▶
Build 42 Unstable Out Now
The Unstable branch is now accessible to anyone who plays Project Zomboid. Right click Project Zomboid in your Steam library and hit Properties. Then, navigate to the betas tab and select the Unstable branch from the dropdown menu.
If you find a bug, read this first, then post it on our forums. If you put it anywhere else (including Discord) then your report will likely get lost.
Ballistics system:
[ 2024-12-17 21:18:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 42 Unstable is now available to play!
Important
- Those who play Unstable must be aware that theyre playing a work in progress.
- This Unstable exists so we can collect player feedback to find bugs and improve our game. Some key features, primarily multiplayer, are initially disabled they will be re-enabled later.
- Build 41 saves and mods are NOT compatible with Build 42.
- There will be bugs and annoyances, and game balance will likely be way from perfect, particularly with the zombie distribution and combat changes.
- Your saves may break after Unstable updates.
HOW TO PLAY?
The Unstable branch is now accessible to anyone who plays Project Zomboid. Right click Project Zomboid in your Steam library and hit Properties. Then, navigate to the betas tab and select the Unstable branch from the dropdown menu.
If you find a bug, read this first, then post it on our forums. If you put it anywhere else (including Discord) then your report will likely get lost.
WHATS IN? WHATS NEXT?
PLEASE NOTE:
- Due to some unavoidable last minute compatibility issues, unstable 42 for Mac will arrive in a subsequent update, very possibly falling in the New Year.
- SteamDeck / controller input is still WIP, and currently not recommended for play
- MP will be enabled during the Unstable beta process.
- Our GOG friends will get access to Unstable very soon too, weve just had a lot on our plate but will try and roll the unstable out to GOG asap.
- Polishing of Craft and Building UIs
- Ingredients tuning
- XP gain adjustments
- More icons, better tooltips
- Various collision issues
CURRENT KNOWN ISSUES
Ballistics system:
- Shooting at crawlers / on stairs with the new aim system is problematic. This will be addressed in the new year.
- Rare game crash during heavy usage of the M16 (fixing this is a top priority)
- Search bar ignores selected categories
- Recipes can use Items instead of values (e.g. hunger values)
- Batteries can behave oddly
- Tile properties for new player build constructions need to be set up, some moveables cant be picked up etc
- Players cant disassemble moveable objects and reclaim resources
- Clipping and minor animation issues while picking up or dropping corpses, dragging on stairs and throwing corpses over window frames and fences
- Improvements required for turning animation while grabbing, and arm overtwist while dragging and turning.
- Shoving animation currently plays after dropping corpses.
- Some missing 3D models and icons for items
- Not currently able to look around while seated
- Some animal pathfinding bugs present (e.g. animals can walk through closed gates)
- Liquids UI improvements needed
- Some hitching while dragging/zooming the new spawn map.
- Further balance is required for sneaking in different weather and darkness conditions
[ 2024-12-17 21:18:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
WhatZ Next
So what does the Unstable release currently look like, and what will happen during the beta once its out there? Well, the scores on the doors are currently this:
As many have assumed, we are currently working on getting Unstable out before Christmas. We feel like we will be in a good place for this, but clearly the closer we get the shorter the window for any necessary patching before the Christmas season. If we need to, we will choose to delay but right now the enjoyment were seeing from our testers certainly would seem to suggest that the build will be in a good enough state for wider consumption. (And if it were to slip, at this point in time its hard to imagine it slipping far into the New Year.) If anything were to happen to change our minds, you would be the first to know.
Weve had around 30 people on the internal beta giving feedback now, and overall the response has been very positive. Which, as we mentioned last time, has been a relief. With the feedback too has come a clear spotlight on what we need to be polishing, both now while we finalise the build and what we will be turning our attention to during the Unstable update process. Testers have certainly seemed to enjoy the way the game feels now with it playing more smoothly, and the world feeling more alive. They universally have responded well to the new lighting, new map additions, new lore, animals, optimization, underground areas, dynamic music, player vocals, corpse dragging, farming and many other of all the manifold things that are in 42. Our changes to the flow of PZ with our rebalanced zed spawns, combat building up muscle strain and fresh focus on the player having to sneak by crowds have also been welcomed. This said, this is certainly a change likely to cause some debate in the community (it does switch things up quite a lot) but we would much rather balance things within the mainframe once we have something playable out in the wild. It makes the game a little slower, more tactical and zombies more of a threat especially now you also have the darkness to contend with. Those who prefer to go a little more Action Jackson might disagree, however, so well see how it all shakes out once everyone gets their hands on it. (And, of course, sandbox will always be available to modify, or disable, aspects that folk dont like.) Given that rural and some residential areas have less zeds (though we are still balancing this and pumping a few more in) theres also a vague feeling that the overall game might be a little easier for experienced players now but, again, we will tighten this up once we have more universal feedback from the playerbase at large. People really seem to enjoy the animals too both when running them over, and caring for them. Having deer and rabbits wander along their paths through woodland also gives the world a lot of life, but in terms of the actual hunting gameplay itself theres a feeling that theres much room for improvement. As such, this will be a focus during the Unstable process. Currently deer migrate over the map along paths preordained at the games start, and they leave poop and broken twigs that those with the tracking skill can follow which testers seem to have found cool and atmospheric. The rudiments are fun enough, but to get more of a Call of the Wild feeling were going to have to give the deer, their deaths, and the tracking much more focus during Unstable as the animal husbandry side of animals is what has received more than the lions share of attention during dev. Fishing, meanwhile, has gone down well but from feedback weve already got a few ideas on how to improve it during Unstable also.
A massive part of the final push for 42 Unstable has been from the crafting team, whose work has up until this point in time has generally been kept in a separate room from the closed beta testers while we keep feedback internal. Much of this work has been to do with improving the various different UIs we were using, which werent intuitive enough and didnt share enough key architecture between them to keep things consistent. Although this will see some added refinement by the time you get your hands on it, this is the current iteration of the crafting on a flat surface UI.
While it could also do with more direct information on whats in each building recipe (unclear currently if this will make it into Unstable) we are also very happy with how crisp and clear our new Build UI is. The Build UI overall is intended to remove much of PZs reliance on right mouse click and can also be used to build items such as campfires. In time, perhaps during Unstable, we will also be considering making the movables system a part of this to cut down on general screen clutter. [previewyoutube=foOnx80CAt8;full][/previewyoutube] In terms of animals, one pain point testers have outlined is the need to manually draw a zone for your livestock should you want to move them farmsteads come with these created on the map, but its not immediately obvious to new players. As such, Prof has come up with a way for each animal to automatically create its own zone to feed, drink and breed within but in the interests of getting the build out weve decided to bump the full integration of this to later during the Unstable process. This approach is still fairly experimental, we cant 100% confirm it will get in, but we are optimistic given what we have from it so far. As such, this is what a PZ sheeps brain would see, if it were reading the Matrix.
As a part of general animal improvements, meanwhile, weve also added a radial menu to help you with care for your livestock. [previewyoutube=98-GxPR0_V0;full][/previewyoutube] Something that our initial testers also requested was improved stealth/sneak. The change in zed spawning means that points of interest, and points of good lootage, are now doused in zombies more than ever before. Given the addition of darkened nights, it felt like it was now time to tie zombie awareness a lot tighter to their surroundings: taking in light levels, cars and fences obscuring their view, and the weather. So yes, this also means that zeds will finally have their senses dulled on a foggy day. [previewyoutube=ptl0LjW2eWA;full][/previewyoutube] Finally while, as mentioned above, not as full-on Call of the Wild as we want it to be come the full release of Build 42 heres a quick video of some Wild Turkey slaughter to help our American friends celebrate Thanksgiving. (Theres Wild Turkeys in Unstable too, we forgot to add that to the infographic above). [previewyoutube=IZeQBNM-y4o;full][/previewyoutube] A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something. We also live on Twitter/Xright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. If you fancy you can sign up to receive PZ blogs in your emails right here.
[ 2024-11-28 19:42:26 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone, and Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate.
UNSTABLE PLANS
So what does the Unstable release currently look like, and what will happen during the beta once its out there? Well, the scores on the doors are currently this:
As many have assumed, we are currently working on getting Unstable out before Christmas. We feel like we will be in a good place for this, but clearly the closer we get the shorter the window for any necessary patching before the Christmas season. If we need to, we will choose to delay but right now the enjoyment were seeing from our testers certainly would seem to suggest that the build will be in a good enough state for wider consumption. (And if it were to slip, at this point in time its hard to imagine it slipping far into the New Year.) If anything were to happen to change our minds, you would be the first to know.
INTERNAL BETA TEST IMPRESSIONS
Weve had around 30 people on the internal beta giving feedback now, and overall the response has been very positive. Which, as we mentioned last time, has been a relief. With the feedback too has come a clear spotlight on what we need to be polishing, both now while we finalise the build and what we will be turning our attention to during the Unstable update process. Testers have certainly seemed to enjoy the way the game feels now with it playing more smoothly, and the world feeling more alive. They universally have responded well to the new lighting, new map additions, new lore, animals, optimization, underground areas, dynamic music, player vocals, corpse dragging, farming and many other of all the manifold things that are in 42. Our changes to the flow of PZ with our rebalanced zed spawns, combat building up muscle strain and fresh focus on the player having to sneak by crowds have also been welcomed. This said, this is certainly a change likely to cause some debate in the community (it does switch things up quite a lot) but we would much rather balance things within the mainframe once we have something playable out in the wild. It makes the game a little slower, more tactical and zombies more of a threat especially now you also have the darkness to contend with. Those who prefer to go a little more Action Jackson might disagree, however, so well see how it all shakes out once everyone gets their hands on it. (And, of course, sandbox will always be available to modify, or disable, aspects that folk dont like.) Given that rural and some residential areas have less zeds (though we are still balancing this and pumping a few more in) theres also a vague feeling that the overall game might be a little easier for experienced players now but, again, we will tighten this up once we have more universal feedback from the playerbase at large. People really seem to enjoy the animals too both when running them over, and caring for them. Having deer and rabbits wander along their paths through woodland also gives the world a lot of life, but in terms of the actual hunting gameplay itself theres a feeling that theres much room for improvement. As such, this will be a focus during the Unstable process. Currently deer migrate over the map along paths preordained at the games start, and they leave poop and broken twigs that those with the tracking skill can follow which testers seem to have found cool and atmospheric. The rudiments are fun enough, but to get more of a Call of the Wild feeling were going to have to give the deer, their deaths, and the tracking much more focus during Unstable as the animal husbandry side of animals is what has received more than the lions share of attention during dev. Fishing, meanwhile, has gone down well but from feedback weve already got a few ideas on how to improve it during Unstable also.
OTHER ITEMS
A massive part of the final push for 42 Unstable has been from the crafting team, whose work has up until this point in time has generally been kept in a separate room from the closed beta testers while we keep feedback internal. Much of this work has been to do with improving the various different UIs we were using, which werent intuitive enough and didnt share enough key architecture between them to keep things consistent. Although this will see some added refinement by the time you get your hands on it, this is the current iteration of the crafting on a flat surface UI.
While it could also do with more direct information on whats in each building recipe (unclear currently if this will make it into Unstable) we are also very happy with how crisp and clear our new Build UI is. The Build UI overall is intended to remove much of PZs reliance on right mouse click and can also be used to build items such as campfires. In time, perhaps during Unstable, we will also be considering making the movables system a part of this to cut down on general screen clutter. [previewyoutube=foOnx80CAt8;full][/previewyoutube] In terms of animals, one pain point testers have outlined is the need to manually draw a zone for your livestock should you want to move them farmsteads come with these created on the map, but its not immediately obvious to new players. As such, Prof has come up with a way for each animal to automatically create its own zone to feed, drink and breed within but in the interests of getting the build out weve decided to bump the full integration of this to later during the Unstable process. This approach is still fairly experimental, we cant 100% confirm it will get in, but we are optimistic given what we have from it so far. As such, this is what a PZ sheeps brain would see, if it were reading the Matrix.
As a part of general animal improvements, meanwhile, weve also added a radial menu to help you with care for your livestock. [previewyoutube=98-GxPR0_V0;full][/previewyoutube] Something that our initial testers also requested was improved stealth/sneak. The change in zed spawning means that points of interest, and points of good lootage, are now doused in zombies more than ever before. Given the addition of darkened nights, it felt like it was now time to tie zombie awareness a lot tighter to their surroundings: taking in light levels, cars and fences obscuring their view, and the weather. So yes, this also means that zeds will finally have their senses dulled on a foggy day. [previewyoutube=ptl0LjW2eWA;full][/previewyoutube] Finally while, as mentioned above, not as full-on Call of the Wild as we want it to be come the full release of Build 42 heres a quick video of some Wild Turkey slaughter to help our American friends celebrate Thanksgiving. (Theres Wild Turkeys in Unstable too, we forgot to add that to the infographic above). [previewyoutube=IZeQBNM-y4o;full][/previewyoutube] A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something. We also live on Twitter/Xright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. If you fancy you can sign up to receive PZ blogs in your emails right here.
[ 2024-11-28 19:42:26 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hallodoid
We have a limited number of external testers running around the current B42, and their first impressions have been positive. Which has been a relief. There remains, however, much to do. In the coming weeks we will be getting more and more feedback on the more in-depth systems like animals and nu-crafting, and in turn addressing it.
Heres some of the initial feedback we received, though please note that these were not yet from extended multi-week playthroughs.
I found I wasnt running into zombies like I usually would randomly scattered throughout the place, until an alarm came and that was absolutely brutal. I didnt think itd draw so many. And the darkness is unforgiving too, I was scrambling for lampposts for their spotlight trying to fight off what was left chasing me until I was exhausted and finally able to rest. In regards to the darkness: I think its perfect, I love the horror feeling of it. You really actually fullyneeda flashlight. You think: Oh thank fuck I havesomelight, rather than Ugh, this barely lights anything. There was a time flashlights barely had a reason to be in the game at all, so this is better. I had a great moment with the darkness change I got cocky and had a small horde chase me. I ran into a store with the plan of trying to lose them out the back.I opened and closed behind me a random door inside, to try lose them. I was accidentally now stood in pitch black. I scrambled for the glowing light switch as the door was now being slammed by the chasing horde, only to realise Id run into the worlds tiniest bathroom. Related to darkness, and also because of the spooky season, today we also thought we would show off our new abandoned Sanatorium location which is a fictionalised version of the real life Waverley Hills. As with the irl version, it also comes with a death tunnel which was once used to carry deceased patients out of the building. [previewyoutube=NFGHGU1kf18;full][/previewyoutube]
The empty road, felt really rural. Like how Id expect to drive down my road both currently and in an apocalypse. Then I was just on my way out of Rosewood now, and because it was foggy, I accidentally stumbled into the prison, driving. Holy shit. Outside is crazy, I cannot imagine inside. I barely got out the gate with my car. A true trailer But I would never make it home moment. Just started a new game in West Point with the aim of trying Louisville, and noticed the streets outside are very quiet with the occasional zeds dotted about and it gave off cool 28 Days Later vibes. Ran around building-to-building thinking this is too easy, nothing is stopping me, when after bashing 15 zeds heads in muscle strain kicked in. Felt like a cool way of setting atmosphere without being too easy, feels pretty balanced so far. TRULY, the changes to the grouping are SO GOOD. Probably the most QoL change for me. It really makes the world feel more alive in a way. Instead of having zombies spread out everywhere and having to do the lure away ball up rinse and repeat just to get to an area, now it really feels like I can sneak around and explore areas while losing a group instead of knowing that Im going to run into a ton more and just shouting instead to get it over with. As discussed last time, we have put a lot more thought into how, where and why zeds spawn in the locations they do in B42. This was a primary thing we asked the testers to report back on and, as seen above, they seemed to like it. There are remaining concerns that rural areas might be a little too empty, but we will address this as more feedback comes in. In the meantime the following video gives a good feel for how things compare to B41 and the second half of it is also is a good demo of the lighting. [previewyoutube=L27pE7z3JuY;full][/previewyoutube]
Clearly, any playtest wont all be roses and the fact that the new testers were PZ mega-fans should be taken into account too. (And also, although theres a lot of quotes above, it should be noted that the current set of testers is small, and many of these bullet points come from the same people.) We also got pointers on zed awareness, the discomfort system, and much more on other new additions that well need to keep an eye on as the test pool goes wider. Likewise, as mentioned before we will also need feedback from more elongated play sessions and far more contact with the huge new systems like Crafting and Animal husbandry.
Something that the test sessions revealed were some combat irregularities that needed to be addressed, and were resulting in unfair deaths and which in turn was limiting peoples fun and exploration. This has led us toward doing a deep-dive into both some issues that have been introduced during 42 dev, and also some legacy issues from B41 that deal with zed targeting. The latter could explain some of the rare edge-case combat irregularities that seasoned 41 players might have come across during their bouts of survival. Its our hope that the results of this will bring some added consistency to combat in general.
The Crafting UI needs more love, and attention will turn to this once we are 100% happy with the new Build menu. You can see the Crafting UI in its current form in this lovely little video thats been made for Halloween. [Skeleton animals not accessible in vanilla game. Debug version shown. Craft speed not final.] [previewyoutube=cqLvIgahty8;full][/previewyoutube] For the past half a year or so we have had six people working on our new vision for crafting. As regular readers will know, delays with it have been a primary reason that things have been held back. During B42 development we didnt build in enough safeguards should key members of the team become unavailable due to illness or personal matters. This is now very much a lesson that has been learned and, alongside new production and support staff who have been brought in over the past six months, this is not a beartrap we intend to step into ever again. Were really, really sorry that it has led to such understandable frustration in the community. We are currently very happy with the progress being made by the Crafting Team, and cant wait for the time at which you can all take their work out for a spin. NOTE FOR MODDERS: Something that has been a long standing frustration for modders is how difficult it was to add new player-buildable-tiles to the carpentry and metalworking right click options. This came into sharp relief for us when it also became frustrating to add new B42 buildables to those same options. Previously, the code for all of the tile building options was basically hardcoded in lua, and very inflexible. In B42 we are using text file script definitions (similar to how inventory items, vehicles and recipes are defined) to populate the build options versus using hardcoded values. For the most part the buildable scripts use the same format and syntax as the new b42 crafting scripts. This means that in B42 it should be a far, far simpler matter for modders to add new building options for their subscribers.
Animals and animal husbandry are currently in polish and bugfix mode, waiting on more extended playtesting. One thing, however, we would dearly like to improve is the current requirement on players to draw their own animal zone around sheep/pig/cow enclosures to ensure that they feed, mate and develop while the player is off-screen. During the development of 42 we have expanded our team and knowledge pool, and can now likely improve this and as such the Prof is looking into ways to use an algorithm to automate the process around each animal, thereby removing the need for manual zoning from the player. If we can make this work, however, it will likely be an addition to the Unstable beta as opposed to being a feature at Unstable launch.
Something the new lighting and zed spawn has flagged, given as it has is that our zed awareness needs some polish. While its inclusion will likely not be as a part of the Unstable beta, we are rebalancing zombie senses so that they better take into account sneak levels, zombie focus and direction as per usual but also take into account lighting, low obstacles like fences and bushes, and (yes) weather effects like rain and fog.
Last time we showed some of the flyers that wed been creating, which will serve the gameplay purpose of directing players (especially new ones) to interesting locations, good places to loot, and satisfying places to hold out inside. We received some valid feedback in that, even if supposed to look 90s-ish, some of the graphic design could be improved and as such this past month got our friend Stuart (who in a former life was the Art Director on various London fashion/celeb mags) in on the case. While we were overall happy with what we had before, we do feel these are now far improved and getting completed far more quickly to boot. [Please note, in the below examples not all of these would logically be found in a mailbox.] [previewyoutube=lgml08vufPE;full][/previewyoutube]
A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something. We also live on Twitter/Xright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. If you fancy you can sign up to receive PZ blogs in your emails right here.
[ 2024-11-01 00:12:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
Okay, so.
Where Were At
We have a limited number of external testers running around the current B42, and their first impressions have been positive. Which has been a relief. There remains, however, much to do. In the coming weeks we will be getting more and more feedback on the more in-depth systems like animals and nu-crafting, and in turn addressing it.
Tester Feedback
Heres some of the initial feedback we received, though please note that these were not yet from extended multi-week playthroughs.
Darkness
I found I wasnt running into zombies like I usually would randomly scattered throughout the place, until an alarm came and that was absolutely brutal. I didnt think itd draw so many. And the darkness is unforgiving too, I was scrambling for lampposts for their spotlight trying to fight off what was left chasing me until I was exhausted and finally able to rest. In regards to the darkness: I think its perfect, I love the horror feeling of it. You really actually fullyneeda flashlight. You think: Oh thank fuck I havesomelight, rather than Ugh, this barely lights anything. There was a time flashlights barely had a reason to be in the game at all, so this is better. I had a great moment with the darkness change I got cocky and had a small horde chase me. I ran into a store with the plan of trying to lose them out the back.I opened and closed behind me a random door inside, to try lose them. I was accidentally now stood in pitch black. I scrambled for the glowing light switch as the door was now being slammed by the chasing horde, only to realise Id run into the worlds tiniest bathroom. Related to darkness, and also because of the spooky season, today we also thought we would show off our new abandoned Sanatorium location which is a fictionalised version of the real life Waverley Hills. As with the irl version, it also comes with a death tunnel which was once used to carry deceased patients out of the building. [previewyoutube=NFGHGU1kf18;full][/previewyoutube]
Zeds
The empty road, felt really rural. Like how Id expect to drive down my road both currently and in an apocalypse. Then I was just on my way out of Rosewood now, and because it was foggy, I accidentally stumbled into the prison, driving. Holy shit. Outside is crazy, I cannot imagine inside. I barely got out the gate with my car. A true trailer But I would never make it home moment. Just started a new game in West Point with the aim of trying Louisville, and noticed the streets outside are very quiet with the occasional zeds dotted about and it gave off cool 28 Days Later vibes. Ran around building-to-building thinking this is too easy, nothing is stopping me, when after bashing 15 zeds heads in muscle strain kicked in. Felt like a cool way of setting atmosphere without being too easy, feels pretty balanced so far. TRULY, the changes to the grouping are SO GOOD. Probably the most QoL change for me. It really makes the world feel more alive in a way. Instead of having zombies spread out everywhere and having to do the lure away ball up rinse and repeat just to get to an area, now it really feels like I can sneak around and explore areas while losing a group instead of knowing that Im going to run into a ton more and just shouting instead to get it over with. As discussed last time, we have put a lot more thought into how, where and why zeds spawn in the locations they do in B42. This was a primary thing we asked the testers to report back on and, as seen above, they seemed to like it. There are remaining concerns that rural areas might be a little too empty, but we will address this as more feedback comes in. In the meantime the following video gives a good feel for how things compare to B41 and the second half of it is also is a good demo of the lighting. [previewyoutube=L27pE7z3JuY;full][/previewyoutube]
General
- I do really like how many different containers can be filled with liquids now. Makes finding a drinking source early way less frustrating. Thumbs up!
- I like the doors swinging open, and the game actually feels much smoother.
- Holy fuck. A basement. I wasnt expecting that. Man its awesome.
- Yeah you guys really fucking hit it out of the park already WHAT THE HELL this is SICK. Even though Ive played in this area probably a hundred times seeing the stairs going down and then finding this area just made me feel like I was playing the game for the first time again wtf
- Also SUPER happy with the traits, it was a bit of a shocker, smoker no longer OP.
- The voiceovers actually helped a lot with immersion, I felt it.
- I like the brutalness of the combat, in terms of combat fatigue, needing to rest more, and training that skill up as you progress.
- It felt fun and fresh.
- Love the density. Its terrifying.
- The first thing I noticed was the map in and around Muld. Within 15 minutes I encountered Cortman Medical and was amazed. I actually had to pull out the online PZ map to compare, it was that amazing. This extended to each house I visited, beautiful.
WHAT WERE IMPROVING
Clearly, any playtest wont all be roses and the fact that the new testers were PZ mega-fans should be taken into account too. (And also, although theres a lot of quotes above, it should be noted that the current set of testers is small, and many of these bullet points come from the same people.) We also got pointers on zed awareness, the discomfort system, and much more on other new additions that well need to keep an eye on as the test pool goes wider. Likewise, as mentioned before we will also need feedback from more elongated play sessions and far more contact with the huge new systems like Crafting and Animal husbandry.
Combat tightening
Something that the test sessions revealed were some combat irregularities that needed to be addressed, and were resulting in unfair deaths and which in turn was limiting peoples fun and exploration. This has led us toward doing a deep-dive into both some issues that have been introduced during 42 dev, and also some legacy issues from B41 that deal with zed targeting. The latter could explain some of the rare edge-case combat irregularities that seasoned 41 players might have come across during their bouts of survival. Its our hope that the results of this will bring some added consistency to combat in general.
Crafting
The Crafting UI needs more love, and attention will turn to this once we are 100% happy with the new Build menu. You can see the Crafting UI in its current form in this lovely little video thats been made for Halloween. [Skeleton animals not accessible in vanilla game. Debug version shown. Craft speed not final.] [previewyoutube=cqLvIgahty8;full][/previewyoutube] For the past half a year or so we have had six people working on our new vision for crafting. As regular readers will know, delays with it have been a primary reason that things have been held back. During B42 development we didnt build in enough safeguards should key members of the team become unavailable due to illness or personal matters. This is now very much a lesson that has been learned and, alongside new production and support staff who have been brought in over the past six months, this is not a beartrap we intend to step into ever again. Were really, really sorry that it has led to such understandable frustration in the community. We are currently very happy with the progress being made by the Crafting Team, and cant wait for the time at which you can all take their work out for a spin. NOTE FOR MODDERS: Something that has been a long standing frustration for modders is how difficult it was to add new player-buildable-tiles to the carpentry and metalworking right click options. This came into sharp relief for us when it also became frustrating to add new B42 buildables to those same options. Previously, the code for all of the tile building options was basically hardcoded in lua, and very inflexible. In B42 we are using text file script definitions (similar to how inventory items, vehicles and recipes are defined) to populate the build options versus using hardcoded values. For the most part the buildable scripts use the same format and syntax as the new b42 crafting scripts. This means that in B42 it should be a far, far simpler matter for modders to add new building options for their subscribers.
Animals
Animals and animal husbandry are currently in polish and bugfix mode, waiting on more extended playtesting. One thing, however, we would dearly like to improve is the current requirement on players to draw their own animal zone around sheep/pig/cow enclosures to ensure that they feed, mate and develop while the player is off-screen. During the development of 42 we have expanded our team and knowledge pool, and can now likely improve this and as such the Prof is looking into ways to use an algorithm to automate the process around each animal, thereby removing the need for manual zoning from the player. If we can make this work, however, it will likely be an addition to the Unstable beta as opposed to being a feature at Unstable launch.
Zed Awareness / Stealth
Something the new lighting and zed spawn has flagged, given as it has is that our zed awareness needs some polish. While its inclusion will likely not be as a part of the Unstable beta, we are rebalancing zombie senses so that they better take into account sneak levels, zombie focus and direction as per usual but also take into account lighting, low obstacles like fences and bushes, and (yes) weather effects like rain and fog.
Reading Materials
Last time we showed some of the flyers that wed been creating, which will serve the gameplay purpose of directing players (especially new ones) to interesting locations, good places to loot, and satisfying places to hold out inside. We received some valid feedback in that, even if supposed to look 90s-ish, some of the graphic design could be improved and as such this past month got our friend Stuart (who in a former life was the Art Director on various London fashion/celeb mags) in on the case. While we were overall happy with what we had before, we do feel these are now far improved and getting completed far more quickly to boot. [Please note, in the below examples not all of these would logically be found in a mailbox.] [previewyoutube=lgml08vufPE;full][/previewyoutube]
A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something. We also live on Twitter/Xright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. If you fancy you can sign up to receive PZ blogs in your emails right here.
[ 2024-11-01 00:12:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
Heat of the Night
From the very beginning of PZ amazing community translators have brought so many people from around the world to our game, and allowed non-English speakers to better enjoy the Knox Event. Recently, however, due to the extent and expanse of the full translation sheets over twenty different languages it became clear that it was simply going to be too complicated to keep going in this fashion, especially with the motherlode of B42 content still soon to drop alongside everything that we on the team know still lies ahead. Theres at least 100,000 words in Build 42, possible more depending on how many new CDs and VHSs we get in, so its about a novels worth all added up. Build 42 will see a big shift for us in terms of localization, then, as we are moving to a complete professional translation of the entire game in a full 21 different languages. Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Spanish and many others. We have essentially covered all of our most popular playing languages, and all of our most requested inclusions. This will cover everything in-game: including both new content, and edits to the old. Existing translations have been checked through to ensure consistency and accuracy, and to fill in some of the gaps a few of the translations had due to the sheer vastness of the PZ broadcast system. Importantly, access to all existing community translations and prominence of existing community translator game credits will clearly remain in the game. We are so grateful to our amazing community translators, and we have worked out some cool ways that we can thank such a hugely complex web of people from all over the world whether they have worked as individuals, or within smaller circles of co-translators whove been dedicated to various different parts of the game during different timeframes over the many years of PZs existence. If you are reading this and you are in this bracket (ie. if you are a credited community translator, or have been in the past) then please go into the translations channel on our PZ Discord for further information about your Thank You package, or email nasko[a]theindiestone.com.
When the game map for a new build approaches final, one of the main jobs we always have to do is update the zombie heat map. This is what governs zombies that spawn outdoors: around buildings, on roads, around farms and fields. The current Build 41 one for Muldraugh looks like this:
Now, a criticism of the current zombie spawn is that it isnt realistic. We veer away from the feeling of a classic zombie movie slightly because zombies arent always in realistic places. Zombies are all over the roads, in random fields and basically a long way from where they probably died. With 42s current (experimental) zombie heat map we are trying to address this a little. The map is more intricate, and we hope feels more real. Now if you see zombies, it means there are houses, businesses and lootable locations nearby. Zombies also appear in groups more than before, and spawn less on the road unless there are parked cars or traffic jams. This also makes for more requirements to sneak by the horde, and a generally more realistic-feeling apocalypse. Random empty spaces will have less zombies, and places of interest and choke points will have far more. The current experimental 42 zombie heat map for Muld looks like this:
This will require playtesting and closed test feedback. Some areas will feel emptier, but places that you would expect to have lots of zombies (and which youll want to loot) will have them in abundance. This will be far more in keeping with a Romero movie, however, so we felt it an experiment worth taking on for the 42 heat map but will also clearly have to keep an eye of difficulty levels at the same time. Heres a quick comparison video from its first WIP iteration. [previewyoutube=VHVQbUdUOws;full][/previewyoutube]
All the newspapers are now finalled, and as such Pat, Unconid and Werlias are moving onto the in-game business flyers which serve the gameplay function of revealing interesting areas on the player map. This will in turn encourage exploration, and serve the function of showing new (and existing) players interesting locations that they can journey to and could perhaps prove useful in their continued survival. (Some typos in the following we will be finalling the first batch of these over the next month).
Meanwhile, weve also commissioned a load of new art similar to our primary Bob on Car image that everyone knows so well. These will be used in various different places in-game, such as the background of new screens like the MP connection menu.
Next up, heres another quick glow-up video of a survivor-favourite location from the map team alongside some neat day and night visuals. Also shown in this video is an example of one of some of the super rare vehicles that will be found spawning in particular towns there are multiple examples of cool surprises like this that youll come across in your travels in B42 that weve been dropping into the game as development has gone on. [previewyoutube=4-DZqLKw3dM;full][/previewyoutube]
The Knob Creek Hunting Lodge has also been converted into a log cabin design, which is one of our own favoured places to hang out on the map.
Oh, and we also thought wed do you up a little showcase of some of the other player animations that youll see in 42, but which we havent really mentioned or shown before. [previewyoutube=IelrbhV_zQM;full][/previewyoutube] Finally, this past month or two has also seen a big, positive shake-up behind the scenes in terms of organisation, issue-tracking and general team communication. As Build 42 development has continued the team has steadily grown, and were now at the point where theres almost twice the number of people currently working on PZ than there were for Build 41 and we have been updating our practices to reflect that. We know that waiting for B42 can be arduous, and that when folks point this out it can feel like they are shouting into the void, but we wanted to let you know that we are listening. While the impact wont be instant when youre looking in from the outside, we are putting both processes and personnel in place that we hope will improve matters as we move forward through 42 and beyond. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something. We also live on Twitter/Xright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. If you fancy you can sign up to receive PZ blogs in your emails right here.
[ 2024-09-26 16:17:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone, its been a good month of general work and polish on our closed build. Lots of general required mop and brush up, but as examples of whats been going on heres a few items:
- Making fishing clearer and easier to follow for new players making the messaging clearer to the player when fish are present for example via the disturbances on the water, and making it more obvious when a fish has been caught.
- Fixing issues with body-dragging, for example bugs with phasing through walls on pick-up and drop.
- Improving animal pathfinding to make them act more realistically around walls and map structures, and continued general work on the unseen paths that animals will follow.
- Optimization work on the players view cone to help the game in busy areas.
- Map testing and fixing throughout new towns added to the game, and all the existing areas that have been given a glow up which are primarily in Muldraugh.
- Adding more opportunities for players who generally dont go to farms and forests to come across animals in-game.
- Adding 42s new depth textures to scenery and items that testers discover, and that we previously missed out.
Languages
From the very beginning of PZ amazing community translators have brought so many people from around the world to our game, and allowed non-English speakers to better enjoy the Knox Event. Recently, however, due to the extent and expanse of the full translation sheets over twenty different languages it became clear that it was simply going to be too complicated to keep going in this fashion, especially with the motherlode of B42 content still soon to drop alongside everything that we on the team know still lies ahead. Theres at least 100,000 words in Build 42, possible more depending on how many new CDs and VHSs we get in, so its about a novels worth all added up. Build 42 will see a big shift for us in terms of localization, then, as we are moving to a complete professional translation of the entire game in a full 21 different languages. Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Spanish and many others. We have essentially covered all of our most popular playing languages, and all of our most requested inclusions. This will cover everything in-game: including both new content, and edits to the old. Existing translations have been checked through to ensure consistency and accuracy, and to fill in some of the gaps a few of the translations had due to the sheer vastness of the PZ broadcast system. Importantly, access to all existing community translations and prominence of existing community translator game credits will clearly remain in the game. We are so grateful to our amazing community translators, and we have worked out some cool ways that we can thank such a hugely complex web of people from all over the world whether they have worked as individuals, or within smaller circles of co-translators whove been dedicated to various different parts of the game during different timeframes over the many years of PZs existence. If you are reading this and you are in this bracket (ie. if you are a credited community translator, or have been in the past) then please go into the translations channel on our PZ Discord for further information about your Thank You package, or email nasko[a]theindiestone.com.
Zombie Heat Map
When the game map for a new build approaches final, one of the main jobs we always have to do is update the zombie heat map. This is what governs zombies that spawn outdoors: around buildings, on roads, around farms and fields. The current Build 41 one for Muldraugh looks like this:
Now, a criticism of the current zombie spawn is that it isnt realistic. We veer away from the feeling of a classic zombie movie slightly because zombies arent always in realistic places. Zombies are all over the roads, in random fields and basically a long way from where they probably died. With 42s current (experimental) zombie heat map we are trying to address this a little. The map is more intricate, and we hope feels more real. Now if you see zombies, it means there are houses, businesses and lootable locations nearby. Zombies also appear in groups more than before, and spawn less on the road unless there are parked cars or traffic jams. This also makes for more requirements to sneak by the horde, and a generally more realistic-feeling apocalypse. Random empty spaces will have less zombies, and places of interest and choke points will have far more. The current experimental 42 zombie heat map for Muld looks like this:
This will require playtesting and closed test feedback. Some areas will feel emptier, but places that you would expect to have lots of zombies (and which youll want to loot) will have them in abundance. This will be far more in keeping with a Romero movie, however, so we felt it an experiment worth taking on for the 42 heat map but will also clearly have to keep an eye of difficulty levels at the same time. Heres a quick comparison video from its first WIP iteration. [previewyoutube=VHVQbUdUOws;full][/previewyoutube]
From the Art Studio
All the newspapers are now finalled, and as such Pat, Unconid and Werlias are moving onto the in-game business flyers which serve the gameplay function of revealing interesting areas on the player map. This will in turn encourage exploration, and serve the function of showing new (and existing) players interesting locations that they can journey to and could perhaps prove useful in their continued survival. (Some typos in the following we will be finalling the first batch of these over the next month).
Meanwhile, weve also commissioned a load of new art similar to our primary Bob on Car image that everyone knows so well. These will be used in various different places in-game, such as the background of new screens like the MP connection menu.
Nu_Twiggys
Next up, heres another quick glow-up video of a survivor-favourite location from the map team alongside some neat day and night visuals. Also shown in this video is an example of one of some of the super rare vehicles that will be found spawning in particular towns there are multiple examples of cool surprises like this that youll come across in your travels in B42 that weve been dropping into the game as development has gone on. [previewyoutube=4-DZqLKw3dM;full][/previewyoutube]
The Knob Creek Hunting Lodge has also been converted into a log cabin design, which is one of our own favoured places to hang out on the map.
Oh, and we also thought wed do you up a little showcase of some of the other player animations that youll see in 42, but which we havent really mentioned or shown before. [previewyoutube=IelrbhV_zQM;full][/previewyoutube] Finally, this past month or two has also seen a big, positive shake-up behind the scenes in terms of organisation, issue-tracking and general team communication. As Build 42 development has continued the team has steadily grown, and were now at the point where theres almost twice the number of people currently working on PZ than there were for Build 41 and we have been updating our practices to reflect that. We know that waiting for B42 can be arduous, and that when folks point this out it can feel like they are shouting into the void, but we wanted to let you know that we are listening. While the impact wont be instant when youre looking in from the outside, we are putting both processes and personnel in place that we hope will improve matters as we move forward through 42 and beyond. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something. We also live on Twitter/Xright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. If you fancy you can sign up to receive PZ blogs in your emails right here.
[ 2024-09-26 16:17:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Tidy Up Time
As many will be aware, the Unstable beta of Build 41 was released with MP disabled. During this time the multiplayer was being rewritten from the ground up to work with the new animation system, and also to improve multiplayer stability and general immersion into the improved animations and gameplay. This time around, again, we plan on initially releasing the Build 42 Unstable with MP disabled. This is for several reasons, but it will primarily mean that we can address SP issues in the Unstable beta in more bite-sized chunks without drowning in bug and issue reports, and it will also clearly allow the MP team a little extra time to fix up and polish. A lot of huge changes have been made to improve security of multiplayer, with changes such as server side inventory and countless other anti-cheat measures to make the game more server-authoritative to help secure servers from being sent any kind of spoofed commands that cause issues with cheaters and such. In addition there have been many optimizations and improvements made to deal with lag, optimize zombie movement, prevent rubber banding and so on which will lead hopefully to a much more enjoyable MP experience. Heres a quick video of some vehicle lag improvements that came in this week, for example. This will likely all need more testing and issues closed out once the SP is more final, before its available for more public consumption in Unstable. (Please bear in mind though, that were a highly moddable java game with at this time no third party anti-cheat software. If c++ compiled AAA games with anti-cheat are still struggling with cheaters, then we would all be naive to assume that cheating would not be an issue. Hopefully we have massively restricted the possible capabilities of cheaters in 42 now though now seeing as the server is a lot more authoritative in controlling the world state. Our advice will always be to favour playing in a whitelisted community if you want to avoid cheaters or at least be able to permanently remove them from your game. We will however be exploring proper anti-cheat solutions in the longer term and hopefully most cheats will be limited to stuff like ESP, but even so well continue to recommend whitelisted servers for a cheater free experience.) There will, however, be strict requirements for modders to follow to allow them to do stuff they once took for granted. For example, creating an inventory item will have to be done in a way thatll allow it to be created on the server. The MP team are currently working on guidelines and documentation that will explain how modders can work within the updated framework and not upset the anti-cheat measures. Likewise, similar documents are being written for crafting and other new/updated areas of the game. Finally, how long will an Unstable SP beta last until we drop MP in? Uncertain, but this stuff isnt being written from scratch and is already mostly functional. Its a different situation to the one that saw the lengthy wait for MP integration for 41.
With such a huge update to the game, it is inevitable that almost every mod that exists will be invalidated in some capacity. With the new crafting systems, especially, its unlikely any mod will work out of the box. However, what we do have is a new modding architecture which will help a lot in the transition, thats heavily inspired by the way that a certain game thats set on a World out on the Rim does it. Essentially, Aiterons been working on heavily improving the mod system to allow for versioned mods to be included in a Workshop item. B41 currently uses the root directory of the workshop files as the mod: it contains a media directory and all the rest that allows the mod to override files in the core zomboid data directory. B42, meanwhile, instead introduces a functionality where a build of the game will query the mod for a subdirectory which contains the most recent compatible version of the mod and to then use those files. For example, a subscribed mod could have a 42 directory, a 42.21 directory, a 43 directory and a 43.31 directory. If you run a version of the game thats 42.1 itd use the 42 directory, and load that version of the mod. If you then upgraded to 42.25 then it would start using the 42.21 directory, and so on. Within this theres also a common directory thats used by any version of the mod and can be used to store large files such as art or sounds, that modders clearly dont want duplicated over 20 versions of their mod. (Though this aspect will only truly come into play in versions beyond 41, as we cant at this point realistically modify Build 41 to use the new mod system and B41 mods will clearly remain loading directly out of the root directory as they currently do while ignoring the B42+ versioned directories.) What this will all mean is that when modders update their mods to work with B42, they can leave the B41 files within the mod package and continue to work on B41 content as and when they desire. Simultaneously, however, theyll be able to support the B42 beta without destroying that compatibility with B41 stable From that point on theyll then have much more intelligent versioning to allow for extra power to update their mods, in ways that wont be destructive to older builds of the game. In addition to this, 42s new mod load order functionality will make submods and modpacks a lot easier to create. Finally because of these huge changes, and the likelihood that so few mods at all will work B42 on first release, we currently plan to automatically disable all mods on first load and B42 will be unable to load any of the B41 mod files until a workshop item has been prepared using a 42 directory. This will be necessary in limiting the amount of bug reports wed inevitably get from people loading up their B41 mod lists and completely breaking the game.
As indicated above, were pretty much feature complete with some crafting elements still on their way. Theres various issues lurking in the tester build that need investigation and sorting this week some unexplained and endless explosions in deer/bunny populations, out of memory issues, and combat irregularities. Theres various things here that need sweeping up. As we have mentioned in previous blogs, we felt the delay with the crafting overhaul was set to continue longer than anyone was comfortable with, and so decided to release the first beta without the entirety of the nu-medieval post-apocalypse village crafting possibilities we intend in the longer term as with blacksmithing, pottery, smelting, weapon-related carpentry, carving etc. therell be plenty still to chew on. The final must have feature we have in production for 42 is a Building UI. Weve never been a fan of the right click menu building system, and along with the sharp increase of new buildable tiles it became necessary to improve how building is carried out. For the expanded test pool and Unstable, then, the final addition will be in taking the current furniture picking up icon on the icon strip to the left and turn it into a button to bring up a new panel with the furniture interactions and building choices rolled into it From this well have a nice categorized building UI the player can keep on-screen as a palette to pick buildable tiles from, which will allow you to browse the various categories and tiles you want to build in the world, click on them if you have the necessary building materials, and then place the ghost tile on the target tile. Its pretty simple, and backstage a first implementation isnt taking too long to get operational. In other news:
As discussed last time, we werent happy with the pre-defined and permanent animal paths that deer and other animals would follow that were initially implemented. As such Prof recently added randomized animal paths that are tweakable in lua. New paths are generated using the seed given when you create a world they are static in the sense that they dont self-modify after you started a game, but dynamic in the sense that you will never know what journeys deer will be taking in any fresh world. In future well explore regenerating these paths if they are over-hunted. Heres a quick vid of them in action. [previewyoutube=o1X7d34_c8Q;full][/previewyoutube]
While its not a complete tech tree at the moment, tailoring has got some attention and players should be able to grind the first levels from looted or farmed materials. These do not require a specific crafting station, but higher-level options that well add during Unstable will. [Please note: the crafting window is due another polish pass, and this video also shows a degree of debug/coder-speak wordage. Although performed on a table here, these recipes dont demand it.] [previewyoutube=37aM8yEhkXg;full][/previewyoutube]
Partly due to current game imbalance, and partly because with the new crafting we didnt want to replicate the vertically-placed-work-station spam crafting that you can sometimes see in games like Minecraft, we spent an afternoon revising sheet rope climbing mechanics while waiting for a crafting blocker to clear. Previously only drunk players had a chance of falling when climbing a sheet rope, in Build 42 now any player has a chance to fall when climbing a sheet rope to higher floors after an initial grace period has elapsed the duration of which period, and the chance to fall, is determined by negative moodles, skills such as Strength, Fitness and Nimble, appropriate traits like Dextrous or Gymnast, and professions like Burglar. Additionally characters will accumulate muscle strain if they climb ropes for enough time, and without resting. Theres a smaller chance of falling from a rope while descending, also, while all of this can be toggled off in Sandbox.
In the background to the B42 work, Zac has been overhauling the AnimZed tool that made the success of B41 possible. This will be of great aid when it comes to final B42 polish, and all versions beyond this. The core of every good survivor character brain is a logic state network. He explains. The players character might be walking and from that they could start running, stop entirely, climbFence, aim, sneak etc. All the animation frameworks for players and zeds need to be keyed into all available potential outcomes that the player or the game might dictate. Our problem increasingly was that our characters brains were getting pretty complex. We are adding all sorts of new abilities in both 42 and beyond, and theyre getting bigger and bigger still. Up until now we havent had a tool to visualise the network. Weve been editing the structure manually, by editing xml files. This has led to pain. When trying to incorporate a new feature, or figure out why a character is doing the wrong thing, its always taken a lot of manually parsing reams of network circuitry, and its slowed integration down. So, we have been building a proper logic network editor, named it AnimGraphZeditor, that should be a big boost in making more and more complex brains. The importance of having a robust logic network editor cannot be overstated for final polish of elements of 42, and everything that lies beyond it: essentially taking the abstract mass of logic conditionals, states, and transitions, and puts them up on the screen as circuit diagrams. From here we can identify problems and faulty circuits, and makes it much easier to implement new features and capabilities. While we are in this area, it should also be mentioned that it is still our plan to release AnimZed to the community and this will most likely follow Build 42 release.
Finally a quick video compilation of recent in-game weapon testing featuring all the old familiars, but also a whole bunch of the new items that youll be able to crack heads open with in the next version. [previewyoutube=4B7_EEuKcrY;full][/previewyoutube] A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something. We also live on Twitter/X right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Those who receive blogs and announcements by email: please note that we are changing provider. If you want to continue to receive our mails please sign up again here.
[ 2024-08-29 15:57:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
At the moment we are fixing and polishing our current internal build to get it ready for more formal internal closed testing amongst a slightly wider set of gameplay testers.
Theres still a few items from the crafting revamp still to come in, and some optimization we hope to include, but overall we are pretty much feature complete. The path ahead is predominantly bug fixes, balancing and internal closed beta testing in preparation for an Unstable release.
There isnt currently a date on the Unstable. This will depend heavily on how many serious bugs we still have to resolve and, once we are into this slightly larger closed testing group, what the feedback is like on things like the big changes to crafting and how players feel when they are dropped into it for the first time.
Right now theres elements of B42 that we know arent fun. There are also some showstoppers we are in the process of erasing. While the first Unstable beta clearly doesnt need to be perfect, it does needs to be fun, balanced as much as it could be, not have any broken aspects, and make a good first impression. Especially considering the amount of time it has taken.
It could be we drop the build on closed tester group laps and it goes down a storm, and has relatively few problems. It could be that elements of new systems are annoying or confusing, meaning that we have to go back to make things smoother and more intuitive.
While we desperately want this to be out, and keenly feel the communitys pain, we dont want to put out a duff build and disappoint anyone after the long wait. So well take the testers feedback seriously, and wont be shy of investing time into addressing any of the big concerns they may have, or mega-bugs that they may report.
So, please take this as Its not going to be out imminently but also consider it as a clear roadsign pointing towards us kicking Unstable out of the door, and the light at the end of the tunnel getting brighter.
Well go into a bit more detail on some other aspects of 42 dev at the close of the blog, but first a few other items of information/housekeeping.
SINGLE PLAYER UNSTABLE BETA
As many will be aware, the Unstable beta of Build 41 was released with MP disabled. During this time the multiplayer was being rewritten from the ground up to work with the new animation system, and also to improve multiplayer stability and general immersion into the improved animations and gameplay. This time around, again, we plan on initially releasing the Build 42 Unstable with MP disabled. This is for several reasons, but it will primarily mean that we can address SP issues in the Unstable beta in more bite-sized chunks without drowning in bug and issue reports, and it will also clearly allow the MP team a little extra time to fix up and polish. A lot of huge changes have been made to improve security of multiplayer, with changes such as server side inventory and countless other anti-cheat measures to make the game more server-authoritative to help secure servers from being sent any kind of spoofed commands that cause issues with cheaters and such. In addition there have been many optimizations and improvements made to deal with lag, optimize zombie movement, prevent rubber banding and so on which will lead hopefully to a much more enjoyable MP experience. Heres a quick video of some vehicle lag improvements that came in this week, for example. This will likely all need more testing and issues closed out once the SP is more final, before its available for more public consumption in Unstable. (Please bear in mind though, that were a highly moddable java game with at this time no third party anti-cheat software. If c++ compiled AAA games with anti-cheat are still struggling with cheaters, then we would all be naive to assume that cheating would not be an issue. Hopefully we have massively restricted the possible capabilities of cheaters in 42 now though now seeing as the server is a lot more authoritative in controlling the world state. Our advice will always be to favour playing in a whitelisted community if you want to avoid cheaters or at least be able to permanently remove them from your game. We will however be exploring proper anti-cheat solutions in the longer term and hopefully most cheats will be limited to stuff like ESP, but even so well continue to recommend whitelisted servers for a cheater free experience.) There will, however, be strict requirements for modders to follow to allow them to do stuff they once took for granted. For example, creating an inventory item will have to be done in a way thatll allow it to be created on the server. The MP team are currently working on guidelines and documentation that will explain how modders can work within the updated framework and not upset the anti-cheat measures. Likewise, similar documents are being written for crafting and other new/updated areas of the game. Finally, how long will an Unstable SP beta last until we drop MP in? Uncertain, but this stuff isnt being written from scratch and is already mostly functional. Its a different situation to the one that saw the lengthy wait for MP integration for 41.
