v2.18.0 - New guns, survival barricades, song lyrics, and a Borough crash fix

v2.18.0: new guns, survival barricades, song lyrics, and a Borough crash fix

The first public release since v2.16.17.

New weapons

• Blundergat on every map. One per match, and it Pack-a-Punches into the Sweeper. Its Pack-a-Punch camo no longer draws black off Mob of the Dead, and it fires with a muzzle flash everywhere.
• Blast-O-Matic, the Gallo SA12 mastercraft, on every map except Origins. It Pack-a-Punches into the H-NGM-N. Port by SadSlothXL.
• MM1 Grenade Launcher (Pack-a-Punch: Parasitic MIST) and Browning HP Dual Wield (Pack-a-Punch: Grand Puissances). Both appear on Nuketown and Buried, including the Maze. The MM1 also appears on Die Rise, Origins, and the TranZit and Mob of the Dead survival maps. Ports from Mario Woopsie's MOTD Old School Weapons.
• Origins gets the L96A1 in place of the XPR-50.
• Sliquifier: the Pack-a-Punched gun wears the Pack-a-Punch camo now.

Survival

• Barricades. Windows start boarded up, zombies tear the boards off to get in, and the Carpenter power-up drops. Brutus never smashes them.
• Bonfire Sale drops in Mob of the Dead and Buried survival.
• Electric Cherry and Deadshot get power on the ported survival locations.

Subtitles

• Easter egg songs show their title, and the sung ones show timed lyrics that run to the end of the song.
• Mob of the Dead's power-up announcer and plane-escape lines are captioned, and so are the opening lines the player character speaks on Origins.
• The speaker's name is red.

HUD

• The perk pop-up shows the real perk name and an accurate description.
• The zone name and round timer are grey, and Mob's spawn zone has a name.
• Power-up icons are dark grey instead of copper.
• The mod no longer fills the engine's 31-element HUD group, which made parts of the HUD vanish at random. The perk pop-up also stopped leaking three HUD slots on every respawn.

Fixed

• Borough and Maze survival closed the game the first time a zombie lost an arm or leg. The four limb models a Buried zombie throws now ship with the mod.
• Mod textures drew black for anyone who installed from a release. The mod's own textures (the L96A1, the Blast-O-Matic, the wonder-weapon skins, the Zombie Blood icon) were missing from mod.iwd. All 342 are back inside it.
• The Bouncing Betty's blast reaches zombies again. Its damage, HUD slot and ammo cap match the claymore.
• The Wave Gun lifts and floats zombies again, gives Moon's swell, and hits Brutus.
• Vulture Aid no longer shows the white crossed rifles on the Wunderfizz.
• Going from a survival map to a classic map no longer ends in EXE_CLIENT_FIELD_MISMATCH.
• The M1911 uses its stock sound again.
• The Animated Camos setting works.

Installer

• HD textures download again. The installer looked for a file that only exists on v2.0.0, so installing textures without the pack in the folder always failed. It now downloads HD.Texture.Pack.zip from the latest release.
• The update check picks the mod zip, not whichever zip is listed first.
• Menu art is never copied loose, so it only shows while the mod is loaded.

Removed

• The NO BLEEDOUT FIX option.

Installing

• Mod manager: open Quality of Life Mod Manager, choose Quality of Life, then press Install on Quality of Life for Black Ops II. Press Install on HD texture pack too if you don't have it.
• By hand: download Quality.Of.Life.Mod.T6.ZM.2.18.0.zip, unzip it and run Windows Install.bat.

The HD Texture Pack and Controller Icons are attached below. They are unchanged since v2.16.17, so there is no need to reinstall them if you already have them.

v2.16.17 - Stable: the wrong wall textures are gone, and the developer overlay is off

v2.16.17 — the diner wall texture, and the developer overlay is off

The wrong texture on walls

Some surfaces rendered a texture the base game never uses there. The clearest
case was the Diner, where a wall showed what looked like chain-link fencing.

