Zombie Survival, custom weapons, and a friendly community

Hey Zombie players,

Today I have a bittersweet announcement regarding ZS. I've been focusing less and less on ZS since 2021-- I started working on other projects, and interest regarding ZS just went down in general. Most of what I did was adding and removing the three Events-- April Fools, Halloween, and Smissmas, from the servers, and found this a chore, wondering if it was even worth it.

The logs do show that people are still playing-- and people even manage to beat PVE every so often too despite its massive difficulty. But the part of me that cares about ZS doesn't want me to stop because events are too annoying. That's why I put some time down, and now, events start and stop automatically.

April Fools is every year from March 31st to April 2nd
Halloween is every year from October 25th to November 2nd
Smissmas is every year from December 17th to December 30th

However, not all things are bad, and I've recently done some updates to the servers that may be useful:
* The servers have moved to Chicago, and will be part of a new upcoming project. The numerical IPs have changed-- but as always, I recommend using the domain names like pvp1.zs.naleksuh.com
* ZS has now moved from the SourceMod MySQL driver (insecure) to a brand new REST API made specifically for ZS. This will handle analytics and the public logging of PVE victories
* The server now picks a random map upon startup, instead of it being the same map every time-- this was difficult to do before because +randommap uses any valid map file regardless of map list, but the new implementation of holiday maps has made adding this easier
* During a holiday, holiday custom weapons can be used in addition to the normal ones (previously, *only* the holiday ones could be used)
* TF2 holidays will no longer apply unless the ZS holiday is also active (that's right, no more 5 weeks of Halloween)
* Fixed a bug regarding the hud display to the Engie Boss showing incorrect information for the Medic Boss gamemode


... and maybe new stuff in the future. Even though I haven't put a lot of work into ZS lately, and some things have been on the to-do list for nearly 5 years, I'm still inspired to work on it every now and then, especially as I just like keeping things tidy and hate bugs. I've got a backlog of more than 4 pages, but you might see bug fixes in the future. I even plan to rewrite all of ZS into an entirely new scripting language!

That's all for now. Keep playing Zombies!

~ Naleksuh