MODPOCALYPSE
With such a huge update to the game, it is inevitable that almost every mod that exists will be invalidated in some capacity. With the new crafting systems, especially, its unlikely any mod will work out of the box. However, what we do have is a new modding architecture which will help a lot in the transition, thats heavily inspired by the way that a certain game thats set on a World out on the Rim does it. Essentially, Aiterons been working on heavily improving the mod system to allow for versioned mods to be included in a Workshop item. B41 currently uses the root directory of the workshop files as the mod: it contains a media directory and all the rest that allows the mod to override files in the core zomboid data directory. B42, meanwhile, instead introduces a functionality where a build of the game will query the mod for a subdirectory which contains the most recent compatible version of the mod and to then use those files. For example, a subscribed mod could have a 42 directory, a 42.21 directory, a 43 directory and a 43.31 directory. If you run a version of the game thats 42.1 itd use the 42 directory, and load that version of the mod. If you then upgraded to 42.25 then it would start using the 42.21 directory, and so on. Within this theres also a common directory thats used by any version of the mod and can be used to store large files such as art or sounds, that modders clearly dont want duplicated over 20 versions of their mod. (Though this aspect will only truly come into play in versions beyond 41, as we cant at this point realistically modify Build 41 to use the new mod system and B41 mods will clearly remain loading directly out of the root directory as they currently do while ignoring the B42+ versioned directories.) What this will all mean is that when modders update their mods to work with B42, they can leave the B41 files within the mod package and continue to work on B41 content as and when they desire. Simultaneously, however, theyll be able to support the B42 beta without destroying that compatibility with B41 stable From that point on theyll then have much more intelligent versioning to allow for extra power to update their mods, in ways that wont be destructive to older builds of the game. In addition to this, 42s new mod load order functionality will make submods and modpacks a lot easier to create. Finally because of these huge changes, and the likelihood that so few mods at all will work B42 on first release, we currently plan to automatically disable all mods on first load and B42 will be unable to load any of the B41 mod files until a workshop item has been prepared using a 42 directory. This will be necessary in limiting the amount of bug reports wed inevitably get from people loading up their B41 mod lists and completely breaking the game.
INTERNAL BUILD NOW
As indicated above, were pretty much feature complete with some crafting elements still on their way. Theres various issues lurking in the tester build that need investigation and sorting this week some unexplained and endless explosions in deer/bunny populations, out of memory issues, and combat irregularities. Theres various things here that need sweeping up. As we have mentioned in previous blogs, we felt the delay with the crafting overhaul was set to continue longer than anyone was comfortable with, and so decided to release the first beta without the entirety of the nu-medieval post-apocalypse village crafting possibilities we intend in the longer term as with blacksmithing, pottery, smelting, weapon-related carpentry, carving etc. therell be plenty still to chew on. The final must have feature we have in production for 42 is a Building UI. Weve never been a fan of the right click menu building system, and along with the sharp increase of new buildable tiles it became necessary to improve how building is carried out. For the expanded test pool and Unstable, then, the final addition will be in taking the current furniture picking up icon on the icon strip to the left and turn it into a button to bring up a new panel with the furniture interactions and building choices rolled into it From this well have a nice categorized building UI the player can keep on-screen as a palette to pick buildable tiles from, which will allow you to browse the various categories and tiles you want to build in the world, click on them if you have the necessary building materials, and then place the ghost tile on the target tile. Its pretty simple, and backstage a first implementation isnt taking too long to get operational. In other news:
ANIMAL TRACKERS
As discussed last time, we werent happy with the pre-defined and permanent animal paths that deer and other animals would follow that were initially implemented. As such Prof recently added randomized animal paths that are tweakable in lua. New paths are generated using the seed given when you create a world they are static in the sense that they dont self-modify after you started a game, but dynamic in the sense that you will never know what journeys deer will be taking in any fresh world. In future well explore regenerating these paths if they are over-hunted. Heres a quick vid of them in action. [previewyoutube=o1X7d34_c8Q;full][/previewyoutube]
SEW-SEW
While its not a complete tech tree at the moment, tailoring has got some attention and players should be able to grind the first levels from looted or farmed materials. These do not require a specific crafting station, but higher-level options that well add during Unstable will. [Please note: the crafting window is due another polish pass, and this video also shows a degree of debug/coder-speak wordage. Although performed on a table here, these recipes dont demand it.] [previewyoutube=37aM8yEhkXg;full][/previewyoutube]
UPS AND DOWNS
Partly due to current game imbalance, and partly because with the new crafting we didnt want to replicate the vertically-placed-work-station spam crafting that you can sometimes see in games like Minecraft, we spent an afternoon revising sheet rope climbing mechanics while waiting for a crafting blocker to clear. Previously only drunk players had a chance of falling when climbing a sheet rope, in Build 42 now any player has a chance to fall when climbing a sheet rope to higher floors after an initial grace period has elapsed the duration of which period, and the chance to fall, is determined by negative moodles, skills such as Strength, Fitness and Nimble, appropriate traits like Dextrous or Gymnast, and professions like Burglar. Additionally characters will accumulate muscle strain if they climb ropes for enough time, and without resting. Theres a smaller chance of falling from a rope while descending, also, while all of this can be toggled off in Sandbox.
TOOLS UPDATE
In the background to the B42 work, Zac has been overhauling the AnimZed tool that made the success of B41 possible. This will be of great aid when it comes to final B42 polish, and all versions beyond this. The core of every good survivor character brain is a logic state network. He explains. The players character might be walking and from that they could start running, stop entirely, climbFence, aim, sneak etc. All the animation frameworks for players and zeds need to be keyed into all available potential outcomes that the player or the game might dictate. Our problem increasingly was that our characters brains were getting pretty complex. We are adding all sorts of new abilities in both 42 and beyond, and theyre getting bigger and bigger still. Up until now we havent had a tool to visualise the network. Weve been editing the structure manually, by editing xml files. This has led to pain. When trying to incorporate a new feature, or figure out why a character is doing the wrong thing, its always taken a lot of manually parsing reams of network circuitry, and its slowed integration down. So, we have been building a proper logic network editor, named it AnimGraphZeditor, that should be a big boost in making more and more complex brains. The importance of having a robust logic network editor cannot be overstated for final polish of elements of 42, and everything that lies beyond it: essentially taking the abstract mass of logic conditionals, states, and transitions, and puts them up on the screen as circuit diagrams. From here we can identify problems and faulty circuits, and makes it much easier to implement new features and capabilities. While we are in this area, it should also be mentioned that it is still our plan to release AnimZed to the community and this will most likely follow Build 42 release.
WEAPON TESTING
Finally a quick video compilation of recent in-game weapon testing featuring all the old familiars, but also a whole bunch of the new items that youll be able to crack heads open with in the next version. [previewyoutube=4B7_EEuKcrY;full][/previewyoutube] A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something. We also live on Twitter/X right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Those who receive blogs and announcements by email: please note that we are changing provider. If you want to continue to receive our mails please sign up again here.
[ 2024-08-29 15:57:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Cortman by Night
Some of the things weve been doing this month on the crafting revamp includes:
There are two different sorts of subterranean lair in B42 random ones that could occur in various set places, and permanent ones. As far as the permanent ones go theres a range of bunkers, tunnels and cave networks waiting to be discovered as well as simply new lower floors to some of the maps more known and recognisable locations. What we hadnt done yet for B42, however, is mark all the potential locations for the random basements and then to test them so theyll all fire off in your game once we hit Unstable beta. Heres a map of one of our locations showing the basic spread of what you can expect. Apologies for spoilers, we thought it wouldnt be too bad seeing as it was only one town. So anyway heres Brandenburg.
And heres a quick video showing some, admittedly posed for the camera, testing in which the same location is shown to have a different basement on a different run. [previewyoutube=3xjMFRenElA;full][/previewyoutube] The basements on show here arent dazzlingly exciting, but this will of course be the case for most of the ones you find. Part of this testing is also checking the rules that we have in place to match random basement size and orientation to the size of the house.
Grappletech is, for all intents of purpose, done. This is the update to PZs animation tech that allows two characters to directly interact whether survivor on survivor, survivor on zed, or zed on survivor. As discussed and shown before, the first use-case of this will be in fixing the jankiness in PZ thats always surrounded the carrying, moving and disposing of bodies. In a previous blog we also showed an unimplemented animation of the player throwing bodies through a window, as an example, of where we would take it next and this has now been added into the system. This can be seen in the following video, alongside some old friends. PLEASE NOTE: We are aware that after the window chuck the plummet of the corpse doesnt look great yet. This will be addressed in future, and is separate to what were doing with GrappleTech. PLEASE ALSO NOTE: The effort noises the character makes while dragging corpses will be considerably toned down, or absent, in the release version. Its a bit much here. [previewyoutube=t0ey-ZNv8PA;full][/previewyoutube] At present body dragging and window chucking is not in the internal test build, however it will be required at some point for the crafting revamp as this will allow for far more direct animations with irregularly-shaped crafting stations. We had previously said it wouldnt be a part of the Unstable beta, but now its done and playable feel its a potential dependent on the progress made by the crafting team. While were back at the K&B house by the way, check out how it looks during the day and the night now. [previewyoutube=nUZGuAzZVc4;full][/previewyoutube]
[ 2024-07-25 13:44:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all. Alongside continued crafting work its very much a time of mixing/polishing previously announced and described things in the internal test build.
As such please forgive us if things are a little bullet pointy and expanded info on things youve heard about before. Its all stuff that needs doing.
CRAFTING
Some of the things weve been doing this month on the crafting revamp includes:
- On-boarding three of our friends from TEA games to add some firepower to the crafting team and get it all out of the door. While theyve been getting up to speed with the code they have also been documenting it all with its latest implementation, which in turn will become our guidance for modders upon release.
- Working on crafting station animation interactions. In Build 42 you wont see direct physical movement of player and crafting station when you interact, for example a potters wheel wont spin. Until we, potentially, one day include 3D models on the map furniture will remain as static sprites as they always have been.
- Working out how best to separate out the new skills. We became concerned that we were introducing too many portmanteau skills simply for the sake of keeping the skill list slimmed down. Theres still some folding together of craft skills when theres clear similarities in tools and techniques, but overall it felt wrong to lump too much together.
- Making sure that theres sandbox settings that cater for faster progression. Sandbox and settings now include settings for Skill XP multipliers for individual skills, so your speed up each different ladder can be directly adjusted.
- Addressing undesired and unfun gameplay loops. A common server admin complaint is that the map swiftly becomes barren of furniture and loot containers due to players chasing XP. As such, in B42 scrapping, dismantling and ripping items will no longer grant XP.
- Adding skills for wilderness play. Knapping and Carving have both been added. Knapping is used for fashioning stone blades from the pieces of flint you can find in the world, for making knives, spears, axes, scythes and other tools. Carving involves carving wood and bone for similar purposes.
- Improving how recipes work and are learned. There are a great many new recipes in B42, and when you become a Level 10 Master Blacksmith it makes no sense that you may not know some of them within that field. As such many of them now come with an Autolearn requirement in which a skill level (or a combination of different skill levels) will automatically know them.
BASEMENTING
There are two different sorts of subterranean lair in B42 random ones that could occur in various set places, and permanent ones. As far as the permanent ones go theres a range of bunkers, tunnels and cave networks waiting to be discovered as well as simply new lower floors to some of the maps more known and recognisable locations. What we hadnt done yet for B42, however, is mark all the potential locations for the random basements and then to test them so theyll all fire off in your game once we hit Unstable beta. Heres a map of one of our locations showing the basic spread of what you can expect. Apologies for spoilers, we thought it wouldnt be too bad seeing as it was only one town. So anyway heres Brandenburg.
And heres a quick video showing some, admittedly posed for the camera, testing in which the same location is shown to have a different basement on a different run. [previewyoutube=3xjMFRenElA;full][/previewyoutube] The basements on show here arent dazzlingly exciting, but this will of course be the case for most of the ones you find. Part of this testing is also checking the rules that we have in place to match random basement size and orientation to the size of the house.
GRAPPLETECH
Grappletech is, for all intents of purpose, done. This is the update to PZs animation tech that allows two characters to directly interact whether survivor on survivor, survivor on zed, or zed on survivor. As discussed and shown before, the first use-case of this will be in fixing the jankiness in PZ thats always surrounded the carrying, moving and disposing of bodies. In a previous blog we also showed an unimplemented animation of the player throwing bodies through a window, as an example, of where we would take it next and this has now been added into the system. This can be seen in the following video, alongside some old friends. PLEASE NOTE: We are aware that after the window chuck the plummet of the corpse doesnt look great yet. This will be addressed in future, and is separate to what were doing with GrappleTech. PLEASE ALSO NOTE: The effort noises the character makes while dragging corpses will be considerably toned down, or absent, in the release version. Its a bit much here. [previewyoutube=t0ey-ZNv8PA;full][/previewyoutube] At present body dragging and window chucking is not in the internal test build, however it will be required at some point for the crafting revamp as this will allow for far more direct animations with irregularly-shaped crafting stations. We had previously said it wouldnt be a part of the Unstable beta, but now its done and playable feel its a potential dependent on the progress made by the crafting team. While were back at the K&B house by the way, check out how it looks during the day and the night now. [previewyoutube=nUZGuAzZVc4;full][/previewyoutube]
OTHER STUFF
- Newspapers have been finalled, and this week have been checked through for authenticity by a local American local news journalist. They will next be added to the games loot tables once relevant edits have been made.
-
[previewyoutube=oZMPwjuxqxk;full][/previewyoutube]
- We werent entirely happy with the predictable way that deer were following our pre-defined paths through forests, and as such with zoning and biome work complete (as seen last month) a natural next step for this system would be to create multiple pathways for wildlife organically.
- Over with the Sound Team (as well as providing noises and settings for new items, weapons and altitudes) we have tied their work more closely to the map tools.
- We are also currently testing the glow-up of Muldraugh, specifically at night-time, and its looking pretty awesome to tell the truth. We hope that survivors are going to be tempted out of their bases during moonlit hours a bit more than usual to see it.
[ 2024-07-25 13:44:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Biomic Man
One aspect of 42 is that we no longer have a rigid black border, and instead have generated wilderness at the maps edges. As a part of this we also needed ways to zone these areas, meaning to automatically mark them as a particular area so that the game knows, for example, which sounds to play and which foraging area to allocate. Having foraging being mapper-defined, and a laborious job to mark up, has always been an issue. Its a big annoyance for players who like to stray from the beaten path only to discover theyre no longer in a foraging zone. Here, for example is an overview of some of the 41 maps current zoning. To the east is a large swathe of unzoned (and therefore unforageable) land while the zone squares of dark green forest and light green woodland is lumpy, boxy and unnatural.
Now in B42 then ProfMobius, he of Minecraft origin, has put together a biome system for the inner map as well as the generated map that now runs beyond our usual boundaries. By extension, this also means that foraging will be both fixed throughout the map. Another big part of this is that it will also be more interesting as you walk through more varied patterns of land-types that are far more clearly visually representative of what they are in real world terms. So heres what the above looks like with more detailed, automatically created, biomes. Note the more interesting interplay of woodland and deep forest in, for example, the central south area.
Within these biomes the Prof controls the spawning of specific trees over others. In the screenshots below you can see different kinds of forest environment like a River Birch forest, clusters of more PH resistant trees, deep forest, and even semi urban areas. There are nine biomes in all: deep forest, organic forest, birch forest, pine forest, farm maintained forest, pollution resistant forest, and three more which are mixes of the above. Their generation is guided by geographical features such as rivers, roads, neighbouring farms and large bodies of water. The end result is a lot of much-needed variety for all of your off-road adventures.
We are now working to make life for the modders and mappers easier with this, in terms of biome generation and clean/invisible transitions between the vanilla map and the communitys additions, but otherwise all the above is now in the internal test build.
In the past few weeks weve done more work on in-game lights in terms of balance, purpose and mechanics.
Theres still a fair amount to do, this project will likely continue to be updated through the Unstable beta, but we are closer and closer to the atmosphere we first envisioned when we introduced 42s new light propagation system. That includes items like streetlights with an orange hue as (in the 90s, most used sodium), plain neon appearing white, halogen lighting being slightly yellow and incandescent and such. Mix in the coloured lighting that we mentioned last time, and all of a sudden you have a far more interesting lighting-scape to encounter on night-time forays before the power finally goes out. [previewyoutube=0jhKlV4FY8I;full][/previewyoutube] Another part of this has been to make light overlays and adjust values for each light emissive object: things like signs, crafting station and fridges. This paves the way for a lot of cool lighting scenarios, as seen below in some WIP screenshots.
Last time round we showed you some map work that was taking place in familiar locations, like Muldraugh. The response was largely positive, but some folk correctly worried that they were perhaps a little too ornate and fancy for Muld which in itself we have always represented as a very normal slice of Americana where normal people lead normal lives, and face the normal everyday challenges of life. Muld, our first town and first love, will always be front and centre for the tone of PZ and as such we decided to take things in a slightly different direction after feedback. Public buildings like the school (latest version now seen below) have been made to look a little more realistic for a town like Muldraugh, and Cortmans is a little less fancy. Other locations, however, like the revamped police station will remain as seen last month.
Everything remains super-improved, please do not worry on that account, but we have toned down the newness and the poshness of what was shown in Muld. All buildings seen last time will be used elsewhere on the map also, so will still be available to hold out inside but in a different and more appropriate geographic location. Heres another glow-up spot, meanwhile, that went through recently.
[ 2024-06-27 17:07:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
As discussed last time, in the interests of getting the 42 Unstable out of the door we are limiting the number of new craft disciplines that will be initially available and then dripfeeding others (alongside polish, balance etc) in updates to the beta. We have done a bit of a stocktake on what we have done, and are aiming to have the following finished off for a first release. (The contents may settle and change, of course, but we feel this is still a fair assessment.)
- Metal smelting and Blacksmithing
- Pottery
- Weapon-related carpentry skills, such as carving handles and shafts for crafted weapons
- Small-scale bone carving to create sewing needles, fish hooks, cutlery and materials for some fun armor types.
- The essentials when it comes to agricultural production: flour, oil, thread, twine etc.
- Weapon crafting performed on in-game surfaces that dont necessarily require a particular workstation
BIOMES / FORAGING
One aspect of 42 is that we no longer have a rigid black border, and instead have generated wilderness at the maps edges. As a part of this we also needed ways to zone these areas, meaning to automatically mark them as a particular area so that the game knows, for example, which sounds to play and which foraging area to allocate. Having foraging being mapper-defined, and a laborious job to mark up, has always been an issue. Its a big annoyance for players who like to stray from the beaten path only to discover theyre no longer in a foraging zone. Here, for example is an overview of some of the 41 maps current zoning. To the east is a large swathe of unzoned (and therefore unforageable) land while the zone squares of dark green forest and light green woodland is lumpy, boxy and unnatural.
Now in B42 then ProfMobius, he of Minecraft origin, has put together a biome system for the inner map as well as the generated map that now runs beyond our usual boundaries. By extension, this also means that foraging will be both fixed throughout the map. Another big part of this is that it will also be more interesting as you walk through more varied patterns of land-types that are far more clearly visually representative of what they are in real world terms. So heres what the above looks like with more detailed, automatically created, biomes. Note the more interesting interplay of woodland and deep forest in, for example, the central south area.
Within these biomes the Prof controls the spawning of specific trees over others. In the screenshots below you can see different kinds of forest environment like a River Birch forest, clusters of more PH resistant trees, deep forest, and even semi urban areas. There are nine biomes in all: deep forest, organic forest, birch forest, pine forest, farm maintained forest, pollution resistant forest, and three more which are mixes of the above. Their generation is guided by geographical features such as rivers, roads, neighbouring farms and large bodies of water. The end result is a lot of much-needed variety for all of your off-road adventures.
We are now working to make life for the modders and mappers easier with this, in terms of biome generation and clean/invisible transitions between the vanilla map and the communitys additions, but otherwise all the above is now in the internal test build.
LIGHTING
In the past few weeks weve done more work on in-game lights in terms of balance, purpose and mechanics.
Theres still a fair amount to do, this project will likely continue to be updated through the Unstable beta, but we are closer and closer to the atmosphere we first envisioned when we introduced 42s new light propagation system. That includes items like streetlights with an orange hue as (in the 90s, most used sodium), plain neon appearing white, halogen lighting being slightly yellow and incandescent and such. Mix in the coloured lighting that we mentioned last time, and all of a sudden you have a far more interesting lighting-scape to encounter on night-time forays before the power finally goes out. [previewyoutube=0jhKlV4FY8I;full][/previewyoutube] Another part of this has been to make light overlays and adjust values for each light emissive object: things like signs, crafting station and fridges. This paves the way for a lot of cool lighting scenarios, as seen below in some WIP screenshots.
GLOW UP(DATE)
Last time round we showed you some map work that was taking place in familiar locations, like Muldraugh. The response was largely positive, but some folk correctly worried that they were perhaps a little too ornate and fancy for Muld which in itself we have always represented as a very normal slice of Americana where normal people lead normal lives, and face the normal everyday challenges of life. Muld, our first town and first love, will always be front and centre for the tone of PZ and as such we decided to take things in a slightly different direction after feedback. Public buildings like the school (latest version now seen below) have been made to look a little more realistic for a town like Muldraugh, and Cortmans is a little less fancy. Other locations, however, like the revamped police station will remain as seen last month.
Everything remains super-improved, please do not worry on that account, but we have toned down the newness and the poshness of what was shown in Muld. All buildings seen last time will be used elsewhere on the map also, so will still be available to hold out inside but in a different and more appropriate geographic location. Heres another glow-up spot, meanwhile, that went through recently.
OTHER STUFF
- Nick from TEA is working on edge-case moments of unfairness and mis-targeting that occur during hectic moments in combat and can result in frustrations. It is our hope that (alongside 42s general improvement and polish to player movement via bugs fixed in the animation system) we can have some pain points removed before we hit Unstable.
- Among many and varied other things both big and small, the MP team have been working on smoothening the movement and direction of zeds that are chasing your fellow survivors. While perhaps not something you generally notice in the heat of the moment, as the following video shows it should bring a less-jaggedy feel to general MP zombie pathing.
[ 2024-06-27 17:07:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
Glowing Onez
At this point the main element of the Build 42 update thats been holding stuff back has been the substantial crafting overhaul thats been underway. When we set out with B42 our main ambition has been to fill out the crafting potential of the game to vastly expand the end game by providing players the ability to build a community and replace a lot of the items that currently require looting to obtain to give players the ability to run servers and game worlds indefinitely without needing to respawn loot. Weve made good progress towards this end but the more time has gone on weve realized that aiming to achieve these goals are holding back Build 42s entrance to an Unstable beta release. While its definitely achievable, and will be realized in time, stubbornly holding things back until we get there it only going to delay people getting a hold on all the other cool stuff in the Build that theyve been waiting for. As such weve decided it would be a better approach to polish up what we have, and continue the process of bug fixing and polishing the build to the point it would be able to go into the Unstable branch. Then for us to fill out the gaps in the crafting overhaul during Unstable, or perhaps with some smaller releases while Build 43 is under full development. Though we havent worked out exactly what will be in the first iteration, therell still be a lot of new crafting for people to sink their teeth into, from stuff like the blacksmithing, pottery, woodworking, food preservation, extra fluid and workstation mechanics, new crafting system and much more. Certain crafting tech trees wed hoped to be in the initial 42 Unstable release will be pushed back though, to avoid any more unnecessary delays. People would much rather see the build out and get to play with all it has to offer, rather than be upset about the things never made it into the first Unstable release as originally planned. In the meantime, while theres a ton to play with, initially the crafting overhaul may not quite live up to the potential we set out for until we fill it out later down the line. Weve only made the decision this week, while active development of the other major features has been rolling on. As such the build is still very unstable, unbalanced and buggy: itll definitely take some time to focus on fixing and polishing it up to a releasable state, and to fill in any gaps we feel we need to make the build feel whole. As such the Unstable build is not imminent, but with this readjustment of our plans the pile of stuff that needs to be done before release has gotten a lot shorter. How quickly well get the build shipshape remains to be seen, it will take some time to settle, but well likely have a much better picture by the next time the blog rolls around.
As you already know the map is getting a significant lick of paint with new towns, bigger buildings in cities and underground locations. With all the improvement, and the new tiles going toward this improvement, then our existing towns were starting to look a little threadbare. Until now, of course.
As you can see, Ayrton has been heading back into our familiar locations and giving them all a fresh lick of paint. The difference is quite marked, and were hopeful that youll all enjoy what weve done with the place once 42 goes Unstable.
42s lighting system is a big improvement from 41s, with enclosed rooms without light sources actually appearing dark and general light propagation being a lot more realistic.
Something we have recently improved on, in this area, however are the individual lights within each room: on lamps, signs, crafting stations, electrical appliances and such.
Here what were doing is adding a sprite as an overlay on top of light sources to give them a on status. After tinkering with 42s new light parameters we have been able to produce more consistent colour temperatures across our various different light sources types whether coloured, shaded, halogen or otherwise all while still providing for more radical scenarios like coloured light bulbs. To demonstrate, here are some example of interior lighting which show how objects that light up (lamps, neon signs, etc) can affect a scene, and how we have blended it with a standard rooms spread of light.
Work continues with unconid and werlias in providing assets built with PZ models and 3D items to help us expand on our lore and your immersion into the Knox Event. The focus is currently on newspapers, but will expand out into flyers once the numbers of back-dated editions youd reasonably expect to be found on a particular date in 1993 have been fleshed out. So heres one of our recent examples.
Swiftly followed by the sort of place youd most likely find one of the most recent (and final) daily editions
As another part of us bedding down in the lore, meanwhile, we are also making sure that characters in broadcasts, flyers and newspapers who have an evident place of work (or place of demise) have their zombified forms spawn at the relevant location on the map. This is something of a side project for a few of our coders, but will hopefully pay dividends for when players are exploring new locations and getting to know the locals. While in this area we are also improving the way in which the world generates loot and zed encounters that mesh better with the overall timeline. Bandit zeds and survivalist zeds, and their safehouses, when first encountered will give a far better indication of the current world state and the number of days since society breakdown.
Over in the MP department, the team have been concocting a few things to make the lives of players and server operators a little easier. To whit:
Finally, small details we know, but the Art Department have also been pumping out more items to give a little more personality to the zeds you slay and to the homes they once lived in.
This months target has been novelty key-rings and interesting bags/containers. All relatively simple for us to mix into your looting, but hopefully with some payoff as you find interesting items in each home you pillage, and each pocket you rifle through.
This months non-buried corpses in the cemetery from Fritz. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here
[ 2024-05-30 17:26:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
How do, all.
CRAFTING CONSOLIDATION
At this point the main element of the Build 42 update thats been holding stuff back has been the substantial crafting overhaul thats been underway. When we set out with B42 our main ambition has been to fill out the crafting potential of the game to vastly expand the end game by providing players the ability to build a community and replace a lot of the items that currently require looting to obtain to give players the ability to run servers and game worlds indefinitely without needing to respawn loot. Weve made good progress towards this end but the more time has gone on weve realized that aiming to achieve these goals are holding back Build 42s entrance to an Unstable beta release. While its definitely achievable, and will be realized in time, stubbornly holding things back until we get there it only going to delay people getting a hold on all the other cool stuff in the Build that theyve been waiting for. As such weve decided it would be a better approach to polish up what we have, and continue the process of bug fixing and polishing the build to the point it would be able to go into the Unstable branch. Then for us to fill out the gaps in the crafting overhaul during Unstable, or perhaps with some smaller releases while Build 43 is under full development. Though we havent worked out exactly what will be in the first iteration, therell still be a lot of new crafting for people to sink their teeth into, from stuff like the blacksmithing, pottery, woodworking, food preservation, extra fluid and workstation mechanics, new crafting system and much more. Certain crafting tech trees wed hoped to be in the initial 42 Unstable release will be pushed back though, to avoid any more unnecessary delays. People would much rather see the build out and get to play with all it has to offer, rather than be upset about the things never made it into the first Unstable release as originally planned. In the meantime, while theres a ton to play with, initially the crafting overhaul may not quite live up to the potential we set out for until we fill it out later down the line. Weve only made the decision this week, while active development of the other major features has been rolling on. As such the build is still very unstable, unbalanced and buggy: itll definitely take some time to focus on fixing and polishing it up to a releasable state, and to fill in any gaps we feel we need to make the build feel whole. As such the Unstable build is not imminent, but with this readjustment of our plans the pile of stuff that needs to be done before release has gotten a lot shorter. How quickly well get the build shipshape remains to be seen, it will take some time to settle, but well likely have a much better picture by the next time the blog rolls around.
MULD GLOW-UP
As you already know the map is getting a significant lick of paint with new towns, bigger buildings in cities and underground locations. With all the improvement, and the new tiles going toward this improvement, then our existing towns were starting to look a little threadbare. Until now, of course.
As you can see, Ayrton has been heading back into our familiar locations and giving them all a fresh lick of paint. The difference is quite marked, and were hopeful that youll all enjoy what weve done with the place once 42 goes Unstable.
LIGHTING GLOW-UP
42s lighting system is a big improvement from 41s, with enclosed rooms without light sources actually appearing dark and general light propagation being a lot more realistic.
Something we have recently improved on, in this area, however are the individual lights within each room: on lamps, signs, crafting stations, electrical appliances and such.
Here what were doing is adding a sprite as an overlay on top of light sources to give them a on status. After tinkering with 42s new light parameters we have been able to produce more consistent colour temperatures across our various different light sources types whether coloured, shaded, halogen or otherwise all while still providing for more radical scenarios like coloured light bulbs. To demonstrate, here are some example of interior lighting which show how objects that light up (lamps, neon signs, etc) can affect a scene, and how we have blended it with a standard rooms spread of light.
PAPERS PLEASE
Work continues with unconid and werlias in providing assets built with PZ models and 3D items to help us expand on our lore and your immersion into the Knox Event. The focus is currently on newspapers, but will expand out into flyers once the numbers of back-dated editions youd reasonably expect to be found on a particular date in 1993 have been fleshed out. So heres one of our recent examples.
Swiftly followed by the sort of place youd most likely find one of the most recent (and final) daily editions
As another part of us bedding down in the lore, meanwhile, we are also making sure that characters in broadcasts, flyers and newspapers who have an evident place of work (or place of demise) have their zombified forms spawn at the relevant location on the map. This is something of a side project for a few of our coders, but will hopefully pay dividends for when players are exploring new locations and getting to know the locals. While in this area we are also improving the way in which the world generates loot and zed encounters that mesh better with the overall timeline. Bandit zeds and survivalist zeds, and their safehouses, when first encountered will give a far better indication of the current world state and the number of days since society breakdown.
MP TEAM UPDATE
Over in the MP department, the team have been concocting a few things to make the lives of players and server operators a little easier. To whit:
- The ability for servers to have customisable login and server connection screens, with an image of the servers own choosing and an additional smaller server icon.
- Improved anti-cheat settings. These could formerly prove problematic but now they have been improved/tightened, and through Server Options you can turn each one on and off individually, and also configure actions when cheats are detected whether its banning, kicking, logging or ignoring.
- Added an interface for viewing the capabilities of different roles like Admin, Moderator, and User. This interface also allows you to add custom roles, and from that customize the user capabilities for these new roles.
- A new War Manager feature intended to help server admins govern conflict between rival groups on the map. Everything about this is customisable, especially timers and countdowns, but essentially during a waged (and accepted) war then safehouse protection is turned off for all parties involved. This comes after a war has been declared and has been accepted, with refused declarations steadily taking away (admin-defined) points that will ultimately leave you unprotected if you stave off war declarations for too long.
FUN LOOTIN
Finally, small details we know, but the Art Department have also been pumping out more items to give a little more personality to the zeds you slay and to the homes they once lived in.
This months target has been novelty key-rings and interesting bags/containers. All relatively simple for us to mix into your looting, but hopefully with some payoff as you find interesting items in each home you pillage, and each pocket you rifle through.
This months non-buried corpses in the cemetery from Fritz. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here
[ 2024-05-30 17:26:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
D'ya Like Them GrappleZ
Something that, clearly, was fundamental to Build 41 was the new animations system and thus far for Build 42 we havent mentioned any improvements to this. Importantly, it should be underlined that his work isnt in the internal test build yet (and is certainly unconfirmed as a part of 42 when it first enters an Unstable beta) but were far enough along now with work done in this area that were comfortable to talk about Zacs GrappleTech. Right now in Build 41 all the animations work perfectly fine in their solo states. This is when one player character, or one zombie, is doing its thing individually and not interacting with others around it. Where problems can arise, however, is when that human/zed interacts with another human/zed. Bites, pulldowns and shoves happen to the air around their target rather than the character model itself. This generally works fine enough but can also lead to feelings of graphical non-interaction, game events not being explained to the player efficiently enough, and the whiff of stun-lock. How to remedy this then? An extension to 41s anims system, GrappleTech allows us to join two characters in a more personal and combined state. Essentially on a code level, in vaguely technical terms, we have a Grappler and the Grappled that combine and synchronize their animations together until the grapple is broken. Whats more, because this is an extension of the Animation system the Grappled state isnt just a single, fixed animation, nor just a non-interactive cutscene. Rather, all the interactivity inherent in the Animation State system remains. In short: the Grappler character initiates a grapple perhaps with an attack or pull-down of some sort and the Grappled code decides whether the Grapple is to be accepted or rejected. The grapple system also takes into account whatever variables we desire when making that decision: tiredness, clumsiness, or injuries on either side that could cause the grapple to fail. As a prototype, and most its likely first application in B42 once the Unstable beta is underway, we made the player able to pick up and drag a corpse. [previewyoutube=J42QKHxo4us;full][/previewyoutube] As you can see here, Zac has leveraged the logic in the Animation State system, and has been able to wire up Martins animation variants for picking up a body from the front and back, and then dragging it. This is fairly rudimentary currently (clearly it would look better with some physics-bobble on the zombie legs as they are dragged around, and we dont have SFX yet) but what we do have running to prove out the system are a raft of player effects: an impact on player stamina, the exhaustion from dragging the heavy corpse, and the trail of blood thatll sometimes drag out behind also. Super-importantly this whole system also lets Animator Martin, and of course modders, animate two characters interacting in their animation software and then to see that interaction replicated directly in-game. Formerly interlinking character actions would have to be animated separately, which was trickier to say the least. An instance of this can be seen below which also serves as an example of how we can also tie the Grapple state to other useful gameplay activities: like dumping the corpse out of windows all in one animation sweep. Every stage of the Grappled state is as interactive as any regular state. We dont usually show animations that arent in-game yet (this is in Zacs test build, but very rough around the edges still) but again, this is a great example of how both character models can now be worked on at once for both Martin and our modding community inside their animation software. [previewyoutube=oRnrxqM_mjQ;full][/previewyoutube] Ultimately, the possibilities are exciting and open-ended for this. While perhaps not for 42, in which we mainly plan to use GrappleTech during the beta period to polish existing rough spots of character interaction in the current game, this is the gateway to all sorts of potential gameplay. The key word here is potential (potential!) but this does mean that one day well be able to consider stuff like zombies grabbing players and dragging them through windows, dragged zeds being dumped into pits and graves, animal attacks and tramples, or even (maybe? who knows) mountable steeds one day. It would certainly be extremely helpful for that thing that hilarious meme reviews always demand too, but that aint gonna happen
So some notes on where were currently headed with the gameplay and balance:
With this wide variety of weapons to craft in the game, its our hope that the player will be able to cobble together offensive weapons using the materials they find as they explore the world and to make up weapons as they go along. This said, clearly the selection and quality of them will vary widely according to skill.
In general with the Build 42 items we tried to have more cool, fun and collectible items. Its an easy way to get more personality into the game, to keep your looting more varied, and to give you a better feeling of the deceased. One example of this is that we are updating and adding more recipe magazines so that they feel more individual, and less like they all belong to some perfect collection that everyone within the Knox Event seems to possess. We want things to feel more funky and chaotic, like real-life. This is also, clearly, a way we can make sure we can have rare high-value loot that doesnt cause players to feel bottlenecked in the way that sledgehammers and generator manuals do in 41.
Although weve mainly been talking weapons this month, as you can see theres also recipe magazines for armour and hollow books thatll let you hide things inside them. Our artists, meanwhile, have made them all interesting to look at and (youd imagine) to read and collect. Also seen here are some examples of recipe clippings and schematics; these will have an appropriate-by-context random recipe on them when your player finds them. One of the ways were trying to make the random survivalist safehouses you may encounter in the world more exciting, for example, is by having the possibility for some of the weapon or other gear schematics to spawn alongside the usual loot youd find.
Last time we mentioned the fluid rework was for hair dyes, at which point it was only those products that had had been converted as they provided a useful and visible test case for mixing and swirling together. Just a brief update, here, then to say that we have them all converted now and working through the gameplay details of each. The system now caters for: water, gasoline, bleach, alcohol, beverages and milk from the new animals. Here you can see different coloured liquids, in separate bowls.
This week we mixed in the effects of drinking alcoholic beverages and poisons, so characters can get drunk, sick or die. Drunkenness also now comes with visual effects, and delays on character controls depending on the amount of laughing juice youve imbibed. In more boring matters, weve also added in systems like rain filling open items left outside, and made rain barrels work with B42 systems also.
Lets take a quick tour around what RJs cooking for animal crafting. On the right you see the butcher hook: here you slaughter the animal, remove leather/feather, blood, organs, meat and bones. Every animal will have a weight of meat, blood, bones, feathers and the like that depends on the its size and weight at the moment of its unfortunate demise. Here too you can see the beginnings of the leathering process. On the left of this screen theres a softening beam, where you can remove excess flesh from a hide and also get to choose whether you scrape off the fur too. (You can keep the fancy holstein pattern on your leather if you fancy it.) After that, nearby, is the tanning bucket where you soak the leather in a brain tan or bark tan. After that, the leather goes off to the drying rack you can see on the top of the screen. Leave the leather here for a nice long time, and then youre good. Also visible: a churning bucket, to create delicious butter from milk and a calf skeleton, just for fun.
Granular and non-sexy item, this one, but we hope youll agree still one thatll have a big impact on looting and safehouse storage. We have two longstanding issues to deal with here: messy item hoarding in player bases, and extremely long lists of recipes. So for the first issue, theres a simple solution: we now allow players to pack items into boxes that are more efficient to store, both for players and for save files. [previewyoutube=zqav1gKkzp4;full][/previewyoutube] The second requires something a little more complicated: the recipe system allowing for dynamic result items so that a single recipe can handle packing or unpacking for several different item types. In 41 each recipe could only have a fixed item as the result: for example when opening canned food we needed one recipe for each canned food type. With the changes were making we can have a single open canned food recipe for everything, and the recipe will create the proper result item.
This weeks walk in the dark from Stomno. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2024-04-25 16:05:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
LIFES A DRAG
Something that, clearly, was fundamental to Build 41 was the new animations system and thus far for Build 42 we havent mentioned any improvements to this. Importantly, it should be underlined that his work isnt in the internal test build yet (and is certainly unconfirmed as a part of 42 when it first enters an Unstable beta) but were far enough along now with work done in this area that were comfortable to talk about Zacs GrappleTech. Right now in Build 41 all the animations work perfectly fine in their solo states. This is when one player character, or one zombie, is doing its thing individually and not interacting with others around it. Where problems can arise, however, is when that human/zed interacts with another human/zed. Bites, pulldowns and shoves happen to the air around their target rather than the character model itself. This generally works fine enough but can also lead to feelings of graphical non-interaction, game events not being explained to the player efficiently enough, and the whiff of stun-lock. How to remedy this then? An extension to 41s anims system, GrappleTech allows us to join two characters in a more personal and combined state. Essentially on a code level, in vaguely technical terms, we have a Grappler and the Grappled that combine and synchronize their animations together until the grapple is broken. Whats more, because this is an extension of the Animation system the Grappled state isnt just a single, fixed animation, nor just a non-interactive cutscene. Rather, all the interactivity inherent in the Animation State system remains. In short: the Grappler character initiates a grapple perhaps with an attack or pull-down of some sort and the Grappled code decides whether the Grapple is to be accepted or rejected. The grapple system also takes into account whatever variables we desire when making that decision: tiredness, clumsiness, or injuries on either side that could cause the grapple to fail. As a prototype, and most its likely first application in B42 once the Unstable beta is underway, we made the player able to pick up and drag a corpse. [previewyoutube=J42QKHxo4us;full][/previewyoutube] As you can see here, Zac has leveraged the logic in the Animation State system, and has been able to wire up Martins animation variants for picking up a body from the front and back, and then dragging it. This is fairly rudimentary currently (clearly it would look better with some physics-bobble on the zombie legs as they are dragged around, and we dont have SFX yet) but what we do have running to prove out the system are a raft of player effects: an impact on player stamina, the exhaustion from dragging the heavy corpse, and the trail of blood thatll sometimes drag out behind also. Super-importantly this whole system also lets Animator Martin, and of course modders, animate two characters interacting in their animation software and then to see that interaction replicated directly in-game. Formerly interlinking character actions would have to be animated separately, which was trickier to say the least. An instance of this can be seen below which also serves as an example of how we can also tie the Grapple state to other useful gameplay activities: like dumping the corpse out of windows all in one animation sweep. Every stage of the Grappled state is as interactive as any regular state. We dont usually show animations that arent in-game yet (this is in Zacs test build, but very rough around the edges still) but again, this is a great example of how both character models can now be worked on at once for both Martin and our modding community inside their animation software. [previewyoutube=oRnrxqM_mjQ;full][/previewyoutube] Ultimately, the possibilities are exciting and open-ended for this. While perhaps not for 42, in which we mainly plan to use GrappleTech during the beta period to polish existing rough spots of character interaction in the current game, this is the gateway to all sorts of potential gameplay. The key word here is potential (potential!) but this does mean that one day well be able to consider stuff like zombies grabbing players and dragging them through windows, dragged zeds being dumped into pits and graves, animal attacks and tramples, or even (maybe? who knows) mountable steeds one day. It would certainly be extremely helpful for that thing that hilarious meme reviews always demand too, but that aint gonna happen
So some notes on where were currently headed with the gameplay and balance:
- Blacksmithed weapons will generally be the most durable and high quality, but also require the most infrastructure and skill to produce.
- Weapons fabricated in a welding shop will be cruder and lower quality, but still durable.
- Weapons made out of different kinds of sticks and broken pieces of metal or bones, will generally have a much shorter lifespan.
- In terms of more improvised/compound post-apocalyptic weapons, like adding a modification to a baseball bat, for most cases youll be making a trade-off between durability and the ability to inflict more short-term damage.
- For the most part in each family of crafted weapons there will be options for all the different sorts of weapon that PZ provides: blunt, small blunt, axes, spears and short blade. That said: long blade is an exception. Were trying to keep swords special, high-tier and high-value partly because they arguably fit the post-apocalypse less neatly and need to feel different, and partly because weve already seen the success of this approach with the katana.
- Spears have been rethought, and many of the spears that you may be used to in B41 have been removed. However, there are also many new spears and many different ways to make a spear compared to whats out there currently.
With this wide variety of weapons to craft in the game, its our hope that the player will be able to cobble together offensive weapons using the materials they find as they explore the world and to make up weapons as they go along. This said, clearly the selection and quality of them will vary widely according to skill.
LEGACY MEDIA
In general with the Build 42 items we tried to have more cool, fun and collectible items. Its an easy way to get more personality into the game, to keep your looting more varied, and to give you a better feeling of the deceased. One example of this is that we are updating and adding more recipe magazines so that they feel more individual, and less like they all belong to some perfect collection that everyone within the Knox Event seems to possess. We want things to feel more funky and chaotic, like real-life. This is also, clearly, a way we can make sure we can have rare high-value loot that doesnt cause players to feel bottlenecked in the way that sledgehammers and generator manuals do in 41.
Although weve mainly been talking weapons this month, as you can see theres also recipe magazines for armour and hollow books thatll let you hide things inside them. Our artists, meanwhile, have made them all interesting to look at and (youd imagine) to read and collect. Also seen here are some examples of recipe clippings and schematics; these will have an appropriate-by-context random recipe on them when your player finds them. One of the ways were trying to make the random survivalist safehouses you may encounter in the world more exciting, for example, is by having the possibility for some of the weapon or other gear schematics to spawn alongside the usual loot youd find.
LIQUID LUNCH
Last time we mentioned the fluid rework was for hair dyes, at which point it was only those products that had had been converted as they provided a useful and visible test case for mixing and swirling together. Just a brief update, here, then to say that we have them all converted now and working through the gameplay details of each. The system now caters for: water, gasoline, bleach, alcohol, beverages and milk from the new animals. Here you can see different coloured liquids, in separate bowls.
This week we mixed in the effects of drinking alcoholic beverages and poisons, so characters can get drunk, sick or die. Drunkenness also now comes with visual effects, and delays on character controls depending on the amount of laughing juice youve imbibed. In more boring matters, weve also added in systems like rain filling open items left outside, and made rain barrels work with B42 systems also.
ANIMAL CRAFT
Lets take a quick tour around what RJs cooking for animal crafting. On the right you see the butcher hook: here you slaughter the animal, remove leather/feather, blood, organs, meat and bones. Every animal will have a weight of meat, blood, bones, feathers and the like that depends on the its size and weight at the moment of its unfortunate demise. Here too you can see the beginnings of the leathering process. On the left of this screen theres a softening beam, where you can remove excess flesh from a hide and also get to choose whether you scrape off the fur too. (You can keep the fancy holstein pattern on your leather if you fancy it.) After that, nearby, is the tanning bucket where you soak the leather in a brain tan or bark tan. After that, the leather goes off to the drying rack you can see on the top of the screen. Leave the leather here for a nice long time, and then youre good. Also visible: a churning bucket, to create delicious butter from milk and a calf skeleton, just for fun.
OPERATION: PACKAGING
Granular and non-sexy item, this one, but we hope youll agree still one thatll have a big impact on looting and safehouse storage. We have two longstanding issues to deal with here: messy item hoarding in player bases, and extremely long lists of recipes. So for the first issue, theres a simple solution: we now allow players to pack items into boxes that are more efficient to store, both for players and for save files. [previewyoutube=zqav1gKkzp4;full][/previewyoutube] The second requires something a little more complicated: the recipe system allowing for dynamic result items so that a single recipe can handle packing or unpacking for several different item types. In 41 each recipe could only have a fixed item as the result: for example when opening canned food we needed one recipe for each canned food type. With the changes were making we can have a single open canned food recipe for everything, and the recipe will create the proper result item.
SMALL STUFF
- The map teams quest to polish up Louisville, and beyond, continues with an emphasis on rooftops and higher floors.
- In general, were trying to add more variety to existing items in the world as well as adding new ones. A good example is that youll be able to find different kinds of generators, all with different characteristics. This has been set up to be as easy as possible for modders to also add new varieties of generators, requiring only a simple item scripts, a tile and some modder ingenuity for whatever cool new features they dream up.
This weeks walk in the dark from Stomno. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2024-04-25 16:05:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Zaumby Thursday
Weve mentioned the fact that Build 42 will have a variety of readable materials that you can loot and inspect, but we hadnt shown them off in-game as quite frankly they didnt look great. They were crammed inside our existing Survival Guide UI, and it really wasnt going to bat for us. We didnt really want to create a load of individual images that wouldnt be readily translatable into other languages either, and become a massive timesink for our art department who are already pumping out loads of vital stuff elsewhere. So, clever Aiteron got onto the case... [previewyoutube=o7s_6cKrZxo;full][/previewyoutube] So what is this? Well, its a secondary UI API system and with it both ourselves and modders can create readable text UIs in easier and more flexible ways, and whats more reuse templates for them too. Techie bit: currently, 4 Java elements have been added: Base, Text, Texture, TextEntry, and then based on these weve built a more complex UI in lua thats easily manipulated by us and modders to play around with position, rotation angle, scale, color, animations, text settings, etc. Alongside this a new RichText system has been added, meaning the media templates can be changed completely in translation files (including size, position of elements and other settings) so we can make great media for our whole international audience. Video for modders who might be interested here. How are we using it? For Build 42 we are using this to create two flavours of lootable reading material, although not all of it will be available in the game we moment we go into unstable beta.
Whats making it extra cool? This has been cooking for a while, but we were increasingly unhappy with aspects of the way things looked. We were using in-game isometric screenshots, and they didnt feel quite right for our in-game newspapers as such. Were delighted to say, then, that community heroes unconid and Werlias have agreed to come on board and help us out with this. Both have been entertaining PZ players with their brilliantly made posed still images and videos using PZ models and imagery, and they seemed amazingly well suited to bringing life to the characters of the Knox Event in readable media. Likewise, we will also easily be able to do fun stuff with, say Nolan of Nolans Used Cars, by easily placing his cowboy hat zombie at the location of the car lot that the flyer has revealed on your map.
Something in PZ thats needed improvement for the absolute longest time, is one of the things that you see the most. Weve been unhappy with the way that grass looks for a long while, and it became more unsightly with the advent of Build 41s 3D models. Build 42 is now blessed with a depth buffer. This means that we can reduce the players clipping with the scenery, we can show doors swinging open and closed, and (during our unstable beta) we will also be able to show seated characters on furniture in all four directions so players wont have to use mods to access the sedentary animations for the directions that dont clip. Its also great for grass and general undergrowth too, so alongside updating the existing grass sprites to feel more detailed and natural weve also added support for depth maps so large blades and clumps of grass will intersect your character as you walk, crouch, etc as if they were 3D geometry. [previewyoutube=HZ4ftcmAtCU;full][/previewyoutube] As you can see, this makes the character feel much more grounded. It also has various impacts on the gameplay: crawling zombies are slightly harder to detect, falling objects get a little more lost in the grass etc. With the increased wilderness gameplay that 42 will bring for many players, in terms of hunting and settlement building, players will be surrounded by grass and wilderness a lot more so were really pleased to have got this in, and looking so good.
In the world beyond Build 42 we also intend to build on this, tying our grass and scrubland to our seasonal and erosion systems helping you to get a better sense of the months and years as they pass.
Now that 42 is delving underground, and indeed much higher into the sky, we need some improved soundscapes to deal with it. Recently the team at Formosa have been working on what happens with your speakers once you start delving underground. As such theyve kindly supplied two videos showing their work: the March Ridge bunker we saw last time, and a new spooky Ekron industrial lower floor. What can you hear thats different here? Ground level and outdoor sounds gradually dip away the lower you go, and once youre in an underground area various appropriate one-shot noises can be found like distant mice, cans falling and rolling in somewhere in the gloom etc. As far as the roomtones go theres also water dripping layers to give it more of an abandoned feel too, where appropriate, and likewise gunshot noises and the like have been played with to sound more appropriate in an enclosed underground space. [previewyoutube=gZySfGoyhpU;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=r3b85PCFmBs;full][/previewyoutube] A key part of zombie fiction that Project Zomboid hasnt catered for yet are attracted hordes trapped up against long wire fences as seen with the fences that surround the prison in The Walking Dead. Previously our pathfinding hasnt catered for this, and players have felt a sense of security while behind our sturdy wire fences. Now, things will change a bit. BUT FIRST: some traditional caveats. This feature will be a sandbox option, and it will also only come into play with large hordes and over a long period of time. This video is WIP, and the effect is sped up, and we can work on the crowding/banging visuals too. The point of this is that we want a gradual build up of a huge horde, so players get the feeling that they are safe for now. The fence will only hold for so long up against so many zombies, and eventually it might give way. In terms of pathfinding, with lone or few zombies, the change to zombie senses also leads to more Romero-like zombies, with some not being intelligent enough to go around and obstacle, and choose to slam into a fence in their efforts to get to a player instead. [previewyoutube=zB-EFFMhS-c;full][/previewyoutube]
Fenris extensive upgrades to PZs guns continue, this month with changes of note like the following:
This month weve also had focus on improving our late-game B42 armour system. As with the weapon crafting, the intent was to make something that wasnt referential to zombie media or other games, but instead something that seemed natural for the time and circumstances. We dont want crafted armour to look too anachronistic or knightly looking like they should be part of a renaissance fair. We dont want to be too goofy, although there are a few more fun options in there, and we dont want anything that doesnt look like it belongs in the Zomboid setting. Importantly armour should work like real armour, and operate within the bounds of PZ logic itself. As such a few categories that will come as part of B42 are: Metal While avoiding overt medievalisms, clearly 42s crafting update and blacksmith skills necessitate metal armour: plates, leather, straps, buckles and all. Inspirations here include Ned Kelly and his gang, while (although we always say we wont take inspiration from other games) the way Rust implements its metal armours is very much along our line of thinking though clearly well make our own way with it. Please note: there wont be any historical armour and weapon museums in b42, or suits of armour on display in mansions. With this sort of high-end crafted stuff, we wants players to have to go out into the world and engage with the new crafting system and not beeline for a spot on the map to enjoy them. Apocalyptic Vibe We had to ensure that the armour was believable and feasible, while keeping a procedural approach like our approach of the lego weapons in which existing items are adapted and melded. Then, for a more distinct look, we thought of tinges of punk rock and heavy metal imagery, with apocalyptic media such as Escape From New York serving as inspiration. From this we now have armour that can, for example, be crafted out of tyres.
Natural Ingredients One important aspect of the new armour content was that it had to support the new crafting system, as well as survival gameplay on a forest map free of civilization. Although we deliberately didnt make it too odious to progress from dirt and sticks to solving the riddle of steel, theres still a lot of middle ground between the two. Leather is an obvious candidate, and is something we have already made some pieces for. However throughout history people have used all sorts of other materials for armor as well, and we are exploring some interesting ideas based on real world examples. We dont want to go out on a limb and branch far with this, but knock on wood it will work out okay. A Sporting Chance Given that the game is set in 1993 Kentucky, theres all sorts of armour already available in the form of lootable Sportsball Gear! All sorts of pads, guards, and paddings, including two items that should make players very happy: The Athletic Cup and the Ice Hockey Neck Guards. As well, some of those items of Sports gear, like the weapons crafting, can be modified to make badass, cool, post apocalyptic armor, which brings us to
Spikes And you and the zombies can be spiky too now. [previewyoutube=qAzpPCJSlCk;full][/previewyoutube]
Finally, were also in the process of testing Skyscrapers for playability and performance. Turns out 32 floors of zombies, all spawning at the same rate of zombies creates a LOT of zombies. So we need to get to balancing things out a bit. [previewyoutube=xQrKztRh_qE;full][/previewyoutube] Thanks all. Sadly not too much from the new crafting in motion this time. Please be assured, though, that theres a lot of work going on there, but some aspects arent ready for show, and others are waiting for a core code update to hook things into and as such arent filmable. Theres a bit of a logjam building of stuff that can be pumped out, so we hope itll be a flood of cool stuff next time round. This is such a core aspect of gameplay, which could bring huge improvements across the board, so its also needing the most consideration and care to not get wrong.
A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here
[ 2024-03-28 21:02:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, here again for the March Thursdoid. Lots of stuff from lots of different areas of the game this time, we do hope you enjoy.
STRIKE A POSE
Weve mentioned the fact that Build 42 will have a variety of readable materials that you can loot and inspect, but we hadnt shown them off in-game as quite frankly they didnt look great. They were crammed inside our existing Survival Guide UI, and it really wasnt going to bat for us. We didnt really want to create a load of individual images that wouldnt be readily translatable into other languages either, and become a massive timesink for our art department who are already pumping out loads of vital stuff elsewhere. So, clever Aiteron got onto the case... [previewyoutube=o7s_6cKrZxo;full][/previewyoutube] So what is this? Well, its a secondary UI API system and with it both ourselves and modders can create readable text UIs in easier and more flexible ways, and whats more reuse templates for them too. Techie bit: currently, 4 Java elements have been added: Base, Text, Texture, TextEntry, and then based on these weve built a more complex UI in lua thats easily manipulated by us and modders to play around with position, rotation angle, scale, color, animations, text settings, etc. Alongside this a new RichText system has been added, meaning the media templates can be changed completely in translation files (including size, position of elements and other settings) so we can make great media for our whole international audience. Video for modders who might be interested here. How are we using it? For Build 42 we are using this to create two flavours of lootable reading material, although not all of it will be available in the game we moment we go into unstable beta.
- Newspapers and Community News pamphlets, to help with world-building and to fully flesh out the timeline of the Knox Event.
- Local business flyers, house listing advertisements, restaurant menus and the like. These will all be locations that will be useful to your survival story and reading the flyer will automatically reveal their location on the player map. In this way we will direct new players to helpful looting areas, and some of the communitys favourite safehouse locations.
Whats making it extra cool? This has been cooking for a while, but we were increasingly unhappy with aspects of the way things looked. We were using in-game isometric screenshots, and they didnt feel quite right for our in-game newspapers as such. Were delighted to say, then, that community heroes unconid and Werlias have agreed to come on board and help us out with this. Both have been entertaining PZ players with their brilliantly made posed still images and videos using PZ models and imagery, and they seemed amazingly well suited to bringing life to the characters of the Knox Event in readable media. Likewise, we will also easily be able to do fun stuff with, say Nolan of Nolans Used Cars, by easily placing his cowboy hat zombie at the location of the car lot that the flyer has revealed on your map.
GRASSED ME RIGHT UP
Something in PZ thats needed improvement for the absolute longest time, is one of the things that you see the most. Weve been unhappy with the way that grass looks for a long while, and it became more unsightly with the advent of Build 41s 3D models. Build 42 is now blessed with a depth buffer. This means that we can reduce the players clipping with the scenery, we can show doors swinging open and closed, and (during our unstable beta) we will also be able to show seated characters on furniture in all four directions so players wont have to use mods to access the sedentary animations for the directions that dont clip. Its also great for grass and general undergrowth too, so alongside updating the existing grass sprites to feel more detailed and natural weve also added support for depth maps so large blades and clumps of grass will intersect your character as you walk, crouch, etc as if they were 3D geometry. [previewyoutube=HZ4ftcmAtCU;full][/previewyoutube] As you can see, this makes the character feel much more grounded. It also has various impacts on the gameplay: crawling zombies are slightly harder to detect, falling objects get a little more lost in the grass etc. With the increased wilderness gameplay that 42 will bring for many players, in terms of hunting and settlement building, players will be surrounded by grass and wilderness a lot more so were really pleased to have got this in, and looking so good.
In the world beyond Build 42 we also intend to build on this, tying our grass and scrubland to our seasonal and erosion systems helping you to get a better sense of the months and years as they pass.
SOUND UNDERGROUND
Now that 42 is delving underground, and indeed much higher into the sky, we need some improved soundscapes to deal with it. Recently the team at Formosa have been working on what happens with your speakers once you start delving underground. As such theyve kindly supplied two videos showing their work: the March Ridge bunker we saw last time, and a new spooky Ekron industrial lower floor. What can you hear thats different here? Ground level and outdoor sounds gradually dip away the lower you go, and once youre in an underground area various appropriate one-shot noises can be found like distant mice, cans falling and rolling in somewhere in the gloom etc. As far as the roomtones go theres also water dripping layers to give it more of an abandoned feel too, where appropriate, and likewise gunshot noises and the like have been played with to sound more appropriate in an enclosed underground space. [previewyoutube=gZySfGoyhpU;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=r3b85PCFmBs;full][/previewyoutube] A key part of zombie fiction that Project Zomboid hasnt catered for yet are attracted hordes trapped up against long wire fences as seen with the fences that surround the prison in The Walking Dead. Previously our pathfinding hasnt catered for this, and players have felt a sense of security while behind our sturdy wire fences. Now, things will change a bit. BUT FIRST: some traditional caveats. This feature will be a sandbox option, and it will also only come into play with large hordes and over a long period of time. This video is WIP, and the effect is sped up, and we can work on the crowding/banging visuals too. The point of this is that we want a gradual build up of a huge horde, so players get the feeling that they are safe for now. The fence will only hold for so long up against so many zombies, and eventually it might give way. In terms of pathfinding, with lone or few zombies, the change to zombie senses also leads to more Romero-like zombies, with some not being intelligent enough to go around and obstacle, and choose to slam into a fence in their efforts to get to a player instead. [previewyoutube=zB-EFFMhS-c;full][/previewyoutube]
GUN CHANGES
Fenris extensive upgrades to PZs guns continue, this month with changes of note like the following:
- Wind, fog and rain, as well as general lighting conditions now have an effect on hit and critical chances. Some of these can be offset by traits or skill levels.
- Ranged shots at targets hidden by dense fog or darkness can be challenging or impossible.
- Maximum firing range has been increased and is no longer affected by skill level (chances of hitting targets at range still is).
- Distance to target has a greater effect on penalties caused by panic, drunkenness, player movement, weather, etc.
- Most penalties are significantly reduced at close ranges.
- Sound radius is increased overall, but with a sandbox option to modify higher or lower. Sound range is reduced when firing indoors.
- Sighting systems have an ideal range they were designed for: a minimum effective range, and a maximum. Outside of this range they are less effective. If the target is close enough that just pointing without aiming would give a higher chance then the sights are ignored (eg a x8 scope on a target 2 tiles away).
- Panic previously didnt actually affect hit chances (just critical and damage). This has been corrected. Remain calm, dont panic, youll be fine.
- Hit chances and critical chances are now calculated in the same way (with exceptions): if something (like panic) effects hit chance, it also effects critical.
- Hit chances are generally increased allowing lower levels to make a successful shot under the right situation. However, avoiding negative conditions is vital, especially panic.
- Ammo weights have been corrected and rebalanced. Mounted flashlights are functional and highly advised for low-light shooting.
ARMOR
This month weve also had focus on improving our late-game B42 armour system. As with the weapon crafting, the intent was to make something that wasnt referential to zombie media or other games, but instead something that seemed natural for the time and circumstances. We dont want crafted armour to look too anachronistic or knightly looking like they should be part of a renaissance fair. We dont want to be too goofy, although there are a few more fun options in there, and we dont want anything that doesnt look like it belongs in the Zomboid setting. Importantly armour should work like real armour, and operate within the bounds of PZ logic itself. As such a few categories that will come as part of B42 are: Metal While avoiding overt medievalisms, clearly 42s crafting update and blacksmith skills necessitate metal armour: plates, leather, straps, buckles and all. Inspirations here include Ned Kelly and his gang, while (although we always say we wont take inspiration from other games) the way Rust implements its metal armours is very much along our line of thinking though clearly well make our own way with it. Please note: there wont be any historical armour and weapon museums in b42, or suits of armour on display in mansions. With this sort of high-end crafted stuff, we wants players to have to go out into the world and engage with the new crafting system and not beeline for a spot on the map to enjoy them. Apocalyptic Vibe We had to ensure that the armour was believable and feasible, while keeping a procedural approach like our approach of the lego weapons in which existing items are adapted and melded. Then, for a more distinct look, we thought of tinges of punk rock and heavy metal imagery, with apocalyptic media such as Escape From New York serving as inspiration. From this we now have armour that can, for example, be crafted out of tyres.
Natural Ingredients One important aspect of the new armour content was that it had to support the new crafting system, as well as survival gameplay on a forest map free of civilization. Although we deliberately didnt make it too odious to progress from dirt and sticks to solving the riddle of steel, theres still a lot of middle ground between the two. Leather is an obvious candidate, and is something we have already made some pieces for. However throughout history people have used all sorts of other materials for armor as well, and we are exploring some interesting ideas based on real world examples. We dont want to go out on a limb and branch far with this, but knock on wood it will work out okay. A Sporting Chance Given that the game is set in 1993 Kentucky, theres all sorts of armour already available in the form of lootable Sportsball Gear! All sorts of pads, guards, and paddings, including two items that should make players very happy: The Athletic Cup and the Ice Hockey Neck Guards. As well, some of those items of Sports gear, like the weapons crafting, can be modified to make badass, cool, post apocalyptic armor, which brings us to
Spikes And you and the zombies can be spiky too now. [previewyoutube=qAzpPCJSlCk;full][/previewyoutube]
EXPLORING UP HIGH
Finally, were also in the process of testing Skyscrapers for playability and performance. Turns out 32 floors of zombies, all spawning at the same rate of zombies creates a LOT of zombies. So we need to get to balancing things out a bit. [previewyoutube=xQrKztRh_qE;full][/previewyoutube] Thanks all. Sadly not too much from the new crafting in motion this time. Please be assured, though, that theres a lot of work going on there, but some aspects arent ready for show, and others are waiting for a core code update to hook things into and as such arent filmable. Theres a bit of a logjam building of stuff that can be pumped out, so we hope itll be a flood of cool stuff next time round. This is such a core aspect of gameplay, which could bring huge improvements across the board, so its also needing the most consideration and care to not get wrong.
A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here
[ 2024-03-28 21:02:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
Leapdoid
Permanent underground structures are being added to the internal builds map for testing. As discussed before some basement locations will be randomised to add surprise flavour to your looting, but therell be plenty of ever-present locations that will likely be survivor favourites for taking over and making your own. Heres a fun example, which also very clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of B42s tech upgrade that governs the realistic spread of light. It really is very dark down there, and with that very claustrophobic and scary [previewyoutube=m3Tzna-nAM8;full][/previewyoutube] Another aspect of the underground structures is sound, and now weve got more and more of these in the test build our sound team will be working to cut out wildlife sounds, add muffle, echo, drips and such. Likewise, meanwhile, another focus is adjusting the noise of street level activity when you climb higher in buildings. Its also worth mentioning that in 42, or at least certainly its unstable release, you will not be able to tunnel or break down the external walls of underground structures. This is something it would be healthy for the engine to be able to do (although wed never have Minecraft-style insta-tunnels in vanilla, clearly) but is probably a can of worms best opened later down the line.
In amongst the feverish connecting of code wires from others on the crafting team, Turbo has been working on the new interface that will allow for hand-crafting items on in-game surfaces. Weve got something ready to go into the internal build, but in its current WIP form still needs some polish and probably isnt quite ready to show off before its rough edges have been smoothed out. In essence though, this work has been to cater for crafting items that arent as straightforward as ripping clothing to make bandages or opening a can of beans (which will always be feasible just in your hands) but dont necessarily need a specialized workstation either. Activities like preparing a sandwich or making a nailed baseball bat logically require a handy surface to perform the work. The way its being implemented any logical surface will do (tables, counters etc) but this sort of crafting will no longer be possible while standing in the middle of the street with zombies approaching. In terms of changes in player habits and behaviour going from 41 to 42, this will probably be the one thats felt most keenly. Theres a lot of muscle memory well be scrubbing out here, after all. However we are doing our utmost to keep it logical, and to keep it real. The current challenge has been to devise an interface that accomplishes all the tasks necessary: providing a handy way of browsing or looking up the recipes, allowing for craftingof multiple objects, allowing the use of tools to modify the quality or success chances of the crafting, and giving access to all the functionality provided in the crafting update. Were not there yet on this surface level, but functionally on the code level its all there and working and ready to be integrated into the game. Next steps will be to make the UI as clean and convenient as can be, improving and iterating as we go, as its such a core aspect of 42. (Just to reiterate, however, simple crafts like ripping bandages and so on will still be craftable in the way they are in 41: right clicking the item and clicking the relevant right click menu option. This is still the most immediate and convenient way for a player to do these split second crafts in the midst of action.) Meanwhile, of course, the results of all this new crafting continue to get pumped through from the art department, prepped and laid into the code. Heres a few that popped through recently.
We havent heard from the MP bods in a little while so lets go over to Andrei for a little while: We are very busy on the Multiplayer side of things. When Build 41 MP was first released we had three coders on our team, and now due to the success of 41 we have five. As many will be aware we have been focused on anti-cheat functionality for the last several months which is now being finalized: preventing cheating with inventory and items by moving their processing from clients to the server. Clearly simultaneous to this we have also been working on the integration of new 42-specific gameplay most notably adding support for animals into MP. We have also been moving the team onto the fixes, feature requests and changes we have heard from the community. Some highlights of this are as follows, but please note that our list is long and not everything will be mentioned! If youve felt it or found it annoying in your MP play then it is probably on our list:
Okay, before we get to some of the more in-depth stuff some quickfire smaller nuggets of interesting things that have gone into the game recently. We are making some character traits have more direct gameplay implications with a case-in-point being character builds with vision-related issues. Likewise, helmets and headgear that limit what your player can see will get similar, but not identical, effects. (PLEASE NOTE: effect seen in the following video is WIP. It was an internal video, but is too fun not to share) [previewyoutube=-yqxa8ycChg;full][/previewyoutube] The Event Zones Wild West tourist attraction is now in testing and open for business now featuring a new game item that is the wooden coffin. [previewyoutube=eExgFjby4Zc;full][/previewyoutube] Our good friend Ash from TEA has been working with us to integrate Bink into PZ, which is some cool middleware that grown-up games use to play videos, cut-scenes and the like. Were primarily getting it integrated for some cosmetic changes youll discover when you boot up the game thatll be seen at a later date, but it also means that we can now show tutorial videos and such in-game. In future it also makes moving images on TV screens, cinema screens etc. a possibility although thatll be a luxury that comes about long after 42 unstable. [previewyoutube=gCu3FFmzVjk;full][/previewyoutube] Finally, in the Fun Stuff section Foxs 4K-ification mission continues. In fact, its nearly done and higher-resolution UIs for 4K players will shortly become available in the internal test build. With higher resolutions, meanwhile comes higher resolution screen furniture. So bid a hearty hello to some of your new, newly detailed, moodles. Friendly folk, arent they?
ProfMobius, he of Minecraft heritage who we brought on board towards the end of last year, has been working on the procedurally generated wilderness to exist outside the map borders to allow for a not quite infinite but huge world outside the main map. Currently hes working on automatic blending between hand crafted content such as the edge of the map with the generated wilderness biomes, to allow for a smooth and seamless transition between them without visible borders. This will also be invaluable for modders, as currently its a rather difficult task to blend the edges of a modded map with the vanilla map, which often results in an ugly sudden border of trees or vegetation changes as you transition. The new system will blend in the procedural elements gradually into the vegetation that exists on a modded map, so the border will be less jarring. Hes also looking into generating roads so they continue from the borders of the main map, which will massively expand the canvas for modders to position their modded maps what with them now being able to space them out amongst a huge game world instead of overwriting or extending the main map which will vastly reduce the potential for conflicts.
Definitions for biomes, as well as template for road styles will be creatable in lua, allowing for easy modding to provide more diverse and new biomes with different vegetation, different road styles, and ultimately modders will also have access to the building stamping functionality provided by the basement system and could well extend that to place buildings in the world too. The full wilderness map will have a different set of biomes to choose from, allowing less realistic but more varied biomes to be feasible: travelling an hour down the road to get from a desert to a tundra, for example. For obvious reason, however, the extension of the main game map borders will be restricted to sensible Kentucky biomes, but may be able to include stuff like farmland as well as forests and plains. With this system in place, and the huge swaths of wilderness with convenient road networks to utilize, its our hope that a heavily map-modded game could have a truly huge gameplay area 100s of times bigger than currently, with potentially miles of wilderness between major locations added by modders
Okay this is the technical bit for modders I warned you about. Theres some fun gun-related stuff afterwards if you make it through. Finally, we expect this to be more of interest to modders than general players, but it will also impact the ease of future development of the game so is good news all around. For the ease of integration of various aspects of Build 43 we took some time to implement a debug gui library known as imgui into the game which replaces our somewhat time- consuming lua based debug interfaces. We realised that it would likely benefit Build 42 content too, and as such it became part of its glorious whole and indeed started giving us results the very next day. Imgui is, essentially, the industry standard for providing powerful easy-to-implement debugging uis into game engines and its already paying dividends. If you are bored at this point its fine to skip to the guns. First of all, before anyone gets excited about this being used for mod UIs for gameplay, were strictly only allowing this to be enabled when debug is activated in the game. This is because the way imgui needs to be rendered is extremely detrimental to our rendering multithreading since it doesnt support it on opengl, as well as this the entire point of the system is to provide extremely quick to implement debugging UI that favours ease of implementation over performance. As such we need to put our foot down on restricting the new UI to debugging otherwise wed quickly see our performance gains eaten up dramatically by modded games. We do plan a big UI overhaul in future but want to use UI middleware suited for actual end user gameplay, with all the performance, swishes, fades, pulses and slickness the UI finally deserved. ImGui is not that. In debug mode, the game can now run with more a development IDE feel, with various inspectors and dockable windows to examine the bowels of the game and the game viewport as a dockable and resizable window. For example you can inspect all the game UI elements active to allow for easier UI work and debugging within the game, and you can inspect variables on a plotted graph to help balance values over time. Otherwise you can inspect in-game textures and other assets, and numerous other helpful things which should really aid in demystifying the games innards for our modding community. [previewyoutube=Qy8xQC1KKh4;full][/previewyoutube] Modders will be able to dive in and look into the guts of lua and java at runtime to inspect anything they like: navigating through characters, items, or anything else to inspect them.
Imgui also contains a fully functional text editor. We plan for this to be completely integrated for lua editing within the game itself, as well as a more robust debugger to replace the slightly ropey F11 one we currently have, however this is also a challenge due to the way lua executes so will come later. In the meantime, for a nice Build 43 behind the scenes, here is the in-game AI behaviour editing UI with breakpoints, stepping and watch window:
In terms of more imminent usage for game-improvement, meanwhile, lets move over to Fenris at the gun range.
From the second imgui was made available Fenris, he of ORGM mod vintage, leapt at the opportunity to use its features to do some intensive firearms work: making them more useful at lower skill levels without breaking balance, while also providing for more tweaks for accuracy based on the players actions. Here he is on the firing range, with imgui active. [previewyoutube=sFMPtc4xGkA;full][/previewyoutube] Here, the graph shows a new AimingDelay mechanic (the blue line) first initially dropping after the player starts to stablise their aim, then rising with each shot then overlaid with the recoil delay and animation states. We see him taking timed shots and waiting briefly so his aim stabilises again. The effect can then be seen across the different skill levels, and how the rate of fire changes. Fenris work on improvement here is extensive, but aspects of his commits to the game these past two weeks have included:
We saw this pop up on the YouTubes and thought it was a great run-down on what weve been working on. Our thanks to CosmiicSteem for the vid! [previewyoutube=B9qZ3FYZvR4;full][/previewyoutube] This weeks foggy safehouse from Rick Grimes, though presumably not the real one. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2024-02-29 22:40:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, a good mix of things this doid.
Fun gameplay stuff, and a chunk of info we wanted to flag for modder-awareness and the more tech-minded amongst you. (Feel free to skip that bit to get to the more enticing gun stuff from Fenris thats become its first application.)
Onwards, then.
HUNKER INNA BUNKER
Permanent underground structures are being added to the internal builds map for testing. As discussed before some basement locations will be randomised to add surprise flavour to your looting, but therell be plenty of ever-present locations that will likely be survivor favourites for taking over and making your own. Heres a fun example, which also very clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of B42s tech upgrade that governs the realistic spread of light. It really is very dark down there, and with that very claustrophobic and scary [previewyoutube=m3Tzna-nAM8;full][/previewyoutube] Another aspect of the underground structures is sound, and now weve got more and more of these in the test build our sound team will be working to cut out wildlife sounds, add muffle, echo, drips and such. Likewise, meanwhile, another focus is adjusting the noise of street level activity when you climb higher in buildings. Its also worth mentioning that in 42, or at least certainly its unstable release, you will not be able to tunnel or break down the external walls of underground structures. This is something it would be healthy for the engine to be able to do (although wed never have Minecraft-style insta-tunnels in vanilla, clearly) but is probably a can of worms best opened later down the line.
CRAFTING
In amongst the feverish connecting of code wires from others on the crafting team, Turbo has been working on the new interface that will allow for hand-crafting items on in-game surfaces. Weve got something ready to go into the internal build, but in its current WIP form still needs some polish and probably isnt quite ready to show off before its rough edges have been smoothed out. In essence though, this work has been to cater for crafting items that arent as straightforward as ripping clothing to make bandages or opening a can of beans (which will always be feasible just in your hands) but dont necessarily need a specialized workstation either. Activities like preparing a sandwich or making a nailed baseball bat logically require a handy surface to perform the work. The way its being implemented any logical surface will do (tables, counters etc) but this sort of crafting will no longer be possible while standing in the middle of the street with zombies approaching. In terms of changes in player habits and behaviour going from 41 to 42, this will probably be the one thats felt most keenly. Theres a lot of muscle memory well be scrubbing out here, after all. However we are doing our utmost to keep it logical, and to keep it real. The current challenge has been to devise an interface that accomplishes all the tasks necessary: providing a handy way of browsing or looking up the recipes, allowing for craftingof multiple objects, allowing the use of tools to modify the quality or success chances of the crafting, and giving access to all the functionality provided in the crafting update. Were not there yet on this surface level, but functionally on the code level its all there and working and ready to be integrated into the game. Next steps will be to make the UI as clean and convenient as can be, improving and iterating as we go, as its such a core aspect of 42. (Just to reiterate, however, simple crafts like ripping bandages and so on will still be craftable in the way they are in 41: right clicking the item and clicking the relevant right click menu option. This is still the most immediate and convenient way for a player to do these split second crafts in the midst of action.) Meanwhile, of course, the results of all this new crafting continue to get pumped through from the art department, prepped and laid into the code. Heres a few that popped through recently.
MULTIPLAYER
We havent heard from the MP bods in a little while so lets go over to Andrei for a little while: We are very busy on the Multiplayer side of things. When Build 41 MP was first released we had three coders on our team, and now due to the success of 41 we have five. As many will be aware we have been focused on anti-cheat functionality for the last several months which is now being finalized: preventing cheating with inventory and items by moving their processing from clients to the server. Clearly simultaneous to this we have also been working on the integration of new 42-specific gameplay most notably adding support for animals into MP. We have also been moving the team onto the fixes, feature requests and changes we have heard from the community. Some highlights of this are as follows, but please note that our list is long and not everything will be mentioned! If youve felt it or found it annoying in your MP play then it is probably on our list:
- Privacy and Anti-Cheat work. We are improving our anti-cheat functionality, and adding various new mechanisms.
- Improving synchronization of characters between clients. We are debugging and fixing issues where zombies appear unexpectedly for the player, or players teleport instead of walking.
- PVP animations and logging. Current hit reactions in PVP lead to unfair and unfun behaviours, likewise there are issues with disconnecting during PVP. We are planning to fix this and extend PVP logging.
- Safehouses. As players will be aware, there are various issues related to exploits and safehouse raids that we need to fix. We also have a lot of things in mind for nice-to-have improvements that we hope to share with you in future blogs.
OTHER FUN STUFF
Okay, before we get to some of the more in-depth stuff some quickfire smaller nuggets of interesting things that have gone into the game recently. We are making some character traits have more direct gameplay implications with a case-in-point being character builds with vision-related issues. Likewise, helmets and headgear that limit what your player can see will get similar, but not identical, effects. (PLEASE NOTE: effect seen in the following video is WIP. It was an internal video, but is too fun not to share) [previewyoutube=-yqxa8ycChg;full][/previewyoutube] The Event Zones Wild West tourist attraction is now in testing and open for business now featuring a new game item that is the wooden coffin. [previewyoutube=eExgFjby4Zc;full][/previewyoutube] Our good friend Ash from TEA has been working with us to integrate Bink into PZ, which is some cool middleware that grown-up games use to play videos, cut-scenes and the like. Were primarily getting it integrated for some cosmetic changes youll discover when you boot up the game thatll be seen at a later date, but it also means that we can now show tutorial videos and such in-game. In future it also makes moving images on TV screens, cinema screens etc. a possibility although thatll be a luxury that comes about long after 42 unstable. [previewyoutube=gCu3FFmzVjk;full][/previewyoutube] Finally, in the Fun Stuff section Foxs 4K-ification mission continues. In fact, its nearly done and higher-resolution UIs for 4K players will shortly become available in the internal test build. With higher resolutions, meanwhile comes higher resolution screen furniture. So bid a hearty hello to some of your new, newly detailed, moodles. Friendly folk, arent they?
PROFS PROC-GEN
ProfMobius, he of Minecraft heritage who we brought on board towards the end of last year, has been working on the procedurally generated wilderness to exist outside the map borders to allow for a not quite infinite but huge world outside the main map. Currently hes working on automatic blending between hand crafted content such as the edge of the map with the generated wilderness biomes, to allow for a smooth and seamless transition between them without visible borders. This will also be invaluable for modders, as currently its a rather difficult task to blend the edges of a modded map with the vanilla map, which often results in an ugly sudden border of trees or vegetation changes as you transition. The new system will blend in the procedural elements gradually into the vegetation that exists on a modded map, so the border will be less jarring. Hes also looking into generating roads so they continue from the borders of the main map, which will massively expand the canvas for modders to position their modded maps what with them now being able to space them out amongst a huge game world instead of overwriting or extending the main map which will vastly reduce the potential for conflicts.
Definitions for biomes, as well as template for road styles will be creatable in lua, allowing for easy modding to provide more diverse and new biomes with different vegetation, different road styles, and ultimately modders will also have access to the building stamping functionality provided by the basement system and could well extend that to place buildings in the world too. The full wilderness map will have a different set of biomes to choose from, allowing less realistic but more varied biomes to be feasible: travelling an hour down the road to get from a desert to a tundra, for example. For obvious reason, however, the extension of the main game map borders will be restricted to sensible Kentucky biomes, but may be able to include stuff like farmland as well as forests and plains. With this system in place, and the huge swaths of wilderness with convenient road networks to utilize, its our hope that a heavily map-modded game could have a truly huge gameplay area 100s of times bigger than currently, with potentially miles of wilderness between major locations added by modders
IMGUI DEBUGGING
Okay this is the technical bit for modders I warned you about. Theres some fun gun-related stuff afterwards if you make it through. Finally, we expect this to be more of interest to modders than general players, but it will also impact the ease of future development of the game so is good news all around. For the ease of integration of various aspects of Build 43 we took some time to implement a debug gui library known as imgui into the game which replaces our somewhat time- consuming lua based debug interfaces. We realised that it would likely benefit Build 42 content too, and as such it became part of its glorious whole and indeed started giving us results the very next day. Imgui is, essentially, the industry standard for providing powerful easy-to-implement debugging uis into game engines and its already paying dividends. If you are bored at this point its fine to skip to the guns. First of all, before anyone gets excited about this being used for mod UIs for gameplay, were strictly only allowing this to be enabled when debug is activated in the game. This is because the way imgui needs to be rendered is extremely detrimental to our rendering multithreading since it doesnt support it on opengl, as well as this the entire point of the system is to provide extremely quick to implement debugging UI that favours ease of implementation over performance. As such we need to put our foot down on restricting the new UI to debugging otherwise wed quickly see our performance gains eaten up dramatically by modded games. We do plan a big UI overhaul in future but want to use UI middleware suited for actual end user gameplay, with all the performance, swishes, fades, pulses and slickness the UI finally deserved. ImGui is not that. In debug mode, the game can now run with more a development IDE feel, with various inspectors and dockable windows to examine the bowels of the game and the game viewport as a dockable and resizable window. For example you can inspect all the game UI elements active to allow for easier UI work and debugging within the game, and you can inspect variables on a plotted graph to help balance values over time. Otherwise you can inspect in-game textures and other assets, and numerous other helpful things which should really aid in demystifying the games innards for our modding community. [previewyoutube=Qy8xQC1KKh4;full][/previewyoutube] Modders will be able to dive in and look into the guts of lua and java at runtime to inspect anything they like: navigating through characters, items, or anything else to inspect them.
Imgui also contains a fully functional text editor. We plan for this to be completely integrated for lua editing within the game itself, as well as a more robust debugger to replace the slightly ropey F11 one we currently have, however this is also a challenge due to the way lua executes so will come later. In the meantime, for a nice Build 43 behind the scenes, here is the in-game AI behaviour editing UI with breakpoints, stepping and watch window:
In terms of more imminent usage for game-improvement, meanwhile, lets move over to Fenris at the gun range.
GUN IMPROVEMENTS
From the second imgui was made available Fenris, he of ORGM mod vintage, leapt at the opportunity to use its features to do some intensive firearms work: making them more useful at lower skill levels without breaking balance, while also providing for more tweaks for accuracy based on the players actions. Here he is on the firing range, with imgui active. [previewyoutube=sFMPtc4xGkA;full][/previewyoutube] Here, the graph shows a new AimingDelay mechanic (the blue line) first initially dropping after the player starts to stablise their aim, then rising with each shot then overlaid with the recoil delay and animation states. We see him taking timed shots and waiting briefly so his aim stabilises again. The effect can then be seen across the different skill levels, and how the rate of fire changes. Fenris work on improvement here is extensive, but aspects of his commits to the game these past two weeks have included:
- Rebalance of how hit chances and recoil are calculated, and general RoF with firearms.
- Improved the target highlighting which was previously misleading, with the colour shifting to green shades with lower hit chances than expected. This is now corrected to go green closer to 80%. Previously only aiming & reloading skills, the distance to target and how long ago you stopped moving had an effect on the highlight.
- Now Strength helps with recoil, Dexterous and All-Thumbs impact on shouldering the weapon, and Eagle-Eyed and Shortsighted can change the optimal sight range.
- Rates of Fire have been increased to more realistic expectations, but it now takes a bit of time to stabilize your aim when initially shouldering the weapon or after each shot. This time is reduced by aiming skill and various traits and conditions. Firing as fast as possible is less accurate then taking your time and lining up the shot. The lighting of the target square is also now taken into account.
FINALLY
We saw this pop up on the YouTubes and thought it was a great run-down on what weve been working on. Our thanks to CosmiicSteem for the vid! [previewyoutube=B9qZ3FYZvR4;full][/previewyoutube] This weeks foggy safehouse from Rick Grimes, though presumably not the real one. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2024-02-29 22:40:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hmm, Upgradez
Weve made huge optimizations to the rendering of the map that should have a huge impact for most lower-midrange and upwards systems. We are now easily able to get a solid framerate even on 4K, or on furthest zoom. The difference in performance is honestly surprising, and extremely satisfying. For full disclosure, however, weve discovered that a few of the absolutely lowest end systems capable of running our game are still adversely affected. This is because the solution for such large FPS optimization comes at the expense of GPU memory usage for the caching textures used. Cards with extremely low dedicated GPU memory may run into problems. Were investigating and trying to optimize this further to make sure as many systems as possible can benefit, and worst case scenario these optimizations will be disabled on systems where they would do more harm than good. However, its still entirely possible that well be able to resolve this completely and provide a large boost to even the most potato systems. More likely, well provide some kind of automatic detection to provide as large a portion of the optimizations as possible for a GPUs available memory. This will be our next task post visual-bug clear out. Generally we estimate that a huge majority of our playerbase will benefit greatly from the optimizations. Since most of the optimization frustrations we hear come from players who feel their machine should be able to run PZ at a solid framerate, we feel this work will ease the vast majority of performance sadness we see in the community.
Another improvement born out of necessity is an improved and smoother viewing cone. Due to the optimizations, it was no longer feasible to alter the lighting of tiles frequently enough to allow for the smooth light changes required for our tile based viewing cone. As such we needed to implement a completely separate and newly-coded viewing cone that didnt rely on tile lighting which truth be told we were never a huge fan of anyway. Now we have a much more accurate, smooth and fancy viewing cone and now we have extra hands on it internally feedback is being collated so that we can provide plenty of requested options to allow you to tweak it this way and that. (Making it more or less visible probably being the primary one.) [previewyoutube=hdklsRfi8zc;full][/previewyoutube]
The new lighting system is now in full testing, and seems to be working pretty well so far. This new propagation system allows for much prettier and more convincing lighting of the world, especially now we have basements which would have been extremely unsatisfying with our existing 41 lighting. 41s system basically had an ambient light level that permeated the entirety of the world depending on the time of the day. Then on top of that indoors would get a reduction in ambient light to make them slightly darker than outside. The new system propagates light from light sources such as bulbs, or the sun, across tiles to simulate reflective light. Its not something cutting-edge that youd expect from the Unreal Engine, or something, but for our purposes its extremely effective. It allows for light from a window to creep across the room, allows for rooms with no natural lighting to be in complete darkness even during the day, allows more immersive coloured lighting, and all manner of other things not previously possible in PZ. Most importantly of all, it fixes the room lighting issues that plague b41 when room layouts are changed with sledgehammers leaving strange lighting artifacts on the floor, since all lighting is calculated purely based on the geometry of the rooms now. With this will now come gameplay balance theres debate on the team as to whether the player character should have a little more clarity in the darkness, some internal spots are a little more inky-blue than black, and new gameplay elements like not being able to read in the dark will need finetuning to the new visual. Also seen in the following video, for extra immersion, doors are now fully animated as discussed last time. This makes a huge difference to the feel of interacting with them during gameplay. [previewyoutube=BgM3zjtGynE;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=1lf0XaUlE8A;full][/previewyoutube]
Were still in the process of adding basement spots around the map whether random or permanent. However, as discussed previously, the new upgraded engine allows support for levels from -32 to +32. This allows for both much more convincingly tall skyscrapers for city locations, as well as for basements and potentially sprawling underground complexes. The mapping and modding is gonna be wild. Part of this is also strapping in engine capabilities to help us in future and as such please take the following as an EXAMPLE video of what we can now do in PZ. Our coders and mappers have enough on their plates at the moment, and as such this is not a confirmed feature for when 42 goes Unstable. It will, however, be feasible within the engine which is why weve chosen to show it. Essentially, EP has been working on some extra physics engine functionality to allow for the physics to exist on floors other than the ground floor as well as providing new physics shapes that in future will allow for this. This work was also a necessary foothold for other physics-based features we have brewing for future versions. [previewyoutube=thfgbPM-oRw;full][/previewyoutube] Please note also, just to quell any mapper fears again, these extensive engine and map data structure changes will not make existing map mods invalid. All maps will need to be reexported in the new versions of the tools when we release them, most likely around the time we put out the Unstable beta, but they wont need to be redone from scratch.
Were waiting on a big commit to fill in some of the gaps in the crafting system process itself, so in the mean-time lets focus on some of the fun stuff thatll be coming out the other end: weapons. Clearly we already have the more normal and traditional blacksmithed weapons for B42 already, and likewise the more ancient-styled stone axes and such. With these were avoiding anything specific to any period or culture, going for real life examples that were common across history and geography, and that could pass as something reasonably iron age, medieval, or post-apocalypse. We have consulted an expert in these matters regarding the designs and selection, and were also providing them with further weapon designs as we make them for feedback. But, as we stretch out into our apocalypse we also wanted something a little more apocalypse-y.
As such, currently whats being wrapped up are post-apocalypse improvised weapons. These include classic examples like the nail-spiked weapons, but also weapons that have been constructed with welding and metalshop tools. With these designs a conscious decision has been made to not think about weapons from other games or zombie media, and instead research was conducted regarding real life improvised /crafted weapons. This included stuff like police collections of seized weapons and trench warfare, with additional inspiration from weapons in Max Mad-style post-apocalypse media. We also took on something of a procedural approach, where we looked at the weapons and items that existed (or could exist) in the game, and imagined them being combined like Lego bricks to create weapons. Granted in many cases we just re-invented the wheel, but that helped keep things grounded, realistic, and consistent with the rest of the game.
Although we tried to make these weapons realistic and believable, we have allowed for a couple of weapons to be slightly (reasonably) zany. Were allowed to have a little fun, after all, and all those weapons will also have realistic drawbacks when wielded. Simultaneous to this, we are also adding some broken versions of existing Zomboid weapons. Some of these broken weapons and their parts will be used in crafting other weapons, but these fragments also exist for gory consequences when weapons break when bashing a zombie with them. I dont quite know why were using this strange moustachioed gentleman to demonstrate these today, but lets have a proper look at him in any case. Curious chap.
Finally, a big welcome to Nick from our colleagues at TEA Games who has joined us to help us implement something we call PenguinTech after the time Zac got two million on-screen dancing penguins into a Wii game. Originally slated for B41 this will, in essence, be a clever way of optimizing our zombie hordes pooling what states they are in, and then sharing a smaller pool of zombie skeletons for the same anims. With this, fingers crossed, well get better performance when theres a horde on-screen and in turn we can be less dainty with their application in your survival. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2024-01-25 17:48:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Its been a really big week for us, as we merged the second-to-last element of Build 42 into the main codebase across the rest of the team which is the long awaited tech upgrade which brings a whole host of improvements to the engine.
Its currently being tested and the feedback has been super positive so far. This said, its also brought over lots of small bugs, visual glitches, and issues with new depth map clipping items incorrectly. Nothing over-dramatic, but enough stuff to keep testers and coders alike fully occupied.
This is where a lot of our brains have been at recently, so we thought wed give you an update on the engine as it now stands while testers run around kicking its tires alongside some videos they have made along the way.
Likewise, we also have some examples of some of its new capabilities that we will be able to explore in future perhaps during the Unstable beta, perhaps beyond.
So, a run-down of what this tech upgrade brings into the game:
OPTIMIZATION
Weve made huge optimizations to the rendering of the map that should have a huge impact for most lower-midrange and upwards systems. We are now easily able to get a solid framerate even on 4K, or on furthest zoom. The difference in performance is honestly surprising, and extremely satisfying. For full disclosure, however, weve discovered that a few of the absolutely lowest end systems capable of running our game are still adversely affected. This is because the solution for such large FPS optimization comes at the expense of GPU memory usage for the caching textures used. Cards with extremely low dedicated GPU memory may run into problems. Were investigating and trying to optimize this further to make sure as many systems as possible can benefit, and worst case scenario these optimizations will be disabled on systems where they would do more harm than good. However, its still entirely possible that well be able to resolve this completely and provide a large boost to even the most potato systems. More likely, well provide some kind of automatic detection to provide as large a portion of the optimizations as possible for a GPUs available memory. This will be our next task post visual-bug clear out. Generally we estimate that a huge majority of our playerbase will benefit greatly from the optimizations. Since most of the optimization frustrations we hear come from players who feel their machine should be able to run PZ at a solid framerate, we feel this work will ease the vast majority of performance sadness we see in the community.
VIEW CONE
Another improvement born out of necessity is an improved and smoother viewing cone. Due to the optimizations, it was no longer feasible to alter the lighting of tiles frequently enough to allow for the smooth light changes required for our tile based viewing cone. As such we needed to implement a completely separate and newly-coded viewing cone that didnt rely on tile lighting which truth be told we were never a huge fan of anyway. Now we have a much more accurate, smooth and fancy viewing cone and now we have extra hands on it internally feedback is being collated so that we can provide plenty of requested options to allow you to tweak it this way and that. (Making it more or less visible probably being the primary one.) [previewyoutube=hdklsRfi8zc;full][/previewyoutube]
LIGHT PROPAGATION
The new lighting system is now in full testing, and seems to be working pretty well so far. This new propagation system allows for much prettier and more convincing lighting of the world, especially now we have basements which would have been extremely unsatisfying with our existing 41 lighting. 41s system basically had an ambient light level that permeated the entirety of the world depending on the time of the day. Then on top of that indoors would get a reduction in ambient light to make them slightly darker than outside. The new system propagates light from light sources such as bulbs, or the sun, across tiles to simulate reflective light. Its not something cutting-edge that youd expect from the Unreal Engine, or something, but for our purposes its extremely effective. It allows for light from a window to creep across the room, allows for rooms with no natural lighting to be in complete darkness even during the day, allows more immersive coloured lighting, and all manner of other things not previously possible in PZ. Most importantly of all, it fixes the room lighting issues that plague b41 when room layouts are changed with sledgehammers leaving strange lighting artifacts on the floor, since all lighting is calculated purely based on the geometry of the rooms now. With this will now come gameplay balance theres debate on the team as to whether the player character should have a little more clarity in the darkness, some internal spots are a little more inky-blue than black, and new gameplay elements like not being able to read in the dark will need finetuning to the new visual. Also seen in the following video, for extra immersion, doors are now fully animated as discussed last time. This makes a huge difference to the feel of interacting with them during gameplay. [previewyoutube=BgM3zjtGynE;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=1lf0XaUlE8A;full][/previewyoutube]
OVERGROUND UNDERGROUND
Were still in the process of adding basement spots around the map whether random or permanent. However, as discussed previously, the new upgraded engine allows support for levels from -32 to +32. This allows for both much more convincingly tall skyscrapers for city locations, as well as for basements and potentially sprawling underground complexes. The mapping and modding is gonna be wild. Part of this is also strapping in engine capabilities to help us in future and as such please take the following as an EXAMPLE video of what we can now do in PZ. Our coders and mappers have enough on their plates at the moment, and as such this is not a confirmed feature for when 42 goes Unstable. It will, however, be feasible within the engine which is why weve chosen to show it. Essentially, EP has been working on some extra physics engine functionality to allow for the physics to exist on floors other than the ground floor as well as providing new physics shapes that in future will allow for this. This work was also a necessary foothold for other physics-based features we have brewing for future versions. [previewyoutube=thfgbPM-oRw;full][/previewyoutube] Please note also, just to quell any mapper fears again, these extensive engine and map data structure changes will not make existing map mods invalid. All maps will need to be reexported in the new versions of the tools when we release them, most likely around the time we put out the Unstable beta, but they wont need to be redone from scratch.
MEANWHILE...
Were waiting on a big commit to fill in some of the gaps in the crafting system process itself, so in the mean-time lets focus on some of the fun stuff thatll be coming out the other end: weapons. Clearly we already have the more normal and traditional blacksmithed weapons for B42 already, and likewise the more ancient-styled stone axes and such. With these were avoiding anything specific to any period or culture, going for real life examples that were common across history and geography, and that could pass as something reasonably iron age, medieval, or post-apocalypse. We have consulted an expert in these matters regarding the designs and selection, and were also providing them with further weapon designs as we make them for feedback. But, as we stretch out into our apocalypse we also wanted something a little more apocalypse-y.
As such, currently whats being wrapped up are post-apocalypse improvised weapons. These include classic examples like the nail-spiked weapons, but also weapons that have been constructed with welding and metalshop tools. With these designs a conscious decision has been made to not think about weapons from other games or zombie media, and instead research was conducted regarding real life improvised /crafted weapons. This included stuff like police collections of seized weapons and trench warfare, with additional inspiration from weapons in Max Mad-style post-apocalypse media. We also took on something of a procedural approach, where we looked at the weapons and items that existed (or could exist) in the game, and imagined them being combined like Lego bricks to create weapons. Granted in many cases we just re-invented the wheel, but that helped keep things grounded, realistic, and consistent with the rest of the game.
Although we tried to make these weapons realistic and believable, we have allowed for a couple of weapons to be slightly (reasonably) zany. Were allowed to have a little fun, after all, and all those weapons will also have realistic drawbacks when wielded. Simultaneous to this, we are also adding some broken versions of existing Zomboid weapons. Some of these broken weapons and their parts will be used in crafting other weapons, but these fragments also exist for gory consequences when weapons break when bashing a zombie with them. I dont quite know why were using this strange moustachioed gentleman to demonstrate these today, but lets have a proper look at him in any case. Curious chap.