The cause was in the HD Texture Pack. It shipped 41 images named as bare
numbers (184130943.iwi, 2402415086.iwi, and so on). A numerically-named
image in T6 is not an ordinary texture: it binds its pixels onto whatever stock
image owns that number, whatever that image happens to be. Those 41 carried
custom art — flagstone paving, house siding, wallpaper, signage, window blinds —
and painted it onto stock texture slots that never used it.

Because none of them is named after anything, nothing showed up as different.
Every material, model and map file in the mod is byte-identical to stock.

All 41 are gone from the pack, and both the installer and the mod manager now
refuse them outright, so no older pack can put them back. The 9 numbered files
the mod genuinely needs are its own menu art; they live inside mod.iwd and are
untouched.

If you already have the old pack installed, reinstall the HD Texture Pack from
this release to clear them.

The developer overlay

v2.16.16 shipped with a developer readout in the top-left corner showing map,
location, round and coordinates. It was never meant to be in a public build.

It has its own console variable, zmqol_dev_overlay, but when that was unset it
fell back to sv_cheats — so turning CHEATS on in GAME 3 switched the readout on
without anyone asking for it. Cheats is a gameplay setting, not a debug setting,
and it no longer implies this.

The overlay is now off unless you explicitly turn it on:

zmqol_dev_overlay 1     on
zmqol_dev_overlay 0     off  (the default)

Character arms

The mod manager was still reinstalling the Victis, Mob of the Dead and Richtofen
first-person arm re-textures when you installed textures through it, even though
the standalone installer already refused them. Both refuse them now. Stock arms
on every map.

Installing: download Quality.Of.Life.Mod.T6.ZM.2.16.17.zip, unzip it and
run Windows Install.bat. The HD Texture Pack and Controller Icons are attached
below and listed in the Standalone downloads section of the
README.

ReShade preset update, 21 September 2026: download Cinematic.Colour.Grading.ini below for the latest colour grading settings, or install Quality of Life Mod Manager 2.1.5 or newer.

v2.16.16

v2.16.16 — Menu and pop-up fixes that had been stranded on side branches

Everything below existed on a branch but not on main, so any install from a
release or from the mod manager quietly lost it. This release puts them on
main and ships them.

Perk pop-up

The name and the description are separate centered lines again, under a
centered icon: icon at the top, the perk name under it, the description under
that. The single-element version that drew the name off to the left is gone.
A build gate now fails if the layout changes.

GAME 1: REDUCE ENGINE SLEEPS

Plutonium's own GAME tab has four rows; the mod's rebuilt tab had three. The
missing one, REDUCE ENGINE SLEEPS (com_busyWait), is back in its place.
PERMA-PERKS moves to GAME 3 to make room. A gate fails the build if any of the
four Plutonium rows leaves the tab.

HUD and CHEATS pages

Both pages sit higher, clear of the ESC prompt, and controller focus lands on
a selectable row. Locked by the same gate.

Character arms

The HD texture pack no longer installs the 18 first-person arm re-textures for
the Victis, Mob of the Dead and Richtofen crews. Both installers refuse them at
copy, so a pack reinstall cannot bring them back. Stock arms on every map.

Build provenance

build.bat now records which folder and commit deployed, and warns before
overwriting a deploy that came from somewhere else.

Installing: download Quality.Of.Life.Mod.T6.ZM.2.16.16.zip, unzip it and
run Windows Install.bat. The HD Texture Pack and Controller Icons are attached
below and listed in the Standalone downloads section of the
README.

v2.16.14 - Stable: Origins survival loses its barriers, and the zombies attack again

v2.16.14 — Stable: the Origins survival arenas lose their barriers, and the zombies attack again

Origins survival: no barriers, no Carpenter

Church, Trenches, Excavation Site and The Crazy Place now start with every
zbarrier down and no way to rebuild one. No boards, no "Hold F to Rebuild
Barrier" prompt, nothing to maintain. Carpenter no longer drops on those four.

Classic Origins is untouched — all twelve barriers stand and Carpenter works
there exactly as it did.

Why: the barrier system only half-engaged on those arenas. A measurement probe
on Church logged 44 zombies inside 250 units of the player across two matches
and not one barrier climb — zombies that took the entrance path reached a window
and never got through it, while everything that actually reached the player came
from a ground riser that skips barriers by design. A zombie wedged at a window
stands there swinging at nothing. Removing them outright is the fix.

Zombies that walked into you and never swung

Two separate causes, both fixed.

• The mod shipped its own decompiled copies of Treyarch's zombie AI types. They
  loaded ahead of the map's own, and only six of nine variants were overridden,
  so some zombies got a rewritten AI and the ones beside them got Treyarch's.
  That is the "some attack me, some just push me" shape, on every map. Those
  files are gone. The cost is the freeze-shatter, Wunderwaffe and Thundergun
  death animations.
• The repair for a zombie stuck mid barrier-entry had been gated on a flag the
  engine sets on the last line of that entry sequence, so every zombie it
  existed for was skipped. It is now gated on the boards themselves, and a
  second repair puts a zombie back on the player when it loses its targeting
  thread entirely.

Also in this release line since v2.15.51

• Two new survival locations: Cornfield (TranZit) and Maze (Buried's hedge
  maze), each with their own box, perks and Wunderfizz placement.
• Docks (Mob of the Dead survival): the Pack-a-Punch death zone, the missing
  Wunderfizz and the black mystery box.
• Winter's Howl at DLC5 parity, with the Black Ops freeze-death poses and
  insta-kill applied to its damage.
• Wave Gun: heads stay on until the kill lands, and the swell grows from the
  stomach without wobbling.
• Hellhounds on the arenas this mod adds.
• NO MUD SLOWDOWN, a GAME 3 row — Origins mud stops dragging you down.
• PhD Flopper: the dive explodes without needing a perk machine on the map.
• Menu: the installer is now the Quality of Life Series launcher, and CHEATS
  moved from the pre-game lobby down to Options → Settings → GAME 3.
• The ReShade Cinematic Colour Grading preset ships as tuned, without the bloom
  pass.
• The pre-nerf recoil values are now guarded by a build gate, so they cannot
  drift out silently.

Verification

Booted on this exact build: all four Origins survival arenas report their
barriers gone with no rebuild prompt, classic Origins reports none and keeps
Carpenter, and Town is untouched. No client-field mismatch, no script runtime
error, crash watch healthy.

The rest of the changes in this line were each verified when they landed, not
re-booted for this release.

Installing: download Quality.Of.Life.Mod.T6.ZM.2.16.14.zip, unzip it and
run Windows Install.bat. The optional HD Texture Pack and Controller Icons are
attached below and also listed in the Standalone downloads section of the
README.

v2.15.51 - Stable: the Wave Gun swell grows from the stomach

v2.15.51 - Stable: the Wave Gun swell grows from the stomach

The Wave Gun kill now inflates the zombie as one ball from the torso. v2.15.49
used BO1 Moon's literal bloat line, which pushes every vertex out along its
normal by the same amount, so hands, legs and the head ballooned as much as the
belly and the parts clipped into each other. The five swell vertex shaders now
limit that push to an ellipsoid around the stomach that grows over the 2.5 s
ramp and falls smoothly to nothing at its edge. Hands, feet, legs, the head and
the eyes stay their size; the belly balloons and pops.

Nothing else about the effect changed: same techsets, materials, red blood
cough, sizzle death, microwave ding and burst.

Also in this release line since v2.15.49

• Crazy Place survival: the four chamber walls fly up over 2 s on round start
  instead of vanishing in one frame (v2.15.50, PR #3).
• The custom main-menu art (blue galaxy, globe, title logo, no rocks) ships
  inside mod.iwd instead of relying on loose image overrides (PR #4).

Verification

Live on Town with this exact build: the belly swells and pops, limbs and head
keep their size, and the user approved the look on 2026-09-14. Nuketown, Die
Rise and Mob of the Dead were not re-booted for this release; they use the
same techsets and only the shader bytes changed.

Installing: download Quality.Of.Life.Mod.T6.ZM.2.15.51.zip, unzip it and
run Windows Install.bat. The optional HD Texture Pack and Controller Icons
are attached below and also listed in the Standalone downloads section of
the README.

v2.15.49 - Stable: the Wave Gun swells the way BO1 Moon does

v2.15.49 - Stable: the Wave Gun swell is BO1 Moon's real vertex shader

The Wave Gun's swell now runs the way BO1 Moon does it. Instead of swapping the
zombie through pre-scaled copies of its own model, the body inflates in place:
the vertex shaders carry Moon's one extra line,

worldPos += worldNormal * scriptVector3.x

and the client ramps scriptVector3.x from 0 to 4.0 over 2.5 s, exactly BO1's
values. Every vertex moves out along its own normal, so the body puffs up while
the skeleton, the head and the position stay put — the pop lands on the same
corpse instead of a look-alike.

Why it took a shader

DLC5's T6 port kept Moon's script but its two zombie techsets embedded the
retail vertex shader (DXBC byte-identical, no scriptVector in the constant
tables), so the ramp wrote a constant nothing read. This build recompiles the
two DLC5 zombie techsets and the glowing-eye techset from raw, with BO1's bloat
line added to the vertex shaders. The 44 pixel shaders are DLC5's own bytes, and
the HLSL reproduces retail's DXBC constant layouts, so the only thing the GPU
does differently is the one bloat instruction.

The earlier v2.15.45–v2.15.48 attempts rebuilt the swell as pre-scaled corpse
models. That read as stop motion and is gone; all 310 stepped models were
removed. Because nothing is precached any more, there is no G_ModelIndex
overflow either.

Still there from v2.15.46

• Red blood cough on both death paths (stock fx_zombie_bloodspurt, not Moon's
  white sparkle stream).
• Moon's sizzle death and the microwave ding.
• The expand-aware watchdog, so the 4 s pop never cuts the swell short.

Verification

Verified live on Town (Classic TranZit): swell, red cough and burst on camera;
v2.15.49 built with 0 errors and a rebuilt mod.iwd. The other maps that use
these techsets (Nuketown, Die Rise, Mob of the Dead) were not re-booted for this
release — the techsets are declared globally and loaded by every map, but only
Town was played end to end.

Installing: download Quality.Of.Life.Mod.T6.ZM.2.15.49.zip, unzip it and
run Windows Install.bat. The optional HD Texture Pack and Controller Icons are
not attached to this release — they live in the Standalone downloads section
of the README.

v2.15.44 - Stable: M14 wallbuy removed from Crazy Place

Stable release. Removes the M14 wallbuy from Origins Crazy Place survival (west pillar). Build verified (0 errors, mod.iwd rebuilt). No other feature changes. Based on feature/crazy-place-m14-wallbuy branch.

Updated 2026-09-12: installer refreshed with the latest Cinematic Colour Grading ReShade preset.

v2.15.36 - Scoreboard crew emblems, Origins loading title, subtitle fix

Scoreboard crew emblems, Origins loading title, and a subtitle fix

The classic-map checkerboard is gone

Opening the scoreboard on Origins, Buried, Mob of the Dead or Die Rise drew a
missing-texture checkerboard where the crew emblem belongs. It is fixed, and it
was never the texture — two separate bugs were stacked on top of each other:

• The per-map crew-emblem code compared against CoD.Zombie.MAP_ZM_* and
  GAMETYPEGROUP_ZCLASSIC, which do not resolve in this LUI build. Every one of
  those comparisons was false, so that code never ran at all.
• The CIA/CDC emblem feature then overwrote the icon with faction_cdc. That
  material only ships in the Green Run zones, so on any DLC map it resolved to
  nothing and the game drew its missing-texture placeholder.

Both had to be fixed — repairing only the first let the second overwrite it
again.

Crew emblems are now correct in Survival too

The emblem is chosen by map rather than by game mode, so each crew keeps its
own emblem in Classic and Survival:

Map	Emblem
Origins, and its Crazy Place survival	Primis
Buried, and Borough survival	Victus
Mob of the Dead	Inmates
Die Rise	Victus
Green Run and Nuketown	CIA or CDC, matching the character you picked

The CIA/CDC swap still honours the side you chose in the lobby — that behaviour
is unchanged, it simply no longer leaks onto the DLC maps.

Origins no longer loads under the TranZit title

Loading Origins straight after another match could leave the loading screen
showing TRANZIT. The title and game mode now come from the map being loaded
rather than from the previous match's leftover values.

Fast Restart closes the pause menu

Pressing FAST RESTART restarts the match and closes the pause menu in one
click, instead of leaving the menu open so you had to press Escape yourself.

Subtitle fix

Takeo's two low-ammo lines on Origins read "raw" where he actually says "low"
("I am low on ammunition!").

---

Known issue

Choosing INSTANT EXIT after a Fast Restart can drop the game to a
LUI_ERROR dialog. The fault is inside Plutonium's own main-menu file
(MainMenuOG.lua), which this mod neither ships nor overrides, so it is not
something the mod can fix from its side. Leaving the match with Escape →
INSTANT EXIT on its own is unaffected.

---

Installing: download Quality.Of.Life.Mod.T6.ZM.2.15.36.zip and run
Windows Install.bat. The HD Texture Pack and Controller Icons packs below are
optional and unchanged from the previous release.

v2.15.14 - Full subtitle coverage, four BO1 guns, and stability fixes

v2.15.14 — Full subtitle coverage, four BO1 guns, and stability fixes

This is the stable build following a full source, fastfile, package, and in-game audit.

Highlights

• Expanded subtitles to every supported voice across all six maps, including announcers, characters, Maxis, Samantha, Richtofen, Brutus, the bus, TVs, the ghost, and whispers.
• Reworked subtitle presentation so simultaneous lines stack and slide cleanly. Duplicate captions—including Blood Money events emitted through both stock and custom callbacks—collapse to one row, and speaker names persist across every page of a long caption.
• Restored the Tunnel survival map and added its Mystery Box with proper cinder-block support.
• Added four Black Ops 1 Mystery Box weapons: M60, L96A1, Browning HP, and RPG-7. Origins excludes them to stay below its engine precache limit.
• Fixed the L96A1 textures and scope overlay, M60 Pack-a-Punch/animated camos, SPAS-24 and Python one-cycle reloads, silent weapon handling sounds, and duplicate .give behavior.
• Applied Buried's remade Ray Gun model on every map and removed the mod-added zombie scream from Thundergun shots.
• Restored one-at-a-time Bouncing Betty behavior and made Max Ammo restore one Betty.
• Fixed round-ending commands around marked_for_death zombies and restored fast restart after live validation.
• Added ReShade watchdog cleanup for duplicated or corrupt shader installs.
• Fixed the four missing scoreboard arrow/key materials that could appear as checkerboard boxes on game over or while viewing scores.
• Added an MIT license.

Wave Gun

The stock-map Wave Gun fallback now retains the original weapon flow and verified kill behavior: combined/split modes, upgraded forms, per-shot targeting, denizen handling, Pack-a-Punch registration, the microwave sizzle alias, eye blood, spine mist, pop sounds, and deterministic zombie death/removal.

Technical limitation: Moon's true floating animation and inflatable zombie material are not present in the retail stock-map zombie assets. Those two visual stages therefore cannot be reproduced faithfully on stock maps without replacing hundreds of map-specific zombie models and overflowing the engine model table. This release uses the stable blood/mist/pop fallback rather than claiming or shipping a fragile imitation.

Validation

• All 9,856 subtitle rows validated: no duplicate aliases, blank captions, invalid ranges, overlong generated chunks, or missing custom aliases.
• All generated subtitle hooks matched their checked-in copies byte for byte.
• All compilable GSC/CSC source passed the compiler audit; the one excluded CSC is intentionally stored as precompiled bytecode.
• Fastfile rebuilt and verified through OAT readback; all four scoreboard materials are present.
• Offline package rebuilt with 705 entries and no temporary test harness or malformed paths.
• Fresh-session in-game checks passed for subtitle deduplication/stacking/pagination, Wave Gun sizzle and kill/burst behavior, scoreboard rendering, mod loading, and TranZit startup.

Downloads

• Quality.Of.Life.Mod.T6.ZM.2.15.14.zip — main mod package
• HD.Texture.Pack.zip — optional HD texture pack
• Controller.Icons.Pack.zip — optional controller icons

The separate sound package remains available from v2.14.28 and is discovered automatically by the installer.

v2.14.28 - The Crazy Place finished, the Mystery Box crash found, and a KNIFE LUNGE switch

The Crazy Place is finished, the Mystery Box crash is found, and your knife can stop dragging you into zombies. Eighteen versions since v2.14.10, all of them today's work: Origins Survival's arena gets its box, its Pack-a-Punch and its Wunderfizz; a crash that had been hiding behind the box for weeks is traced to one line; and the GAME 3 tab gains KNIFE LUNGE, THIRD PERSON and a real SUBTITLES option.

Fixed

• The Mystery Box was crashing the game. Every few box opens the game died on a bad entry in the box's spinning model list — the Bouncing Betty had been listed there by the mod's client side since v2.9.9 with nothing on the server to match it. Removed from the list. If a box ever crashes you again, quit the game fully and send console_zm.log.
• NO BLEEDOUT PATCH, three fixes. Zombies that the game itself removes for wandering too far are no longer counted twice, so rounds on Origins end when they should; a Nuke's kills are no longer refunded to the round; and the guard that puts a vanished zombie back is confirmed working from the logs, with its false "not protecting" warning gone.
• Pack-a-Punched Storm PSR was silent. Its upgraded forms asked for sounds that exist in no bank; they now use the base gun's.
• Wonder weapons. The Thundergun's power cells glow and its steam vents have their materials on every map; two smoke materials were missing on Nuketown, TranZit and Mob; the Wunderwaffe's start-up guard was the inverse of Black Ops' and now matches it.
• HUD on Origins. The zone name popup no longer draws over the top of the screen, the health and shield bars have no black gap at their ends, and the bars ease instead of snapping.

New

• KNIFE LUNGE on the GAME 3 tab. On is the normal game. Off removes the melee charge that pulls you onto a zombie, so you knife where you stand. Works live, both ways.
• SUBTITLES on the HUD tab. Your character's spoken lines as text at the bottom of the screen, on all six maps, including the quest lines the maps play outside the dialogue system. A second row above it carries another player's line in grey, and a third setting adds [Name] in front of each line.
• THIRD PERSON on the GAME 3 tab. Camera behind your character; off is the normal view.
• FLASH MESSAGES replaces the two match-start flash toggles with one row: credits, help, both, or nothing. The credits now print a Source: line with the project's address.
• BETTER SPEED COLA, part two. With the option on, Speed Cola also makes you drink perk bottles faster.
• SOLO EASTER EGGS now covers Mob of the Dead. The Final Flight can be boarded alone and finishing it gives Pop Goes the Weasel; which ending you get still depends on who you are playing as, exactly as the game decides it for a full team.
• The Sliquifier can be Pack-a-Punched, and the packed one kills at any round. The SLIQUIFIER PRE-NERF row is gone, since the packed gun is that.

The Crazy Place (Origins Survival)

• A Mystery Box inside the arena, against the pillar row, facing the floor, with collision and the green powered light every captured-generator box has on classic Origins.
• The Pack-a-Punch stands built in the middle of the arena, exactly as it looks once every generator is captured, and it is the only Pack-a-Punch on the location, so INSTANT PACK-A-PUNCH works on it. It blocks you like it should.
• One Der Wunderfizz inside the arena, against the north wall. The six machines outside the sealed chamber are gone from this mode.
• The lobby's CHARACTER row shows the Origins crew here and the Mob crew on Cell Block; the CIA/CDC row appears only where survival uses those teams.

Changed

• Health bar redrawn: green in a grey box, bottom left, yellow the moment you take damage and red when the next hit would down you, with your health as a number beside it and the shield's health next to that when you carry one. The shield bar's maximum is now each map's real value.
• Both game timers get a black outline, and the name and area lines in the bottom-left corner are slightly smaller.

Sound pack

• zm_qol-sounds.zip is attached to this release again, rebuilt: the Zombies main-menu theme is now Damned 6 (MW3 Zombies), levelled to match the game and looping. The installer picks the newest release that carries the pack, so anyone installing or reinstalling the sound pack from now on gets this one instead of August's.

Notes

• Everything here is built and deployed from source and has been played today. The box crash fix was identified from the crash dumps by the entry's position in the list; a long session of box opens without a crash is the confirmation, and today's did not crash.