start exactly the mission or tutorial we want, rather than ending up in the sandbox wondering where the enemies are, or lost in multiplayer) to make the whole thing look less windowsy, etc.

Terminal installs are not user-friendly for the vast majority of computer users. While there is a slightly larger proportion of users for whom terminal installs are friendly in the Spring community than in the general population, it's still not that big and certainly not a growth direction.

Is it not possible to make it part of a web-page - maybe together with weblobby?

And make this thing stable / less laggy?

Just make your own ncurses installer hurr.

What about pyqt? (This was used for rapid-gui)

GoogleFrog made a wiki page of the current long-term goals: https://code.google.com/p/zero-k/wiki/DevelopmentTasks

There isn't really a roadmap in the sense that there is a goal A followed by a goal B followed by a goal C, because much like the game, progress is usually horizontal. So there is a goal A and a goal B and a goal C and none of them are a prerequisite for another. So improving the spectating/casting UI is a goal, but it doesn't necessarily need to come before the goal of creating new videos.

Also remember that 'developer' is a loose term. The game is created and supported by a community, and 'developer' is really just a way of designating the community members who contribute(d) regularly. SO if there are really some changes you want to see made, consider helping out on one of the tasks! Even contributions that feel very small can make a big difference.