BACK TO ANIMS-LAND
Finally, a big welcome to Nick from our colleagues at TEA Games who has joined us to help us implement something we call PenguinTech after the time Zac got two million on-screen dancing penguins into a Wii game. Originally slated for B41 this will, in essence, be a clever way of optimizing our zombie hordes pooling what states they are in, and then sharing a smaller pool of zombie skeletons for the same anims. With this, fingers crossed, well get better performance when theres a horde on-screen and in turn we can be less dainty with their application in your survival. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2024-01-25 17:48:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Zleigh Ride
With the last Thurzdoid some people arrived at the mistaken impression that in normal b42 play, the iron ore deposits would exist on the map and be the primary source of metal for crafting. While were not ruling this out in the long term, and itll certainly be the only source of metal to be found within the wilderness map (more on this later), the primary logical source of metal would always initially be found within the now abandoned civilized world itself.
For several builds now, players have been able to dismantle various metal furniture and other objects in the world, including wrecked vehicles, to get metal bars, sheets and scrap. This still exists in build 42, and should serve as the primary source of metalin various sorts and sizesfor crafting.
This also includes taking apart railroad tracks, which is fortunate in that you can use a piece of the track to construct a makeshift anvil. On the subject of modern metalworking, here are some new workstations, a standing bandsaw, drill press, and arch furnace. The bandsaw currently can be used to cut metal pieces into smaller metal pieces, which can save you some wear and tear on your hacksaw, and the drill press can be used to put holes into metal, such as fabricating tools such as header tools for making nails or a drawplate for making wire, among other uses. The arc furnace can be used for melting down assorted items to cast various metal ingots and bars. Now this isnt the extend of the uses of these workstations, or the end of what were adding in this vein.
Speaking of other workstations, here are some of the new agricultural stations in b42, herb and crop drying racks, stone quern, and mill, as well as some new crops: Barley, Flax, Hemp (industrial), Hops, Rye, Sugar Beets, Sunflowers, and Tobacco. This gives us a great foundation of resources for textiles, cordage, brewing and oils. We have more crops coming, including some winter crops, garden vegetables, hot peppers, and some pretty herbs.
Moving on to things relevant for the wilderness, here is an example of a campsite made using primitive tier resources. It includes a small worksurface boulder and tree stump, which are naturally spawning workstations that can be used for some basic crafts, including some bootstrapping crafts for getting crafting up and started. Heres also an example of a small cabin that could be built in the wilderness.
Moving on to the blacksmithing and crafted weapon related matters, as some crafted items consist of handles and heads, some that can be sharp,
Appropriate items will track those conditions as such:
There are some other new and very interesting statistics that will be associated with tool and weapon parts, but well discuss this later once its implemented. The goal of these will be to provide much more variety to items, and much greater reward from higher skill crafting, and looting of rarer items.
Aside from being used as part of the guts and bolts of the crafting system, this also allows for a more interesting procedural weapon upkeep and breakage system. The upkeep stuff is intended to be warm and immersive, but without an excessive amount of micromanagement. With the examples like the hatchet and spear, you can use the classic items like Duct Tape, Wood Glue, or Zip-Ties to repair the handle, or carve a new one and replace it. Sharpness affects weapon damage and criticals. Weapons at 0 sharpness can still be used to kill, but are less effective, will take longer to chop down a door or a tree, and will accumulate damage faster. Sharpness can be restored using a Whetstone, but is temporarily capped by the weapons Head Condition (or general condition for items like knives). Minor head damage can be repaired with a Whetstone, greater damage with a Grindstone, and a broken blade can be used to make a smaller blade or other item. With the procedural damage system, Sharpness, Handle Condition, and Head Condition all are affected by usage and combat, with Sharpness generally draining the fastest, followed by Handle Condition. When Handle or Head Condition hits 0, the fun stuff can happen with Procedural Weapon Breakage. With the Hatchet, when the Handle Condition reaches 0, the handle breaks, and the Head goes flying. With a larger Axe or other weapon, you may end with with a usable crude wooden club in your hands. Spears basically work the same way, but leave you with a broken stick in your hands and can leave the Spear head embedded in a zombie. When Head Condition reaches 0, the Handle still breaks, but a broken Head is left on the ground or in a zombie, which may be salavged to make something new. Broken Handles can generally be carved to make smaller handles or other wooden objects.
This procedural weapon crafting and breaking also serves to give us the bits and pieces to make some nice post apocalyptic makeshift weapons.
Speaking of crafted weapons, Spears are being heavily rethought, reworked, and rebalanced. This is a case where the weapon part and breakage stuff really helps to make Spears more cool and spear-like. You will be able to make simple wooden spears from appropriate items, such as Brooms or Hockey Sticks, as well as Long Sticks, and a Wooden Spear can be Fire Hardened for greater durability and a minor boost to performance . Heres also some crafted blades and the spears and knives made from them:
Last time we introduced you to our latest recruit, former legendary modder and Minecraft dev ProfMobius. We wanted to get him settled into Zomboid in an area he felt comfortable within, and it made sense for him to perform a trick he last played for Mojang. As such, his first port of call is to look into a wilderness procedural generation system. Please note this isnt full procedural generation and not intended to create random towns and cities, and at least for now, is purely to provide random wilderness. This will serve two important purposes for Build 42. 1) It will allow for the current borders of the premade map to cease to have a black impassible border, and will instead allow players to be able to explore outside the confines of the map a very, very large (though probably not infinite) distance. This will allow players to establish themselves a greater distance away from the premade map and will expand the scope of wilderness based gameplay, as well as locations for settlements that can exist considerable distances away from the existing towns within the game. 2) The second purpose will be to allow for servers optionally to be able to generate a complete wilderness map with no towns, roads or other signs of civilization. Not only will this be a good testbed for ensuring that none of our primitive and medieval crafting trees rely upon anything a player would need to loot, but will provide a basis for vanilla and especially modded multiplayer servers to focus entirely around crafting and community building, rather than looting and zombies. The random map generation will have large biomes (all will be sensible for a Kentucky climate environment for the vanilla map border generation, but we may be able to be more imaginative and less realistic on the complete random map generation, and discussions are still happening about this) to add variety and things to discover. While we will not be looking to generate fully random maps with buildings, towns, roads etc at this point, its important to point out that the random basement system implemented into Build 42 has required the ability for binary exported buildings from our building editor to be able to be injected or stamped into the game world at run-time, and this functionality will be accessible to modders. We fully expect modders to have all the power they need to be able to expand the wilderness map with random towns and road networks. It may be something wed consider exploring at some point once the main map is complete, but until then its not something we want to distract from the hand-crafted game world. While we believe random maps would be a cool addition for those who have played the game so much the existing map and popular modded maps no longer feel fresh, we would prefer new players always had the traditional handcrafted map in their first throes of survival. Heres a quick rough cut of something created with the earliest draft of ProfMobius world generation tool hopefully the start of something cool [previewyoutube=p6H8jSHWuxU;full][/previewyoutube]
Just to underline our continued dedication to handcrafted mapping, we have a backlog of many and varied Challenge maps and spin-off maps waiting in the wings for main game inclusion. The one now stumbling and blinking into the stark and glaring light of day is Xeonyxs Many Years Later. Given the sparsity of normal looting spots this is due to be another of our testbeds for our revamped post-apocalyptic crafting, but its pretty fun in terms of just how full of despair it feels. The recent addition of rats and wildlife also really set it off now. Heres a quick vid from recent explorations: [previewyoutube=_jk3JMXAcGw;full][/previewyoutube]
Finally, Amz, our video producer and the most Christmas tree must be up the day after Halloween Christmassy person in any room thats ever existed has put together this amazing John Lewisesque video! We all love it and hope you will too! Enjoy! [previewyoutube=zA7260FI9rM;full][/previewyoutube] Oh, and in weird bug news we had a problem with infinitely spawning chickens. Things swiftly got out of hand. [previewyoutube=EjMl595R9tI;leftthumb][/previewyoutube]
Wed like to point people in the direction of a friend of TISs new zombie survival game thats carving out a slightly different area of the zombie survival niche, a bit more actiony and aiming for something in-between State of Decay and Zomboid in the Venn diagram of zombie survival. If you have place in your heart for another great zombie game, especially one thats plenty of fun to play in co-op, make sure to check out HumanitZ on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1766060/HumanitZ
[ 2023-12-21 13:07:13 CET ] [ Original post ]
Happy winter religious festival if you celebrate it, or if you have it in a months time, or just if you think its nice because you get a few days off while your neighbours drown in eggnog!
Heres the December news round.
CRAFTING TEAM UPDATE
With the last Thurzdoid some people arrived at the mistaken impression that in normal b42 play, the iron ore deposits would exist on the map and be the primary source of metal for crafting. While were not ruling this out in the long term, and itll certainly be the only source of metal to be found within the wilderness map (more on this later), the primary logical source of metal would always initially be found within the now abandoned civilized world itself.
For several builds now, players have been able to dismantle various metal furniture and other objects in the world, including wrecked vehicles, to get metal bars, sheets and scrap. This still exists in build 42, and should serve as the primary source of metalin various sorts and sizesfor crafting.
This also includes taking apart railroad tracks, which is fortunate in that you can use a piece of the track to construct a makeshift anvil. On the subject of modern metalworking, here are some new workstations, a standing bandsaw, drill press, and arch furnace. The bandsaw currently can be used to cut metal pieces into smaller metal pieces, which can save you some wear and tear on your hacksaw, and the drill press can be used to put holes into metal, such as fabricating tools such as header tools for making nails or a drawplate for making wire, among other uses. The arc furnace can be used for melting down assorted items to cast various metal ingots and bars. Now this isnt the extend of the uses of these workstations, or the end of what were adding in this vein.
Speaking of other workstations, here are some of the new agricultural stations in b42, herb and crop drying racks, stone quern, and mill, as well as some new crops: Barley, Flax, Hemp (industrial), Hops, Rye, Sugar Beets, Sunflowers, and Tobacco. This gives us a great foundation of resources for textiles, cordage, brewing and oils. We have more crops coming, including some winter crops, garden vegetables, hot peppers, and some pretty herbs.
Moving on to things relevant for the wilderness, here is an example of a campsite made using primitive tier resources. It includes a small worksurface boulder and tree stump, which are naturally spawning workstations that can be used for some basic crafts, including some bootstrapping crafts for getting crafting up and started. Heres also an example of a small cabin that could be built in the wilderness.
Moving on to the blacksmithing and crafted weapon related matters, as some crafted items consist of handles and heads, some that can be sharp,
Appropriate items will track those conditions as such:
There are some other new and very interesting statistics that will be associated with tool and weapon parts, but well discuss this later once its implemented. The goal of these will be to provide much more variety to items, and much greater reward from higher skill crafting, and looting of rarer items.
Aside from being used as part of the guts and bolts of the crafting system, this also allows for a more interesting procedural weapon upkeep and breakage system. The upkeep stuff is intended to be warm and immersive, but without an excessive amount of micromanagement. With the examples like the hatchet and spear, you can use the classic items like Duct Tape, Wood Glue, or Zip-Ties to repair the handle, or carve a new one and replace it. Sharpness affects weapon damage and criticals. Weapons at 0 sharpness can still be used to kill, but are less effective, will take longer to chop down a door or a tree, and will accumulate damage faster. Sharpness can be restored using a Whetstone, but is temporarily capped by the weapons Head Condition (or general condition for items like knives). Minor head damage can be repaired with a Whetstone, greater damage with a Grindstone, and a broken blade can be used to make a smaller blade or other item. With the procedural damage system, Sharpness, Handle Condition, and Head Condition all are affected by usage and combat, with Sharpness generally draining the fastest, followed by Handle Condition. When Handle or Head Condition hits 0, the fun stuff can happen with Procedural Weapon Breakage. With the Hatchet, when the Handle Condition reaches 0, the handle breaks, and the Head goes flying. With a larger Axe or other weapon, you may end with with a usable crude wooden club in your hands. Spears basically work the same way, but leave you with a broken stick in your hands and can leave the Spear head embedded in a zombie. When Head Condition reaches 0, the Handle still breaks, but a broken Head is left on the ground or in a zombie, which may be salavged to make something new. Broken Handles can generally be carved to make smaller handles or other wooden objects.
This procedural weapon crafting and breaking also serves to give us the bits and pieces to make some nice post apocalyptic makeshift weapons.
Speaking of crafted weapons, Spears are being heavily rethought, reworked, and rebalanced. This is a case where the weapon part and breakage stuff really helps to make Spears more cool and spear-like. You will be able to make simple wooden spears from appropriate items, such as Brooms or Hockey Sticks, as well as Long Sticks, and a Wooden Spear can be Fire Hardened for greater durability and a minor boost to performance . Heres also some crafted blades and the spears and knives made from them:
THE PROFESSORS PROC-GEN LABORATORY
Last time we introduced you to our latest recruit, former legendary modder and Minecraft dev ProfMobius. We wanted to get him settled into Zomboid in an area he felt comfortable within, and it made sense for him to perform a trick he last played for Mojang. As such, his first port of call is to look into a wilderness procedural generation system. Please note this isnt full procedural generation and not intended to create random towns and cities, and at least for now, is purely to provide random wilderness. This will serve two important purposes for Build 42. 1) It will allow for the current borders of the premade map to cease to have a black impassible border, and will instead allow players to be able to explore outside the confines of the map a very, very large (though probably not infinite) distance. This will allow players to establish themselves a greater distance away from the premade map and will expand the scope of wilderness based gameplay, as well as locations for settlements that can exist considerable distances away from the existing towns within the game. 2) The second purpose will be to allow for servers optionally to be able to generate a complete wilderness map with no towns, roads or other signs of civilization. Not only will this be a good testbed for ensuring that none of our primitive and medieval crafting trees rely upon anything a player would need to loot, but will provide a basis for vanilla and especially modded multiplayer servers to focus entirely around crafting and community building, rather than looting and zombies. The random map generation will have large biomes (all will be sensible for a Kentucky climate environment for the vanilla map border generation, but we may be able to be more imaginative and less realistic on the complete random map generation, and discussions are still happening about this) to add variety and things to discover. While we will not be looking to generate fully random maps with buildings, towns, roads etc at this point, its important to point out that the random basement system implemented into Build 42 has required the ability for binary exported buildings from our building editor to be able to be injected or stamped into the game world at run-time, and this functionality will be accessible to modders. We fully expect modders to have all the power they need to be able to expand the wilderness map with random towns and road networks. It may be something wed consider exploring at some point once the main map is complete, but until then its not something we want to distract from the hand-crafted game world. While we believe random maps would be a cool addition for those who have played the game so much the existing map and popular modded maps no longer feel fresh, we would prefer new players always had the traditional handcrafted map in their first throes of survival. Heres a quick rough cut of something created with the earliest draft of ProfMobius world generation tool hopefully the start of something cool [previewyoutube=p6H8jSHWuxU;full][/previewyoutube]
MANY YEARS LATER
Just to underline our continued dedication to handcrafted mapping, we have a backlog of many and varied Challenge maps and spin-off maps waiting in the wings for main game inclusion. The one now stumbling and blinking into the stark and glaring light of day is Xeonyxs Many Years Later. Given the sparsity of normal looting spots this is due to be another of our testbeds for our revamped post-apocalyptic crafting, but its pretty fun in terms of just how full of despair it feels. The recent addition of rats and wildlife also really set it off now. Heres a quick vid from recent explorations: [previewyoutube=_jk3JMXAcGw;full][/previewyoutube]
CHRISTMAS ANIMALS
Finally, Amz, our video producer and the most Christmas tree must be up the day after Halloween Christmassy person in any room thats ever existed has put together this amazing John Lewisesque video! We all love it and hope you will too! Enjoy! [previewyoutube=zA7260FI9rM;full][/previewyoutube] Oh, and in weird bug news we had a problem with infinitely spawning chickens. Things swiftly got out of hand. [previewyoutube=EjMl595R9tI;leftthumb][/previewyoutube]
Oh the Humanitz!
Wed like to point people in the direction of a friend of TISs new zombie survival game thats carving out a slightly different area of the zombie survival niche, a bit more actiony and aiming for something in-between State of Decay and Zomboid in the Venn diagram of zombie survival. If you have place in your heart for another great zombie game, especially one thats plenty of fun to play in co-op, make sure to check out HumanitZ on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1766060/HumanitZ
[ 2023-12-21 13:07:13 CET ] [ Original post ]
One Door OpenZ
Another exciting addition to the build 42 tech upgrade branch has just dropped. The tech upgrade branch is what contains our optimizations, improved view cone, basement/skyscraper technology and now an immersive improvement that weve wanted for a long time, that could potentially lead to many cool additional gameplay opportunities that werent possible before. [previewyoutube=Ev2genBbzb4;full][/previewyoutube] Thats right, kids, doors have now entered the third dimension. Where before doors would just flip instantly on the tile the moment they are opened or closed, now they are animated and use the tech branchs depth buffer. This is obviously a huge improvement for immersion, but could potentially lead to cool new mechanics in future (note, certainly not b42s initial release) like opening doors at different speeds, doors being left slightly open, peeking, bashing open, one-way fire doors and such. While easy to overlook, our doors are pretty much unchanged since the 0.1.5d days yet also one of the most fundamental things about PZ gameplay so getting some visual niceness, and some future gameplay opportunities, feels like a win. So lets have a quick noisy vid in which doors open and slam shut in unison. [previewyoutube=6Wbt795liVQ;full][/previewyoutube] (In future we clearly also already have the tech to have doors and visibly opening and closing on vehicles too, its already in the code and used by many mods, however in the main game its always been the plan to couple this to in-car character animations, visible interiors and such.)
Were operating in various different areas with crafting, but the one thats becoming most interesting and fleshed out with recipes and new items is definitely blacksmithing which has come a long way in the last month. So lets head over to Blair to have a chat about the ways in which youll be getting to grips with the creation of some of these beauties.
For blacksmithing in build b42 we have the tiers, workstations, and materials worked out; now most of the crafting recipes have been made as well, and its a case where content is being added almost daily as the art assets are completed. Most items that one could reasonably expect to be blacksmithed can be blacksmithed, and in most cases the resultant item is a more rugged, crafted version than the default version of the item that you may be used to.
In many cases there are multiple tiers of items, requiring better skills, stations and materials to produce, where it serves the game. Weapons are an example of where this extra attention is being put into the system, where there are distinct tiers of the basic types, that differ in both appearance and performance.
A lot of work still needs to be done with balancing, as well as getting the fun stuff like animations of the character performing the actions, with fire and smoke. Our artists are hard at work making the assets for all the new items needed for this, but otherwise blacksmithing could be considered mostly done; you could say that all of the design hurdles have been crossed, and we have solved the Riddle of Steel. One conceit of b42 crafting is that you should be able to start on a theoretical all forest map; this isnt a concrete thing that were testing yet, but were providing foundation for it. Steel production from nothing being one of them.
Although iron ore outcroppings are more commonplace in games than in real life Kentucky, we have tiles of them, for use for our own forest maps, and maps of modders. (ALERT ALERT: we are aware this is quite game-y, and may well refine in future. For now, however, it works for our purposes.) Once you have smashed them into iron ore, you can dig a charcoal pit, and build a primitive forge and furnace, and use the charcoal to extract an iron bloom from iron ore. With a stone hammer and some crude wooden tongs (which wont survive the process) workable iron is beaten out of the iron bloom, and that iron can be used to produce simple iron implements such as tongs, smithing hammers, nails, and basic masonry tools.
Eventually you can work your way up to building a proper come kiln, for both making charcoal, and also coke out of the charcoal for steel production, as well as a smelting furnace, and then an intermediary forge and a grindstone. With this you can produce medium-quality iron implements, that benefit from proper hardening and quenching, as well as higher carbon content. From there one would work there way up to a blast furnace, for producing steel, and then, with the steel, cast and harden a proper blacksmithing anvil and make an advanced forge, and eventually a metalworking bench for making high quality, precision tools and items.
Elsewhere, meanwhile, we have been going through the game and converting existing systems to the new fluid mechanics that come as a part of the crafting system. A good example of this, as it clearly shows in the end product, are our hair dyes even if they are relatively cosmetic as far as the game-proper goes. In the following video, then, you see the dyes being transferred to (and used from) any fluid container whether bottles, cans or buckets. Here too you can see them being mixed, and the resulting new colour being applied to the characters hair. (Elements of this still WIP) [previewyoutube=Si0LoUFXK5s;full][/previewyoutube]
Weve given you more sandbox power over how much gasoline is stored beneath Knox gas stations, as previous work in the area didnt go far enough. Youll have options to select whether gas pumps are infinite, what their minimum and maximum potential amounts of stored gasoline is, and indeed what the chances are of it spawning completely empty (see image below). We have also made these a little more user-friendly with better right click feedback on power, required containers, admin info on fuel remaining etc. Weve also added a more visible fuel caps on our car models, and indeed a fuel-side indicator icon on your vehicles dashboard.
After the successful integration of the body noises, hey!s and psst!s of a real actor and a real actress we made the call to widen the net a little and get a variety of different people to record specific voice/noise sets for the game. There will now be four male and four female voices that you can choose at character creation stage, which will also mean that in MP those around you will likely have slightly different puffs, pants and combat exertions. Likewise having a more particular sound to your voice and character will likely be good for your own personal RP reasons. (Please note here, again, that exertion noise frequency hasnt been 100% balanced yet.) [previewyoutube=6N-g3U8EB50;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=P-F606_oiVE;full][/previewyoutube]
Its relatively easy to slot in new animals to RJs system, the modding scene will likely be fairly extravagant, so while fixing bugs with our chickens, cows, sheep and pigs hes also slipped in some raccoons and wild turkeys to roam alongside the deer.
[previewyoutube=ROhZaTzvSC0;full][/previewyoutube]
Foxs up-rezzing (and slight tidy-up) of all the games many windows, icons, menus and general game furniture continues. In fact, were now at a point in which many aspects of the game can be played at 4k without the need for squinting and a magnifying glass. Folk with higher-res screens have long-suffered with Zomboid, so were excited to finally put this issue to bed as can be seen in the following 4K video. Please note, however, that some windows here still feel a little crowded we probably need to loosen up the crafting window that could use a bit more padding, the tabs feel a little close together etc. [previewyoutube=vrBoz9t1s0E;full][/previewyoutube]
The map expansion, and elevation/lowering, continues apace. Something else we are bringing to your exploration is a little more colour and character to the places you are surviving within as such therell be more variety of things left on whiteboards and chalkboards in schools, universities and laboratories for example. Meanwhile, theres clearly elements of signage Americana we can use for our game too. Case in point, being a wide range of different signs outside our churches.
Weve also got an, as yet unnamed, Wild West tourist attraction going into the game which could also potentially be a good place to find some of the crafting gear thatll be new to 42. Maybe a couple of cowboy actor zeds shambling about as well, for good measure.
We generally dont populate the map with Mad Max lookin zeds, but people certainly seem to like having a little more freedom in terms of the threads you choose to go a hunting and a looting in. As a side project from his crafting duties, then, Blair has worked with animator Martin to improve the clipping issues folk often come up against with certain combinations of clothing. This issue was becoming more and more apparent with the crafted straps and metal shin guards being developed in the blacksmithing aspect of 42, so needed nipping in the bud. Essentially, now clothing items and body locations can have set definitions which then instruct the game to use alternate clothing models in particular circumstances. So a different arm guard model, for example, will be automatically used if the character is wearing a bulky jacket. We feel that this will have massive potential for modding. On top of this we have also made it so accoutrements like limb armour (shin pads, for example) can go on either limb; you can wear just one, or a pair, or a mismatched pair. This said, so its not too annoying, theyll appear as matched pairs in loot or on zeds. Finally, while not entirely linked to this endeavour but still in the same ballpark, helmets/headgear/masks all now affect your vision cone and your hearing (modestly) which weve added as a balancing measure for when crafted helmets are in the game.
Oh, and the above also means we can have (American) Football Shoulder Pads in-game too, so expect some varsity jock zombies wearing those around campus also. Heres a somewhat silly, but fun, screenie showing a little bit more of what this system can create including a bunch of the new items that will be craftable with the new blacksmith/forge systems.
Weve expanded a lot over the past year, and we had called time on anyone else for fear of things running away with themselves. Clearly Soul Filcher joined recently, and unmentioned in this blog weve got Fenris in the guts of our Discord integration, Patrick with his (very encouraging) experimentation with ragdolls, and theres a hugely experienced guy called Matt who we havent announced before whos putting in foundations for future engine improvements. After all this we mentally shut the door on likely changes and additions, until Zac, the coding maestro behind 41s animation systems, made his return to work after a long period away this month and is now working the kinks out of issues weve had since he was last with us with character rotation and movement. Heres a link to show his WIP improvement though it might not be super-perceptible in vid-form. When this is all sorted the in-game character should feel more responsive, and also give us more flexibility when improving on the general animation suite. He also brings alongside him a lovely guy from Tea Games called Ash, whos helping integrate the video play middleware Bink into the game which will (among other things) help us mix some improvements into our title screen, and to provide combat video examples in our tutorial windows and such.
The other guy, meanwhile, whos burst onto or internal development scene is someone we know as The Prof. Thomas ProfMobius Guimbretiere comes to us by way of Minecraft, and some players might already be familiar with his mods and work over in block-land. He started modding Minecraft something like 13/14 years ago and co-produced MCP, the predecessor of Forge, before later authoring important mods like Waila, Jabba and Opis. He was then hired by Mojang themselves for work on Minecraft Java (ooh, Java) and went on to work on oceans, corals, new villager AI, village construction and a full rework of the games world generation. All of which is, clearly, hugely relevant to our interests. Since his Mojang days, hes been working on the backend of Razzleberries (https://razzleberri.es/) but now hes in the iron grip of Spiffo. To begin, to well be easing him in on something hes familiar with that well probably cover next time. Theres plenty of fun stuff planned beyond that too though.
For all you Americans, Amz has made you a Thanksgiving vid. Its got some WIP raccoons in it and everything. Though, thinking about it, maybe we should have gone with the turkeys. Anyway [previewyoutube=lsbARFrNig0;full][/previewyoutube] Many thanks also to everyone kindly voting for us in the Steam Awards. We really appreciate your support and associated reviews, but also if you are in two minds about whether or not to click for us please consider the likes of No Mans Sky or Deep Rock Galactic which are both amazing. Itll still be a while till 42 is in public beta, and wed be more comfortable with the nomination-love once its out, all-singing and all-dancing. This weeks misty mess from CAPSens Crim. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-11-23 22:45:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Yip yip, hello. Lets dive in.
SWING BOTH WAYS
Another exciting addition to the build 42 tech upgrade branch has just dropped. The tech upgrade branch is what contains our optimizations, improved view cone, basement/skyscraper technology and now an immersive improvement that weve wanted for a long time, that could potentially lead to many cool additional gameplay opportunities that werent possible before. [previewyoutube=Ev2genBbzb4;full][/previewyoutube] Thats right, kids, doors have now entered the third dimension. Where before doors would just flip instantly on the tile the moment they are opened or closed, now they are animated and use the tech branchs depth buffer. This is obviously a huge improvement for immersion, but could potentially lead to cool new mechanics in future (note, certainly not b42s initial release) like opening doors at different speeds, doors being left slightly open, peeking, bashing open, one-way fire doors and such. While easy to overlook, our doors are pretty much unchanged since the 0.1.5d days yet also one of the most fundamental things about PZ gameplay so getting some visual niceness, and some future gameplay opportunities, feels like a win. So lets have a quick noisy vid in which doors open and slam shut in unison. [previewyoutube=6Wbt795liVQ;full][/previewyoutube] (In future we clearly also already have the tech to have doors and visibly opening and closing on vehicles too, its already in the code and used by many mods, however in the main game its always been the plan to couple this to in-car character animations, visible interiors and such.)
CRAFTING STUFF
Were operating in various different areas with crafting, but the one thats becoming most interesting and fleshed out with recipes and new items is definitely blacksmithing which has come a long way in the last month. So lets head over to Blair to have a chat about the ways in which youll be getting to grips with the creation of some of these beauties.
For blacksmithing in build b42 we have the tiers, workstations, and materials worked out; now most of the crafting recipes have been made as well, and its a case where content is being added almost daily as the art assets are completed. Most items that one could reasonably expect to be blacksmithed can be blacksmithed, and in most cases the resultant item is a more rugged, crafted version than the default version of the item that you may be used to.
In many cases there are multiple tiers of items, requiring better skills, stations and materials to produce, where it serves the game. Weapons are an example of where this extra attention is being put into the system, where there are distinct tiers of the basic types, that differ in both appearance and performance.
A lot of work still needs to be done with balancing, as well as getting the fun stuff like animations of the character performing the actions, with fire and smoke. Our artists are hard at work making the assets for all the new items needed for this, but otherwise blacksmithing could be considered mostly done; you could say that all of the design hurdles have been crossed, and we have solved the Riddle of Steel. One conceit of b42 crafting is that you should be able to start on a theoretical all forest map; this isnt a concrete thing that were testing yet, but were providing foundation for it. Steel production from nothing being one of them.
Although iron ore outcroppings are more commonplace in games than in real life Kentucky, we have tiles of them, for use for our own forest maps, and maps of modders. (ALERT ALERT: we are aware this is quite game-y, and may well refine in future. For now, however, it works for our purposes.) Once you have smashed them into iron ore, you can dig a charcoal pit, and build a primitive forge and furnace, and use the charcoal to extract an iron bloom from iron ore. With a stone hammer and some crude wooden tongs (which wont survive the process) workable iron is beaten out of the iron bloom, and that iron can be used to produce simple iron implements such as tongs, smithing hammers, nails, and basic masonry tools.
Eventually you can work your way up to building a proper come kiln, for both making charcoal, and also coke out of the charcoal for steel production, as well as a smelting furnace, and then an intermediary forge and a grindstone. With this you can produce medium-quality iron implements, that benefit from proper hardening and quenching, as well as higher carbon content. From there one would work there way up to a blast furnace, for producing steel, and then, with the steel, cast and harden a proper blacksmithing anvil and make an advanced forge, and eventually a metalworking bench for making high quality, precision tools and items.
Elsewhere, meanwhile, we have been going through the game and converting existing systems to the new fluid mechanics that come as a part of the crafting system. A good example of this, as it clearly shows in the end product, are our hair dyes even if they are relatively cosmetic as far as the game-proper goes. In the following video, then, you see the dyes being transferred to (and used from) any fluid container whether bottles, cans or buckets. Here too you can see them being mixed, and the resulting new colour being applied to the characters hair. (Elements of this still WIP) [previewyoutube=Si0LoUFXK5s;full][/previewyoutube]
GAS 2 GONE
Weve given you more sandbox power over how much gasoline is stored beneath Knox gas stations, as previous work in the area didnt go far enough. Youll have options to select whether gas pumps are infinite, what their minimum and maximum potential amounts of stored gasoline is, and indeed what the chances are of it spawning completely empty (see image below). We have also made these a little more user-friendly with better right click feedback on power, required containers, admin info on fuel remaining etc. Weve also added a more visible fuel caps on our car models, and indeed a fuel-side indicator icon on your vehicles dashboard.
VOICE SETS
After the successful integration of the body noises, hey!s and psst!s of a real actor and a real actress we made the call to widen the net a little and get a variety of different people to record specific voice/noise sets for the game. There will now be four male and four female voices that you can choose at character creation stage, which will also mean that in MP those around you will likely have slightly different puffs, pants and combat exertions. Likewise having a more particular sound to your voice and character will likely be good for your own personal RP reasons. (Please note here, again, that exertion noise frequency hasnt been 100% balanced yet.) [previewyoutube=6N-g3U8EB50;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=P-F606_oiVE;full][/previewyoutube]
ANIMALS
Its relatively easy to slot in new animals to RJs system, the modding scene will likely be fairly extravagant, so while fixing bugs with our chickens, cows, sheep and pigs hes also slipped in some raccoons and wild turkeys to roam alongside the deer.
[previewyoutube=ROhZaTzvSC0;full][/previewyoutube]
4K PZ
Foxs up-rezzing (and slight tidy-up) of all the games many windows, icons, menus and general game furniture continues. In fact, were now at a point in which many aspects of the game can be played at 4k without the need for squinting and a magnifying glass. Folk with higher-res screens have long-suffered with Zomboid, so were excited to finally put this issue to bed as can be seen in the following 4K video. Please note, however, that some windows here still feel a little crowded we probably need to loosen up the crafting window that could use a bit more padding, the tabs feel a little close together etc. [previewyoutube=vrBoz9t1s0E;full][/previewyoutube]
MAP NICETIES
The map expansion, and elevation/lowering, continues apace. Something else we are bringing to your exploration is a little more colour and character to the places you are surviving within as such therell be more variety of things left on whiteboards and chalkboards in schools, universities and laboratories for example. Meanwhile, theres clearly elements of signage Americana we can use for our game too. Case in point, being a wide range of different signs outside our churches.
Weve also got an, as yet unnamed, Wild West tourist attraction going into the game which could also potentially be a good place to find some of the crafting gear thatll be new to 42. Maybe a couple of cowboy actor zeds shambling about as well, for good measure.
DRESS UP BOX
We generally dont populate the map with Mad Max lookin zeds, but people certainly seem to like having a little more freedom in terms of the threads you choose to go a hunting and a looting in. As a side project from his crafting duties, then, Blair has worked with animator Martin to improve the clipping issues folk often come up against with certain combinations of clothing. This issue was becoming more and more apparent with the crafted straps and metal shin guards being developed in the blacksmithing aspect of 42, so needed nipping in the bud. Essentially, now clothing items and body locations can have set definitions which then instruct the game to use alternate clothing models in particular circumstances. So a different arm guard model, for example, will be automatically used if the character is wearing a bulky jacket. We feel that this will have massive potential for modding. On top of this we have also made it so accoutrements like limb armour (shin pads, for example) can go on either limb; you can wear just one, or a pair, or a mismatched pair. This said, so its not too annoying, theyll appear as matched pairs in loot or on zeds. Finally, while not entirely linked to this endeavour but still in the same ballpark, helmets/headgear/masks all now affect your vision cone and your hearing (modestly) which weve added as a balancing measure for when crafted helmets are in the game.
Oh, and the above also means we can have (American) Football Shoulder Pads in-game too, so expect some varsity jock zombies wearing those around campus also. Heres a somewhat silly, but fun, screenie showing a little bit more of what this system can create including a bunch of the new items that will be craftable with the new blacksmith/forge systems.
NEW HIRES / RETURNING FACES
Weve expanded a lot over the past year, and we had called time on anyone else for fear of things running away with themselves. Clearly Soul Filcher joined recently, and unmentioned in this blog weve got Fenris in the guts of our Discord integration, Patrick with his (very encouraging) experimentation with ragdolls, and theres a hugely experienced guy called Matt who we havent announced before whos putting in foundations for future engine improvements. After all this we mentally shut the door on likely changes and additions, until Zac, the coding maestro behind 41s animation systems, made his return to work after a long period away this month and is now working the kinks out of issues weve had since he was last with us with character rotation and movement. Heres a link to show his WIP improvement though it might not be super-perceptible in vid-form. When this is all sorted the in-game character should feel more responsive, and also give us more flexibility when improving on the general animation suite. He also brings alongside him a lovely guy from Tea Games called Ash, whos helping integrate the video play middleware Bink into the game which will (among other things) help us mix some improvements into our title screen, and to provide combat video examples in our tutorial windows and such.
THE PROF
The other guy, meanwhile, whos burst onto or internal development scene is someone we know as The Prof. Thomas ProfMobius Guimbretiere comes to us by way of Minecraft, and some players might already be familiar with his mods and work over in block-land. He started modding Minecraft something like 13/14 years ago and co-produced MCP, the predecessor of Forge, before later authoring important mods like Waila, Jabba and Opis. He was then hired by Mojang themselves for work on Minecraft Java (ooh, Java) and went on to work on oceans, corals, new villager AI, village construction and a full rework of the games world generation. All of which is, clearly, hugely relevant to our interests. Since his Mojang days, hes been working on the backend of Razzleberries (https://razzleberri.es/) but now hes in the iron grip of Spiffo. To begin, to well be easing him in on something hes familiar with that well probably cover next time. Theres plenty of fun stuff planned beyond that too though.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING
For all you Americans, Amz has made you a Thanksgiving vid. Its got some WIP raccoons in it and everything. Though, thinking about it, maybe we should have gone with the turkeys. Anyway [previewyoutube=lsbARFrNig0;full][/previewyoutube] Many thanks also to everyone kindly voting for us in the Steam Awards. We really appreciate your support and associated reviews, but also if you are in two minds about whether or not to click for us please consider the likes of No Mans Sky or Deep Rock Galactic which are both amazing. Itll still be a while till 42 is in public beta, and wed be more comfortable with the nomination-love once its out, all-singing and all-dancing. This weeks misty mess from CAPSens Crim. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-11-23 22:45:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Cellar Door-doid
Now the vast infrastructure overhaul of the crafting systems has been merged and opened up to the rest of the gang, weve had a crack team of coders working solidly on implementing the various new post-apocalyptic profession tech trees, workstations and recipes that will provide for a vast amount of options for crafting and building in B42. As a summary for anyone who isnt up to date on our overall goals, the crafting overhaul is intended to provide the following things to Zomboid: Give Zomboid a more feature rich end-game. At present, long time players of the game often find they run out of objectives once they get a well-stocked and secure safehouse. We want to provide many more objectives a settled survivor can undertake to improve their safehouse, or indeed a community of players. More things to build. More opportunities to craft. More ways to be creative. Provide a way for servers to be able to run indefinitely without the need to wipe or respawn loot. At present the gameplay loop relies so much on looting the map for items that servers run into problems when most urban locations are looted. These either cause servers to rely on unrealistic loot respawning, or to frequently wipe the server. We want servers to be able to run well into the Alexandria years and for players to experience life much further within the post-apocalypse in an interesting way that feels and plays different to the early chaos. Provide believable post-apocalypse professions that would emerge in a post-technical post-apocalyptic society. If its been 30 years since the apocalypse, making a new character who is a burger flipper ceases to make much sense. As time ticks by from the initial infection, we will retire pre-apocalypse professions and introduce post-apocalypse professions that mirror pre-modern professions such as blacksmithing, tailoring, butchering and so on. We are also tying these skills into relevant modern day professions where applicable. Provide more community cooperation in multiplayer (and NPCs in B43 and beyond) with different interacting professions that can contribute to a community as well as provide much more extensive crafting and building, encouraging trade and other interesting player interactions. We want to give players more interesting choices of professions and activities to contribute to a survivor community, and allow for players to cut more unique and interesting niches for themselves within a survivor group or community. Part of this is reshaping how the skill and XP system work to both make individuals less capable of mastering everything, while making their initial potential a lot higher without grinding if they spec into a particular skill heavily. Simultaneously, meanwhile, we still need to be providing sandbox options to allow solo players to master more skills and professions so as not to cut solo players from all the new content and things to do. Provide a framework for players who want to focus more on community building and player interactions than zombie survival, so that they can optionally run servers with a more traditional wilderness map based survival game or extensive tech mods. While zombie apocalypse will always be our core focus for the vanilla game, we want Zomboid to provide a breadth of survival mechanics and content that, especially with mods, make a solid foundation for many other varied survival experiences outside the looting and zombie gameplay. This includes making provisions for the full range of possibilities in terms of tech and progression modpacks and overhauls that will add mountains of new ways for the community to play the game. Our tech tree is built from the ground up with the assumption that it is taking place on a wilderness map without any civilization to ensure that there are no holes. In normal gameplay, close to the apocalypse, its expected that players would be able to skip huge portions of this tree by using scavenged technology and supplies from the crumbling modern world. However, with the correct knowledge and skills, players will be empowered to fill any gap if that loot and technology is not available to them. Let the modders be all they can be. Finally, we also believe that the crafting systems themselves are solid and foundational enough for the amazing modders in our community to run absolutely fucking wild with and we honestly cannot wait to see what they come up with. Recap over Now weve recapped our general goals with the crafting overhaul, well introduce you to some of the work on three of the profession trees that weve been in the guts of this month.
One of the new post-apocalypse professions that will be available for players, blacksmithing will allow for the comprehensive working of metal to provide players the ability to craft many items that are unattainable outside looting in the current build of the game. The initial work has been based around providing the ability for someone living in the wild to be able to work with metal using a primitive furnace and forge made using rocks and clay, along with higher tiers being producible later on as players progress. Of course there will also be modern equivalents of these workstations available within the world map for players to exploit too, but as stated earlier we are filling out the crafting tech tree always from the very bottom, with the assumption that players do not have access to any looted supplies whatsoever.
Please note that we are currently exploring a new design for building mechanics, in our attempt to get away from using right click menus for everything. We are hoping for a nicer building interface since well have a huge number of extra building projects for the player and just cramming them all into right click menus will get more and more cumbersome as time goes on. With these facilities simple iron implements can be produced, such as nails, as well as the tools required to build the next tier. Additionally it can be used for simple assembly and maintenance tasks.
This second tier is approximately Medieval-ish, the furnaces are built using stonemasonry, consisting of dressed stone blocks and cement; there is a proper blacksmiths anvil; and also a quenching bucket.
With this more complex and durable tools can be crafted, as well as a higher level of maintenance.
And yup, want to be the most popular person on a server? Crank out sledgehammers for your friends!
Finally in this area, for steel production we need to make coke, produced from charcoal.
This dome kiln can be used to produce both coke, and also charcoal from wood. Wood charcoal is important for this branch of crafting. The heat it produces is good for working metal, but its also carbon and had effects on ferrous metal being forged. It will be able to be produced through other means than just the dome kiln, but can be produced more efficiently in higher quantities when using one.
We featured some of the possibilities with pottery in a previous Thursdoid however a big benefit of working with clay (as well as stone) is for additional options for building. PLEASE NOTE: theres anims, tile artwork, SFX and lots of other polish missing at present. [previewyoutube=8L4Ib51XGvk;full][/previewyoutube] As well as stone or clay full-size walls, the extended building options from these systems will allow for paths, roofs and decorative elements allowing for player built communities to really feel like a settlement and provide options for security to keep the zeds at bay. This will of course be a balancing concern for us, but we feel with sufficient effort and skill a survivor should be able to (very ultimately) erect walls that zombies do not simply attempt to walk through and bash their heads on until they fall over.
The last profession well cover today is the Brewer, who has numerous valuable things to bring to the table. While at present alcoholic drinks may not have too much direct impact on gameplay, we will be providing more benefits and downsides to the partaking in alcohol. After all, we imagine it would be a likely bit of escapism for many a zombie apocalypse survivor, and thered be more value still added later down the line once the NPCs and the accompanying psychological overhaul we have planned at the same time. In the first instance of this, however, the Brewer profession also allows for the creation of a rather vital way of preserving food. [previewyoutube=XqyzF1XPBWc;full][/previewyoutube]
Last doid we showed you building developments high upwards into the sky, this time were going deeper underground as theres too much panic in this town. For those unaware, Build 42 will come with two sorts of below ground floor. First off well have the Permanent ones that will always be attached to locations on the map. These will generally be familiar locations, places of interest, businesses and secret military complexes. Today however, well be looking at our Randomized ones. We currently have 119 of these designed: some empty and desolate, some full of loot beyond your wildest dreams, and some that make you seriously question the mental state of the previous occupant. Heres a fuzzed-up image to whet your whistle.
These will be basements, bunkers, panic rooms and Waynes World sets that you will be delighted to discover spawning on your regular looting sorties and they will appear within whatever houses could potentially fit them in and still look natural. The frequency of their appearances will also be governed by a Sandbox option. Well also have a long list of designated spots within buildings on the map where a random basement will fit, these spots will be assigned and a random compatible basement will be placed in the world on world creation. Heres a quick video to show some of our favourites off but first a few familiar words of caution! This is WIP, stair placement within buildings will improve, and likewise the steps will look more natural in the way that they appear within the house. We may also look at hatches etc as time goes on. [previewyoutube=EDnTo1O-a-M;full][/previewyoutube]
Lovely Aiterons mission of tidying up, reorganising and adding new utility to our front-end UI continues. Notably hes currently improving the Mod Manager which, as an ex-modder himself, he is ideally suited to do. Heres a quick video showing his changes. [previewyoutube=suhYxCHKBE8;full][/previewyoutube] So whats seen here? Well, amongst other things, the following:
An area of the game we need to improve is the feeling that something happened here. We have burned down houses, survivor homes and our costume zeds but we dont have much that says people who were panicked were once here. As such now we will be including a random chance for homes, stores and businesses to have been looted with items strewn over the floor, general detritus and litter, and sometimes graffiti on the walls too. (Theres no graffiti that says Hit them in the head! just yet, but we are a video game so give us time on that one Im sure it will happen eventually.) [previewyoutube=3dhQjx_z9v8;full][/previewyoutube]
At the same time as the big ticket new systems, our coders and art team like to dripfeed fun smaller stuff into the test build. Recent additions have been: The Military Manpack Radio. Works when worn on the back, in addition to other radio usages.
New fluid containers that use the revamped crafting systems that deal with liquids so for example the canteens use the new tech where theyre a single script item definition with procedural textures and icons, similar to how clothing items work.
Backpack sprayers that are fluid containers, that should prove useful for farming. (And also get us thinking about flamethrowers, once we have the time to get back into the fire rework.)
In keeping with all the other game studios and publishers providing faintly spooky content at this time of year, please take this offering of deer skellingtons and a baby deer skellington. We trust that you are now suitably unsettled, and please note that it took about a minute to get our pre-existing animal skellingtons into motion. We havent spent all month on the skellingtons. [previewyoutube=-mdqWIvbnGc;full][/previewyoutube] Well see you back here next month (details on the temporarily monthly Thursdoids here) for more cool stuff. Thanks again all x A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here
[ 2023-10-19 21:31:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
Evening all, here we all are again. Lets take a stroll through the development Event zone.
Crafting Overhaul Recap
Now the vast infrastructure overhaul of the crafting systems has been merged and opened up to the rest of the gang, weve had a crack team of coders working solidly on implementing the various new post-apocalyptic profession tech trees, workstations and recipes that will provide for a vast amount of options for crafting and building in B42. As a summary for anyone who isnt up to date on our overall goals, the crafting overhaul is intended to provide the following things to Zomboid: Give Zomboid a more feature rich end-game. At present, long time players of the game often find they run out of objectives once they get a well-stocked and secure safehouse. We want to provide many more objectives a settled survivor can undertake to improve their safehouse, or indeed a community of players. More things to build. More opportunities to craft. More ways to be creative. Provide a way for servers to be able to run indefinitely without the need to wipe or respawn loot. At present the gameplay loop relies so much on looting the map for items that servers run into problems when most urban locations are looted. These either cause servers to rely on unrealistic loot respawning, or to frequently wipe the server. We want servers to be able to run well into the Alexandria years and for players to experience life much further within the post-apocalypse in an interesting way that feels and plays different to the early chaos. Provide believable post-apocalypse professions that would emerge in a post-technical post-apocalyptic society. If its been 30 years since the apocalypse, making a new character who is a burger flipper ceases to make much sense. As time ticks by from the initial infection, we will retire pre-apocalypse professions and introduce post-apocalypse professions that mirror pre-modern professions such as blacksmithing, tailoring, butchering and so on. We are also tying these skills into relevant modern day professions where applicable. Provide more community cooperation in multiplayer (and NPCs in B43 and beyond) with different interacting professions that can contribute to a community as well as provide much more extensive crafting and building, encouraging trade and other interesting player interactions. We want to give players more interesting choices of professions and activities to contribute to a survivor community, and allow for players to cut more unique and interesting niches for themselves within a survivor group or community. Part of this is reshaping how the skill and XP system work to both make individuals less capable of mastering everything, while making their initial potential a lot higher without grinding if they spec into a particular skill heavily. Simultaneously, meanwhile, we still need to be providing sandbox options to allow solo players to master more skills and professions so as not to cut solo players from all the new content and things to do. Provide a framework for players who want to focus more on community building and player interactions than zombie survival, so that they can optionally run servers with a more traditional wilderness map based survival game or extensive tech mods. While zombie apocalypse will always be our core focus for the vanilla game, we want Zomboid to provide a breadth of survival mechanics and content that, especially with mods, make a solid foundation for many other varied survival experiences outside the looting and zombie gameplay. This includes making provisions for the full range of possibilities in terms of tech and progression modpacks and overhauls that will add mountains of new ways for the community to play the game. Our tech tree is built from the ground up with the assumption that it is taking place on a wilderness map without any civilization to ensure that there are no holes. In normal gameplay, close to the apocalypse, its expected that players would be able to skip huge portions of this tree by using scavenged technology and supplies from the crumbling modern world. However, with the correct knowledge and skills, players will be empowered to fill any gap if that loot and technology is not available to them. Let the modders be all they can be. Finally, we also believe that the crafting systems themselves are solid and foundational enough for the amazing modders in our community to run absolutely fucking wild with and we honestly cannot wait to see what they come up with. Recap over Now weve recapped our general goals with the crafting overhaul, well introduce you to some of the work on three of the profession trees that weve been in the guts of this month.
Blacksmithing
One of the new post-apocalypse professions that will be available for players, blacksmithing will allow for the comprehensive working of metal to provide players the ability to craft many items that are unattainable outside looting in the current build of the game. The initial work has been based around providing the ability for someone living in the wild to be able to work with metal using a primitive furnace and forge made using rocks and clay, along with higher tiers being producible later on as players progress. Of course there will also be modern equivalents of these workstations available within the world map for players to exploit too, but as stated earlier we are filling out the crafting tech tree always from the very bottom, with the assumption that players do not have access to any looted supplies whatsoever.
Please note that we are currently exploring a new design for building mechanics, in our attempt to get away from using right click menus for everything. We are hoping for a nicer building interface since well have a huge number of extra building projects for the player and just cramming them all into right click menus will get more and more cumbersome as time goes on. With these facilities simple iron implements can be produced, such as nails, as well as the tools required to build the next tier. Additionally it can be used for simple assembly and maintenance tasks.
This second tier is approximately Medieval-ish, the furnaces are built using stonemasonry, consisting of dressed stone blocks and cement; there is a proper blacksmiths anvil; and also a quenching bucket.
With this more complex and durable tools can be crafted, as well as a higher level of maintenance.
And yup, want to be the most popular person on a server? Crank out sledgehammers for your friends!
Finally in this area, for steel production we need to make coke, produced from charcoal.
This dome kiln can be used to produce both coke, and also charcoal from wood. Wood charcoal is important for this branch of crafting. The heat it produces is good for working metal, but its also carbon and had effects on ferrous metal being forged. It will be able to be produced through other means than just the dome kiln, but can be produced more efficiently in higher quantities when using one.
Pottery / Stoneworking
We featured some of the possibilities with pottery in a previous Thursdoid however a big benefit of working with clay (as well as stone) is for additional options for building. PLEASE NOTE: theres anims, tile artwork, SFX and lots of other polish missing at present. [previewyoutube=8L4Ib51XGvk;full][/previewyoutube] As well as stone or clay full-size walls, the extended building options from these systems will allow for paths, roofs and decorative elements allowing for player built communities to really feel like a settlement and provide options for security to keep the zeds at bay. This will of course be a balancing concern for us, but we feel with sufficient effort and skill a survivor should be able to (very ultimately) erect walls that zombies do not simply attempt to walk through and bash their heads on until they fall over.
Brewer
The last profession well cover today is the Brewer, who has numerous valuable things to bring to the table. While at present alcoholic drinks may not have too much direct impact on gameplay, we will be providing more benefits and downsides to the partaking in alcohol. After all, we imagine it would be a likely bit of escapism for many a zombie apocalypse survivor, and thered be more value still added later down the line once the NPCs and the accompanying psychological overhaul we have planned at the same time. In the first instance of this, however, the Brewer profession also allows for the creation of a rather vital way of preserving food. [previewyoutube=XqyzF1XPBWc;full][/previewyoutube]
CAN BE HAPPY UNDERGROUND
Last doid we showed you building developments high upwards into the sky, this time were going deeper underground as theres too much panic in this town. For those unaware, Build 42 will come with two sorts of below ground floor. First off well have the Permanent ones that will always be attached to locations on the map. These will generally be familiar locations, places of interest, businesses and secret military complexes. Today however, well be looking at our Randomized ones. We currently have 119 of these designed: some empty and desolate, some full of loot beyond your wildest dreams, and some that make you seriously question the mental state of the previous occupant. Heres a fuzzed-up image to whet your whistle.
These will be basements, bunkers, panic rooms and Waynes World sets that you will be delighted to discover spawning on your regular looting sorties and they will appear within whatever houses could potentially fit them in and still look natural. The frequency of their appearances will also be governed by a Sandbox option. Well also have a long list of designated spots within buildings on the map where a random basement will fit, these spots will be assigned and a random compatible basement will be placed in the world on world creation. Heres a quick video to show some of our favourites off but first a few familiar words of caution! This is WIP, stair placement within buildings will improve, and likewise the steps will look more natural in the way that they appear within the house. We may also look at hatches etc as time goes on. [previewyoutube=EDnTo1O-a-M;full][/previewyoutube]
MODDING
Lovely Aiterons mission of tidying up, reorganising and adding new utility to our front-end UI continues. Notably hes currently improving the Mod Manager which, as an ex-modder himself, he is ideally suited to do. Heres a quick video showing his changes. [previewyoutube=suhYxCHKBE8;full][/previewyoutube] So whats seen here? Well, amongst other things, the following:
- Mod and map order. You will now be able to change the load order of enabled mods and maps, which also comes with an auto-sort for available mods.
- Share your presets. You will now be able to share your preset of mods (with specific mods, and the load order) and your friends and/or players on your server will be able to take it and use it themselves. If some mods are missing, then the game will flag it and show links to the ones that are uninstalled.
- We have added special version tags that will be required for mod compatibility for B42. This is due to the massive changes to the game likely invalidating a large number of mods, and the potential for serious bugs if people attempt to run with those designed for B41. Hopefully in this way things will be clearer through the B42 Unstable process, and sailing can be as smooth as we can all muster it.
- The games use of ModIDs has been altered to be appended by the workshop ID of each mod. This adjustment is aimed at resolving server issues that result in file mismatch errors when users attempt to connect, due to various mod versions sharing the same ModID. This happens on the Steam Workshop a fair bit due to re-uploads and modpacks. Now, with the workshop number attached to the ModID, only the correct version of a mod will be loaded by clients connecting to servers. Were hoping that this will then lessen frustrations with said cursed file mismatch errors whenever youre in an area of mod self-conflict.
- We are also working on a new modding API and new modding guide for 42. Its currently unclear whether itd be released alongside a 42 Unstable. Its certainly in the works though.
LOOTED HOMES
An area of the game we need to improve is the feeling that something happened here. We have burned down houses, survivor homes and our costume zeds but we dont have much that says people who were panicked were once here. As such now we will be including a random chance for homes, stores and businesses to have been looted with items strewn over the floor, general detritus and litter, and sometimes graffiti on the walls too. (Theres no graffiti that says Hit them in the head! just yet, but we are a video game so give us time on that one Im sure it will happen eventually.) [previewyoutube=3dhQjx_z9v8;full][/previewyoutube]
FUN NEW ITEMS
At the same time as the big ticket new systems, our coders and art team like to dripfeed fun smaller stuff into the test build. Recent additions have been: The Military Manpack Radio. Works when worn on the back, in addition to other radio usages.
New fluid containers that use the revamped crafting systems that deal with liquids so for example the canteens use the new tech where theyre a single script item definition with procedural textures and icons, similar to how clothing items work.
Backpack sprayers that are fluid containers, that should prove useful for farming. (And also get us thinking about flamethrowers, once we have the time to get back into the fire rework.)
Other Stuff
- The Sound team hit an impressive milestone the other week, with them hitting the total of 50 music tracks that have been re-written so that they work within 42s new and awesome dynamic music system. Our thanks, as ever, to the fabulous team at Formosa and everything they do for the game.
- Taking over a building, but still a clean-freak even though the worlds gone to shit and appearances no longer matter? Well worry no more, as 42 will allow you to wash away and scrub the grime and graffiti to make your safehouse look and feel spotless. Until the blood starts to drip again, clearly.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN WOOOO
In keeping with all the other game studios and publishers providing faintly spooky content at this time of year, please take this offering of deer skellingtons and a baby deer skellington. We trust that you are now suitably unsettled, and please note that it took about a minute to get our pre-existing animal skellingtons into motion. We havent spent all month on the skellingtons. [previewyoutube=-mdqWIvbnGc;full][/previewyoutube] Well see you back here next month (details on the temporarily monthly Thursdoids here) for more cool stuff. Thanks again all x A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here
[ 2023-10-19 21:31:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
Sky High
The engine upgrade is now in a phase of finding all the edge case issues where something doesnt render correctly due to the new caching rendering method. Alongside this, very excitingly, the map team are working on larger buildings and basements to be slotted into the game map. EP tested out the first building to use the increased floor limits, a literal 32 floor skyscraper which looks super impressive to see in-game. This, as yet unnamed, skyscraper also allowed us to get a fun new animation into the mix as well PLEASE NOTE: Impact with pavement is WIP. Therell be far more crunchy SFX, far less blending issues with the character standing back up, and also more blood obviously. Screaming too. [previewyoutube=1oQzDorSQ_g;full][/previewyoutube] Elsewhere we are making the most of the improvements to how sprites are cached and handled. This now allows, for example, sprites to be combined with overlays into a single cached texture. With this we can create nicer, and more accurate, highlighting and borders when they are selected and moused over. As seen here:
Increasingly with the engine upgrade its become ever more clear that with it well be able to polish up more oddities and visual quirks of Zomboid in the long term. If youre interested, this is made evident by the testing tools that weve added to Zomboids debug menus that put the new tile depth system through its paces. [previewyoutube=9ETJCMQzZTA;full][/previewyoutube] In this video you will see a large debug 3d cylinder that can be moved around to test how it interacts with the map environment. This now interacts with walls and other objects as if they were bona fide 3D geometry within the iso scene, which was impossible up till now. Previously it would have inserted itself in its entirety between tiles laid on top of each other. This will allow us to increasingly have a more believably 3D looking world despite using 2D tiles, getting rid of a lot of unsightly glitches and potentially opening up other gameplay avenues in the further future. To be clear, this vid shows the sort of stuff that were now able to finally nix although whether that will happen prior to 42 going unstable or later on is still an open question. Oh and heres another player/zed falling vid as we love it so much [previewyoutube=q1PJog3aXFc;full][/previewyoutube]
Weve shown rats in blogs before, but previously they didnt have many rules or conditions attached. Now, as we close out what has internally been dubbed as rat week we can say that rats will procedurally spawn as the world is explored and they will also appear in special randomized rat stories. They can randomly spawn with trash, trash containers, and corpses. [previewyoutube=yfnmQvfzWUY;full][/previewyoutube] As the days of the apocalypse tick by we will slowly approach the Maximum Rat Index which is currently two months on default Sandbox settings which is the point at which rats will have the highest chance of spawning and a higher chance of appearing in greater numbers. In buildings with rat problems we will also be working with the sound team over at Formosa to make sure we have fun stuff like noises for rats in ceilings, rats in the walls, rats gnawing on flesh, rats scuttling over different floor surfaces etc. Well keep a lid on the majority of our special randomized rat stories, but expect some gross supplies and destroyed loot. That said, are you familiar with the concept of a rat king crown? Google it if not!
Oh, and would you like something to wash down with that bleach?
Lots of fun stuff going into the map expansion, not least the 32 level skyscrapers we have going into Louisville. Our plan is to have a few of these pepper the urban landscape, where appropriate, for 42 and then to come back for more fully-fledged urban replanning later down the line. If you take in all the new basements required for the new build, and the new swathes of land to the west of Muld that are being finalized, theres a lot of ground to cover for the map team even if so much of it already in the can. We want everything to be good quality, and dont want any aspects rushed. With that in mind, lets have another more detailed look at Xeonyxs scraper showcased in the first video. What a beaut!
Elsewhere, what better place to explore in an update where lighting and lightsources are going to be far more than an issue than Ayrtons spooky abandoned orphanage in a forest? All the cool kids will want to hang out there, were sure.
Finally, for a map expansion we need signs for homes and businesses. So expect all sorts of new fun stuff, alongside adverts and map-reveal flyers for them on the radio and in peoples homes.
Alongside other new clothing, bags, holsters, and functional gear in 42, were also adding fully featured military webbing and SCBA gear. The webbing provides two hotbar slots that can be used to attach walkie talkies, special new angle headed clip-on flashlights, and appropriate knives. The SCBA gear, meanwhile, provides one. Military webbing also serves as a wearable container that is superior to wearing fanny packs. Some of this coolness can be seen in the following video alongside the shemagh scarves that will allow British fans of a certain age cosplay as Simon Reeve. [previewyoutube=WZ8BNG5xoB4;full][/previewyoutube] As seen in the next video, SCBA gear is also functional in that, when it has an attached tank with oxygen remaining and is turned on, it will protect the wearer from inhaled atmospheric hazards. This also applies to the Hazmat suits. [previewyoutube=fcMlwffzvuw;full][/previewyoutube] We have also made Gasmasks functional, although they require filters that are drained by exposure to airborne contaminants, and have added Halfmask Respirators that use different filters that are consumed at a faster rate. Some other, appropriate, masks will now also provide mild protection from corpse sickness. However, your character will remove and replace their mask when eating, drinking, smoking, taking pills, and such. Engineer characters, and characters that learn the recipes, can also craft improvised gasmask filters, as well as recharge gasmask and respirator filters. All of these new items spawn in appropriate locations, vehicles, and on appropriate zombies.
One of the primary complaints we get about PZ, and a rightful one, is our lack of support for higher resolution monitors. There have always been workarounds, but they havent been effective enough -and on a 4K screen the resolution makes our UI look to be a size that only a furrow-browed ant could use. Well come 42 unstable (hopefully its a big task) our local hero Fox will have climbed Resize Mountain and up-rezzed our entire UI to make it far more amenable to those lucky folks with super-snazzy monitors. So good news for many, we hope.
In 42 not only are we adding visible holsters, in multiple colours, but also special shoulder and ankle holsters. Shoulder holsters will conceal the holster and handgun when garments like jackets are worn over them, and also can store two pistol magazines as a container. Ankle holsters can only hold the m36 Revolver currently, and the holster and firearm will be concealed by long pants, skirts or dresses. Youll be able to find them on both existing, and new, zombie costume types and we strongly suggest seeking out a plainclothes police detective zombie. (Might be tricky though). [previewyoutube=0-EA6LaTwJ0;full][/previewyoutube]
A MASSIVE thanks to everyone who bought a Steadfast Spiffo from Makeship! We sold 2000 more plushies than the first run of Spiffos due to your amazing charitable instincts and we raised over 73,000 US dollars for Cancer Council Queensland in memory of our friend Vicki Ann Woods! Thank you so much for helping us with this, and we hope you enjoy your Steadfast Spiffo when he arrives on your doorstep later this year.
Well see you back here next month (details on the temporarily monthly Thursdoids here) for more cool stuff. Thanks again all x A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here
[ 2023-09-21 20:40:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
So hmm, where were we? Okay so, recent weeks have seen two mega-merges into our trunk internal testing build. The first was latest from our MP team, to top up the central development branch with their latest from their ongoing server work to flag up any unexpected issues and to get a few gameplay systems back online in MP. The second was the guts of the long-awaited crafting revamp from Turbo, which means that the functionality for all our primary crafting stations is now in and its a matter of banging heads together and integrating everything weve had stacked up for it. To this end were pleased to announce that weve hired yet another stalwart individual from the modding community to aid us in this quest. We were thinking about the different modders who could give our crafting team a little extra grunt, we have so many amazing ones after all, but the offerings of Soul Filcher stood out as being produce of exactly the sort of brain we needed. Were really happy to have Soul officially on the team, and while his initial introductory task has been some tidy-up work and minor improvements on our many and varied different traits he should be diving into the new crafting stations with the others in the weeks ahead.
SKY HIGH
The engine upgrade is now in a phase of finding all the edge case issues where something doesnt render correctly due to the new caching rendering method. Alongside this, very excitingly, the map team are working on larger buildings and basements to be slotted into the game map. EP tested out the first building to use the increased floor limits, a literal 32 floor skyscraper which looks super impressive to see in-game. This, as yet unnamed, skyscraper also allowed us to get a fun new animation into the mix as well PLEASE NOTE: Impact with pavement is WIP. Therell be far more crunchy SFX, far less blending issues with the character standing back up, and also more blood obviously. Screaming too. [previewyoutube=1oQzDorSQ_g;full][/previewyoutube] Elsewhere we are making the most of the improvements to how sprites are cached and handled. This now allows, for example, sprites to be combined with overlays into a single cached texture. With this we can create nicer, and more accurate, highlighting and borders when they are selected and moused over. As seen here:
Increasingly with the engine upgrade its become ever more clear that with it well be able to polish up more oddities and visual quirks of Zomboid in the long term. If youre interested, this is made evident by the testing tools that weve added to Zomboids debug menus that put the new tile depth system through its paces. [previewyoutube=9ETJCMQzZTA;full][/previewyoutube] In this video you will see a large debug 3d cylinder that can be moved around to test how it interacts with the map environment. This now interacts with walls and other objects as if they were bona fide 3D geometry within the iso scene, which was impossible up till now. Previously it would have inserted itself in its entirety between tiles laid on top of each other. This will allow us to increasingly have a more believably 3D looking world despite using 2D tiles, getting rid of a lot of unsightly glitches and potentially opening up other gameplay avenues in the further future. To be clear, this vid shows the sort of stuff that were now able to finally nix although whether that will happen prior to 42 going unstable or later on is still an open question. Oh and heres another player/zed falling vid as we love it so much [previewyoutube=q1PJog3aXFc;full][/previewyoutube]
OH, RATS
Weve shown rats in blogs before, but previously they didnt have many rules or conditions attached. Now, as we close out what has internally been dubbed as rat week we can say that rats will procedurally spawn as the world is explored and they will also appear in special randomized rat stories. They can randomly spawn with trash, trash containers, and corpses. [previewyoutube=yfnmQvfzWUY;full][/previewyoutube] As the days of the apocalypse tick by we will slowly approach the Maximum Rat Index which is currently two months on default Sandbox settings which is the point at which rats will have the highest chance of spawning and a higher chance of appearing in greater numbers. In buildings with rat problems we will also be working with the sound team over at Formosa to make sure we have fun stuff like noises for rats in ceilings, rats in the walls, rats gnawing on flesh, rats scuttling over different floor surfaces etc. Well keep a lid on the majority of our special randomized rat stories, but expect some gross supplies and destroyed loot. That said, are you familiar with the concept of a rat king crown? Google it if not!
Oh, and would you like something to wash down with that bleach?
MAP LATEST
Lots of fun stuff going into the map expansion, not least the 32 level skyscrapers we have going into Louisville. Our plan is to have a few of these pepper the urban landscape, where appropriate, for 42 and then to come back for more fully-fledged urban replanning later down the line. If you take in all the new basements required for the new build, and the new swathes of land to the west of Muld that are being finalized, theres a lot of ground to cover for the map team even if so much of it already in the can. We want everything to be good quality, and dont want any aspects rushed. With that in mind, lets have another more detailed look at Xeonyxs scraper showcased in the first video. What a beaut!
Elsewhere, what better place to explore in an update where lighting and lightsources are going to be far more than an issue than Ayrtons spooky abandoned orphanage in a forest? All the cool kids will want to hang out there, were sure.
Finally, for a map expansion we need signs for homes and businesses. So expect all sorts of new fun stuff, alongside adverts and map-reveal flyers for them on the radio and in peoples homes.
ITS A GAS, GAS, GAS
Alongside other new clothing, bags, holsters, and functional gear in 42, were also adding fully featured military webbing and SCBA gear. The webbing provides two hotbar slots that can be used to attach walkie talkies, special new angle headed clip-on flashlights, and appropriate knives. The SCBA gear, meanwhile, provides one. Military webbing also serves as a wearable container that is superior to wearing fanny packs. Some of this coolness can be seen in the following video alongside the shemagh scarves that will allow British fans of a certain age cosplay as Simon Reeve. [previewyoutube=WZ8BNG5xoB4;full][/previewyoutube] As seen in the next video, SCBA gear is also functional in that, when it has an attached tank with oxygen remaining and is turned on, it will protect the wearer from inhaled atmospheric hazards. This also applies to the Hazmat suits. [previewyoutube=fcMlwffzvuw;full][/previewyoutube] We have also made Gasmasks functional, although they require filters that are drained by exposure to airborne contaminants, and have added Halfmask Respirators that use different filters that are consumed at a faster rate. Some other, appropriate, masks will now also provide mild protection from corpse sickness. However, your character will remove and replace their mask when eating, drinking, smoking, taking pills, and such. Engineer characters, and characters that learn the recipes, can also craft improvised gasmask filters, as well as recharge gasmask and respirator filters. All of these new items spawn in appropriate locations, vehicles, and on appropriate zombies.
4K REVOLUTION
One of the primary complaints we get about PZ, and a rightful one, is our lack of support for higher resolution monitors. There have always been workarounds, but they havent been effective enough -and on a 4K screen the resolution makes our UI look to be a size that only a furrow-browed ant could use. Well come 42 unstable (hopefully its a big task) our local hero Fox will have climbed Resize Mountain and up-rezzed our entire UI to make it far more amenable to those lucky folks with super-snazzy monitors. So good news for many, we hope.
HOLSTERS
In 42 not only are we adding visible holsters, in multiple colours, but also special shoulder and ankle holsters. Shoulder holsters will conceal the holster and handgun when garments like jackets are worn over them, and also can store two pistol magazines as a container. Ankle holsters can only hold the m36 Revolver currently, and the holster and firearm will be concealed by long pants, skirts or dresses. Youll be able to find them on both existing, and new, zombie costume types and we strongly suggest seeking out a plainclothes police detective zombie. (Might be tricky though). [previewyoutube=0-EA6LaTwJ0;full][/previewyoutube]
OTHER STUFF
- Following the successful integration of the effort and body noises from real actor people in a real recording studio into the game weve decided to get a load more done (three new men, three new ladies) so we get a range of different-sounding people which in turn will make for more interesting character creation, and for more variety when players stand and fight around each other in MP.
- For the longest time, since forever in fact, alcoholic intake hasnt had enough impact on the player outside of some fun stuff when drink-driving. We havent gone as far as implementing a whole new animation set, but as a fun little side project you might find a few extra complications next time youre utterly shit-faced.
FINALLY
A MASSIVE thanks to everyone who bought a Steadfast Spiffo from Makeship! We sold 2000 more plushies than the first run of Spiffos due to your amazing charitable instincts and we raised over 73,000 US dollars for Cancer Council Queensland in memory of our friend Vicki Ann Woods! Thank you so much for helping us with this, and we hope you enjoy your Steadfast Spiffo when he arrives on your doorstep later this year.
Well see you back here next month (details on the temporarily monthly Thursdoids here) for more cool stuff. Thanks again all x A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here
[ 2023-09-21 20:40:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Connection Is Made
A big Spiffo welcome to Patrick, an actual real American on the main dev team. Patrick is a software engineer who has been away working in academia on educational games for a fair while but has his roots in more conventional gaming and has had his claws in various Tomb Raiders, Tony Hawk games, Ratchets, and Clanks over the years. His primary mission is the implementation of ragdolls into the game although initial work and experimentation is still very much exploratory. We havent had an actual real American who remembers 1993 on the dev team for a while, so it also means he gets to answer a lot of questions about parking lots, drivethroughs and various other Americana. He is coping with this admirably.
A quick check-in with our (still WIP) animal tracking system. This could probably look a little better in terms of visual variation when it comes to animal tracks and direction, but is shaping up to be pretty fun. [previewyoutube=abaZnFtOM1Q;full][/previewyoutube]
In B42 not only will holsters be visible, but a new shoulder holster item has been added. Additionally we now have military webbing, which can be worn instead of a shoulder holster, and also occupies the spaces that fanny packs would occupy. This webbing provides two additional hotbar slots, which we currently have set up for walkie talkies and knives, and also provide superior container option to fanny packs. Not only can these items be found as appropriate container loot, but also can be seen on both existing, and new, zombie outfit types.
Just over a week left if you want to buy yourself a Steadfast Spiffo, and say fuck cancer simultaneously. Tweet for further info. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-08-17 19:50:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey everyone. Jumping straight in with an update on the new and improved crafting system this time around if thats okay with yall.
As weve talked about in previous Thursdoids, a large part of the crafting overhaul revolves around creating a unified, powerful and expansive system for machines, crafting stations and appliances. This covers all the different things you find around the world, and those crafted by yourself and your friends.
A primary piece of this puzzle has been in the creation of dev systems and methodology that allow for the hugely swifter implementation of far more varied/interesting crafting and devices which in turn is a big thing for modders, and for the nu-medieval post apocalyptic society gameplay we will now cater for.
This has also been built, however, with a framework that will allow for a wide variety of other gameplay aspects some of which will be a part of the initial 42 release, while others will be drip-fed into future 42 builds, and more still in the mainline builds beyond that. (The underlying systems will be available for modders from the word go, however.)
One of the advantages that the crafting revamp brings with it is the opportunity to provide engineering and electronics gameplay with a ton more depth. This system revolves around the concept of components.
An example of this would be a power input component, which provides electrical power to a machine from an external wire. Another would be a crafting component, which would undertake a crafting recipe that can make use of any liquid or item within a machines resource component, that can store items, liquid or power. Importantly, every component also has an associated UI thats been designed for player interaction.
This will mean as our library (and the communitys library) of components grows, we can quickly put them together to create all sorts of in-game machines and appliances. Its also relatively easy to slap a UI skin on to each component (perhaps something already existing from the game, perhaps something new) to make them appear in the most appropriate way.
Components will also be moddable, so modders will be able to add new components that could then be used as parts of a machines in-game functionality and UI.
The end goal is to open this up to the player in-game, having these components as items obtainable through disassembly.
A burglar alarm for example will be comprised of a speaker component, as well as a battery input component and a motion sensor component. A player could feasibly go around collecting the components, removing the motion sensors and installing them around their base, wiring each of them up to lights to act as an early warning system.
Meanwhile the speaker component of the burglar alarm could be similarly wired up to a switch to allow people in the base to create a distraction sound to lure zombies away or into a trap.
These are just two potential gameplay moments plucked from the air, but good examples of a believable utility of scavenging components from real world items.
Putting aside all the new professions and skills coming to B42, this will finally provide engineering and electronic skills with a lot of cool utility and make anyone with these skills a valuable asset to any survivor group.
This system will also be the bedrock for the crafting tree, providing functionality for the various profession workbenches, crafting stations and more primitive machines. For example, for the more medieval constructions, one form of power input available is rotational energy, allowing for mills and other contraptions to power machines and stations.
Ultimately our hope would be any machine or appliance on the map would simply be a combination of these components. Someone skilled enough would be able to remove them and put them together in any way they made sense: each component will have simple item, power, liquid or logic inputs and outputs.
Taking it a step further, it would also give us the option of making functional machines within the various industrial areas of the map providing functional machines that could feasibly be utilized (perhaps even looted and taken back to base) and potentially making factory locations extremely high value targets for looting.
This will also, ultimately, add far more interesting gameplay to base construction and generator usage. We would have pipes and wires to facilitate the wiring and plumbing of machines and home systems together rather than fudging water collector positions to make operable sinks, or just placing a generator next to a building and instantly powering it.
How far could this be pushed?
Well, in testing the systems flexibility, Turbo grabbed some existing sprites from around the map to make sure the system was working okay for both our needs, and those of the modding community.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS VIDEO IS FROM A DEVELOPMENT TESTBED.
Theres no guarantee any of this will make it into B42, and likewise they are all built from random tiles that Turbs has nicked from our industrial sprite collection. This is all a part of testing the speed and simplicity of creating new machines and from that underline how powerful the new system is.
Everything seen in this vid was put together with minimal specific code and largely relied on existing components put together within the machines in the PZ script files along with new items and recipes.
[previewyoutube=RA6gewj2PDU;full][/previewyoutube]
Weve got enough on our plate, so we likely wont have a full suite of replaced existing machines and appliances by the time 42 unstable rolls around but we believe that these new foundations for PZs crafting system will provide great opportunities both for our existing gameplay, and the gameplay we have planned for the years ahead.
This has certainly been the part of 42 thats taken the longest to come together (not helped by dev illness and hospitalization in early development stages) but its also the stuff that we absolutely needed to nail to provide the huge boost in player and community creativity that we know it can provide. Were at that point now, we feel, and look forward to showing off more applications in the near future.
HELLO PATRICK
A big Spiffo welcome to Patrick, an actual real American on the main dev team. Patrick is a software engineer who has been away working in academia on educational games for a fair while but has his roots in more conventional gaming and has had his claws in various Tomb Raiders, Tony Hawk games, Ratchets, and Clanks over the years. His primary mission is the implementation of ragdolls into the game although initial work and experimentation is still very much exploratory. We havent had an actual real American who remembers 1993 on the dev team for a while, so it also means he gets to answer a lot of questions about parking lots, drivethroughs and various other Americana. He is coping with this admirably.
FOLLOW THAT DEER
A quick check-in with our (still WIP) animal tracking system. This could probably look a little better in terms of visual variation when it comes to animal tracks and direction, but is shaping up to be pretty fun. [previewyoutube=abaZnFtOM1Q;full][/previewyoutube]
HOLSTERS AND WEBBING
In B42 not only will holsters be visible, but a new shoulder holster item has been added. Additionally we now have military webbing, which can be worn instead of a shoulder holster, and also occupies the spaces that fanny packs would occupy. This webbing provides two additional hotbar slots, which we currently have set up for walkie talkies and knives, and also provide superior container option to fanny packs. Not only can these items be found as appropriate container loot, but also can be seen on both existing, and new, zombie outfit types.
CHARITY SPIFF PLZ BUY
Just over a week left if you want to buy yourself a Steadfast Spiffo, and say fuck cancer simultaneously. Tweet for further info. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-08-17 19:50:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
NEW CHARITY SPIFFO!
They came for him they still come but he will NEVER yield. He is: Steadfast Spiffo. Spiffo is BACK, with maxed out levels of adorability. With his roomy camping backpack filled with useful survival supplies, sturdy axe, and many utility belts, hes prepared for anything and for a limited time, can be added to inventories as YOUR companion in the apocalypse! Face down the odds. Fight the fight. Survive against the horde all accompanied by a plushably grizzled hug-raccoon! Interested in putting down money for Steadfast Spiffo? Then visit the crowdfunding page over on Makeship! Weve timed it so (hopefully) orders will be ready to make for amazing Christmas presents.
All money raised by the Indie Stone from Steadfast Spiffo will go to the Queensland Cancer Council, an Australian cancer charity that brought help and solace to a good friend of ours during very difficult times.
Vicki Ann Woods was the partner of Zac Congo, one of the principal architects of the animation system that made Build 41 (and PZ) the success it is today. Even during a long illness, her love and moral support became a part of what the game has now become. Sometimes (not always, but sometimes) we get people asking how they can further support Project Zomboid. They say that they paid some money long ago, but have so many hours of gameplay that they want to add a little more. We always tell them not to be daft, and just tell some friends or leave a nice review. Well, for the next 21 days we have a different answer: please buy this Spiffo! Buying this Spiffo helps support people like Vicki, and like Zac, during their times of greatest need and to aid research that will help all of us and our families worldwide. Thank you x (And heres that link again if you need it)
[ 2023-08-04 18:19:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Indie Stone are pleased to announce another crowd-sourced Spiffo plushie through our friends over at Makeship this time raising money for a cause thats dear to all our hearts.
First off, lets meet the raccoon himself.
INTRODUCING STEADFAST SPIFFO!
They came for him they still come but he will NEVER yield. He is: Steadfast Spiffo. Spiffo is BACK, with maxed out levels of adorability. With his roomy camping backpack filled with useful survival supplies, sturdy axe, and many utility belts, hes prepared for anything and for a limited time, can be added to inventories as YOUR companion in the apocalypse! Face down the odds. Fight the fight. Survive against the horde all accompanied by a plushably grizzled hug-raccoon! Interested in putting down money for Steadfast Spiffo? Then visit the crowdfunding page over on Makeship! Weve timed it so (hopefully) orders will be ready to make for amazing Christmas presents.
FUNDRAISING
All money raised by the Indie Stone from Steadfast Spiffo will go to the Queensland Cancer Council, an Australian cancer charity that brought help and solace to a good friend of ours during very difficult times.
Vicki Ann Woods was the partner of Zac Congo, one of the principal architects of the animation system that made Build 41 (and PZ) the success it is today. Even during a long illness, her love and moral support became a part of what the game has now become. Sometimes (not always, but sometimes) we get people asking how they can further support Project Zomboid. They say that they paid some money long ago, but have so many hours of gameplay that they want to add a little more. We always tell them not to be daft, and just tell some friends or leave a nice review. Well, for the next 21 days we have a different answer: please buy this Spiffo! Buying this Spiffo helps support people like Vicki, and like Zac, during their times of greatest need and to aid research that will help all of us and our families worldwide. Thank you x (And heres that link again if you need it)
[ 2023-08-04 18:19:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
BagZ of fun
Last week our Formosa UKs primary PZ-dedicated chaps, Michael and Matteo, took the opportunity to do a full new mixing session for the game while they were both on the same island said island being Great Britain. A proportion of this was done with MP in mind, and especially gunshots, but seeing as multiplayer is currently broken/WIP in our dev build they instead hooked up an in-game barbecue to a long sequence of gunshots and worked around it like that. (Enterprising chaps, these two.) Were still waiting on some improved occlusion settings for indoor/outdoor, and the like, and some tweaks to player related sounds but otherwise the following has been tweaked and added.
As ever we have a wide range of smaller additions going into the game from other team members while the pedestal pieces are under construction. Recently these have included: New containers! Pic-a-nic Basket, Garden Basket, Fishing Basket, Musical Instrument Cases, an improvised Sheet Sling Bag, new Sheriff and SWAT versions of the duffel bag, protective cases, rifle cases and ALICE Belt and Suspender webbing green and camo version. [previewyoutube=EqKH3gqwiEI;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=wg7VmSDSYls;full][/previewyoutube]
Continued farming revamp improvements. Working on the systems for fertilizers, compost, and pests. Optimizing, rebalancing, constituting, simplifying and working out what other new crops we will require then pestering the art department for them. Making the scarecrows actually spawn in scarecrow-y outfits. Wallpapering. And were also coding in the oft-requested ability to fully wash grime from walls. [previewyoutube=uaOJbdvhU7o;full][/previewyoutube] New tools. New gizmos for managing our script assets; which upon release with B42 will provide ways to make modders lives easier, such as a utility which exports item display names from their scripts to create new translation files for those items if they dont already have one. Likewise weve built an internal tool to help our sound team notice events that havent been hooked up, or are new additions that havent had a sound built for them yet. Zoning. One of the more onerous of mapping tasks is underway for the map expansion essentially tagging the whole map so the game knows what should be happening where, and what should be spawning where. In this image light greeny-blue is crop fields, light green is forest, dark green is deep forest, blue is for navigation, purple-ish is for town areas and the blue squares are the new animal zones. Meanwhile the tiny pink dots are parking stalls for spawning vehicles of all sorts, and the yellow is for generic vegetation. Other colours designate different events, to special outfit zombie types etc.
Hiring. The success of B41 has meant weve been able to cast our net further, and higher, for additions to the PZ team to work on what the game will become in the mid-far future. We wont shine any spotlights on anyone until theyre bedded down, and theres something to show, but we are putting a lot of work into ensuring PZ stays fun, relevant and ever-evolving in the years to come. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Are you a Spiffo admirer who missed out on the recent plushie Makeship campaign? Watch the wires next week
[ 2023-07-27 18:29:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
Lets have a dig into whats happening in everyones favourite apocalypse. (Although other apocalypses are available.
First off a quick check-in with three of the four main pillars of Build 42 the pillars in question being crafting system revamp, MP improvement, the depth/performance/lighting tech upgrade, and finally animals which will have to wait till next time as RJ is only very recently back from his summer hols.
Turbo has been finalizing his machine and crafting station systems for a check-in next week, after we decided on some ways to maximise their utility for both our own devs and modders and give them as broad and solid a foundation as we can. The results are exciting and the design process for machines and the numerous crafting stations continues to expand these systems over the new tech tree and across existing devices over the entire PZ map. (Stuff like gas stations, wells, water pumps etc will also eventually be tied to the new system but maybe not in the initial release.)
Next up: tech upgrade. Lots of stuff going on in codeland for this but the topline additions have been improvements to the new visibility polygon, and continued work on the tile depth addition that will remove annoying character/wall clipping and ultimately make proper addition of lying and sitting down in all four directions feasible for mainline addition. (As well as the rendering optimizations it will entail obv.)
Alongside this the continued whackamole of things broken by the foundational changes made by the engine upgrades stuff like (to grab a few random examples) doors not shaking when thumped, muzzleflash not showing, railings not being cutaway properly, rendering of zeds on hidden floors not working and many/varied other important stuff.
Finally, we now have four coders and two MP-devoted testers beavering away on our multiplayer two coders devoted to the ongoing mission to bring all player inventory operations server-side, and another two knuckling down on general MP bugs and required polish. Over the past two weeks the guys have also been hooking up new for 42 systems, like the revamped fishing, to the netcode and looking ahead to properly wiring up the animals too.
SOUNDSCAPE IMPROVEMENTS
Last week our Formosa UKs primary PZ-dedicated chaps, Michael and Matteo, took the opportunity to do a full new mixing session for the game while they were both on the same island said island being Great Britain. A proportion of this was done with MP in mind, and especially gunshots, but seeing as multiplayer is currently broken/WIP in our dev build they instead hooked up an in-game barbecue to a long sequence of gunshots and worked around it like that. (Enterprising chaps, these two.) Were still waiting on some improved occlusion settings for indoor/outdoor, and the like, and some tweaks to player related sounds but otherwise the following has been tweaked and added.
- Re-balanced all the firearms so they make sense in relation to each other
- Changed the firearm inside/outside setup for general improvements
- Rebalanced the ambiance setup (from beds, to fog, to rain, wind etc) to make it all more coherent
- Re-worked some mixer setup/routing for reverb which has made for a very pleasant upgrade, especially with birdsong.
- Brought backsome volume/filter changes on the camera zoom, but still subtle.
- Improvements to zombie voices so when you get bitten to death by a dozen zombies the mix doesnt wig out anymore.
- Zombie vocals, music and animal noises now play more nicely over the music so it all cuts through a bit better.
OTHER NEW STUFF
As ever we have a wide range of smaller additions going into the game from other team members while the pedestal pieces are under construction. Recently these have included: New containers! Pic-a-nic Basket, Garden Basket, Fishing Basket, Musical Instrument Cases, an improvised Sheet Sling Bag, new Sheriff and SWAT versions of the duffel bag, protective cases, rifle cases and ALICE Belt and Suspender webbing green and camo version. [previewyoutube=EqKH3gqwiEI;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=wg7VmSDSYls;full][/previewyoutube]
Continued farming revamp improvements. Working on the systems for fertilizers, compost, and pests. Optimizing, rebalancing, constituting, simplifying and working out what other new crops we will require then pestering the art department for them. Making the scarecrows actually spawn in scarecrow-y outfits. Wallpapering. And were also coding in the oft-requested ability to fully wash grime from walls. [previewyoutube=uaOJbdvhU7o;full][/previewyoutube] New tools. New gizmos for managing our script assets; which upon release with B42 will provide ways to make modders lives easier, such as a utility which exports item display names from their scripts to create new translation files for those items if they dont already have one. Likewise weve built an internal tool to help our sound team notice events that havent been hooked up, or are new additions that havent had a sound built for them yet. Zoning. One of the more onerous of mapping tasks is underway for the map expansion essentially tagging the whole map so the game knows what should be happening where, and what should be spawning where. In this image light greeny-blue is crop fields, light green is forest, dark green is deep forest, blue is for navigation, purple-ish is for town areas and the blue squares are the new animal zones. Meanwhile the tiny pink dots are parking stalls for spawning vehicles of all sorts, and the yellow is for generic vegetation. Other colours designate different events, to special outfit zombie types etc.
Hiring. The success of B41 has meant weve been able to cast our net further, and higher, for additions to the PZ team to work on what the game will become in the mid-far future. We wont shine any spotlights on anyone until theyre bedded down, and theres something to show, but we are putting a lot of work into ensuring PZ stays fun, relevant and ever-evolving in the years to come. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Are you a Spiffo admirer who missed out on the recent plushie Makeship campaign? Watch the wires next week
[ 2023-07-27 18:29:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
Knox Event: 30 Years On
Okay so this week one of the four pillars of the next main PZ build is going back into the spotlight. Weve seen good progress backstage in crafting, MP improvement and animals/wildlife but its the engine upgrades thatve given us something cool and visual to show off this week. The tech improvements will be supplying basements, the 32 floor limit and new light propagation system but clearly a primary focus of it all has been with performance. Using 88 tile chunks, in the tech branch we are caching areas of the map to speed up drawing the scene dramatically. The benefit of this is obvious when it comes to FPS, with our own machine averaging over 300 FPS when zoomed out to maximum. (In the end product, once in the game proper, your mileage may differ for better or worse.) The downside to this, however, is that the upgrades involved meant we would be unable to change the lighting on tiles in front of the player which has always been used to represent the viewing arc and line of sight as the character turns or moves. With the changes in the tech branch doing this would always invalidate the cached chunks in every frame, thereby rendering the optimizations ineffective. To replace this in early B42, as a stopgap, we had a much more nave and simpler viewing cone that was drawn over the screen which also allowed you to see what parts of the screen were outside the characters viewing arc. You can see it on the old Light Propagation Demo we posted in the initial 42 Techdoid a while back. [previewyoutube=9_0TiPQ-JQA;full][/previewyoutube] However, this was never ideal. With this it was impossible to tell if an obstacle in the world is blocking your view, as it would just blindly extend to the edge of the screen with no concern for obstacles in the world. As such, EP has been working on a new system that gives all the same information as our old system but without the extreme FPS consequences of it and also far slicker and more accurate than our old tile system. What hes done is pretty cool! [previewyoutube=sagb4sDQzJU;full][/previewyoutube] As you can see, theres now much more precise and smooth LOS information than the old tile system ever could muster. Were now experimenting with different levels of visibility and blur on the effect to make sure it is a) visible enough to convey the line of sight information to the player, but b) not overbearing enough to distract the player as it moves around in real-time. Where weve got it right now in this second video is still super cool (note the effect when doors and curtains are opened and closed) but its possibly a little too transparent on these lighter tiles. [previewyoutube=2RLZrfTJ0bg;full][/previewyoutube] Well continue tweaking until we find something that works best as a default, but as ever well do our utmost to provide settings that will let you adjust it to whatever youre most comfortable with.
Its been a big week for the map and art team, as the B42 map expansion has just gone into its first round of testing. It covers a pretty huge area, as is shown in this handily obscured image.
Clearly the Louisville expansion in 41 was very built up, and here theres a lot of grass and wilderness, but that covered 56 cells and what youre looking at here is 430. Our testers are having a wild old time checking out its many and varied secrets and hideaways, and logging all the map errors they find for future fixing. As weve discussed previously, a lot of the existing map will be getting a spruce-up too not least with buildings that make the most of the new height limit.
Over our lengthy development, and unending devotion to sandbox settings, things in our front-end have become a little messy. As such Aiteron is currently improving and redesigning our Main Menu UI. PLEASE NOTE: No design here is final, this is very much a work in progress we want feedback on from players and modders. First off are changes to the sandbox settings themselves. The layouts been redone, and an advanced tick box has been added that switches over to deeper settings and selections. Weve also mixed in a search and separation of settings by category on the right. [previewyoutube=uXYCRvvz7R8;full][/previewyoutube] Next up, an in-depth set of improvement for the mod UI. Here youll find a search function, category filtering, and the ability to add mods as favorites. There are also added presets for mods, which can then be shared with friends using Share and Add buttons. Aiteron has also improved the mod info panel where youll be able to find out more about the mod contents, and quickly go to the other mods it requires or the relevant website. He has also made sure to add a parameter for incompatible mods, which will specify exactly which mods your chosen mod wont play nicely with. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, theres a raft of new info for modders themselves and an expanded functionality for mod.info. Theres options been added for modVersion, author, category, icon, incompatibility and, soon, more besides. Next up Aiteron will be looking into mod changelog functionalities, and a way to determine mod order which he intends to govern the manual or semi-automatic order of mods being loaded. Heres what it currently looks like REMEMBER WIP etc! Feedback required! [previewyoutube=l6lBjGFtOHA;full][/previewyoutube]
The first results of our recording sessions are now properly in-game: the grunts, groans and wheezes of your survivor are now in-game. Whats more they add a LOT to the experience, and weve got some really positive thoughts coming through from our internal testers. Weve made some videos for you to demonstrate but before viewing (and listening) please be advised of the following: Currently the exertion noises play too much especially during extended combat. We definitely need to tone things down or its going to get a little too top tier ladies tennis match. As such we will likely be tying exertion sounds to the exertion levels themselves, which will also be tied into our heavy breathing noises after heavy periods of activity. So, with that in mind [previewyoutube=UA6yiHkFrpg;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=s15BU6t0gco;full][/previewyoutube]
Look, an aphid. Aint it sweet.
A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-07-06 18:32:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Today marks a day in history.
It is EXACTLY thirty years since the Knox Event broke out on 6th July 1993. Our thoughts are with everyone impacted on this sad anniversary.
To commemorate this we are allowing everyone to relive the experience IN REAL TIME on the Twitters.
Please follow @TheKnoxEvent to experience a textual timeline of what manifested three decades ago, albeit (one would hope) with a little less inevitable death than the real thing.
TECH UPGRADE
Okay so this week one of the four pillars of the next main PZ build is going back into the spotlight. Weve seen good progress backstage in crafting, MP improvement and animals/wildlife but its the engine upgrades thatve given us something cool and visual to show off this week. The tech improvements will be supplying basements, the 32 floor limit and new light propagation system but clearly a primary focus of it all has been with performance. Using 88 tile chunks, in the tech branch we are caching areas of the map to speed up drawing the scene dramatically. The benefit of this is obvious when it comes to FPS, with our own machine averaging over 300 FPS when zoomed out to maximum. (In the end product, once in the game proper, your mileage may differ for better or worse.) The downside to this, however, is that the upgrades involved meant we would be unable to change the lighting on tiles in front of the player which has always been used to represent the viewing arc and line of sight as the character turns or moves. With the changes in the tech branch doing this would always invalidate the cached chunks in every frame, thereby rendering the optimizations ineffective. To replace this in early B42, as a stopgap, we had a much more nave and simpler viewing cone that was drawn over the screen which also allowed you to see what parts of the screen were outside the characters viewing arc. You can see it on the old Light Propagation Demo we posted in the initial 42 Techdoid a while back. [previewyoutube=9_0TiPQ-JQA;full][/previewyoutube] However, this was never ideal. With this it was impossible to tell if an obstacle in the world is blocking your view, as it would just blindly extend to the edge of the screen with no concern for obstacles in the world. As such, EP has been working on a new system that gives all the same information as our old system but without the extreme FPS consequences of it and also far slicker and more accurate than our old tile system. What hes done is pretty cool! [previewyoutube=sagb4sDQzJU;full][/previewyoutube] As you can see, theres now much more precise and smooth LOS information than the old tile system ever could muster. Were now experimenting with different levels of visibility and blur on the effect to make sure it is a) visible enough to convey the line of sight information to the player, but b) not overbearing enough to distract the player as it moves around in real-time. Where weve got it right now in this second video is still super cool (note the effect when doors and curtains are opened and closed) but its possibly a little too transparent on these lighter tiles. [previewyoutube=2RLZrfTJ0bg;full][/previewyoutube] Well continue tweaking until we find something that works best as a default, but as ever well do our utmost to provide settings that will let you adjust it to whatever youre most comfortable with.
MAPPAGE
Its been a big week for the map and art team, as the B42 map expansion has just gone into its first round of testing. It covers a pretty huge area, as is shown in this handily obscured image.
Clearly the Louisville expansion in 41 was very built up, and here theres a lot of grass and wilderness, but that covered 56 cells and what youre looking at here is 430. Our testers are having a wild old time checking out its many and varied secrets and hideaways, and logging all the map errors they find for future fixing. As weve discussed previously, a lot of the existing map will be getting a spruce-up too not least with buildings that make the most of the new height limit.
SANDBOX SETTING SPREE
Over our lengthy development, and unending devotion to sandbox settings, things in our front-end have become a little messy. As such Aiteron is currently improving and redesigning our Main Menu UI. PLEASE NOTE: No design here is final, this is very much a work in progress we want feedback on from players and modders. First off are changes to the sandbox settings themselves. The layouts been redone, and an advanced tick box has been added that switches over to deeper settings and selections. Weve also mixed in a search and separation of settings by category on the right. [previewyoutube=uXYCRvvz7R8;full][/previewyoutube] Next up, an in-depth set of improvement for the mod UI. Here youll find a search function, category filtering, and the ability to add mods as favorites. There are also added presets for mods, which can then be shared with friends using Share and Add buttons. Aiteron has also improved the mod info panel where youll be able to find out more about the mod contents, and quickly go to the other mods it requires or the relevant website. He has also made sure to add a parameter for incompatible mods, which will specify exactly which mods your chosen mod wont play nicely with. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, theres a raft of new info for modders themselves and an expanded functionality for mod.info. Theres options been added for modVersion, author, category, icon, incompatibility and, soon, more besides. Next up Aiteron will be looking into mod changelog functionalities, and a way to determine mod order which he intends to govern the manual or semi-automatic order of mods being loaded. Heres what it currently looks like REMEMBER WIP etc! Feedback required! [previewyoutube=l6lBjGFtOHA;full][/previewyoutube]
GRUNTING
The first results of our recording sessions are now properly in-game: the grunts, groans and wheezes of your survivor are now in-game. Whats more they add a LOT to the experience, and weve got some really positive thoughts coming through from our internal testers. Weve made some videos for you to demonstrate but before viewing (and listening) please be advised of the following: Currently the exertion noises play too much especially during extended combat. We definitely need to tone things down or its going to get a little too top tier ladies tennis match. As such we will likely be tying exertion sounds to the exertion levels themselves, which will also be tied into our heavy breathing noises after heavy periods of activity. So, with that in mind [previewyoutube=UA6yiHkFrpg;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=s15BU6t0gco;full][/previewyoutube]
BUGS
Look, an aphid. Aint it sweet.
A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-07-06 18:32:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Snack Attack
For the past few weeks Turbos focus has been on making the new machine scripting system more versatile and easy to use. As well as creating the crafting stations and machines required for the crafting tree were working on (potters wheels, anvils, woodwork benches and such) our ultimate goal is to allow all machines and appliances on the map utilize this system to unify how machines work within the game. This overall goal wont be present in its entirety for a first release of B42, but the framework will have been installed that allows for them not only to share the same UI systems to keep them consistent, but also allow for them to be connected together, and allow them to have more complexity of interior parts that could be salvaged and co-opted for other uses. From fire alarms, to clocks, to ovens, to microwaves. The ramifications of this system will be huge both for the game and for modders, allowing for the machine UI and functionality to be both scriptable with lua and with the object scripting. It will then provide powerful and easy-to-use tools for devs and modders to create interesting machines quickly, cater for slots to place items, and allow for items to interact with these machines in a diverse way with a consistent UI. Instead of needing to build a bespoke scripted UI, and the complex interactions between the player, machines will be able to be added with minimal code for functionality, and provide higher level details on what goes into them and what comes out. Likewise therell be stardardised knobs and buttons that this backend will allow to be attached for player interaction. In order to test the versatility of how this system could be applied to vanilla objects within the game (and how far we could push it) we wanted to apply it all to a system that wasnt strictly a crafting station like the more standard one we showed off a month or so ago with some post-apocalyptic pottery. As such, Turbo put together a test case that could have some fun utilization within a multiplayer settlement in the post-apocalypse and indeed is pretty cool on your general solo survival adventure too. [previewyoutube=opGQu8LCdEs;full][/previewyoutube] There will probably be those out there looking at this at face value, perhaps even getting annoyed and asking nggggh, why vending machines?. (Hello, to those out there!) However, the important aspect to take away from this video are the many unique interactions, systems and features that have been built into the vending machine using this same framework. What we see here allows for a unique key to unlock the machine, allows it to be stocked with different items (which could be very useful for players on a multiplayer server wanting to run a shop, for example), allows it to take in money and deposit an item from its internal inventory, allows for buttons on the machine to pick particular products, and finally allows for a custom user interface for a particular machine thats FAR easier to create than it is with B41s currently somewhat unwieldly UI system. That the new crafting / machine framework is flexible enough to be able to accurately create a vending machine is a huge deal to us, and in time to modders and the overall good health of the game as we continue to grow and expand. Ultimately this framework will be expanded across all machines across the PZ map, as well as those that are craftable through the crafting tree. In turn, this will allow us to open up a ton of interesting crafting and engineering opportunities, as well as open up more and more of the existing machines and gadgets strewn around the PZ map. As said before though, this is probably a longer term goal, and our focus right now is squarely on the new post-apoc crafting tech tree. This is all, however, our first (big) step towards the longer term goal of unifying how these things work across the entirety of Project Zomboid. This will then free ourselves, and modders, to have as many possibilities as possible for machinery, and ensure a consistent framework to allow anything created in the game to interoperate with each other, power, liquids and item input/output. Beyond this it will minimize mod conflicts, and overall allow PZ to become a powerful framework for modders to add in all sorts of crazy fun stuff in future.
Fenris has been working on updating and improving Discord integration, which will allow for powerful features to help roleplay servers and servers running gameplay events, as well as general integration features. Currently, chat within Discord rooms should be transmittable into the game chat and vice versa but the code used is somewhat outdated and it doesnt work brilliantly. Some may say: not at all. Server owners choose not to use it. With 42, however, everything will be polished and sparkly new. Whats more server operators will be able to allow discord commands to trigger lua code on the server, for example to begin a timed event and trigger changes in gameplay. Likewise this will also allow for custom lua to trigger messages sent to different discord channels on the discord server. Another feature we intend to include will allow for admin controlled radio / tv scripts to be executable from multi-line text from the discord server, to avoid admins having to quickly type out multiple pre-written text lines manually in the heat of gameplay. This is all very limited and walled off, and the game side lua will require custom code to allow for these Discord interactions, so there wont be any security risks associated with this discord interoperability. For planned roleplay events or custom server game mode events, though, this should provide many cool tools for server operators to play with.
Other mentionable work on the mighty PZ thats happened this week has been:
A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-06-22 22:06:11 CET ] [ Original post ]
Haylo, heres another dev-log sent down from the mothership.
Few different things form different areas this time around, starting off with an example system update from one of the four main pillars of Build 42 which are the crafting improvements, and the sorts of places they could take the game to.
CRAFTY BUSINESS
For the past few weeks Turbos focus has been on making the new machine scripting system more versatile and easy to use. As well as creating the crafting stations and machines required for the crafting tree were working on (potters wheels, anvils, woodwork benches and such) our ultimate goal is to allow all machines and appliances on the map utilize this system to unify how machines work within the game. This overall goal wont be present in its entirety for a first release of B42, but the framework will have been installed that allows for them not only to share the same UI systems to keep them consistent, but also allow for them to be connected together, and allow them to have more complexity of interior parts that could be salvaged and co-opted for other uses. From fire alarms, to clocks, to ovens, to microwaves. The ramifications of this system will be huge both for the game and for modders, allowing for the machine UI and functionality to be both scriptable with lua and with the object scripting. It will then provide powerful and easy-to-use tools for devs and modders to create interesting machines quickly, cater for slots to place items, and allow for items to interact with these machines in a diverse way with a consistent UI. Instead of needing to build a bespoke scripted UI, and the complex interactions between the player, machines will be able to be added with minimal code for functionality, and provide higher level details on what goes into them and what comes out. Likewise therell be stardardised knobs and buttons that this backend will allow to be attached for player interaction. In order to test the versatility of how this system could be applied to vanilla objects within the game (and how far we could push it) we wanted to apply it all to a system that wasnt strictly a crafting station like the more standard one we showed off a month or so ago with some post-apocalyptic pottery. As such, Turbo put together a test case that could have some fun utilization within a multiplayer settlement in the post-apocalypse and indeed is pretty cool on your general solo survival adventure too. [previewyoutube=opGQu8LCdEs;full][/previewyoutube] There will probably be those out there looking at this at face value, perhaps even getting annoyed and asking nggggh, why vending machines?. (Hello, to those out there!) However, the important aspect to take away from this video are the many unique interactions, systems and features that have been built into the vending machine using this same framework. What we see here allows for a unique key to unlock the machine, allows it to be stocked with different items (which could be very useful for players on a multiplayer server wanting to run a shop, for example), allows it to take in money and deposit an item from its internal inventory, allows for buttons on the machine to pick particular products, and finally allows for a custom user interface for a particular machine thats FAR easier to create than it is with B41s currently somewhat unwieldly UI system. That the new crafting / machine framework is flexible enough to be able to accurately create a vending machine is a huge deal to us, and in time to modders and the overall good health of the game as we continue to grow and expand. Ultimately this framework will be expanded across all machines across the PZ map, as well as those that are craftable through the crafting tree. In turn, this will allow us to open up a ton of interesting crafting and engineering opportunities, as well as open up more and more of the existing machines and gadgets strewn around the PZ map. As said before though, this is probably a longer term goal, and our focus right now is squarely on the new post-apoc crafting tech tree. This is all, however, our first (big) step towards the longer term goal of unifying how these things work across the entirety of Project Zomboid. This will then free ourselves, and modders, to have as many possibilities as possible for machinery, and ensure a consistent framework to allow anything created in the game to interoperate with each other, power, liquids and item input/output. Beyond this it will minimize mod conflicts, and overall allow PZ to become a powerful framework for modders to add in all sorts of crazy fun stuff in future.
SOWING DISCORD
Fenris has been working on updating and improving Discord integration, which will allow for powerful features to help roleplay servers and servers running gameplay events, as well as general integration features. Currently, chat within Discord rooms should be transmittable into the game chat and vice versa but the code used is somewhat outdated and it doesnt work brilliantly. Some may say: not at all. Server owners choose not to use it. With 42, however, everything will be polished and sparkly new. Whats more server operators will be able to allow discord commands to trigger lua code on the server, for example to begin a timed event and trigger changes in gameplay. Likewise this will also allow for custom lua to trigger messages sent to different discord channels on the discord server. Another feature we intend to include will allow for admin controlled radio / tv scripts to be executable from multi-line text from the discord server, to avoid admins having to quickly type out multiple pre-written text lines manually in the heat of gameplay. This is all very limited and walled off, and the game side lua will require custom code to allow for these Discord interactions, so there wont be any security risks associated with this discord interoperability. For planned roleplay events or custom server game mode events, though, this should provide many cool tools for server operators to play with.
ELSEWHERE
Other mentionable work on the mighty PZ thats happened this week has been:
- Aiteron has been making improvements to our sandbox menu, mod menu general mod settings. Our sandbox settings panels had become so vast and unwieldy that they needed a redesign now with an added search function, simplification in some areas to make things less impenetrable to noobs, and some advanced settings for the long-term survivors amongst us. We will also be improving the server settings interface, simplifying the addition of mods, unifying settings, making it easier to add modded sandbox settings etc.
- Blair reports in for the blog with the unsexy work of remaking farming interactions and its associated UI. Hes currently working out what information you receive, and where, and also at which farming skill level. Hes also sorting out some of the wonkiness you saw in the animations you saw in the last Thursdoid we did.
- Were approaching a new merge from the map team into the internal testing build, probably taking place tomorrow, so our testers can gambol through even more new buildings and locations. Heres a quick video of some of the existing fun places theyve come across.
- New masks. New hats.
A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-06-22 22:06:11 CET ] [ Original post ]
Church on Zunday
Lets pop quickly back into the revamped farming, which this week has had some ease-of-use controls added in to make things less of a click-through-UI nightmare and bring a touch of extra Stardewwy-ness. This video shows various elements of fun stuff but primarily that by taking a farming tool into your primary, pressing RMB and aiming, and then pressing E will have you go about the farming action. Likewise with sowing seeds, and harvesting. CAVEAT: Please note that these controls arent final, and also that theres a fair amount of animation polish required to make it all look super-smooth. [previewyoutube=zY_-_8guk8A;full][/previewyoutube] Also, heres a quick timelapse of them plants a growin. [previewyoutube=Bn9ZD6G88Ak;full][/previewyoutube]
Finally, we spotted this out on the wires. How good does this make our lore look and sound?! Maybe AI doesnt provide a terrifying nightmarish future after all! (Or if it does, it at least it will make the chaos look and sound really good on YouTube!) [previewyoutube=IYN0Oof0Hyc;full][/previewyoutube] This weeks survivalist from Ser. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-06-08 17:48:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
A lot of stuff in a WIP state at the moment, so not too many big flashy shiny things in the blog this time round. Hopefully enough to whet your whistle though.
In terms of work on the four central pillars of 42, the next big thing happening will be the next merge-in of the crafting revamp to the central trunk build. This will primarily be the crafting station code, which has had a bit of rewiring and now will also allow for benches/machines etc to (optionally) have parts items that degrade on use and can be viewed/added/removed via a maintenance tab.
Meanwhile, RJ is working on integrating his deer tracking with the foraging/search mode integrated into Build 41, while in our tech upgrade optimization / lighting / more depth & height branch we continue to play a bit of whack-a-mole with issues that have arisen with such foundational changes. So, this week, as an example thats been stuff like: savefile thumbnail creation being borked, zombies spawning on water, the tops of tall tiles showing through the floor above etc.
Finally, in the realms of MP and the continuing mission to bring inventories etc. server-side the gang have been working on getting trapping and nu-fishing working with the new systems, and solving various issues that occur with new object creation also.
FARMZ
Lets pop quickly back into the revamped farming, which this week has had some ease-of-use controls added in to make things less of a click-through-UI nightmare and bring a touch of extra Stardewwy-ness. This video shows various elements of fun stuff but primarily that by taking a farming tool into your primary, pressing RMB and aiming, and then pressing E will have you go about the farming action. Likewise with sowing seeds, and harvesting. CAVEAT: Please note that these controls arent final, and also that theres a fair amount of animation polish required to make it all look super-smooth. [previewyoutube=zY_-_8guk8A;full][/previewyoutube] Also, heres a quick timelapse of them plants a growin. [previewyoutube=Bn9ZD6G88Ak;full][/previewyoutube]
OTHER STUFF
- As previously mentioned, alongside readable newspapers and newsletters, players will now be able to pick up flyers that advertises places of interest on the Knox Event map and then also reveal that location on the players own personal map. This week weve really been knuckling down on this, as weve realized its a great tool to direct new players towards buildings favoured by many in the community for their safehouses. Anyone able to name the following locations from the real estate advertising?
- As well as expanding the current map, were also giving existing areas of the map a loving glow-up. Take this amazing improvement from Ayrton as an awesome example.
- Clearly any new build will also be coming with new clothing, hats and whatnot. Martins also pumping out loads of new fun stuff for you to loot, wear, and also for those tricksy zombies to wear too.
Finally, we spotted this out on the wires. How good does this make our lore look and sound?! Maybe AI doesnt provide a terrifying nightmarish future after all! (Or if it does, it at least it will make the chaos look and sound really good on YouTube!) [previewyoutube=IYN0Oof0Hyc;full][/previewyoutube] This weeks survivalist from Ser. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-06-08 17:48:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
Mizter McGregor's Garden
First off, lets darken Blairs door and watch him lean over a fence with a piece of straw in his mouth while he outlines what hell imminently be merging into our internal branch for our testers to play around with.
Currently Im working on smoothing out the interface and interactions for the revamped farming. One important part of the interface, and player feedback, are the new plant sprites Mash has produced to represent plant states. Previously, our far more limited number of plants had sprites for their individual growth stages, as well as some generic sprites to represent trampled plants. Now, for every single growth stage and for every plant, we have 600 additional sprites to represent whats now grown to 15 crops and 8 herbs. These cover states of:
Last time we properly met the Knox Events deer population and their migration habits, and now its time to introduce some smaller varmints who are tied to the same system, but will move around according to a different ruleset. WIP vid. Kitten behaviour will probably get more realistic / change. (Kitten is the correct word for baby rabbit we dont know that either. [previewyoutube=hr5dTl9lPgI;full][/previewyoutube] Also we had a bug this week with the carrots. [previewyoutube=CCbNT9b42fQ;full][/previewyoutube] Also also, with animals comes poop: https://twitter.com/theindiestone/status/1659235346301714450
Now ably assisted by our newest friend Dirk the map team carry on a-pace with the huge map expansion that (most likely) will land alongside 42, or be a part of its beta updates. After a brief spot of begging we managed to bag a little taster of one of its more epic locations as ever big thanks to Amz for the vid. [previewyoutube=v9qwpo4VPwo;full][/previewyoutube]
Elsewhere Fenris has been chewing on a key accessibility issue that weve been wanting to get fixed up since forever namely the ability to remap mouse buttons (including extra buttons on fancy mouses) to different actions, by making mouse buttons and keys work exactly the same within the bind menu. Ooh, and also look! Area-specific vehicle spawns in action
This weeks misty hunt from Felkhan. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-05-25 14:14:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
Last time round we checked in with some of the main pillars of Build 42 those things being the crafting and crafting systems update, the tech upgrade, animals/migration and MP.
As such, for todays blog well be dipping into some of the stuff that wider members of the team have been working on for more general improvement elsewhere in the game.
FARMING
First off, lets darken Blairs door and watch him lean over a fence with a piece of straw in his mouth while he outlines what hell imminently be merging into our internal branch for our testers to play around with.
Currently Im working on smoothing out the interface and interactions for the revamped farming. One important part of the interface, and player feedback, are the new plant sprites Mash has produced to represent plant states. Previously, our far more limited number of plants had sprites for their individual growth stages, as well as some generic sprites to represent trampled plants. Now, for every single growth stage and for every plant, we have 600 additional sprites to represent whats now grown to 15 crops and 8 herbs. These cover states of:
- Unhealthy due to disease, lack of water, or general low health.
- In the process of dying due to these aforementioned reasons.
- Completely dead.
- Dead-but-also-trampled/crushed. These are for plants that have been crushed by zombie hordes, vehicles etc, and also for dead plants that are degrading over time.
CHEEKY RABBITS
Last time we properly met the Knox Events deer population and their migration habits, and now its time to introduce some smaller varmints who are tied to the same system, but will move around according to a different ruleset. WIP vid. Kitten behaviour will probably get more realistic / change. (Kitten is the correct word for baby rabbit we dont know that either. [previewyoutube=hr5dTl9lPgI;full][/previewyoutube] Also we had a bug this week with the carrots. [previewyoutube=CCbNT9b42fQ;full][/previewyoutube] Also also, with animals comes poop: https://twitter.com/theindiestone/status/1659235346301714450
MAPPING
Now ably assisted by our newest friend Dirk the map team carry on a-pace with the huge map expansion that (most likely) will land alongside 42, or be a part of its beta updates. After a brief spot of begging we managed to bag a little taster of one of its more epic locations as ever big thanks to Amz for the vid. [previewyoutube=v9qwpo4VPwo;full][/previewyoutube]
AND FINALLY
Elsewhere Fenris has been chewing on a key accessibility issue that weve been wanting to get fixed up since forever namely the ability to remap mouse buttons (including extra buttons on fancy mouses) to different actions, by making mouse buttons and keys work exactly the same within the bind menu. Ooh, and also look! Area-specific vehicle spawns in action
This weeks misty hunt from Felkhan. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-05-25 14:14:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Skillful HuntZman
RJ has been taking a holiday (American translation: vacation) from his work on domestic animals and husbandry, and has taken to the woodland and forests of the Knox Event. Wild animals will be important to B42 for both reasons of ambiance and necessity it will make your experience feel no end more engaging to see deer skittering through the treeline, but also will make hunting a viable survival technique and one required for some of our advanced crafting recipes when society is long-gone. [previewyoutube=a3gE3T-nTaY;full]https://youtu.be/a3gE3T-nTaY[/previewyoutube] What RJ has been working on, in particular, this week is the movement of animals over the map their migration if you will. So if you could all also have a looksee at the following video too, then we can run into it in some more depth afterwards. Also clearly: USUAL WIP CAVEATS APPLY. Things can and will change through development and testing. [previewyoutube=dnAFN7gtQPg;full][/previewyoutube] So what are we seeing here? Well basically throughout the day our deer will follow paths that our designers (and modders) can map out in our WorldEd tool and in the vid you can see a virtual animal following a path. Right now, one virtual animal is a group of animals thats been defined in a lua file. Our current group, for example, consists of one buck, several doe and some fawns. Though clearly once they are fully implemented the variation will be greater, and also dependent on stuff like the time of year. Once players get close to this coded virtual animal these deer will then spawn into the world as real animals and once you retreat away theyll revert to their virtual status so the game can take over their movement and activities once more. If the group has become separated meanwhile, theyll team back up again when their paths next cross. In their virtual form the animals will move over the map, doing potential set activities at set different places. They are timetabled to have several sleeping and eating periods currently sleeping for a period of half an hour at some point between 12pm and 4pm, eating at some point between 5am and 7am, and eating again for an hour at some point before 4pm and 6pm. (Clearly, all this is easily changed at the dev-end and can also be adjusted for whatever different animals we choose to add in future) To aid players who want to be hunters, deer will leave evidence and tracks of where theyve been and what theyre doing. So therell be footprints (with a direction suggested), poop, and broken twigs and undergrowth while flattened plants will indicate a sleeping spot, and grazed areas an eating spot. The way in which we represent these visibly in-game is currently being worked out, but for now (and perhaps later on too) we will be providing for it in a dual use for eris super foraging mode that was introduced in B41. A goal for the player, then, might be to follow tracks and work out the deers possible sleep or eating spot, mark them on their map, and then wait near those spots at the correct hours and hope that animals will stop by. Were also working out on ways for a Tracking skill to be integrated into this, though seeing as the design is still under discussion well probably talk about that at a later date. Something else that were aware should be factored in is human smell and wind direction potentially spooking animals, as it would in real life, but we plan to add that layer in a bit further down the line. RJ would also like to give out a call of Special Thanks to Inrictus for the time hes spent teaching him how to be a proper huntsman! Finally, heres another quick video of a survivor setting up camp with our new tents and whatnot (no deer this time) to give a little flavour of what the surrounding gameplay will feel like too. [previewyoutube=kEey9g7khio;full][/previewyoutube]
Operation Optimization is going very well, easily obtaining several hundred FPS on our dev hardware when zoomed out. However at the moment we still need to look into optimizations for how our current fog and puddles work both of these are intensive graphical operations that need updating frame by frame. Thus, at the moment, they invalidate our cached chunks and diminish some of the gains from the optimizations. As such at a later date either before a first public release, or very possibly in a follow up build to it we in particular plan to revisit these systems to optimize them for our new rendering system. Particularly the fog system, in fact, since having a depth map will now provide opportunities to make our visual effects look much better since we will have a solid representation of surfaces and depth to allow us to much improve how it interacts with objects in the scene.
Now the crafting systems are all in place, were starting to fill out the tech tree of recipes and wanted to show whats currently being implemented. As a reminder to those who perhaps arent as interested in the long term crafting and survival systems we are implementing, these will be completely optional as to whether you want to engage with it. If youre more interested in evading zombie hordes in the centre of towns and cities then youll still be able to do that. However, to address our games weaker late game, provide many roleplay opportunities, and provide depth of gameplay outside interactions with zombies were going all out on making the crafting possibilities as exhaustive as possible. Likewise, we are building new and more powerful crafting systems that modders will really be able to get their teeth into. Remember, our benchmark is that a group of players should be able to build a functioning village even if spawning on a wilderness map with no signs of civilization. We want to make sure every aspect of crafting is covered to give multiplayer communities the opportunity to build and thrive, and provide modders with the tools required to make cool as hell expansive tech mods as seen on Minecraft, allowing Zomboid to become a more diverse survival, crafting and automation game modding platform in future. An example of this would be working with clay. Clay can be dug up near rivers, and will be used to make bricks, tiles, roofing, pottery, and a whole host of other items and tiles to place in the world. Those living on a barren map wanting to build a secure home will be overjoyed to be able to use bricks and tiles to make a proper dwelling thats sturdy enough to stop zombies from breaking in. Likewise even on a smaller-scale basis, this craft will prove vital when survivors dont have access to modern cutlery or liquid storage. So heres a quick video (very WIP still, we have a lot of balance, UI and polish to apply yet) that will show off some of the crafting systems when working with clay. [previewyoutube=Aa6pgRZ-CSI;full]https://youtu.be/Aa6pgRZ-CSI[/previewyoutube] In future Thursdoids well try to demo different diverse parts of the tech tree and their related professions as they implemented, as well as UI and quality of life improvements as we make them
The Indie Stone would like to extend an excited hello to two new fine folks this week Egor who will be joining the MP team as they move ahead with their upgrades, and community fan favourite DaddyDirkieDirk. Dirk has joined our art team to pump out ever more delectable tiles to give our map more life, and its deepest parts some more intriguing objects to perceive in the darkness and if you are interested in his fantastic work as a modder then we ran a Mod Spotlight on him only last week. Thanks all! A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-05-11 20:22:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello all!
This week well be checking in with three of the main four pillars of Build 42 work on the fourth, the server-side player inventories and general MP improvement, has been fairly business as usual the past month or so and theres not much to talk about thatd be juicy for enough for public consumption.
Steady your loins, then, as first of all we jump into
ANIMALS AND MIGRATION
RJ has been taking a holiday (American translation: vacation) from his work on domestic animals and husbandry, and has taken to the woodland and forests of the Knox Event. Wild animals will be important to B42 for both reasons of ambiance and necessity it will make your experience feel no end more engaging to see deer skittering through the treeline, but also will make hunting a viable survival technique and one required for some of our advanced crafting recipes when society is long-gone. [previewyoutube=a3gE3T-nTaY;full]https://youtu.be/a3gE3T-nTaY[/previewyoutube] What RJ has been working on, in particular, this week is the movement of animals over the map their migration if you will. So if you could all also have a looksee at the following video too, then we can run into it in some more depth afterwards. Also clearly: USUAL WIP CAVEATS APPLY. Things can and will change through development and testing. [previewyoutube=dnAFN7gtQPg;full][/previewyoutube] So what are we seeing here? Well basically throughout the day our deer will follow paths that our designers (and modders) can map out in our WorldEd tool and in the vid you can see a virtual animal following a path. Right now, one virtual animal is a group of animals thats been defined in a lua file. Our current group, for example, consists of one buck, several doe and some fawns. Though clearly once they are fully implemented the variation will be greater, and also dependent on stuff like the time of year. Once players get close to this coded virtual animal these deer will then spawn into the world as real animals and once you retreat away theyll revert to their virtual status so the game can take over their movement and activities once more. If the group has become separated meanwhile, theyll team back up again when their paths next cross. In their virtual form the animals will move over the map, doing potential set activities at set different places. They are timetabled to have several sleeping and eating periods currently sleeping for a period of half an hour at some point between 12pm and 4pm, eating at some point between 5am and 7am, and eating again for an hour at some point before 4pm and 6pm. (Clearly, all this is easily changed at the dev-end and can also be adjusted for whatever different animals we choose to add in future) To aid players who want to be hunters, deer will leave evidence and tracks of where theyve been and what theyre doing. So therell be footprints (with a direction suggested), poop, and broken twigs and undergrowth while flattened plants will indicate a sleeping spot, and grazed areas an eating spot. The way in which we represent these visibly in-game is currently being worked out, but for now (and perhaps later on too) we will be providing for it in a dual use for eris super foraging mode that was introduced in B41. A goal for the player, then, might be to follow tracks and work out the deers possible sleep or eating spot, mark them on their map, and then wait near those spots at the correct hours and hope that animals will stop by. Were also working out on ways for a Tracking skill to be integrated into this, though seeing as the design is still under discussion well probably talk about that at a later date. Something else that were aware should be factored in is human smell and wind direction potentially spooking animals, as it would in real life, but we plan to add that layer in a bit further down the line. RJ would also like to give out a call of Special Thanks to Inrictus for the time hes spent teaching him how to be a proper huntsman! Finally, heres another quick video of a survivor setting up camp with our new tents and whatnot (no deer this time) to give a little flavour of what the surrounding gameplay will feel like too. [previewyoutube=kEey9g7khio;full][/previewyoutube]
ENGINE UPGRADE
Operation Optimization is going very well, easily obtaining several hundred FPS on our dev hardware when zoomed out. However at the moment we still need to look into optimizations for how our current fog and puddles work both of these are intensive graphical operations that need updating frame by frame. Thus, at the moment, they invalidate our cached chunks and diminish some of the gains from the optimizations. As such at a later date either before a first public release, or very possibly in a follow up build to it we in particular plan to revisit these systems to optimize them for our new rendering system. Particularly the fog system, in fact, since having a depth map will now provide opportunities to make our visual effects look much better since we will have a solid representation of surfaces and depth to allow us to much improve how it interacts with objects in the scene.
CRAFTING UPDATE
Now the crafting systems are all in place, were starting to fill out the tech tree of recipes and wanted to show whats currently being implemented. As a reminder to those who perhaps arent as interested in the long term crafting and survival systems we are implementing, these will be completely optional as to whether you want to engage with it. If youre more interested in evading zombie hordes in the centre of towns and cities then youll still be able to do that. However, to address our games weaker late game, provide many roleplay opportunities, and provide depth of gameplay outside interactions with zombies were going all out on making the crafting possibilities as exhaustive as possible. Likewise, we are building new and more powerful crafting systems that modders will really be able to get their teeth into. Remember, our benchmark is that a group of players should be able to build a functioning village even if spawning on a wilderness map with no signs of civilization. We want to make sure every aspect of crafting is covered to give multiplayer communities the opportunity to build and thrive, and provide modders with the tools required to make cool as hell expansive tech mods as seen on Minecraft, allowing Zomboid to become a more diverse survival, crafting and automation game modding platform in future. An example of this would be working with clay. Clay can be dug up near rivers, and will be used to make bricks, tiles, roofing, pottery, and a whole host of other items and tiles to place in the world. Those living on a barren map wanting to build a secure home will be overjoyed to be able to use bricks and tiles to make a proper dwelling thats sturdy enough to stop zombies from breaking in. Likewise even on a smaller-scale basis, this craft will prove vital when survivors dont have access to modern cutlery or liquid storage. So heres a quick video (very WIP still, we have a lot of balance, UI and polish to apply yet) that will show off some of the crafting systems when working with clay. [previewyoutube=Aa6pgRZ-CSI;full]https://youtu.be/Aa6pgRZ-CSI[/previewyoutube] In future Thursdoids well try to demo different diverse parts of the tech tree and their related professions as they implemented, as well as UI and quality of life improvements as we make them
SOME WELCOMES
The Indie Stone would like to extend an excited hello to two new fine folks this week Egor who will be joining the MP team as they move ahead with their upgrades, and community fan favourite DaddyDirkieDirk. Dirk has joined our art team to pump out ever more delectable tiles to give our map more life, and its deepest parts some more intriguing objects to perceive in the darkness and if you are interested in his fantastic work as a modder then we ran a Mod Spotlight on him only last week. Thanks all! A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-05-11 20:22:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
Bren After Reading
One way to give our towns and city more personality is to provide more written literature for you to loot and peruse whether its a fully readable lore item, or simply an interestingly named (if non-readable) book found in a house you loot that might deepen your understanding of the life of the zombie you just bludgeoned downstairs.
Build 42 will feature a range of newspapers, each with a final three or four issues to pick up and read in a separate written content UI. They will contain news articles about the initial build-up to the Knox Event articles, everyday life articles, and even a few breadcrumbs as to whats really been going in. This will also include smaller scale publications: like town news pamphlets for the smaller settlements that dont quite warrant a full-scale newspaper. Beyond this weve also had a lovely man called Stuart taking all our teeny-tiny map logos and up-rezzing them into more suitable forms for both in-game and irl usage. Their first use within the game are local business fliers that are also readable via the same printed media UI.
Clearly theres not much zed content that can be made from these, but their gameplay role is to mark up interesting locations (and sources of potentially helpful loot) on the in-game map a function that we feel will be especially handy for new players. We feel that finding a flier thats a membership advertisement for, say, the West Maple Country Club and revealing it on the players map will give an interesting reason for new players to leave town and explore and likewise a job advert for McCoy logging and a corresponding map reveal might flag a decent place to potentially find an axe. Theres SO MUCH stuff on the PZ map, and we wanted a way to direct people to some of the locations were most proud of. Especially those lost in the vastness of Louisville.
We also really want you to feel interested in the deceased people whose homes you are raiding, and perhaps even saddened by their demise. From this weve also added a LOT more texture to the names of some of the books, comics and magazines theyve been reading and indeed the photographs theyve been tenderly keeping in an upstairs drawer. The hope is that when the spawn tags on these 1500 different interestingly titled books/mags (non-readable) combine with the way we guide our RNG looted spawns work then neat little stories will form in your head about the sorts of folks that lived here up until recently and perhaps who you just left dead on the kitchen floor. Perhaps they were reading a book called Long Term Illness Management by Laura Paloma, which shines a light on the medication in the bathroom. Perhaps their love of military history ties in with the guns, or maybe its satisfying to know the zombie in the garden used to read trashy thrillers. Likewise finding photographs that arent simply called photograph in a cupboard wont do much to you, but instead seeing Photograph of a Smiling Family or Photograph of a Wedding Car Arriving at a Church will hopefully do you some emotional damage. Weve got about five hundred of these, and theyre already bringing some amazing (doomed) colour to the average loot run. Weve also got six new TV channels, a new radio station, and 75 new VHSs ready to mix into the game (all written by Pat_Bren, whos also the architect of all the above alongside coder Blair Algol) so really feel that B42 will broaden the narrative possibilities of the game significantly while also neatly tying into the gameplay in many instances. Some other changes that are tied into the above:
Part of the above has been in ensuring that the right newspapers and pamphlets spawn in their appropriate towns, and as such weve mixed in a new municipal region system that tells the games systems exactly what area of the map each location in the game is located within. Were also using this for some new vehicles owned by local businesses, that only ever spawn in their hometown and associated region.
Its generally not a known gameplay function, but for many builds now weve had profession vehicles on the map that are owned by carpenters, metalworkers and electricians all of whom *do* leave tools in their vehicle overnight. Weve never flagged this up, however, which has been a missed opportunity as for players searching for particular items these are very much mobile treasure boxes. Therefore Martin has created a variety of new vehicles for different businesses to better communicate what sort of special loot might be found inside.
We have vehicles for different utilities, nationwide businesses and local businesses many will only spawn in one town, and some are unique in that only one instance of that vehicle will spawn in the world. We know that PZ players love collecting vehicles, especially in multiplayer servers, so this should spice up the hunt for the vehicle collectors. This regional system, and unique vehicle system, is set up to be easily used by mods also.
Regular readers will know that we recently had our very own recording sessions in a studio with microphones, actors and everything. We had various missions to accomplish with this a primary one being to obtain recordings of a male survivor and a female survivor huffing, puffing, getting hurt, climbing over things, sneezing, coughing and even shouting hey!. The first fruits of these can be heard below and (while subtle when added to the mix and heard in isolation from the way the game sounds currently) we believe that theyll add a lot to your overall experience once they land in 42. (PLEASE NOTE: This is a work in progress. Volume and balance levels are initial ones and will change, likewise some recordings sound better than others and we havent cherry-picked the ones that work best yet. We think that the exertion noises during heavy combat could certainly do with a boost.) [previewyoutube=CNh-c1IwC7Y;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=4XrKyBX9vCE;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=zUCgURho-gU;full][/previewyoutube] A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here!Our Discordis open for chat and hijinks too.Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs pagehere.Project Zomboid strongly discourages the unlawful dissemination of classified military intelligence.
[ 2023-04-27 18:44:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, hope this finds you well.
Lots of work on the technical side of the four main pillars of 42 these past two weeks all of which relatively dry, so lets run through that briefly before checking out some of the other items rolling in.
Right now the foundational code to our in-depth crafting systems revamp are being brought into a position where the MP team can better get their hooks into it, while in our optimization/lighting/height channel weve been continuing to polish out cutaway issues, errors thrown and the way our isoregions system handles its newfound 32 potential storeys.
For our MP upgrade, meanwhile, work continues on getting the machinations of player inventories (building, recipes etc) over onto the server while also improving the implementation of our (pretty much fully cooked at this point) new fishing minigames and systems. Domestic animals, meanwhile, are in bug fix mode with additional attention being given to their pathfinding and around animal escapes.
While all this is ongoing other team members are beavering away raising the quality of the game in smaller-scale ways, so lets look at a few of those fun nuggets now.
CURRENT AFFAIRZ
One way to give our towns and city more personality is to provide more written literature for you to loot and peruse whether its a fully readable lore item, or simply an interestingly named (if non-readable) book found in a house you loot that might deepen your understanding of the life of the zombie you just bludgeoned downstairs.
Build 42 will feature a range of newspapers, each with a final three or four issues to pick up and read in a separate written content UI. They will contain news articles about the initial build-up to the Knox Event articles, everyday life articles, and even a few breadcrumbs as to whats really been going in. This will also include smaller scale publications: like town news pamphlets for the smaller settlements that dont quite warrant a full-scale newspaper. Beyond this weve also had a lovely man called Stuart taking all our teeny-tiny map logos and up-rezzing them into more suitable forms for both in-game and irl usage. Their first use within the game are local business fliers that are also readable via the same printed media UI.
Clearly theres not much zed content that can be made from these, but their gameplay role is to mark up interesting locations (and sources of potentially helpful loot) on the in-game map a function that we feel will be especially handy for new players. We feel that finding a flier thats a membership advertisement for, say, the West Maple Country Club and revealing it on the players map will give an interesting reason for new players to leave town and explore and likewise a job advert for McCoy logging and a corresponding map reveal might flag a decent place to potentially find an axe. Theres SO MUCH stuff on the PZ map, and we wanted a way to direct people to some of the locations were most proud of. Especially those lost in the vastness of Louisville.
PERSONAL READING
We also really want you to feel interested in the deceased people whose homes you are raiding, and perhaps even saddened by their demise. From this weve also added a LOT more texture to the names of some of the books, comics and magazines theyve been reading and indeed the photographs theyve been tenderly keeping in an upstairs drawer. The hope is that when the spawn tags on these 1500 different interestingly titled books/mags (non-readable) combine with the way we guide our RNG looted spawns work then neat little stories will form in your head about the sorts of folks that lived here up until recently and perhaps who you just left dead on the kitchen floor. Perhaps they were reading a book called Long Term Illness Management by Laura Paloma, which shines a light on the medication in the bathroom. Perhaps their love of military history ties in with the guns, or maybe its satisfying to know the zombie in the garden used to read trashy thrillers. Likewise finding photographs that arent simply called photograph in a cupboard wont do much to you, but instead seeing Photograph of a Smiling Family or Photograph of a Wedding Car Arriving at a Church will hopefully do you some emotional damage. Weve got about five hundred of these, and theyre already bringing some amazing (doomed) colour to the average loot run. Weve also got six new TV channels, a new radio station, and 75 new VHSs ready to mix into the game (all written by Pat_Bren, whos also the architect of all the above alongside coder Blair Algol) so really feel that B42 will broaden the narrative possibilities of the game significantly while also neatly tying into the gameplay in many instances. Some other changes that are tied into the above:
- The books, magazines and comic books that now have individual titles, will also be persistent. Instead of disappearing after being read, there will be a cooldown period that dictates how much time must pass before the characters moodles can benefit from re-reading said item.
- In conjunction with this revision of literature items, weve gone over the mechanics of the Illiterate traits. Illiterate characters are unable to read literature items, but in some cases, such as Comic Books, Catalogues, Photos, and certain magazines, they will be able to enjoy looking at the item instead of reading it. In build 42 Illiterate characters will also be unable to read or write player generated notes using sheets of paper or notebooks, write notes on maps (although they can still put symbols on them), read the text on the annotated map items, or understand the nutritional information on packaged food.
- Weve done a common sense implementation of needing light to read. If there is insufficient light in a characters square, and they dont have an active light source, they will be unable to read (or look at for illiterate characters) printed matter, unable to read nutritional information on packaged food, and unable to open maps.
MEN WITH VEN
Part of the above has been in ensuring that the right newspapers and pamphlets spawn in their appropriate towns, and as such weve mixed in a new municipal region system that tells the games systems exactly what area of the map each location in the game is located within. Were also using this for some new vehicles owned by local businesses, that only ever spawn in their hometown and associated region.
Its generally not a known gameplay function, but for many builds now weve had profession vehicles on the map that are owned by carpenters, metalworkers and electricians all of whom *do* leave tools in their vehicle overnight. Weve never flagged this up, however, which has been a missed opportunity as for players searching for particular items these are very much mobile treasure boxes. Therefore Martin has created a variety of new vehicles for different businesses to better communicate what sort of special loot might be found inside.
We have vehicles for different utilities, nationwide businesses and local businesses many will only spawn in one town, and some are unique in that only one instance of that vehicle will spawn in the world. We know that PZ players love collecting vehicles, especially in multiplayer servers, so this should spice up the hunt for the vehicle collectors. This regional system, and unique vehicle system, is set up to be easily used by mods also.
GASP. WHEEZE. PANT.
Regular readers will know that we recently had our very own recording sessions in a studio with microphones, actors and everything. We had various missions to accomplish with this a primary one being to obtain recordings of a male survivor and a female survivor huffing, puffing, getting hurt, climbing over things, sneezing, coughing and even shouting hey!. The first fruits of these can be heard below and (while subtle when added to the mix and heard in isolation from the way the game sounds currently) we believe that theyll add a lot to your overall experience once they land in 42. (PLEASE NOTE: This is a work in progress. Volume and balance levels are initial ones and will change, likewise some recordings sound better than others and we havent cherry-picked the ones that work best yet. We think that the exertion noises during heavy combat could certainly do with a boost.) [previewyoutube=CNh-c1IwC7Y;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=4XrKyBX9vCE;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=zUCgURho-gU;full][/previewyoutube] A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here!Our Discordis open for chat and hijinks too.Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs pagehere.Project Zomboid strongly discourages the unlawful dissemination of classified military intelligence.
[ 2023-04-27 18:44:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
Crafting RamblZ
One of our biggest inspirations in terms of what wed like to accomplish with Zomboid ultimately in terms of crafting freedom and possibility, is to provide similar creative and community experiences found playing the extensive tech progression modpacks for Minecraft. Several of the core crafting dev team have periodically dived into Minecraft modpacks for a good chunk of Zomboids development, and spend many hours grinding away decorating our bases, building wonderfully cool machines, laying down pipes, wires and conveyor belts and whatnot to double our ore output or finally get that new power system to power our base. The possibilities we could bring to zomboid have tickled at our brains for many years in this area, and were excited to be finally exploring them. Obviously though, Zomboid is a post apocalypse survival game and it would be rather silly to say the least if some zombie apocalypse survivor was building a nuclear reactor or casting rituals to open portals, so this shouldnt be taken as a literal 1 to 1 inspiration. What weve taken away from our experiences is more the overall spirit of building, of expanding, of obtaining materials, of navigating a very tall tech tree formed from the availability of resources, that will finally allow you to explore a new tree and open up new areas of gameplay to the player, rather than the literal experiences of making ore crushing machines, nuclear reactors or ender teleporters. As much as we feel Zomboid is an extremely deep game, its never hit the bar weve wanted in terms of this area of gameplay. Mixed in with that is the heavy focus on roleplaying, especially with multiplayer or later with NPCs, our ultimate vision is somewhat parallel but different to the experiences in Minecraft, with more of a focus on realism and plausibility, as well as leveraging skills, professions and learning to make the experience more cooperative and interesting in a roleplay environment (though solo players need not worry, as NPCs will fill this gap too, and before them well make sure to adequately provide sandbox options, and likely the builder main menu mode, to not lock this stuff out of the single player experience).
As we stated a while back, our aim with the crafting overhaul is to provide a framework for us to expand the crafting possibilities within the game massively, to allow for a long post-apocalyptic settlement to create everything they need without relying on looting, to elevate the need for players to ever need to reset their worlds unless they want to, while crucially gating all these extra possibilities in a way that makes sense so you dont get the odd situation where your burger flipper has wacky esoteric crafting recipes involving bees wax or crushed limestone popping up in their crafting panel that seem odd or ridiculous within the context of a zombie survival story. The best example of this would be for example using metalworking to make a spoon. If youre a metal worker then you should be able to make a spoon. This is a thing that makes sense in terms of what someone with metalworking skills could produce should they wish to. But a spoon is a weird thing to see pop up as a crafting possibility in an urban environment filled with spoons. Were currently planning on how recipes and crafting possibilities will be presented to the player, how to lock them intelligently behind professions and traits, and more crucially nest them away sensibly within a better interface, while providing enough opportunities to learn them to the player so they dont end up doing generator manual style hunts around the map for many hours. This is not yet set in stone but ideas are forming on a new interface for crafting and building that would provide this stuff to the player in a much more natural way, where we can provide a huge amount of options without drowning the player in recipes that seem completely useless or weird within their current situation.
Another challenge were still nailing down is finding the best balance between extensive and interesting crafting of items, involving multiple stages, potentially multiple methods, multiple skills, maybe multiple characters, but not crossing that line where crafting becomes tedious or frustrating, or you get that sinking feeling looking at the steps you have to complete that disincentivises you from undergoing it. Its a hard balance to hit, and in our first more zomboid / realistic pass of the tech tree, weve probably gone a little far over the tedium line in our desire to honour zomboids realism. Were currently in the process of consolidating some of these steps, still retaining multi-profession or multi-skill or multi-step processes to keep crafting interesting, while removing a few steps that may make for frustrating or repetitive gameplay. Its for this reason weve been a little sheepish about providing a look at our current crafting trees at this time, as we want to make sure we strike this balance first lest we worry people that crafting is going to be an unforgiving grind.
Another area were looking into heavily is the process of learning new skills. While we want to retain the process of a player doing stuff to level up in that skill, with the vastly expanded skill list that 42 will be introducing, we want to come up with other ways a player can level up that dont involve building 1000 things after reading a skill book. For one a skill book may not exist if youre generations after the apocalypse, or if youre playing on a blank wilderness map instead (something wed really like to be a possibility, and our test case to make sure our crafting overhaul is comprehensive will be making sure the player literally cannot rely on looted items). Were still coming up with ideas of how to approach this, but certainly the idea of learning recipes for items or buildable tiles as well as gaining skill xp from observing other players craft them is something were exploring heavily. Again, NPCs will fill this gap for single player, and in the meantime well ensure that builder mode and sandbox provide the tools necessary for solo players to get access to this content without other characters to learn from. Another aspect of this is that with much more expanded profession and trait possibilities, we hope to provide much meatier skill bonuses from professions, allowing players to come into the game a lot more capable than before at these specific areas of the game, given that there will be many more they are not capable at. In addition, were exploring the possibility of linking recipes and professions that share common skills or concepts together, allowing characters a head start at performing crafting when they have picked up relevant experience in similar areas elsewhere.
So heres where we can have our cake and have eaten it. Making a nuclear reactor seems a very silly thing to have in zomboid, but where the modding scene is concerned, hopefully people can go wild here. If a wilderness map becomes a viable way to play, the game no longer reliant on looted items nor a zombie threat to make it interesting (particularly in a multiplayer setting), then modders arent really constrained by the zombie survival theme of the game any more, and could extend our tech tree way beyond what we provide to allow for a much more abstract tech em up survival sim providing factorio and minecraft style experiences along with multiplayer or NPC driven roleplay. Weve kept all the power of crafting within the familiar scripts and lua that people are used to, expanded with item properties and traits based on crafting skills, multi-tile constructions for crafting stations or machines, fluid, item or power transmission for doing logistical networks, and can only imagine the possibilities will balloon dramatically as soon as our incredible modders get their hands on it. This is where we imagine zomboid could become an even more exciting modding platform, and in no way a small aspect of why we want this framework to exist in the game as wed be extremely excited to see what modders will bring to the table (as we always are).
Lots of stuff. While it may not be relevant for a player running around in Muldraugh in the 1990s, and while a burger flipper may not have this knowledge, therell be professions that emerge in the years following the apocalypse to cover crafting the majority of non electrical items in the game currently (though with perhaps a more homemade aesthetic), tanning leather, making glue or soap, spinning wool, or making cloth to make clothing, dyes to dye that clothing, bowyers to make bows for the hunters, growing hemp to make ropes, glass-makers, stone masonry to finally make those zombie proof walls (again, we need to think further on the design here to not make this too OP), thatched roofs. Basically everything to make a thriving post-apocalypse town, provide much more opportunities for creative and aesthetic building mechanics, building paths, fences, walls, and the production of goods to keep that town ticking over and potentially trade with others. In case anyone is not familiar with our plans regarding post-apocalypse professions, this is the concept that in the years after society collapses, we would slowly retire pre-apocalypse professions that have ceased to be relevant in the new world, and bring in new ones that represent professions one would like to have in a more savage and technically regressed post-apocalypse. Single player and multiplayer alike will allow for a player to start much further into the Knox timeline than six months later and provide a vastly different experience, though those who want the current zomboid experience will not be impacted beyond a larger selection of crafting opportunities. Obviously wed be looking to give the world a much more eroded aesthetic if you were playing 100 years after the Knox event, for those hoping for a more Last of Us style degradation of the world over longer time spans, but its unlikely well address this before 42s release as we have a lot on our plate already. Hopefully this gives an insight into why this has taken so long to get the systems in place, and the design challenge of making all this work within the game. Its not clear whether well have literally everything weve designed in come first unstable release of build 42, its very possible well get the base stuff in there, and then fill it out over numerous releases during a long unstable b42 release cycle, as there will be a lot of tile and item artwork required, but we want to get the core systems in place and enough crafting potential to elevate the late game dramatically before we get it out there. We need to make sure the foundations are in place first however, as were walking into unfamiliar territory and are as always ever mindful not to disrupt the things that make zomboid what it is. Its not clear whether well have literally everything weve designed in come first unstable release of build 42, its very possible well get the base stuff in there, and then fill it out over numerous releases during a long unstable b42 release cycle, as there will be a lot of tile and item artwork required, but we want to get the core systems in place and enough crafting potential to elevate the late game dramatically before we get it out there. We need to make sure the foundations are in place first however, as were walking into unfamiliar territory and are as always ever mindful not to disrupt the things that make zomboid what it is. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Title image taken from Abby on Steam
[ 2023-04-13 10:26:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all! So were still not at the point of being able to show anything substantial from the crafting overhaul, however we thought wed talk about a few topics that are relevant to our current work and give people a bit of insight into where were going, our ultimate goals and the design challenges were facing. This will be very much a stream of consciousness post, taken from a chat within the crafting team, so forgive if it lacks direction but we hope itll be interesting!
Inspiration
One of our biggest inspirations in terms of what wed like to accomplish with Zomboid ultimately in terms of crafting freedom and possibility, is to provide similar creative and community experiences found playing the extensive tech progression modpacks for Minecraft. Several of the core crafting dev team have periodically dived into Minecraft modpacks for a good chunk of Zomboids development, and spend many hours grinding away decorating our bases, building wonderfully cool machines, laying down pipes, wires and conveyor belts and whatnot to double our ore output or finally get that new power system to power our base. The possibilities we could bring to zomboid have tickled at our brains for many years in this area, and were excited to be finally exploring them. Obviously though, Zomboid is a post apocalypse survival game and it would be rather silly to say the least if some zombie apocalypse survivor was building a nuclear reactor or casting rituals to open portals, so this shouldnt be taken as a literal 1 to 1 inspiration. What weve taken away from our experiences is more the overall spirit of building, of expanding, of obtaining materials, of navigating a very tall tech tree formed from the availability of resources, that will finally allow you to explore a new tree and open up new areas of gameplay to the player, rather than the literal experiences of making ore crushing machines, nuclear reactors or ender teleporters. As much as we feel Zomboid is an extremely deep game, its never hit the bar weve wanted in terms of this area of gameplay. Mixed in with that is the heavy focus on roleplaying, especially with multiplayer or later with NPCs, our ultimate vision is somewhat parallel but different to the experiences in Minecraft, with more of a focus on realism and plausibility, as well as leveraging skills, professions and learning to make the experience more cooperative and interesting in a roleplay environment (though solo players need not worry, as NPCs will fill this gap too, and before them well make sure to adequately provide sandbox options, and likely the builder main menu mode, to not lock this stuff out of the single player experience).
Extensivity vs Believability
As we stated a while back, our aim with the crafting overhaul is to provide a framework for us to expand the crafting possibilities within the game massively, to allow for a long post-apocalyptic settlement to create everything they need without relying on looting, to elevate the need for players to ever need to reset their worlds unless they want to, while crucially gating all these extra possibilities in a way that makes sense so you dont get the odd situation where your burger flipper has wacky esoteric crafting recipes involving bees wax or crushed limestone popping up in their crafting panel that seem odd or ridiculous within the context of a zombie survival story. The best example of this would be for example using metalworking to make a spoon. If youre a metal worker then you should be able to make a spoon. This is a thing that makes sense in terms of what someone with metalworking skills could produce should they wish to. But a spoon is a weird thing to see pop up as a crafting possibility in an urban environment filled with spoons. Were currently planning on how recipes and crafting possibilities will be presented to the player, how to lock them intelligently behind professions and traits, and more crucially nest them away sensibly within a better interface, while providing enough opportunities to learn them to the player so they dont end up doing generator manual style hunts around the map for many hours. This is not yet set in stone but ideas are forming on a new interface for crafting and building that would provide this stuff to the player in a much more natural way, where we can provide a huge amount of options without drowning the player in recipes that seem completely useless or weird within their current situation.
Grind vs interesting multi-stage crafting
Another challenge were still nailing down is finding the best balance between extensive and interesting crafting of items, involving multiple stages, potentially multiple methods, multiple skills, maybe multiple characters, but not crossing that line where crafting becomes tedious or frustrating, or you get that sinking feeling looking at the steps you have to complete that disincentivises you from undergoing it. Its a hard balance to hit, and in our first more zomboid / realistic pass of the tech tree, weve probably gone a little far over the tedium line in our desire to honour zomboids realism. Were currently in the process of consolidating some of these steps, still retaining multi-profession or multi-skill or multi-step processes to keep crafting interesting, while removing a few steps that may make for frustrating or repetitive gameplay. Its for this reason weve been a little sheepish about providing a look at our current crafting trees at this time, as we want to make sure we strike this balance first lest we worry people that crafting is going to be an unforgiving grind.
Learning/Skill Grind
Another area were looking into heavily is the process of learning new skills. While we want to retain the process of a player doing stuff to level up in that skill, with the vastly expanded skill list that 42 will be introducing, we want to come up with other ways a player can level up that dont involve building 1000 things after reading a skill book. For one a skill book may not exist if youre generations after the apocalypse, or if youre playing on a blank wilderness map instead (something wed really like to be a possibility, and our test case to make sure our crafting overhaul is comprehensive will be making sure the player literally cannot rely on looted items). Were still coming up with ideas of how to approach this, but certainly the idea of learning recipes for items or buildable tiles as well as gaining skill xp from observing other players craft them is something were exploring heavily. Again, NPCs will fill this gap for single player, and in the meantime well ensure that builder mode and sandbox provide the tools necessary for solo players to get access to this content without other characters to learn from. Another aspect of this is that with much more expanded profession and trait possibilities, we hope to provide much meatier skill bonuses from professions, allowing players to come into the game a lot more capable than before at these specific areas of the game, given that there will be many more they are not capable at. In addition, were exploring the possibility of linking recipes and professions that share common skills or concepts together, allowing characters a head start at performing crafting when they have picked up relevant experience in similar areas elsewhere.
Modding
So heres where we can have our cake and have eaten it. Making a nuclear reactor seems a very silly thing to have in zomboid, but where the modding scene is concerned, hopefully people can go wild here. If a wilderness map becomes a viable way to play, the game no longer reliant on looted items nor a zombie threat to make it interesting (particularly in a multiplayer setting), then modders arent really constrained by the zombie survival theme of the game any more, and could extend our tech tree way beyond what we provide to allow for a much more abstract tech em up survival sim providing factorio and minecraft style experiences along with multiplayer or NPC driven roleplay. Weve kept all the power of crafting within the familiar scripts and lua that people are used to, expanded with item properties and traits based on crafting skills, multi-tile constructions for crafting stations or machines, fluid, item or power transmission for doing logistical networks, and can only imagine the possibilities will balloon dramatically as soon as our incredible modders get their hands on it. This is where we imagine zomboid could become an even more exciting modding platform, and in no way a small aspect of why we want this framework to exist in the game as wed be extremely excited to see what modders will bring to the table (as we always are).
So what will you be crafting?
Lots of stuff. While it may not be relevant for a player running around in Muldraugh in the 1990s, and while a burger flipper may not have this knowledge, therell be professions that emerge in the years following the apocalypse to cover crafting the majority of non electrical items in the game currently (though with perhaps a more homemade aesthetic), tanning leather, making glue or soap, spinning wool, or making cloth to make clothing, dyes to dye that clothing, bowyers to make bows for the hunters, growing hemp to make ropes, glass-makers, stone masonry to finally make those zombie proof walls (again, we need to think further on the design here to not make this too OP), thatched roofs. Basically everything to make a thriving post-apocalypse town, provide much more opportunities for creative and aesthetic building mechanics, building paths, fences, walls, and the production of goods to keep that town ticking over and potentially trade with others. In case anyone is not familiar with our plans regarding post-apocalypse professions, this is the concept that in the years after society collapses, we would slowly retire pre-apocalypse professions that have ceased to be relevant in the new world, and bring in new ones that represent professions one would like to have in a more savage and technically regressed post-apocalypse. Single player and multiplayer alike will allow for a player to start much further into the Knox timeline than six months later and provide a vastly different experience, though those who want the current zomboid experience will not be impacted beyond a larger selection of crafting opportunities. Obviously wed be looking to give the world a much more eroded aesthetic if you were playing 100 years after the Knox event, for those hoping for a more Last of Us style degradation of the world over longer time spans, but its unlikely well address this before 42s release as we have a lot on our plate already. Hopefully this gives an insight into why this has taken so long to get the systems in place, and the design challenge of making all this work within the game. Its not clear whether well have literally everything weve designed in come first unstable release of build 42, its very possible well get the base stuff in there, and then fill it out over numerous releases during a long unstable b42 release cycle, as there will be a lot of tile and item artwork required, but we want to get the core systems in place and enough crafting potential to elevate the late game dramatically before we get it out there. We need to make sure the foundations are in place first however, as were walking into unfamiliar territory and are as always ever mindful not to disrupt the things that make zomboid what it is. Its not clear whether well have literally everything weve designed in come first unstable release of build 42, its very possible well get the base stuff in there, and then fill it out over numerous releases during a long unstable b42 release cycle, as there will be a lot of tile and item artwork required, but we want to get the core systems in place and enough crafting potential to elevate the late game dramatically before we get it out there. We need to make sure the foundations are in place first however, as were walking into unfamiliar territory and are as always ever mindful not to disrupt the things that make zomboid what it is. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Title image taken from Abby on Steam
[ 2023-04-13 10:26:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
Eine Kleine NachtmooZik
Next up, some of the other items being conjured up for 42 either with our development partners, or the smaller cool stuff that our own devs have been working on in the background. On top of the below were almost wrapped on stuff like fishing, work on the farming revamp continues and is having new crop assets built for it, and clearly the map expansion continues apace and will likely be a part of a/the 42 release also.
First up for discussion is 42s new adaptive music system a long term plan thats now coming to a fairly awesome fruition. As long term players will know, our OST came from the musical brain, delicate ear and dainty fingers of Zach Beever one of the most important people we came across in the earliest days of Project Zomboid and whose work many of you have heard over thousands of hours of play. What Formosa (formerly Noiseworks) have been up to more recently is taking the original arrangements and stems that Zach has provided to create variations of our beloved soundtrack that have variations of different intensities. The composers who have ably taken on this task are Armin Haas and Matthias Wolf both of whom appear to have nailed it. Players have experienced the first stage of this system in build 41, with action music which is specifically when players are in combat with the undead. For 42, this music has then been worked into a new adaptive exploration soundtrack. Based on in-game events, a music intensity parameter is adjusted and the soundtrack adjusts accordingly as well. The aim is to have the exploration music reflect the more exciting times as well as calm moments in the game in a better and more organised way. The best way to explain this is in the following prototype video. As ever this is WIP! Weve also cropped it slightly oddly to hide some of the debug magic that lays bare some of the magic, so please forgive the character not being centred on the screen! Sound up plz! (obv!) [previewyoutube=HJGk1VlSK94;full][/previewyoutube] Were only working of a very basic set of events at the moment coming across new houses, opening doors, vaulting fences and the like. We will be adding lots of different game events that will have big and small impacts on the intensity parameter the discover of special buildings, finding useful loot, noticing a survivor zed etc etc. The system will undergo lots of further fine-tuning, and will be adjusted further from the version seen above that went into testing only yesterday. Also happening this week in Sound World has been the recording sessions weve had arranged to create body noise puffs, pants and pains that we want to play on top of your characters on-screen manoeuvres. Weve also used this opportunity to record many and various experimental dialogue lines that could potentially be played (very, very muffled) over our TV and radio shows in a Simlish kinda way and likewise automated announcements that may well still be playing in locations such as malls and key Louisville locations even after public zombification has occurred. Well have more on this in the next blog, most likely.
A few notes on outdoor sleeping. First off in 42, sleeping bags and tents (when packed) can be attached to appropriate backpacks. It looks quite nice and fun, especially when attached to a survivor zed.
Next up, weve made some general improvements to outdoor sleeping. As such tents are now both containers and beds. They are not good beds, mind and using a sleeping bag by itself certainly isnt either.
Given as 42 will increase our height limit (and more particularly our depth limit) our artists and mappers are currently working on new visuals that will better suit locations beneath the ground of the Knox exclusion zone. Heres a fun example of the sorts of decoration that we hope will give added flavour to your new life underground, and hopefully bring along some Resi vibes with it.
A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Title image is from D4CR33P3R on Steam. Thats all for this week.
[ 2023-03-31 04:17:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
Wotcha survivors.
The general pattern for 42 dev is that weve got four main pillars of Build 42 all of which are the big stuff and the fundamental large-scale tech improvements.
These are: moving much of the MP system server-side to give servers more control and less hackability, introducing our deeper and more expansive crafting systems, bringing animal life to the Knox Event and engine improvements to optimize, give far greater height/depth levels to our map, and to provide more realistic light and darkness for your survival adventures.
These are the things we need for release, while other things in development by our dev partners (or staff assigned to more general improvement) are seen as nice-to-haves and some may even fall into patches of 42 when things start to shake out a bit.Going through the pillar features though:
- The lengthy first stage of the MP work (transferring player inventories to the server) is now over, and transplanted very neatly over into the internal test build so now our MP coders are delving deep into stage two. This will see all operations of player inventories (building, recipes, foraging etc) also move into server control, overview and deference.
- In terms of the deeper and more expansive crafting as we mentioned last week the code systems this is all based on has now been merged into the internal test build and as such much of the last week or two has been centred around fixing the longstanding recipes and functions that the new stuff has broken. Were pretty much back at a standard of operational on this, or will be after a commit being made tomorrow, and this too has been a process that was a little smoother than expected. That all said, obviously that has been the focus post-merge, so while progress has been made since its integration, the majority of work has been bug fixing and not much to report otherwise. The team are starting to discuss the next step post merge, and looking forward to it immensely!
- Animal and animal husbandry meanwhile (or at least the cows, pigs and sheep chickens are still a little haphazard) are approaching a stage where theyre fun to play around with for extended periods in SP. Following on from the merge of the music system detailed below into the internal test build, they also now moo, oink and baa which has given them a lot of extra life also!
- Finally, in terms of the tech upgrade were mainly at the bug fixing and further optimization phase with the chunked rendering and variable height systems, but itll likely be the sort of thing thatll spit out bugs and countless betcha didnt think of this scenario? gotchas for some time to come, so its not clear when itll be merged into main. As said last week, it should be mostly smooth when the time comes though.
OTHER STUFF
Next up, some of the other items being conjured up for 42 either with our development partners, or the smaller cool stuff that our own devs have been working on in the background. On top of the below were almost wrapped on stuff like fishing, work on the farming revamp continues and is having new crop assets built for it, and clearly the map expansion continues apace and will likely be a part of a/the 42 release also.
AWESOME ADAPTIVE MUSIC SYSTEM
First up for discussion is 42s new adaptive music system a long term plan thats now coming to a fairly awesome fruition. As long term players will know, our OST came from the musical brain, delicate ear and dainty fingers of Zach Beever one of the most important people we came across in the earliest days of Project Zomboid and whose work many of you have heard over thousands of hours of play. What Formosa (formerly Noiseworks) have been up to more recently is taking the original arrangements and stems that Zach has provided to create variations of our beloved soundtrack that have variations of different intensities. The composers who have ably taken on this task are Armin Haas and Matthias Wolf both of whom appear to have nailed it. Players have experienced the first stage of this system in build 41, with action music which is specifically when players are in combat with the undead. For 42, this music has then been worked into a new adaptive exploration soundtrack. Based on in-game events, a music intensity parameter is adjusted and the soundtrack adjusts accordingly as well. The aim is to have the exploration music reflect the more exciting times as well as calm moments in the game in a better and more organised way. The best way to explain this is in the following prototype video. As ever this is WIP! Weve also cropped it slightly oddly to hide some of the debug magic that lays bare some of the magic, so please forgive the character not being centred on the screen! Sound up plz! (obv!) [previewyoutube=HJGk1VlSK94;full][/previewyoutube] Were only working of a very basic set of events at the moment coming across new houses, opening doors, vaulting fences and the like. We will be adding lots of different game events that will have big and small impacts on the intensity parameter the discover of special buildings, finding useful loot, noticing a survivor zed etc etc. The system will undergo lots of further fine-tuning, and will be adjusted further from the version seen above that went into testing only yesterday. Also happening this week in Sound World has been the recording sessions weve had arranged to create body noise puffs, pants and pains that we want to play on top of your characters on-screen manoeuvres. Weve also used this opportunity to record many and various experimental dialogue lines that could potentially be played (very, very muffled) over our TV and radio shows in a Simlish kinda way and likewise automated announcements that may well still be playing in locations such as malls and key Louisville locations even after public zombification has occurred. Well have more on this in the next blog, most likely.
UNDER THE STARS
A few notes on outdoor sleeping. First off in 42, sleeping bags and tents (when packed) can be attached to appropriate backpacks. It looks quite nice and fun, especially when attached to a survivor zed.
Next up, weve made some general improvements to outdoor sleeping. As such tents are now both containers and beds. They are not good beds, mind and using a sleeping bag by itself certainly isnt either.
- You can put a mattress or an un-packed sleeping bag into a tent to make it a better bed.
- You can also use a pillow to modestly increase the quality of a tent bed, including reducing the chance and severity of neck pain. This applies to all other bed as well, including car seats.
- Youre protected from the rain when sleeping in a tent, and the tents look a lot nicer than they used to as well.
GOING UNDERGROUND
Given as 42 will increase our height limit (and more particularly our depth limit) our artists and mappers are currently working on new visuals that will better suit locations beneath the ground of the Knox exclusion zone. Heres a fun example of the sorts of decoration that we hope will give added flavour to your new life underground, and hopefully bring along some Resi vibes with it.
A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Title image is from D4CR33P3R on Steam. Thats all for this week.
[ 2023-03-31 04:17:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
Disruption Week
[ 2023-03-16 17:14:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello all!
A brief and more hastily thrown together Thursdoid this week Im afraid, as were currently at a messy but exciting turning point in b42s development which will be setting us up for the remainder of development, and rather than try to scrape together content for this weeks blog while were in the guts of it, we would rather save what we have for a much more exciting Thursdoid down the line when things are also a little less hectic.
However, well explain the situation this week to give people a better idea of whats happening.
Firstly, months of multiplayer reworking has made its way into the main development build, which is our efforts toward moving a lot more of the codebase to being server authoritative, particularly with a completely server side inventory system, to aid in making future PZ builds a lot more hack proof.
Secondly, the core systems of the massive crafting rework are also being merged into trunk, ready for the wider team to start building on it for the much anticipated deep crafting trees and new post-apocalypse professions for our overhauled crafting systems.
The crafting overhaul is quite huge, changing how recipes and items work on a fundamental level, and will require some work to port over existing items, along with any that have been added elsewhere during the course of the new systems development, and as such touches on many areas of the codebase and is a difficult one to integrate.
As such, things on the main branch are in a bit of temporary disarray as these big systems get integrated into the main line, its going to be a busy week as the team bugfixes and gets the development build ship shape to start pushing forward with all the integrated code toward getting it to a point we can start looking to push it out for public testing.
This new systems allows for:
- Multi tile machines and crafting stations
- Support for networks of items, power, liquids or gases (ultimately a buildings power, heating and plumbing will use these systems for example)
- For items both crafted and looted that have varied statistics and unique properties that alter how they function beyond the simplistic condition of existing versions of the game, and providing much more deep variety to gameplay to crafted and looted items.
- The recipe system has become much more in-depth and customizable allowing for much more interesting crafting processes and possibilities.
[ 2023-03-16 17:14:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
CritterZ
Over to Aiteron for the latest on his fishing additions. This week Ive mainly been working on a unique random seed that procedurally determines where groups of fish will be located in PZs waterways, the radius of the different zones, and the base number of fish that could be found within them. Youll see this through splashes of water, which will depend on the groups of fish. So, the more fish in the fish group area, the more splashes on the waters surface of the water. As such finding the best place for you to fish will be a big part of the systems revamp. Each groups will react to the noise by the noise that goes on in the world too. So, if theres a loud noise then the fishing circles will stop being active for a certain amount of time. If you craft some chum, meanwhile, youll also be able to attract a group of fish for a limited amount of time. In the following video youll be able to see groups of fish (red circles) and a chum area (green circle) [previewyoutube=XKpTi_y484U;full][/previewyoutube] The team at Formosa have also been working with me to create new SFX for the fishing revamp, and I am very pleased with the results so far! We are also working on different sounds for different reeling in speeds. [previewyoutube=ZTzeBluLk4E;full][/previewyoutube]
We are at a key point in the map expansion in that the work of our various mappers has been merged together, and our test team are roaming its wilds to provide playability and design feedback. They are patrolling its highways and by-ways, and feeding back on anything that seems amiss on a broader scale. Were not at the point at which we can do full-on testing (theres still a lot to do, to be polished, and have signs erected and whatnot) but we are at the point where we can go on a fun road trip. [previewyoutube=UGaTsGi67m0;full][/previewyoutube]
Formosa are up to quite a lot at the moment. A big part of their work is in improvements to the music escalation system, which well go into detail about next time, but suffice to say that action music wont carry on for as long as it does post-zed-escape in B42. We are also in the final stages of organising a recording session in which well be having some real life actors (in Hollywood! In America!) to puff, pant and make I am hurt noises thatll make our survivors feel that little bit more real. New SFX have also, meanwhile, been delivered for pigs, piglets, chickens, breaking furniture, the emergency broadcast, cork pops and much else besides. A lot of chickens have also been attacked with hammers. [previewyoutube=NWvfY4xcpdQ;full][/previewyoutube] (We will improve visuals on this sort of attack too, so youre not whacking air)
The Blair Algol furnace has also been burning bright recently, alongside his farming revamp work that weve discussed in former blogs. So heres a general show of the new camping items thatll be found in places like the games different camp supply shops come B42. [previewyoutube=Fe7NMwOfIyU;full][/previewyoutube]
:(
Just to underline, were still not at a point at which a 42 unstable release is (at all) imminent. Theres still loads to do with our primary advancements to engine, online multiplayer, crafting and whatnot. We see people thinking its about to land in comments sometimes, so if you see that too then please direct them here. Thanks everyone. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Todays fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
[ 2023-03-02 22:11:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
Happy March survivors, lets check in with some of the departments we didnt visit in the blogapalooza of two weeks ago.
FISHING
Over to Aiteron for the latest on his fishing additions. This week Ive mainly been working on a unique random seed that procedurally determines where groups of fish will be located in PZs waterways, the radius of the different zones, and the base number of fish that could be found within them. Youll see this through splashes of water, which will depend on the groups of fish. So, the more fish in the fish group area, the more splashes on the waters surface of the water. As such finding the best place for you to fish will be a big part of the systems revamp. Each groups will react to the noise by the noise that goes on in the world too. So, if theres a loud noise then the fishing circles will stop being active for a certain amount of time. If you craft some chum, meanwhile, youll also be able to attract a group of fish for a limited amount of time. In the following video youll be able to see groups of fish (red circles) and a chum area (green circle) [previewyoutube=XKpTi_y484U;full][/previewyoutube] The team at Formosa have also been working with me to create new SFX for the fishing revamp, and I am very pleased with the results so far! We are also working on different sounds for different reeling in speeds. [previewyoutube=ZTzeBluLk4E;full][/previewyoutube]
MAP EXPANSION
We are at a key point in the map expansion in that the work of our various mappers has been merged together, and our test team are roaming its wilds to provide playability and design feedback. They are patrolling its highways and by-ways, and feeding back on anything that seems amiss on a broader scale. Were not at the point at which we can do full-on testing (theres still a lot to do, to be polished, and have signs erected and whatnot) but we are at the point where we can go on a fun road trip. [previewyoutube=UGaTsGi67m0;full][/previewyoutube]
SOUND STUFF
Formosa are up to quite a lot at the moment. A big part of their work is in improvements to the music escalation system, which well go into detail about next time, but suffice to say that action music wont carry on for as long as it does post-zed-escape in B42. We are also in the final stages of organising a recording session in which well be having some real life actors (in Hollywood! In America!) to puff, pant and make I am hurt noises thatll make our survivors feel that little bit more real. New SFX have also, meanwhile, been delivered for pigs, piglets, chickens, breaking furniture, the emergency broadcast, cork pops and much else besides. A lot of chickens have also been attacked with hammers. [previewyoutube=NWvfY4xcpdQ;full][/previewyoutube] (We will improve visuals on this sort of attack too, so youre not whacking air)
SURVIVAL FUN
The Blair Algol furnace has also been burning bright recently, alongside his farming revamp work that weve discussed in former blogs. So heres a general show of the new camping items thatll be found in places like the games different camp supply shops come B42. [previewyoutube=Fe7NMwOfIyU;full][/previewyoutube]
- Seen here are matchboxes, insect repellent, tackle boxes, New duffel bags, compasses, magnesium strikers and a fire-starting block.
- New Literature Titles and Names, so its not all generic non-titled books. (These will still act as consumables rather than items for now, however)
- New Food, drink, snack names and a new eating animation.
- New police duffle bag
- An example of how to use the compass
- Campsite scene showing an array of new survival gear items for the casual camper and general survivalist
- New tent function, which no longer requires RMB and now places and gets picked up like a normal decor/furniture object
- New tent storage feature associated with the above change
LOVELY LITTLE ANIMALS
LOVELY LITTLE DEAD ANIMAL
:(
FINALLY
Just to underline, were still not at a point at which a 42 unstable release is (at all) imminent. Theres still loads to do with our primary advancements to engine, online multiplayer, crafting and whatnot. We see people thinking its about to land in comments sometimes, so if you see that too then please direct them here. Thanks everyone. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Todays fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
[ 2023-03-02 22:11:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
Play Your Cardz Right
To catch up and recap, the main highlights of engine improvements for build 42 are as follows:
This is really handy, since the deck of cards goes out of the window. Youre no longer having to draw everything from the furthermost thing to the closest, and they dont have to be ordered strictly as they get closer to the camera either. With a depth buffer you can choose whatever order you want: draw all brick walls first, then all characters hairs, then all grass, then all you get the idea. Outside transparency, which causes issues, you can draw anything in whatever order is most convenient and most optimized for the GPU. Not only this, but you dont have to put together the 3D scene polygon by polygon every frame: you have a cached mesh probably already on your GPU memory sat waiting for the next frame, and even if the character turns or moves that mesh is still valid to use. Zomboid? Not so much. We have to draw every individual godforsaken goddamned tile: every bit of lighting, every bit of grass, completely from scratch, every frame, every time. And when you zoom out? Wuh-woh shaggy. Youre now asking for trouble. So for B42 we decided to implement a depth buffer! This was a bold proposition since we have no 3D (outside the characters and items, of course). Our 3D is otherwise a faked perspective drawn by the artists drawing the tile: its an illusion. However, with some perseverance, we managed to generate a serviceable depth map of our usual faked isometric tiles:
Note here that when you look carefully at the floors and walls in this, they are not completely smooth. Each tile is still just a certain distance away and it all behaves just as it does now: a deck of cards being dealt every frame, where one thing is either below or on top of another. However we no longer have to draw them back to front. Weve all seen this faked isometric drawn into the tiles cause weird visual glitches too many times to count, where the illusion of the 2d tiled world just breaks in ugly ways. [previewyoutube=4BpNWHNqcbU;full][/previewyoutube] So we went a step further and calculated the fake 3dness for floors and walls, thereby making the depth map peachy smooth:
So where does that leave us? Were dealing the self-same deck of cards we always have been (these are still faked 2d isometric tiles and always will be) however we can now say the left hand bit of this card is actually further back than the right hand side of this card and objects placed on them will represent this as if they had actual 3d depth. For walls and floors, at least, from this fixed perspective we suddenly service them with the GPU as if they are 3D objects: which means that not only do we get rid of the issues with the fixed tile ordering, but we can say this specific part of this tile is further back or further forward than the rest of it. So we can choose to put that part of the tile in front of / behind the character differently to other parts of the same tile. This will make a big difference to immersion on its own, but then we went a step further. With the new depth map, we opened up access to that amazing optimization trick we mentioned before. On the dev branch for this work, we can now just draw a chunk like this tile by tile on one single occasion.
All those hundreds of draw calls as the cards get slammed down from the deck now only need to happen once as we construct the chunk and it becomes its very own tile. Within this we bake the depth information into the depth buffer. So, despite this just being a single picture, we already have all the information hidden behind it thats required to correctly place any player, zombie or placed inventory item anywhere on this chunk (even inside the building, or partially obscured by any part of it) and this can be done AFTER drawing it too. The only times we will ever need to update this chunk and redraw those tiles is if the lighting from time of day changes, or if a naughty zombie dies on it or a player picks up an item, drops one, opens a door or otherwise. (And oh yes, zombie bodies and dropped inventory items will be cached on the chunk too! With depth! So in terms of performance this current resource-hog will be near enough completely free) So now for every frame the chunk above, the charming apartment balconies, becomes the equivalent of a single current tile. One single draw thats not that much slower than drawing that one single tile in the current build, in which we have to have 8x8x4 tiles getting drawn. The work needed to draw each tile on that chunk only needs to occur every so often when its updated in a way that invalidates the depth or changes the tiles visually, or when it first becomes visible. And if anything invalidates that chunk that it requires drawing in full, its only that chunk that needs redrawing. On top of this we have that depth buffer still for every tile drawn, and beyond that the walls and floor tiles have additional faked smooth depth applied to them.
Thats where the magic happens: weirdly the above long-haired hippy character was drawn AFTER the fence tiles were. Due to the magic of the new system we happened to have the extra depth information and were able to throw away pixels of them being drawn seeing as there was something closer. As a cumulative effect of all the above: this is how we accomplished 4k res, max zoom, 500 fps in this video we posted a long while back when we were prototyping all this. [previewyoutube=G6t5h0_Sfqc;full][/previewyoutube] (Though please note we expect, in practice, it wont be this high: the lack of zombies and various other factors make it not completely representative of the full game but its still a good indicator of how vast this optimization will be.)
So the big issue here is that walls and floors are the easy part. Its very simple to calculate how deep a particular pixel of a wall should be, use a shader to put that depth in, and get smooth continuous depth that the player wont clip through like its a 2D billboard facing the screen. EP, however, has recently been experimenting with some stuff thats pretty cool. We must make a big disclaimer there that this is very much, as stated, experimenting, and we cant say for certain what is shown here will be in b42 as shown. He made us promise we made that clear before we speak of it at all, but itll give you an idea of what were trying to do and the cool ideas hes been playing with on his travels. [previewyoutube=gXQ0KrOSdi8;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=2S3HvGN5uC4;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=RmSUq2TOmyU;full][/previewyoutube] None of the 3d shapes will end up in the game world while playing, but the resultant extra depth texture (seen in the bottom left) can be used with the depth map system to make the characters interact with it as if those 3d shapes were there. As you can see, here the character intersects with the (remember, completely 2D) tile as if it were a 3d object itself, with full gradual depth.
As you can see, here the character intersects with the (remember, completely 2D) tile as if it were a 3d object itself, with full gradual depth. And yes, this is the main thing thats been holding us back from sitting in chairs, lying in beds etc. Modders have done great things providing this in the capacity thats feasible in the current engine, but are still limited from sitting properly in chairs that obscure the character or face in different directions. We want a proper solution thatll work 100% when it comes to the main game. Finally, another caveat. Theres no way in hell wed ever be able to do this for every tile in the game, especially the more complicated ones or ones that were drawn (by hand) by the artists that may not actually follow strict laws of isometric in actuality. While this tech can be used for some nice stuff in future its primary and only feasible short to medium term use is as described above. Before we start seeing the inevitable omg PZ will be able to rotate camera RTX mode when?? this is still a complete MASSIVE gulf from anything resembling true 3D. Trust us: weve already ummed and ahhed and experimented with all this tech for a long while now to firmly to know where our limits are and put our boot down on those kinda thoughts. But this does mean that we should be able to deal with all the main simpler structural tiles that make up the main geometry of the maps, and will provide a much more solid feeling world despite it looking very much the same as it always has however, with the new lighting propagation system it shall look that bit better of course! We now return to your scheduled programming.
Next, over to the redoubtable Blair Algol for the latest on agricultural matters. The current state of the farming rework is that the current dev phase of new plants, vegetables, herbs, houseplants and associated changes to farming mechanics, are nearly finished. Im now on fine tuning and polish. The sticky matter in the fine tuning and polish, however, is that my mission has not only been in a more realistic and better balanced farming experience but also to provide a more folksy, relaxing and productive-feeling gameplay loop that fully utilizes the new animation capabilities of modern Zomboid. So this is actually the part where I need to roll up my sleeves and do the heavy lifting. I had been waiting for Aiterons splendid fishing rework to get into a state where it was possible to build off it, so that both the interface, and interactions would be as consistent as possible; as well as with the RJs animal rework, and Eris foraging interface. Were really trying to make the systems and experiences in PZ more consistent as a whole. But the goal is that farming should serve as a fun, peaceful minigame, albeit with challenges as we are making a survival game, but that can be an oasis of calm in the chaos and death of the PZ apocalypse. One fun little feature that Im adding in that regard is using Ladybugs (EUROPEAN TRANSLATION: Mister Ladybirds) as pest control. I should point out that, in testing, even with the longer growing seasons, and new pests/maintenance, the majority of plants would still survive until harvest without any major issues. Yields, however, might vary. To summarize the changes to farming, we have already implemented the following:
A visual update from the Aiteron keep net!
Back to the Blair hothouse! One of the other things Ive been doing for Build 42 is adding a slew of new items both functional and decorative along with addressing inconsistencies and missing functionality with existing items. One of the issues were attempting to address is Bottleneck Items. These are items such as Generator Magazines, Sledgehammers, Lighters/Matches etc. that, when a player has difficulty finding them, can make them feel like theyre soft-locked out of parts of the game. While we dont want to remove the challenge of finding these items, we want to ensure that there are adequate opportunities for a player to find these items, even if they may involve some dangerous excursions. In addition to ensuring that these items spawn in varied appropriate circumstances as loot, including in vehicles, we are ensuring that special circumstances such as the randomized stories and annotated map stash houses can spawn these items, and appropriate items will also be able to be foraged. As an aside, the loot tables themselves are in the process of being scrupulously revised and glowed-up, and should provide more fun and depth for the looting aspects of the game. We made a couple of tools to collect data and feedback regarding this. I had already made LootLog, a tool similar to Aiterons LootZed, except that this one, when activated, logs all loot that spawns to the console.txt with details including the exact location where the loot spawns. Fenris then took this concept to the next level, and now we are working with a tool that tracks and logs exactly how many items of each type spawn for each savegame; a permanent record showing exactly how many items spawn. Not only does this allow us to collect concrete data regarding item spawning, if you are worried that Sledgehammers, Generator Magazines, or Rubber Hoses arent spawning, you can check this record and see if they are. In regards to Generator Magazines, with a high enough Electrical skill in Build 42, your character will be able connect and repair Generators without needing that magazine. We are also adding additional varieties of lighter and matches, as well as Lighter Fluid for refilling the classic lighters, and you will be able to use a vehicle lighter, open flame, or an appropriate stove to light cigarettes. There are also alternate means for players with the Smoker trait to feed their addiction to nicotine. You can currently use many bottles other than the Gas Cans to hold fuel, which was one way we addressed that particular bottleneck (and yes, we are making sure that hoses for siphoning fuel are common), and we are also adding a new, larger, fuel container, alongside some other military-themed items. We know that many players, especially roleplayers, like having themed items, and o some more themed bags, like the military duffelbag in build 41, are on the way. The new entrenching tool serves as a weapon and a shovel, and is folded when placed on the ground or attached to a belt. Several of the new knives such as the Switchblade and Butterfly Knife also have that feature. The new canteen item can be attached to the belt, and will also showcase another new item feature that modders can make good use of: items with varying icons and models from their standard base ones. This allows us to add cosmetic variants without having to actually add new items, similar to how clothing works. I believe there are 4-6 variants of this style of canteen. All of this military loot spawns in appropriate circumstances, so if you want this new gear be prepared to have to go out and get it. Another alternative Bottleneck Item is a P38 Can-Opener that you can keep on your Key Ring. Additionally, your character will be able to use a knife to open cans of food, although that will damage the knife and has the risk of injuring your hand. We also have fancy, expensive imported beer that requires a bottle opener, and the better wines, aside from Champagne of course, will need a corkscrew, or one of the better pocket knives to open. There are many other new items and features: you can use a Pickaxe to remove annoying stumps and boulders; we added various vanity/prestige items and collectibles; players worried about having enough Garbage Bags for water collectors (another Bottleneck Item) will be happy to be able to find a box of them; and we made garbage loot a lot more fun and gross. [previewyoutube=M36KNBgzz0c;full][/previewyoutube]
Next a quick update for modders. Something else were endeavouring to do for Build 42 is to use Tags for item interactions whenever possible. This should make it easy for modders to add new items that work smoothly with a lot of the fun new stuff, and older stuff as well. As mentioned above, for both mods and our own usage, we now have it so that modified item icons and models are persistent; when changed they stay that way when after quitting and reloading and we have made sure to have straightforward function names for ease of use. We added some new events for mods to use, including: OnZombieCreate and LoadChunk OnZombieCreate will allow modders to directly access zombies when they first spawn. Currently for many mods, using the LoadGridSquare event is the only feasible way to accomplish some goals. However, this often has an annoying impact on performance. What LoadChunk does is allow mods to access the chunks of the world map, which are a 10 x 10 grid of map squares, after they stream in. Afterwards, if the mod needs to access a square in that chunk, it can use code such as chunk:getGridSquare(x,y,z) to access said square. Practically speaking this means that the mod can use ~1% of the previous event calls to accomplish the same goals, for many of the purposes in which LoadGridSquare is utilized. We have also moved around the order of operations when sandbox options are loaded and the loot tables are parsed, to make it easier for mods that use sandbox options to set loot spawn values.
Finally, a quick video built from clips from the ongoing animals testing. Tara for now, chucks. [previewyoutube=d0MvWKxZzzQ;full][/previewyoutube] This weeks hellscape from Stonmo. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Apologies for the lack of blog last week, the blog writer had a fever and for much of Thursday was hallucinating that he was stuck in a Mexican hotel and GOG kept on phoning the switchboard to demand that we change the Knox Event lore.
[ 2023-02-16 16:29:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, lets chime in with some of the feverish work being done in the musty basements and damp holes in the ground of the Knox Event. First off, some scribbles from the engine room.
B42 ENGINE
To catch up and recap, the main highlights of engine improvements for build 42 are as follows:
- Basements and underground things!
- A flexible per chunk 32 height that can be different in each chunk, allowing parts of the map to be at 32 level height, where others in theory go from -31 to ground floor.
- New lighting propagation system that has light bounce off walls and leak through windows, doors and other spaces more realistically allowing for more natural ambient light effects and getting rid of those room based lighting issues.
- The ability to have negative coordinates on x and y, thus opening up map expansion directions in the three previously missing directions.
- New chunk based rendering using a depth map to vastly optimise drawing of the game.
This is really handy, since the deck of cards goes out of the window. Youre no longer having to draw everything from the furthermost thing to the closest, and they dont have to be ordered strictly as they get closer to the camera either. With a depth buffer you can choose whatever order you want: draw all brick walls first, then all characters hairs, then all grass, then all you get the idea. Outside transparency, which causes issues, you can draw anything in whatever order is most convenient and most optimized for the GPU. Not only this, but you dont have to put together the 3D scene polygon by polygon every frame: you have a cached mesh probably already on your GPU memory sat waiting for the next frame, and even if the character turns or moves that mesh is still valid to use. Zomboid? Not so much. We have to draw every individual godforsaken goddamned tile: every bit of lighting, every bit of grass, completely from scratch, every frame, every time. And when you zoom out? Wuh-woh shaggy. Youre now asking for trouble. So for B42 we decided to implement a depth buffer! This was a bold proposition since we have no 3D (outside the characters and items, of course). Our 3D is otherwise a faked perspective drawn by the artists drawing the tile: its an illusion. However, with some perseverance, we managed to generate a serviceable depth map of our usual faked isometric tiles:
Note here that when you look carefully at the floors and walls in this, they are not completely smooth. Each tile is still just a certain distance away and it all behaves just as it does now: a deck of cards being dealt every frame, where one thing is either below or on top of another. However we no longer have to draw them back to front. Weve all seen this faked isometric drawn into the tiles cause weird visual glitches too many times to count, where the illusion of the 2d tiled world just breaks in ugly ways. [previewyoutube=4BpNWHNqcbU;full][/previewyoutube] So we went a step further and calculated the fake 3dness for floors and walls, thereby making the depth map peachy smooth:
So where does that leave us? Were dealing the self-same deck of cards we always have been (these are still faked 2d isometric tiles and always will be) however we can now say the left hand bit of this card is actually further back than the right hand side of this card and objects placed on them will represent this as if they had actual 3d depth. For walls and floors, at least, from this fixed perspective we suddenly service them with the GPU as if they are 3D objects: which means that not only do we get rid of the issues with the fixed tile ordering, but we can say this specific part of this tile is further back or further forward than the rest of it. So we can choose to put that part of the tile in front of / behind the character differently to other parts of the same tile. This will make a big difference to immersion on its own, but then we went a step further. With the new depth map, we opened up access to that amazing optimization trick we mentioned before. On the dev branch for this work, we can now just draw a chunk like this tile by tile on one single occasion.
All those hundreds of draw calls as the cards get slammed down from the deck now only need to happen once as we construct the chunk and it becomes its very own tile. Within this we bake the depth information into the depth buffer. So, despite this just being a single picture, we already have all the information hidden behind it thats required to correctly place any player, zombie or placed inventory item anywhere on this chunk (even inside the building, or partially obscured by any part of it) and this can be done AFTER drawing it too. The only times we will ever need to update this chunk and redraw those tiles is if the lighting from time of day changes, or if a naughty zombie dies on it or a player picks up an item, drops one, opens a door or otherwise. (And oh yes, zombie bodies and dropped inventory items will be cached on the chunk too! With depth! So in terms of performance this current resource-hog will be near enough completely free) So now for every frame the chunk above, the charming apartment balconies, becomes the equivalent of a single current tile. One single draw thats not that much slower than drawing that one single tile in the current build, in which we have to have 8x8x4 tiles getting drawn. The work needed to draw each tile on that chunk only needs to occur every so often when its updated in a way that invalidates the depth or changes the tiles visually, or when it first becomes visible. And if anything invalidates that chunk that it requires drawing in full, its only that chunk that needs redrawing. On top of this we have that depth buffer still for every tile drawn, and beyond that the walls and floor tiles have additional faked smooth depth applied to them.
Thats where the magic happens: weirdly the above long-haired hippy character was drawn AFTER the fence tiles were. Due to the magic of the new system we happened to have the extra depth information and were able to throw away pixels of them being drawn seeing as there was something closer. As a cumulative effect of all the above: this is how we accomplished 4k res, max zoom, 500 fps in this video we posted a long while back when we were prototyping all this. [previewyoutube=G6t5h0_Sfqc;full][/previewyoutube] (Though please note we expect, in practice, it wont be this high: the lack of zombies and various other factors make it not completely representative of the full game but its still a good indicator of how vast this optimization will be.)
Next Steps
So the big issue here is that walls and floors are the easy part. Its very simple to calculate how deep a particular pixel of a wall should be, use a shader to put that depth in, and get smooth continuous depth that the player wont clip through like its a 2D billboard facing the screen. EP, however, has recently been experimenting with some stuff thats pretty cool. We must make a big disclaimer there that this is very much, as stated, experimenting, and we cant say for certain what is shown here will be in b42 as shown. He made us promise we made that clear before we speak of it at all, but itll give you an idea of what were trying to do and the cool ideas hes been playing with on his travels. [previewyoutube=gXQ0KrOSdi8;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=2S3HvGN5uC4;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=RmSUq2TOmyU;full][/previewyoutube] None of the 3d shapes will end up in the game world while playing, but the resultant extra depth texture (seen in the bottom left) can be used with the depth map system to make the characters interact with it as if those 3d shapes were there. As you can see, here the character intersects with the (remember, completely 2D) tile as if it were a 3d object itself, with full gradual depth.
As you can see, here the character intersects with the (remember, completely 2D) tile as if it were a 3d object itself, with full gradual depth. And yes, this is the main thing thats been holding us back from sitting in chairs, lying in beds etc. Modders have done great things providing this in the capacity thats feasible in the current engine, but are still limited from sitting properly in chairs that obscure the character or face in different directions. We want a proper solution thatll work 100% when it comes to the main game. Finally, another caveat. Theres no way in hell wed ever be able to do this for every tile in the game, especially the more complicated ones or ones that were drawn (by hand) by the artists that may not actually follow strict laws of isometric in actuality. While this tech can be used for some nice stuff in future its primary and only feasible short to medium term use is as described above. Before we start seeing the inevitable omg PZ will be able to rotate camera RTX mode when?? this is still a complete MASSIVE gulf from anything resembling true 3D. Trust us: weve already ummed and ahhed and experimented with all this tech for a long while now to firmly to know where our limits are and put our boot down on those kinda thoughts. But this does mean that we should be able to deal with all the main simpler structural tiles that make up the main geometry of the maps, and will provide a much more solid feeling world despite it looking very much the same as it always has however, with the new lighting propagation system it shall look that bit better of course! We now return to your scheduled programming.
FARMING
Next, over to the redoubtable Blair Algol for the latest on agricultural matters. The current state of the farming rework is that the current dev phase of new plants, vegetables, herbs, houseplants and associated changes to farming mechanics, are nearly finished. Im now on fine tuning and polish. The sticky matter in the fine tuning and polish, however, is that my mission has not only been in a more realistic and better balanced farming experience but also to provide a more folksy, relaxing and productive-feeling gameplay loop that fully utilizes the new animation capabilities of modern Zomboid. So this is actually the part where I need to roll up my sleeves and do the heavy lifting. I had been waiting for Aiterons splendid fishing rework to get into a state where it was possible to build off it, so that both the interface, and interactions would be as consistent as possible; as well as with the RJs animal rework, and Eris foraging interface. Were really trying to make the systems and experiences in PZ more consistent as a whole. But the goal is that farming should serve as a fun, peaceful minigame, albeit with challenges as we are making a survival game, but that can be an oasis of calm in the chaos and death of the PZ apocalypse. One fun little feature that Im adding in that regard is using Ladybugs (EUROPEAN TRANSLATION: Mister Ladybirds) as pest control. I should point out that, in testing, even with the longer growing seasons, and new pests/maintenance, the majority of plants would still survive until harvest without any major issues. Yields, however, might vary. To summarize the changes to farming, we have already implemented the following:
- Crops now take a realistic amount of time to grow before they can be harvested; this can be adjusted to suit the player or server in the sandbox options.
- Crops also feature realistic growing seasons, where theres optimal months to plant your crops, as well as ones where they are doomed to failure; this can be disabled in the sandbox options.
- Attempting to grow anything other than houseplants indoors will also be doomed to failure; this also can be disabled in the sandbox options, and, when the new lighting systems are implemented, then a realistic greenhouse system could be explored, but dont take that as a guarantee.
- Slugs and snails are new garden pests, that can be dealt with using commercial slug and snail killer, or by learning how to make a slug trap out of an empty beer or pop can and some beer. Rosemary plants, and chickens, also serve as means to control slug infestations.
- Plants will also benefit from regular weedings.
- We have herbs, which have shorter growing seasons, and can be repeatedly harvested, and you can also propagate new herb patches with fresh herbs.
- You can use potatoes, onions and garlic as seeds to plant new patches of vegetables.
- I have added contextual actions using the combat stance in combination with the action key. When you have a hoe equipped, and are in the stance, you can use the action key to dig a furrow. Likewise, if you have seeds in your hand, are in the stance, and are facing a furrow you can use the action key to plant seeds. Likewise for watering plots. I plan on expanding this contextual action to include stuff like chopping down trees when an axe is equipped; removing barricade planks when a crowbar is equipped; etc. as well, for consistency.
FISHING
A visual update from the Aiteron keep net!
NEW ITEM STUFF
Back to the Blair hothouse! One of the other things Ive been doing for Build 42 is adding a slew of new items both functional and decorative along with addressing inconsistencies and missing functionality with existing items. One of the issues were attempting to address is Bottleneck Items. These are items such as Generator Magazines, Sledgehammers, Lighters/Matches etc. that, when a player has difficulty finding them, can make them feel like theyre soft-locked out of parts of the game. While we dont want to remove the challenge of finding these items, we want to ensure that there are adequate opportunities for a player to find these items, even if they may involve some dangerous excursions. In addition to ensuring that these items spawn in varied appropriate circumstances as loot, including in vehicles, we are ensuring that special circumstances such as the randomized stories and annotated map stash houses can spawn these items, and appropriate items will also be able to be foraged. As an aside, the loot tables themselves are in the process of being scrupulously revised and glowed-up, and should provide more fun and depth for the looting aspects of the game. We made a couple of tools to collect data and feedback regarding this. I had already made LootLog, a tool similar to Aiterons LootZed, except that this one, when activated, logs all loot that spawns to the console.txt with details including the exact location where the loot spawns. Fenris then took this concept to the next level, and now we are working with a tool that tracks and logs exactly how many items of each type spawn for each savegame; a permanent record showing exactly how many items spawn. Not only does this allow us to collect concrete data regarding item spawning, if you are worried that Sledgehammers, Generator Magazines, or Rubber Hoses arent spawning, you can check this record and see if they are. In regards to Generator Magazines, with a high enough Electrical skill in Build 42, your character will be able connect and repair Generators without needing that magazine. We are also adding additional varieties of lighter and matches, as well as Lighter Fluid for refilling the classic lighters, and you will be able to use a vehicle lighter, open flame, or an appropriate stove to light cigarettes. There are also alternate means for players with the Smoker trait to feed their addiction to nicotine. You can currently use many bottles other than the Gas Cans to hold fuel, which was one way we addressed that particular bottleneck (and yes, we are making sure that hoses for siphoning fuel are common), and we are also adding a new, larger, fuel container, alongside some other military-themed items. We know that many players, especially roleplayers, like having themed items, and o some more themed bags, like the military duffelbag in build 41, are on the way. The new entrenching tool serves as a weapon and a shovel, and is folded when placed on the ground or attached to a belt. Several of the new knives such as the Switchblade and Butterfly Knife also have that feature. The new canteen item can be attached to the belt, and will also showcase another new item feature that modders can make good use of: items with varying icons and models from their standard base ones. This allows us to add cosmetic variants without having to actually add new items, similar to how clothing works. I believe there are 4-6 variants of this style of canteen. All of this military loot spawns in appropriate circumstances, so if you want this new gear be prepared to have to go out and get it. Another alternative Bottleneck Item is a P38 Can-Opener that you can keep on your Key Ring. Additionally, your character will be able to use a knife to open cans of food, although that will damage the knife and has the risk of injuring your hand. We also have fancy, expensive imported beer that requires a bottle opener, and the better wines, aside from Champagne of course, will need a corkscrew, or one of the better pocket knives to open. There are many other new items and features: you can use a Pickaxe to remove annoying stumps and boulders; we added various vanity/prestige items and collectibles; players worried about having enough Garbage Bags for water collectors (another Bottleneck Item) will be happy to be able to find a box of them; and we made garbage loot a lot more fun and gross. [previewyoutube=M36KNBgzz0c;full][/previewyoutube]
MODDING
Next a quick update for modders. Something else were endeavouring to do for Build 42 is to use Tags for item interactions whenever possible. This should make it easy for modders to add new items that work smoothly with a lot of the fun new stuff, and older stuff as well. As mentioned above, for both mods and our own usage, we now have it so that modified item icons and models are persistent; when changed they stay that way when after quitting and reloading and we have made sure to have straightforward function names for ease of use. We added some new events for mods to use, including: OnZombieCreate and LoadChunk OnZombieCreate will allow modders to directly access zombies when they first spawn. Currently for many mods, using the LoadGridSquare event is the only feasible way to accomplish some goals. However, this often has an annoying impact on performance. What LoadChunk does is allow mods to access the chunks of the world map, which are a 10 x 10 grid of map squares, after they stream in. Afterwards, if the mod needs to access a square in that chunk, it can use code such as chunk:getGridSquare(x,y,z) to access said square. Practically speaking this means that the mod can use ~1% of the previous event calls to accomplish the same goals, for many of the purposes in which LoadGridSquare is utilized. We have also moved around the order of operations when sandbox options are loaded and the loot tables are parsed, to make it easier for mods that use sandbox options to set loot spawn values.
ANIMALS
Finally, a quick video built from clips from the ongoing animals testing. Tara for now, chucks. [previewyoutube=d0MvWKxZzzQ;full][/previewyoutube] This weeks hellscape from Stonmo. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Apologies for the lack of blog last week, the blog writer had a fever and for much of Thursday was hallucinating that he was stuck in a Mexican hotel and GOG kept on phoning the switchboard to demand that we change the Knox Event lore.
[ 2023-02-16 16:29:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
My Zeds is on Fire
Work continues on the fire rewrite branch with the intention being to bring it up to a state in which it can safely enter our internal test build. It recently came to mind that a lot of the fire dev chat in blogs took place in the distant past, before we had to reshuffle and our current MP team became what it is today thereby forcing flames into the sidelines for an elongated spell. As such the guys have made a vid for us today that spells out some of the foundations of what is being done here, in terms of how fire spread, size and duration is governed and indeed the sort of stats that lie beneath the hood that we can balance with, and that the community can mod with. Thats the first half of the video: done with our old fire effects (which are too transparent and also on fast forward) so please take this aspect as instructional/iterative rather than a fait accompli. The second part of the video then moves on to show our experimentation with fire visuals, working alongside our VFX artist friend Brian, as we work out different ways to make in-game flame effects better match our particularly coloured iso-world. [previewyoutube=r8k0GLSAl4Y;full][/previewyoutube]
As regular readers will know, alongside tidying up smaller multiplayer irritations as they go, our MP team are currently transferring player inventory actions over away from the client and onto the server. They have another three or four weeks set aside for the first stage of this: at which point we will the players inventory loaded from the database on the server, and the server always having an up-to-date player inventory hopefully all working in sync with the progress bars, item move times and expected results you get currently. At this point the second major part of the code work will be getting underway: having all the item manipulation occurring on the server side, and ensuring that the server no longer trusts clients (those sneaky clients!) so that stuff like item adding cheats are rendered defunct. After this, clearly, therell be a heap of testing and such but we thought the more technically-minded amongst us would appreciate a catch-up on where the guys are with it.
This past week Aiteron has been working with the testers whove been reporting back on bugs and gameplay in the latest version of our revamped fishing and has been largely working on an improved/experimental control system for a more chilled out and less button-holdy-tappy experience. He has also been working with our aforementioned VFX specialist friend Brian, who has been supplying us with various splashes, bubbles and signs of water movement that will indicate the presence of fish, and also be a suggestion of the size of what lurks beneath. On top of bug fixes, changed recipes and improved items for the system hes also been firming up on exactly what sorts of fish well be adding to the game, and whether theyd be found in rivers or lakes (and definitely not swimming pools). Theres gonna be lot of bass: largemouth, smallmouth, white, spotted and striped. And lets not even get started on the crappies
After an awful lot of code-side tinkering, a super WIP version of our crafting improvement has surfaced into something thats viewable in a vid. Please note this is the visible tip of the iceberg, and clearly whats on show isnt final: you do not saw logs in a furnace, and this isnt how you make a hammer. [previewyoutube=J-RzQP2t5MU;full] [/previewyoutube] So whats on show here? Various objects can now be entirely created using the games scripting language thats been made similar to the way items and vehicles etc. are defined. This covers various currently planned objects that can function as a craft station: stuff like blacksmith furnace, tailoring bench, fletchery, brewing stands, kilns etc. And, unlike the way it is now, these can also be objects consisting of multiple tiles/sprites with various rotations etc. At a craft station the player is able to use their normal recipes (which may provide a bonus for doing the recipe at a craftstation) but its here that they can use their blueprints and which ones are available will be defined by the associated object script. Blueprints (working title) are similar to recipes in that they can take inputs, and produce outputs. However they are distinct from your usual recipes in the following ways:
Finally, over to RJ in the animal zone. Ive been diving more and more into a farm animals designation zones which are paddocks you outline for your animals to occupy (as long as they dont get loose) and where the game will allow you to do all your various primary animal-rearing tasks. For most of this week Ive been refactoring and simplifying my animal behaviour and meta code, but theres a few interesting things to mention. Cows and sheep can now recognize a roof area and stay under it during heavy rain, Ive been trying to get sheep to move in more of a flock most of the time, and baby animals will follow their mother more correctly. You can also now drop food directly on ground for them to eat, or in the feeding trough container where it wont spoil quite so quickly. Also, among many other things (haircare, first aid, dropping bags, new emergency broadcast system noises) the Sound Team have also started making animal noises. Behold, the cows now have hoofsteps. [previewyoutube=zNhVX14L2Lo;full][/previewyoutube] This weeks tarmac follow party from Darth. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-01-26 22:04:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
How do all. Heres a check-in from a few different Build 42 departments, that also occurs in the lead-up to the first in-person meet-up for the wider PZ team since 2018. Were all aflutter about it (and trying to remember everyones real world names instead of online handles) and hope to have lots of good B42 chat in amongst the introduction of an international team to traditional Geordie culture.
Lets pop into a few different areas, then with the caveat that for a fuller B42 overview our last dev blog is probably a better destination.
FIRE
Work continues on the fire rewrite branch with the intention being to bring it up to a state in which it can safely enter our internal test build. It recently came to mind that a lot of the fire dev chat in blogs took place in the distant past, before we had to reshuffle and our current MP team became what it is today thereby forcing flames into the sidelines for an elongated spell. As such the guys have made a vid for us today that spells out some of the foundations of what is being done here, in terms of how fire spread, size and duration is governed and indeed the sort of stats that lie beneath the hood that we can balance with, and that the community can mod with. Thats the first half of the video: done with our old fire effects (which are too transparent and also on fast forward) so please take this aspect as instructional/iterative rather than a fait accompli. The second part of the video then moves on to show our experimentation with fire visuals, working alongside our VFX artist friend Brian, as we work out different ways to make in-game flame effects better match our particularly coloured iso-world. [previewyoutube=r8k0GLSAl4Y;full][/previewyoutube]
MP TEAM
As regular readers will know, alongside tidying up smaller multiplayer irritations as they go, our MP team are currently transferring player inventory actions over away from the client and onto the server. They have another three or four weeks set aside for the first stage of this: at which point we will the players inventory loaded from the database on the server, and the server always having an up-to-date player inventory hopefully all working in sync with the progress bars, item move times and expected results you get currently. At this point the second major part of the code work will be getting underway: having all the item manipulation occurring on the server side, and ensuring that the server no longer trusts clients (those sneaky clients!) so that stuff like item adding cheats are rendered defunct. After this, clearly, therell be a heap of testing and such but we thought the more technically-minded amongst us would appreciate a catch-up on where the guys are with it.
FISHING
This past week Aiteron has been working with the testers whove been reporting back on bugs and gameplay in the latest version of our revamped fishing and has been largely working on an improved/experimental control system for a more chilled out and less button-holdy-tappy experience. He has also been working with our aforementioned VFX specialist friend Brian, who has been supplying us with various splashes, bubbles and signs of water movement that will indicate the presence of fish, and also be a suggestion of the size of what lurks beneath. On top of bug fixes, changed recipes and improved items for the system hes also been firming up on exactly what sorts of fish well be adding to the game, and whether theyd be found in rivers or lakes (and definitely not swimming pools). Theres gonna be lot of bass: largemouth, smallmouth, white, spotted and striped. And lets not even get started on the crappies
CRAFTING
After an awful lot of code-side tinkering, a super WIP version of our crafting improvement has surfaced into something thats viewable in a vid. Please note this is the visible tip of the iceberg, and clearly whats on show isnt final: you do not saw logs in a furnace, and this isnt how you make a hammer. [previewyoutube=J-RzQP2t5MU;full] [/previewyoutube] So whats on show here? Various objects can now be entirely created using the games scripting language thats been made similar to the way items and vehicles etc. are defined. This covers various currently planned objects that can function as a craft station: stuff like blacksmith furnace, tailoring bench, fletchery, brewing stands, kilns etc. And, unlike the way it is now, these can also be objects consisting of multiple tiles/sprites with various rotations etc. At a craft station the player is able to use their normal recipes (which may provide a bonus for doing the recipe at a craftstation) but its here that they can use their blueprints and which ones are available will be defined by the associated object script. Blueprints (working title) are similar to recipes in that they can take inputs, and produce outputs. However they are distinct from your usual recipes in the following ways:
- They have different duration modes in real world seconds, game minutes or can run passively in the background for long periods.
- They may not require the player to be present. For example, a melting process may run on the craftstation while you run off to do other things.
- As well as items, they can take the input (and produce) Fluids and different in-game energies Electric, Heat, Kinetic or Steam.
- When active a Blueprint in progress can store its inputs/outputs, and may have storage capacity for them. For example, a blueprint that needs water as an input may well have an internal storage buffer for water. Well probably show this in a development vid next time.
LES ANIMAUX
Finally, over to RJ in the animal zone. Ive been diving more and more into a farm animals designation zones which are paddocks you outline for your animals to occupy (as long as they dont get loose) and where the game will allow you to do all your various primary animal-rearing tasks. For most of this week Ive been refactoring and simplifying my animal behaviour and meta code, but theres a few interesting things to mention. Cows and sheep can now recognize a roof area and stay under it during heavy rain, Ive been trying to get sheep to move in more of a flock most of the time, and baby animals will follow their mother more correctly. You can also now drop food directly on ground for them to eat, or in the feeding trough container where it wont spoil quite so quickly. Also, among many other things (haircare, first aid, dropping bags, new emergency broadcast system noises) the Sound Team have also started making animal noises. Behold, the cows now have hoofsteps. [previewyoutube=zNhVX14L2Lo;full][/previewyoutube] This weeks tarmac follow party from Darth. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.
[ 2023-01-26 22:04:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
Walk in the Woodz
First of all wed like to welcome officially three new people to the full Project Zomboid team. Fenris_Wolf should need no introduction to the old hands of the Project Zomboid community. He took over and maintained the ORGM mod with great aplomb from the original creator ORMtnMan and will be a name familiar to many. Right now hes reacclimatizing himself with the PZ codebase, charged with clearing out some of the niggly things that have been on our to do list so he gets his fingers dirty in many and various different areas of the game. Clearly his expertise with guns and the firearms code will likely come into play at some point in his time with us, but for now its all about bedding down and getting comfy in Spiffos hovering mothership. Also joining us officially, meanwhile, are Amz and Pat_Bren. Amz is another familiar name from the community, and was a great help to us in the days of 41 MP testing. Shes now officially a full-time tester working with Sasha and Yana, and will also be making cool videos for our blogs and improving our (already extraordinarily professional) social media engagements. Pat_Bren, meanwhile, has been writing up a storm for Build 42 on a part time basis writing new radio and TV channels and content, new lore for whats going on around the world and much more besides and will now be working other cool future content in an official and ongoing capacity.
Right now, were probably due an overview of Build 42, so everyone is on the same page about its contents rather than skipping about between them each blog. 42 boils down to four large chunks of deep-rooted work that we want to all come together: the crafting/animals update, the map expansion, the optimization/lighting/basements engine upgrade, and the weighty job the MP team have taken on to move all inventory interactions over from clients to server. These are all at different stages for example animals are further ahead than a lot of the elements of crafting in terms of being ready to actively test and play with. Right now with the crafting, the work taking place is on the back-end codeside of crafting stations and component UIs. Meanwhile with the engine upgrade at this point were essentially fixing up various different rendering issues that were broken with our quite fundamental changes to the system up to a point at which its ready to be merged into the test build. The map team meanwhile continue to pump out new towns, interesting locations and fun places to travel to and hold out in.
Around these big ticket items we also have other coders, writers, artists and 3D modellers working to improve aspects of the current game. So theres the in-depth fire overhaul, Aiterons revamped fishing, better farming, more imaginative and fun items to find and use, better events to come across, improved recipes, new animations and activities, improved music system and deeper soundscape and general piles and piles of polish and improvement throughout. So with all that firmly held in mind, lets have a quick dart around some of the different departments of PZ to catch up on a few bits and bobs.
[ 2023-01-12 20:54:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, hope youre all doing well and that thus far 2023 has been kind. Lets get straight into it.
NEW FACES
First of all wed like to welcome officially three new people to the full Project Zomboid team. Fenris_Wolf should need no introduction to the old hands of the Project Zomboid community. He took over and maintained the ORGM mod with great aplomb from the original creator ORMtnMan and will be a name familiar to many. Right now hes reacclimatizing himself with the PZ codebase, charged with clearing out some of the niggly things that have been on our to do list so he gets his fingers dirty in many and various different areas of the game. Clearly his expertise with guns and the firearms code will likely come into play at some point in his time with us, but for now its all about bedding down and getting comfy in Spiffos hovering mothership. Also joining us officially, meanwhile, are Amz and Pat_Bren. Amz is another familiar name from the community, and was a great help to us in the days of 41 MP testing. Shes now officially a full-time tester working with Sasha and Yana, and will also be making cool videos for our blogs and improving our (already extraordinarily professional) social media engagements. Pat_Bren, meanwhile, has been writing up a storm for Build 42 on a part time basis writing new radio and TV channels and content, new lore for whats going on around the world and much more besides and will now be working other cool future content in an official and ongoing capacity.
42 STUFF
Right now, were probably due an overview of Build 42, so everyone is on the same page about its contents rather than skipping about between them each blog. 42 boils down to four large chunks of deep-rooted work that we want to all come together: the crafting/animals update, the map expansion, the optimization/lighting/basements engine upgrade, and the weighty job the MP team have taken on to move all inventory interactions over from clients to server. These are all at different stages for example animals are further ahead than a lot of the elements of crafting in terms of being ready to actively test and play with. Right now with the crafting, the work taking place is on the back-end codeside of crafting stations and component UIs. Meanwhile with the engine upgrade at this point were essentially fixing up various different rendering issues that were broken with our quite fundamental changes to the system up to a point at which its ready to be merged into the test build. The map team meanwhile continue to pump out new towns, interesting locations and fun places to travel to and hold out in.
Around these big ticket items we also have other coders, writers, artists and 3D modellers working to improve aspects of the current game. So theres the in-depth fire overhaul, Aiterons revamped fishing, better farming, more imaginative and fun items to find and use, better events to come across, improved recipes, new animations and activities, improved music system and deeper soundscape and general piles and piles of polish and improvement throughout. So with all that firmly held in mind, lets have a quick dart around some of the different departments of PZ to catch up on a few bits and bobs.
- Our smashing friend Steve N, who were borrowing from EverCurious Entertainment, has been digging into our animation system and working out some longstanding issues that weve been desperate to fix. Were currently jumping into a test build to check nothing else has been broken by his changes, but the result will be a lot more silky smooth turns and 180s in your survival forays.
- The big debate currently in our work with livestock is how to make it clear to players that youll need to designate areas that you want them to occupy and produce within, alongside building them fences they wont escape through. Weve got various ideas for this and will be running our experiments past the testers. Increasingly were realising just how much more life these non-human and non-zombie creatures bring to the game. To which end we are also experimenting with some non-interactive beasts that will run before you get near, and give the game a smidge more desolate color [previewyoutube=7tQ_z0cDjZs;full][/previewyoutube]
- As mentioned before, alongside refinements and improvements to the music system, right now via Formosa/Noiseworks were in the process of getting real life human actors (in Los Angeles! In America!) to record some basic bodily noises to give extra life (and pain) to our Knox Event survivors. Imagine how cool it will be in MP when one of your buddies reaches you, having escaped zombies and run in terror, and you can hear their panicked heavy breathing. Thats the sort of thing we want to capture, alongside noises of hurt and exertion as you tumble around the landscape. While were there we are also going to get a variety of other spoken TV and radio noises that we can then obfuscate to improve the entertainment system slightly.
- Aiteron is back with us and has picked up on his work on fishing. This is its current iteration, which will shortly be mixed into the internal test build. This probably needs some more tweaking with the strain animations and the indications that a big fish is being caught but is really getting there now. Itll be mixed into the internal test build soon, which is also the point at which Formosa can start working on the new sound effects and such. [previewyoutube=CKH0tYCxH0E;full][/previewyoutube]
- About a bazillion new items some useful (hose now required for gas siphoning, kids) and some more aimed at making the world feel fuller and more real are also currently going into the internal test build. Here are a few examples.
[ 2023-01-12 20:54:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
VOTE FOR US BLOG
Weve got a lot of the team away on their Christmas break this week who werent around to prod for contributions, or have a house full of sick people who need attention (thats me, Hi), however the following items were shoved into the blog writers sack nonetheless.
Pigs breeding so fast that a piglet horde started to form before one of our testers eyes.
While not a bug, this one was deliberate, heres also a picture of some cows in a strip club. Merry Christmas.
This weeks festive grave visit from ! A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Were also on sale at the moment if any of your mates fancies it x
[ 2022-12-22 23:08:52 CET ] [ Original post ]
First off ahem Vote for Project Zomboid in the Steam Awards!
In a fairly mindblowing chain of events, mainly due to the awesomeness of the survivors of the Knox Event, Project Zomboid has been nominated for Labor of Love in the Steam Awards.
We are up against some fantastic other games (vote Deep Rock or No Mans Sky if youre less keen on us those teams are incredible!) but just being on the list is a massive achievement for us and were so grateful for the community for getting our name up in lights like this.
So thanks everyone, it really does mean a lot!
BLOG BEGINS
Weve got a lot of the team away on their Christmas break this week who werent around to prod for contributions, or have a house full of sick people who need attention (thats me, Hi), however the following items were shoved into the blog writers sack nonetheless.
- In preparation for getting real actor-recorded body sounds, huffs and puffs for the game Matteo has been recording his own voice to get a feel for whats required. Hes kept them quite subtle to match the perspective, and the consideration that the player doesnt want to be heard by zombies, so right now theyre not too over the top. We might change the approach with this, but its interesting to consider them and think what theyll bring in terms of immersion to the game. [previewyoutube=fnspzsy7sXs;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=dpdJJJzEV4M;full][/previewyoutube]
- Were currently working on bringing our optimization and basements branch (both mapper-placed underground areas that always appear, and the randomly occurring ones placed as surprise features and treasure/zombie boxes) into a testable state. This is an ongoing process, but a lot of progress has been made this week so its rather exciting nevertheless.
- The integration of fire is still trucking along with most of our attention currently being on making flames fit the scene, we have a VFX artist joining us for a little while early in the new year and in the meantime are experimenting code-side too. Well share some vids when were closer to the finished article.
- Blair is working on a variety of things and is currently super proud of LootLog which he wants advertised so modders are aware of it. This is a dev and modder tool that, once activated, logs every item that spawns around the player rather than wait for the player (or modder/dev) to discover it. Info logged includes a list of items; the room definition in question; the container type in question; and the X, Y and Z coordinates of the container in question. This is intended as a tool for us and the modding community to evaluate the amounts of loot that spawn, and where it spawns. The blog writer is aware that it isnt super sexy blog content but Blair underlines that it is a niche pleaser so if you are in that niche: consider yourself pleased.
- Also in the Algol pipeline this week: improved profession houses with cars outside that match the profession, new weapons, new zed stories, new filler book items with names dreamt up by dreamy Pat_Bren and the implementation of all sorts of new foods and 3D items.
- RJs animals have entered initial testing, which made for an extremely fun first day of crazy bug reports and oohs and aahs and cuteness. Its amazing what life non-human and non-zombie animated creatures suddenly bring to PZ when you encounter them in-game. Fun bugs we dealt with included:
Pigs breeding so fast that a piglet horde started to form before one of our testers eyes.
While not a bug, this one was deliberate, heres also a picture of some cows in a strip club. Merry Christmas.
This weeks festive grave visit from ! A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Were also on sale at the moment if any of your mates fancies it x
[ 2022-12-22 23:08:52 CET ] [ Original post ]
Final Hours to Order Your Spiffo Plush!
[ 2022-12-15 16:28:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
THANK YOU to everyone who has already ordered their future survival companion.
Head over to the Makeship campaign page to order your own :spiffo: Spiffo:
https://shop.makeship.com/3FHlgG8
[ 2022-12-15 16:28:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
Departments of the Damned
Formosa (formerly Noiseworks) have a lot of different things on the brew work on new music and music systems, all the new actions and items for B42 (switchblade, firecracker etc) and clearly all the animal stuff which theyll be starting on in due course. Something else they are starting work on, however, are acted character noises pants and puffs recorded by real life actors to add a little more depth and feeling to the game, not to mention a greater feeling of real when you are standing next to a character who has exerted themselves or is being injured in MP. This will likely be an option you can turn off if you find it intrusive, but the Sound team believe they will provide an extra layer of immersion for Knox Event survivors. The sorts of things theyll be recording will be: effort noises for window and fence climbs, sleeping noises, pain noises when bitten or scratched, vomiting, sneezing coughing etc.
As those who read this blog might recall, weve been screaming out for a big brain to come in and lend their clever thoughts to some of the movement bugs and issues in our anims system for a while. Previous attempts to find a Chosen One didnt work out, and as such since the 41 release weve had a significant blocker in terms of improving our animation system and our animation tools. There has been significant rejoicing, then, that our friends at Ever Curious Entertainment have lent us their own big brain Steve North who has been deep in AnimZed of late, and should be providing a range of changes and improvements that will help out our animator Martin no end. In terms of a player-facing end result, this means that in B42 hopefully therell be better blends between anims to tighten everything up and make things look smoother. It could also, potentially, improve the responsiveness of controls and give gameplay a slightly tighter feeling. Well see how it goes when the fixes go in.
Work on integration of the previously in-dev fire system continues, this week with the introduction of new mechanics like burnable oily surfaces and development of fire spread in save games and MP code. We are also experimenting with visuals in that a more pixelated fire looks better in-game, and also will be having a VFX artist joining us for a time in January to further improve its appearance in our isometric illustrate-y looking world. Its already looking a smidge better though. [previewyoutube=YE_OsmMyxfI;full][/previewyoutube]
Lots of fun new locations appearing from Xeonyx and Ayrton in the map channel, including this little doozy
Over to RJ, resident of a country doomed to failure in a World Cup football match this coming Saturday. Right now Im prepping my stuff so it can be put in front of our testers. Im trying to improve the meta part of the system that governs them when youre not in their direct presence primarily how the feeding trough and water troughs are managed while youre away. Thats my main focus at the moment but also need to add some polish to the genetics when animals breed, and Ill be moving onto animal sickness soon also. Now onto Turbo, a resident of a country who will most likely be getting spanked by Argentina at the moment this blog goes live at some point this evening. Im getting stuff ready so that other team members can jump into the more stable parts of my craft branch and help expand it, and plug stuff in. First, though, Im going back over my crafting stations, and doing some refactoring in essence adding a lot more automation to the way the system works in the code. It should be worth the extra thought thats going into it though, at the bare minimum you should be able to create a new station purely through scripting alone. If a certain station requires it then custom logic or a custom UI panel or element can easily be added it should be as great for modders as much as ourselves.
If you are/were aware of Blair as a prolific PZ modder, it will come as no surprise that on the team he is a WHIRLWIND of cool ideas and always has multiple gameplay tweaks and features on the go and has struck up an amazing combo team with our Loot Placement Artiste Baph. Heres some fun stuff thats recently gone in for testing from the world of KEYS:
Clearly this isnt everything weve also got optimizations, basements and other fun stuff lined up for 42 but theres not a huge amount of news on these beyond its all coming along. Hopefully well have a few more updates on these in our next pre-Xmasdoid. Fanks all love yus x This weeks good use of 41 fire from BoinXaysa. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Now, the Block of Italicized Text demands: go and buy Dwarf Fortress on Steam! The original, best and most brilliant simulation there is and ever shall be. Its development, and developers, bay12games, are LEGENDARY and built the road that Project Zomboid travels on each and every day. Now DF is finally on Steam, and we implore you all to join in the fun! https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/
[ 2022-12-08 19:33:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
Happy December Thursdoid, and a big hello to all the new survivors whove jumped on board in recent weeks. This week well be doing a quick check-in with the various different departments who are at work on Build 42 and providing a little freeze-frame of exactly whats being worked on.
First though, we would be remiss if we didnt inform all fans of raccoons, soft toys and both of these things that: the Makeship campaign for the Spiffo plush has been EXTENDED for a full extra week due to everyone getting all excited about it.
If you are interested in sliding under a closing door then reaching back for your fluffy Spiffo, like Indiana Jones, then final orders can be made here:
https://shop.makeship.com/3FHlgG8
Okay, so lets go round the Zomboid houses. Starting with the sound team?
SOUND DEPARTMENT
Formosa (formerly Noiseworks) have a lot of different things on the brew work on new music and music systems, all the new actions and items for B42 (switchblade, firecracker etc) and clearly all the animal stuff which theyll be starting on in due course. Something else they are starting work on, however, are acted character noises pants and puffs recorded by real life actors to add a little more depth and feeling to the game, not to mention a greater feeling of real when you are standing next to a character who has exerted themselves or is being injured in MP. This will likely be an option you can turn off if you find it intrusive, but the Sound team believe they will provide an extra layer of immersion for Knox Event survivors. The sorts of things theyll be recording will be: effort noises for window and fence climbs, sleeping noises, pain noises when bitten or scratched, vomiting, sneezing coughing etc.
ANIMS DEPARTMENT
As those who read this blog might recall, weve been screaming out for a big brain to come in and lend their clever thoughts to some of the movement bugs and issues in our anims system for a while. Previous attempts to find a Chosen One didnt work out, and as such since the 41 release weve had a significant blocker in terms of improving our animation system and our animation tools. There has been significant rejoicing, then, that our friends at Ever Curious Entertainment have lent us their own big brain Steve North who has been deep in AnimZed of late, and should be providing a range of changes and improvements that will help out our animator Martin no end. In terms of a player-facing end result, this means that in B42 hopefully therell be better blends between anims to tighten everything up and make things look smoother. It could also, potentially, improve the responsiveness of controls and give gameplay a slightly tighter feeling. Well see how it goes when the fixes go in.
FIRE DEPARTMENT
Work on integration of the previously in-dev fire system continues, this week with the introduction of new mechanics like burnable oily surfaces and development of fire spread in save games and MP code. We are also experimenting with visuals in that a more pixelated fire looks better in-game, and also will be having a VFX artist joining us for a time in January to further improve its appearance in our isometric illustrate-y looking world. Its already looking a smidge better though. [previewyoutube=YE_OsmMyxfI;full][/previewyoutube]
MAPPING DEPARTMENT
Lots of fun new locations appearing from Xeonyx and Ayrton in the map channel, including this little doozy
Over to RJ, resident of a country doomed to failure in a World Cup football match this coming Saturday. Right now Im prepping my stuff so it can be put in front of our testers. Im trying to improve the meta part of the system that governs them when youre not in their direct presence primarily how the feeding trough and water troughs are managed while youre away. Thats my main focus at the moment but also need to add some polish to the genetics when animals breed, and Ill be moving onto animal sickness soon also. Now onto Turbo, a resident of a country who will most likely be getting spanked by Argentina at the moment this blog goes live at some point this evening. Im getting stuff ready so that other team members can jump into the more stable parts of my craft branch and help expand it, and plug stuff in. First, though, Im going back over my crafting stations, and doing some refactoring in essence adding a lot more automation to the way the system works in the code. It should be worth the extra thought thats going into it though, at the bare minimum you should be able to create a new station purely through scripting alone. If a certain station requires it then custom logic or a custom UI panel or element can easily be added it should be as great for modders as much as ourselves.
BLAIR ALGOL DEPARTMENT
If you are/were aware of Blair as a prolific PZ modder, it will come as no surprise that on the team he is a WHIRLWIND of cool ideas and always has multiple gameplay tweaks and features on the go and has struck up an amazing combo team with our Loot Placement Artiste Baph. Heres some fun stuff thats recently gone in for testing from the world of KEYS:
- Zombies will now only have a key, or a key ring with a key in it, for suitable buildings that they spawn in or near to. Prison Guards can have Prison keys, inmates cannot. Employees of a business can have a key for it, customers cannot.
- More keys will spawn in buildings, not just for the building, but also possibly for nearby vehicles. Sometimes those nearby vehicles may also have a key for that building in the glovebox.
- When a vehicle spawns a key (in its glovebox, on a zombie, or on the ground) it has a chance of being accompanied by a key for a nearby building as well.
- Its ensured that only cop zombies get the cop car keys although Survivor zombies could have anything.
- Building keys may well come pre-named according to the sort of building or business they unlock.
- We are doing more fun stuff with Key Rings in general, watch out rabbits!
OTHER DEPARTMENT
Clearly this isnt everything weve also got optimizations, basements and other fun stuff lined up for 42 but theres not a huge amount of news on these beyond its all coming along. Hopefully well have a few more updates on these in our next pre-Xmasdoid. Fanks all love yus x This weeks good use of 41 fire from BoinXaysa. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Now, the Block of Italicized Text demands: go and buy Dwarf Fortress on Steam! The original, best and most brilliant simulation there is and ever shall be. Its development, and developers, bay12games, are LEGENDARY and built the road that Project Zomboid travels on each and every day. Now DF is finally on Steam, and we implore you all to join in the fun! https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/
[ 2022-12-08 19:33:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
UNSTABLE Hotfix 41.78.16 Released
[ 2022-12-08 13:50:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
- Fixed ServerConnectPopup missing the new "Use Steam Relay" option, which led to the +connect argument not working.
[ 2022-12-08 13:50:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hotfix 41.78.15 Released
[ 2022-12-05 21:16:13 CET ] [ Original post ]
- Fixed being able to still add a split-screen player when AllowCoop is disabled.
- Fixed seeing through walls sometimes after loading into a game.
- Fixed an error in ISZoneDisplay:getZoneTooltipText.
- Fixed players briefly appearing at 0,0 on the in-game map after joining a server.
- Fixed displaying players with name ??? on the in-game map. This happened when the client had not received the first full update with the player's name and other info.
[ 2022-12-05 21:16:13 CET ] [ Original post ]
UNSTABLE 41.78.13 Released
[ 2022-11-29 15:59:27 CET ] [ Original post ]
- Added AllowCoop server option to allow or disallow splitscreen clients.
- Added MaxTextureSize (default 256) and MaxVehicleTextureSize (default 512) options to the Display options menu. Each of these can be 256, 512, 1024 or 2048.
- Fixed the propane required for the metal wall upgrade system so that you are capable of making a Mk II metal wall without having to upgrade first.
- Fixed sleeping pills not being taken in account with the panic sleep exploit fix.
- Fixed some vehicle textures (such as for wheels) being limited to 256x256 instead of 512x512.
- Fixed reading ServerList.txt and ServerListSteam.txt with the default system encoding instead of UTF-8.
- Fixed being unable to slice or smash a rotten watermelon.
- Fixed an error in the farming menu that limited squares watered after the first to 50 water units maximum instead of 100.
- Fixed /additem command exception when run from the server console.
- Fixed redundant console output from ISInventoryPaneContextMenu.lua.
- Fixed distant remote players not being displayed on the in-game map.
[ 2022-11-29 15:59:27 CET ] [ Original post ]
Farm of Fear
This week were going over to Blair, and his current mission on overhauling our Farming system. Now, priority number one is to get things more tactile and animation-led with farming: when you use a watering can we want it through a direct mouse-click and not a maze of sub-menus.
Away from this, however, we are also making the overall system more complex, varied and interesting. Elements of this already coded into the 42 mainframe include:
Elsewhere, weve been seeing what animals look like without their clothes/skin on. Were thinking that these look realistic but a little too fatty and should have a little more muscle on show but its interesting nonetheless.
These past two weeks weve also made a lot of progress with getting the previously shelved fire system back on track, including the ability for the game to have liquid-looking Molotov fire FX on the ground. The actual visuals are going to be fine-tuned and improved soon, so wed rather not share images of it, but rest assured its going to be pretty cool. Finally, another quick bump for the Spiffo plush that Makeship are creating for us which is something that the community has been asking for since forever: https://shop.makeship.com/3FHlgG8 If you want one youve got two weeks to put your order in.
In case you want to give it for Christmas then Mash has also created a certificate of gifting intent that will hopefully come in useful.
This weeks road-side (well, centre) picnic from Athena. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2022-11-24 21:21:19 CET ] [ Original post ]
Lets get something out of the way first then. Ugh. We feel so unclean doing what were about to do. SORRY. SORRY EVERYONE. All the other games were posting Steam Awards links like that, so we did too. Dont vote for us if youd rather not, but if you do well click on the above massive intrusive image and that would be swell. So, back to business, we released some final-ish fixes for the current stable build yesterday the changelist for which can be found here. There may well be another smaller patch, early next week, with some other minor changes namely a few small anti-cheat measures, a fix for some modded textures and a bit of metal walls weirdness that still needs addressing.
B42 FARMING
This week were going over to Blair, and his current mission on overhauling our Farming system. Now, priority number one is to get things more tactile and animation-led with farming: when you use a watering can we want it through a direct mouse-click and not a maze of sub-menus.
Away from this, however, we are also making the overall system more complex, varied and interesting. Elements of this already coded into the 42 mainframe include:
- Plants have growing seasons, and for most crops there are one or two optimal planting months. Youll be able to read the best month to plant your crops on the back of seed packets, and if you plant at the wrong time of year youll get a reduced yield, and perhaps the risk of producing sickly plants.
- Appropriate plants, such as Potatoes, can be planted using the vegetable itself.
- Youll be able to dry seed Corn and Peas to preserve them for planting next year.
- Plants can accumulate slugs and snails for the player to deal with either using looted pest control, or perhaps using a folksy remedy. Nearby slug repellent plants such as Rosemary will help too.
- Rosemary is one of several herbs added as well. They tend to grow more quickly, and when harvested are knocked back a few growth stages and then can be harvested again later. The herbs you pick can also be used to propagate new herb patches while theyre still fresh, and can be dried as well.
- We are expanding the need to water your crops to houseplants. Potted indoor vegetation that players find in the world will now be living similar, but not identical, to crops. They need to be watered, can fall victim to diseases, and will become visibly unwell before they die and become a dried husk. This also means that they will be another cool signifier of the days that have elapsed since the beginning of the Knox Event since in time all the plants in homes, shops, the mall etc will wither and die.
Elsewhere, weve been seeing what animals look like without their clothes/skin on. Were thinking that these look realistic but a little too fatty and should have a little more muscle on show but its interesting nonetheless.
These past two weeks weve also made a lot of progress with getting the previously shelved fire system back on track, including the ability for the game to have liquid-looking Molotov fire FX on the ground. The actual visuals are going to be fine-tuned and improved soon, so wed rather not share images of it, but rest assured its going to be pretty cool. Finally, another quick bump for the Spiffo plush that Makeship are creating for us which is something that the community has been asking for since forever: https://shop.makeship.com/3FHlgG8 If you want one youve got two weeks to put your order in.
In case you want to give it for Christmas then Mash has also created a certificate of gifting intent that will hopefully come in useful.
This weeks road-side (well, centre) picnic from Athena. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2022-11-24 21:21:19 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.78.12 Hotfix Released
[ 2022-11-23 06:20:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
- Propane Torch usage rebalanced for Fixing and Repair scripts to accommodate the change in capacity; all reduced to 2.
- Added "AllowRottenItem:true" parameter to the recipes to Empty Frying Pans; Griddle Pans; and Roasting Pans. This will allow players to reclaim said pans when they let Stir Fries and Omelettes get rotten.
- Recipes such as the Mildew Spray Cure, and Emptying Sacks of produce now have the field "AllowRottenItem:true" which allows rotten items to be used in that recipe.
- Fixed the Make Mildew Cure recipe not allowing both regular and Canned Milk; as players were unable to make this cure after all of the normal Milk has gone rotten.
- Fixed being unable to use Rotten Milk to make the Mildew Spray Cure.
- Commented out the "Make Pot of Soup" recipes; they're obsolete given the evolved recipe system which handles this matter better.
- Fixed being unable to use Canned Soup to make evolved recipe soup.
- Changed the display name of "Canned Soup" to "Canned Vegetable Soup".
- Note: To make Pots of Soup with Opened Cans of Soup you must now add them to a Pot of Water, as an evolved recipe soup. This fixes the Super Soup exploit and will allow players to also add additional ingredients to the Soup. The other way of making Pots of Soup was an obsolete and in many ways incompatible method from before the evolved recipe system.
- Updated the Clean Tray recipe so it works with trays of Biscuit Dough, and also so that it works with rotten and cooked ingredients, so players can always recover a tray from rotten trays of food.
- Several tweaks to clothing masks.
- Added missing SetMelee Delay on Pistol Whip animation.
- Fixed Hoodie and Vest masks to work properly with base mesh.
- Fixed JokeKnife, JokeArrow, BunnyEars, FurryEars, Antlers and GodStar Headbopper to work with all hairstyles.
- Fixed moodle and heart wiggle-speed, now reduced by half.
- Fixed an issue with forageSystem.lua not accounting for the new loot rarity settings.
- Fixed the veteran having some duplicate clothing selection options.
- Fixed in-game map road that was made curved in cell 35,31.
- Fixed print() statement from JoyPadSetup.lua that resulted in unnecessary messages in the console log.
- Fixed source files not being loaded in the Lua debugger on Linux.
- Fixed mod Lua files not being loaded in the Lua debugger.
- Fixed being able to purify Watering Cans in an Oven.
- Fixed being able to turn Cooked Eggs back into Uncooked Eggs.
- Fixed Pizzas having the hasMetal tag.
- Fixed error in SliceCooked test.
- Fixed PopEmpty2 and PopEmpty3 having DisplayCategory = WaterContainer instead of DisplayCategory = Junk.
- Fixed PopEmpty having DisplayCategory = Material instead of DisplayCategory = Junk.
- Fixed BeerCanEmpty having DisplayCategory = WaterContainer instead of Junk.
- Fixed Buckets not having been updated to use metal filling sounds instead of plastic filling sounds.
- Fixed distant players not appearing on the in-game map when the server option allows it.
- Fixed Male_Undies not having the "OBSOLETE = TRUE" parameter. Also removed them from the foraging pool.
- Fixed not using a language's desired encoding when reading credits.txt.
- Fixed non-admins seeing invisible remote players on the in-game map.
[ 2022-11-23 06:20:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Spiffo Plushie - Orders available for a limited time on Makeship!
[ 2022-11-17 00:53:49 CET ] [ Original post ]
ProjectZomboid's ultimate survival companion is here!
This limited edition Spiffo plushie is now available to order and is ready to take on the zombie
apocalypse with a usable backpack packed with all the newbie survivor trimmings.
Order yours today!
Orders will be live for 21 days only. Makeship will start their production once the campaign ends, with shipments estimated to start on March 4th 2023.
[ 2022-11-17 00:53:49 CET ] [ Original post ]
Spiffo and Friends
This afternoon we put out 41.78 to the stable branch, and you can read its changelist here. Nothing seems to have exploded just yet, but there will very likely be a hot fix for anything that does crop up. Weve had a few complaints of visual issues with some clothing that wed thought wed fixed for instance, that can probably get a quick look-over again before we move on. This patch is largely quality of life changes, some MP tweaks and fixes for longstanding annoyances so hopefully youll see a few things in the changelist that make you feel both cherished and warm. Other than that hot fix, unless we return if circumstances demand it, the final devs who were tinkering in Build 41 will from this point on all be fully aboard the Build 42 train.
First, let us reiterate Build 42 is still a long way off. However RJs development playpen for the domestic animals that the build will feature is still ticking along quite nicely. This week he has prepared two videos for your delight but first TWO caveats. First, our animator Martin wants it known that one of the things well be working on will be the way animals turn / turn when they move. Secondly, clearly what youre seeing here is debug dev-stuff especially how it looks and operates when leading an animal around on a rope. We havent quite landed on the best way to herd animals around yet, and will likely have to land at a halfway house between realistic, feasible and fun. Likewise, thirdly I guess, UIs clearly arent final yet either. So heres proof that you can pet the cute little animals in Build 42 of Project Zomboid. [previewyoutube=L3dgSFaFjYk;full][/previewyoutube] And heres how to coax them into a trailer so you can cart them off to slaughter them somewhere distant so their loud desperate squeals wont attract zombies. [previewyoutube=yvqykEOswc8;full][/previewyoutube]
Yes, its happened. Spiffo merchandise is finally a thing. Behold! More information to come later on down the line. But for now
To register your interest in crowdfunding a Spiffo plushie visit the Makeship Store! The full campaign begins in less than a week! To find out how you could win one of two free plushies visit this twitter post! This weeks table arsenal from Polaris. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. No-one is allowed to make a jar-based gag in the presence of our Spiffo plushie, please, as we had to google it and oh dear god no please no.
[ 2022-11-10 21:11:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello survivors! Three things of note this week.
FINAL BUILD 41 PATCH RELEASED
This afternoon we put out 41.78 to the stable branch, and you can read its changelist here. Nothing seems to have exploded just yet, but there will very likely be a hot fix for anything that does crop up. Weve had a few complaints of visual issues with some clothing that wed thought wed fixed for instance, that can probably get a quick look-over again before we move on. This patch is largely quality of life changes, some MP tweaks and fixes for longstanding annoyances so hopefully youll see a few things in the changelist that make you feel both cherished and warm. Other than that hot fix, unless we return if circumstances demand it, the final devs who were tinkering in Build 41 will from this point on all be fully aboard the Build 42 train.
BARNYARD FRIENDS
First, let us reiterate Build 42 is still a long way off. However RJs development playpen for the domestic animals that the build will feature is still ticking along quite nicely. This week he has prepared two videos for your delight but first TWO caveats. First, our animator Martin wants it known that one of the things well be working on will be the way animals turn / turn when they move. Secondly, clearly what youre seeing here is debug dev-stuff especially how it looks and operates when leading an animal around on a rope. We havent quite landed on the best way to herd animals around yet, and will likely have to land at a halfway house between realistic, feasible and fun. Likewise, thirdly I guess, UIs clearly arent final yet either. So heres proof that you can pet the cute little animals in Build 42 of Project Zomboid. [previewyoutube=L3dgSFaFjYk;full][/previewyoutube] And heres how to coax them into a trailer so you can cart them off to slaughter them somewhere distant so their loud desperate squeals wont attract zombies. [previewyoutube=yvqykEOswc8;full][/previewyoutube]
MAGICAL WOODLAND FRIEND
Yes, its happened. Spiffo merchandise is finally a thing. Behold! More information to come later on down the line. But for now
To register your interest in crowdfunding a Spiffo plushie visit the Makeship Store! The full campaign begins in less than a week! To find out how you could win one of two free plushies visit this twitter post! This weeks table arsenal from Polaris. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. No-one is allowed to make a jar-based gag in the presence of our Spiffo plushie, please, as we had to google it and oh dear god no please no.
[ 2022-11-10 21:11:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.78 Released
[ 2022-11-10 17:10:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
NEW
- Added a prompt for the updated Terms of Service as we are a big boy game now and have to fit in with the other biggerer boys.
- Added sandbox option to disable Fake Dead Reanimation. Disabled Fake deads in MP by default.
- Added more control over fake dead behaviour to the sandbox options; having zombies that were "killed" having a chance to become fake dead is an option that is off by default.
- Added sandbox option that allows Corpse Maggot spawning to be disabled or limited to corpse inventory.
- Added sandbox option that allows poisoning food to be disabled, or for poisoning food with bleach to be disabled.
- Added sandbox option to disable the Tainted Water Tooltip/Warning for hardcore play
- Added sandbox option for enabling/disabling XP multipliers affecting passive skills, which is false by default.
- Added sandbox option that prevents survivor vehicles from spawning.
- Added sandbox option "Light Bulb Lifespan". This does not affect Light Bulbs in vehicles, only in light fixture tiles.
- Added "Randomize" options to Zombie sandbox options for Memory, Sight, and Hearing.
- Added loot rarity settings "Incredibly Rare" and "None", as well as a "Super Low" option for Fuel Pump content.
- Items from table stories/randomized stories/etc will still spawn when loot rarity is set to none.
- Renamed Item "Weight" to "Encumbrance" in the UI and context menu.
- Added an Accessibility Option that makes the player character automatically walk to a click container within a short radius of 3 tiles.
- Added the ability to set custom "Good" and "Bad" highlighting colours in the Accessibility Options menu. This is applied to things like traits, tooltips, and the aiming outline.
- Added an option to bind "Walk To" to a key instead of having to go through the RMB menu.
- Added highlighting to clicked Crates so it's easier to tell which crate is selected. This can be enabled or disabled in the in-game Options.
- Added a Context Menu entry that enables/disables Auto-Drink.
- Tiles that are being disassembled will now be highlighted in the "bad colour", red being the default.
- Resolutions higher than 1440p will have their zoom levels adjusted to allow closer zoom-in, bringing it more in line with lower resolutions.
- Disabled some Randomized Survivor Safehouses from occurring in instances where a building has over 10 rooms, or is a spawn location.
- The limit is 10 for some and 20 for other Randomized Survivor Safehouses.
- This also means the Toilet Paper story is now disabled in buildings that have over 10 rooms or are spawn locations, which will likely reduce the amount of Reddit posts about it by 50%.
- Added a check to prevent any of the randomized burnt building stories from occurring if the building is a spawn location.
- Changed ISCloseVehicleDoor to play the door closing sound when the action is completed instead of its start. This is to provide better feedback for players in cases where they have unwittingly cancelled this action.
- Added "HasMetal" tag for items. This tag was added to food and water items in metal containers, which will now set microwaves on fire when microwaved.
- Adjusted the mechanics UI so that both the Battery Charge and Condition are included in the Battery entry in the list of parts.
- Modified the vehicle mechanics UI to prominently feature the % of a full tank of gas it has, in addition to the battery charge.
- Added a few more existing clothing options to the character creation.
- Added the ability to destroy only one wall when selecting corner walls.
- Replaced the bucket world static model textures with metal icons and textures and not plastic ones, as buckets are now metal and not plastic.
- Updated the BucketEmpty and BucketWaterFull scripts with tooltips and IsCookable to reflect that they are now metal and not plastic.
- Changed the icon of the Watering Can With Water to match the Empty Water Can and the Watering Can models.
- Added a stale tooltip for perishable food to display, when appropriate, that such food is neither fresh nor rotten.
- Added tooltip to Club Hammers and Mallets explaining that they are unsuitable for driving nails.
- Flatpack model is applied to movable items that use the Flatpack icon.
- Made more food items capable of being added to tacos and burritos.
- Bell Pepper can now be added to Stews.
- Added a check so cooked eggs cannot be used for inappropriate non-evolved recipes.
- Removed the requirement for hot water to make a bowl of oats.
- Changed the Violet FoodType to NoExplicit.
- Trash tiles (Movable items) and Plastic Bags can now be used as tinder and fuel for fires.
- Changed the Sawed-off Shotgun recipes to only use the hacksaw, and not the garden saw; a wood saw would be unable to cut through the metal barrel of a shotgun.
- Added the Meat Cleaver to the Slice Onions recipe. Removed it from the Jack-o'-lantern recipe.
- Changed the Cigarettes script to prioritize using Matches before a Lighter if both are in the same inventory.
- Added a new Doctor's bag and military duffel bag.
- Renamed "Hemophobic" trait to "Fear of Blood".
- Vehicle Spawn Chance rate can now be a float value instead of just an int.
- Added a check to prevent items that "weigh" over 50 units from being put in vehicle seats.
- This is an ongoing issue with bags/containers that are modded over capacity, which get stuck once placed in vehicle seats when the bag + contents have an Encumbrance of >50.
- Changed translation strings to make bottle names more consistent.
- Changed IGUI_HouseKey from "House Key" to "Key" to avoid issues with non-residential keys.
- Removed the numeric information tooltip provided when selecting eat all/half/quarter food item context options.
- Commented out the tool definitions in ClothingRecipesDefinitions as they currently are nonfunctional and serve no purpose aside from confusing modders.
- Commented out the WoodenLance in the safehouse weapons distro lists; that item is redundant vs SpearCrafted, and also doesn't work with spear recipes. SpearCrafted already spawns with safehouse weapons.
- Replaced AmmoStraps in the safehouse armor distro list with AmmoStraps_Bullets and AmmoStraps_Shells.
- Changed the display name translation string for the wearable AmmoStraps items to Bandolier on account of consistent confusion with the weapon attachment that is also called Ammo Straps.
- Changed the display name translation string for firearm magazines to use the firearm it is for, and not the caliber, as the prefix. Solves having two .308 Magazines, for both the MSR788 and the M14, and also that's how they're named in real life.
- Added a tooltip to firearm magazines that displays the ammunition type that it accepts.
- Added missing models for Candy Corn, Candied Fruit Slices, Hot Sauce, Fountain Cups, JuJubes, Nettles, Shrimp Dumplings, Poached Eggs, Scrambled Eggs, Packaged Corn, Pickled Ginger, Sugar Cookies, Fish Sushi, Radio Receivers,Radio Transmitters, Gummy Bears, Gummy Worms, and Tent Kits.
MULTIPLAYER
- Added server option "KnockedDownAllowed" to enable/disable the PVP knockdown.
- This is a stopgap change to give servers an option to make PVP combat less frustrating before we can address PVP combat more directly in the future.
- Adjusted Type 3 and 5 Anticheat to reduce false-positives.
- Added auto-completion for player nicknames when pressing TAB while typing in the Chatbox.
- Added RCON command "checkModsNeedUpdate" to check for mods that need to be updated.
- Allow other non-admin permission levels to delete items in inventory/containers.
- Added Checksum logging for MP servers, enabled by default for now.
- Extended NetChecksum logs:
- Client dumps logs into checksum.txt.
- Client sends logs to server.
- Server dumps logs into checksum.txt.
- Server dumps client's logs into checksum- .txt.
- Multiplayer clients will now retry the GettingServerInfo request 3 times.
- DB Viewer userlog will now have the amount field increased for repeated counts of suspicious activity.
- When sorting the relative paths of scripts and Lua files to determine load order, the relative paths are first converted to lowercase. This is to fix platform differences breaking checksums in multiplayer. It also fixes the issue where the same file might be loaded more than once if mods use different capitalization for the same file or folder.
- Fixed the multiplayer "whisper" command corrupting the Lua environment due to multithreading.
- Fixed being unable to claim a safehouse unless standing on the ground floor.
- Fixed not checking upper floors for other players or zombies when claiming a safehouse.
- Fixed an exception on the server when food rots into a new item in a container that isn't in the world any longer.
- Fixed new stubble getting added to remote players after each appearance change.
- Fixed text annotations not appearing on annotated maps in multiplayer.
- Fixed Endurance sync in the Admin Health Tool.
- Fixed a bug that didn't display mods in the mod list of a server in the ESC menu.
- Fixed admins being unable to remove car hoods while inside the vehicle.
- Fixed players being unable to interact with Radios they placed themselves.
- Fixed a safehouse owner always respawning in their safehouse when the option to do so is unchecked.
BALANCE
- Modified the M16 & M14 critical values to be more consistent with other rifles.
- M16 CriticalChance changed from 30 to 25.
- Added CritDmgMultiplier 10
- Added AimingPerkCritModifier 12
- M14 CriticalChance changed from 0 to 30.
- Added CritDmgMultiplier 10
- AimingPerkCritModifier 15
- M16 CriticalChance changed from 30 to 25.
- