This history is based on my own point of view. There might be some stories before I noticed ZR.
When It Began
I remember one time in late 2007 when I was playing on my favorite zombie server ("Zombie World Domination by SwissQuake.ch", running Zombie Mod at that time). That's when
mbalex (Cpt. Moore) started testing the new Zombie:Reloaded plugin (version 1.0) on our server, made by
sumguy14.
At that time the ZR plugin had the basic features similar to Zombie Mod with a few new ones like classes. I wasn't even aware that we didn't run Zombie Mod anymore, though I noticed there were some changes. With help from Cpt. Moore and others helping testing, ZR began to grow. Bugs were fixed and features added. However, ZR was nothing at that time compared to the one we have now. Even the community was almost nonexistent.
After a few months
Greyscale started rewriting ZR from scratch with the 2.0 branch.
Improvements
We were still running the 1.0 branch until Greyscale released ZR 2.5.1. At that point it was pretty stable and didn't have that many bugs. Because Greyscale's code style was a lot easier to read, I started learning SourcePawn by reading the
entire plugin's source. File by file. We updated our server to 2.5.1 and I slowly began adding some useful features to ZR.
Suddenly Greyscale disappeared from the forums, so I started releasing my fixed versions. I never thought of it myself, but that way the development of the plugin was active. According to Murph (friend of Greyscale), Greyscale said that he wouldn't continue working on ZR if I weren't working on it.
The Big Change!
Once Greyscale came back we agreed on teamwork. When two people are going to work on the same code base there
will be conflicts and merging issues. This can easily be solved with a version control system, like Mercurial. Since the plugin already worked pretty well - and my work was committed to a Mercurial repository, we continued development based on my latest patch.
This is where the fun part started. We had
big plans and wanted to do an awesome 3.0 release (it is awesome already, isn't it?
). The entire plugin was redesigned, not from scratch, but internal code structure changes. Better structured code made development and troubleshooting
a lot easier, which also resulted in faster development speed.
During the spring and summer 2009 we were coding like mad and improved every part of ZR to become more flexible. After a long awaited release,
Zombie:Reloaded 3.0 Beta 1 was finally released in late July 2009.
The Show Goes On
After the first beta was released we started preparing beta 2. The second beta got a few new features like authentication on models and classes so players could make VIP classes, cookies so players' settings could be saved until next time they connect, and a few other minor useful features and improvements. There were several bug fixes too of course. Since ZR was getting big and complex, I also wrote a pretty big manual that explains all settings and config files in detail, in hope that people would look up stuff in it instead of keep posting questions on the forums that already have been answered several times before. I still hope it's useful to look up info about settings in ZR?
Beta 2 was supposed to be the last beta before a final 3.0 release, but because we have so many ideas and they're all almost being implemented at the same time, I think we have to make a third beta release. Note that ZR is already stable and we just mark them as betas because of incomplete features (we do a
"Google", but we'll also get past betas at some time
).
At the moment we're working on implementing a new plugin base template in ZR made by Greyscale. This will make
coding more flexible where we can "hot plug" features (included files) and compile without errors. Making a light version of ZR would then be piece of cake. Or, other plugin developers can easily implement our features in their plugins since our feature "modules" are almost 100% independent.
The Orangebox Update
Luckily, ZR is running on a platform independent framework (SourceMod), and SourceMod was already prepared for the big CS:S update. I updated our linux server, and it just worked. Talk about being lucky! All existing plugins for CS:S were broken (except for those who prepared them), which broke a lot of servers in the entire world!
Our server were only offline for a few hours when I updated it. Once I started it, we got at least two players connecting every minute, from all over the world. We were one of the few ZR servers that ran a zombie game on the new CS:S version. It's still pretty busy and our server is reborn.
Zombie Mod vs. Zombie:Reloaded
Because of Zombie Mod is a Metamod plugin, it has to be recompiled to run on the orangebox engine.
Until after two weeks after the orangebox update, Zombie Mod's developer C0ldfyr3 was away (with a good
reason though) and unable to release an update. There's still no update available as of this writing.
This is both good and bad. Because we have the only working zombie game at the moment, we get a lot of attention and free advertising. People start noticing ZR, which is also
mentioned a lot in the Zombie Mod forums, along with 20+ pages of kids whining about C0ldfyr3's inactivity. Someone also think that Zombie Mod is dying, but I don't think so, yet. Zombie Mod have a pretty big and strong community, so it won't go away just like that.
I really hope that a ZM update will be released soon, because I personally think that people should have a choice between ZR and ZM (I'd recommend ZR to people though
).
Other Notes
I just looked through the old 2.5 thread and all the work we've done with the ZR 3 branch is just done in 16 months! That's a lot of work to be a SourceMod plugin. At the beginning I even thought ZR was bloated but I had no idea that we would end up with redesigning it, again (base template).
Here's when Greyscale came back after being idle for a while. Look at that looong post from me a bit below:
http://forums.alliedmods.net/showthr...045#post786045 
To me, that was when the real fun started. We started using mercurial (version control system) and automated scripts for building and various stuff. The plugin is also almost constantly being changed when we are two working on it (except for that idle time the last 2-3 months now). When I'm idle, Greyscale is coding like mad, and when he get a break I'm back in coding.
However, I've been doing a lot more project management than coding lately, like being active on this forum to help people and collect bug/feature reports.
Some code stats:
http://code.google.com/p/zombiereloa...%20Summary.pdf (Notice the difference between 2.5.1.29 and 3.0.0-b1. That's when we did that
big change.
)
This plugin is almost three years old now, and it's soon exactly one year since we released ZR 3.0 beta 1 (2009.07.25).
Linear Mode
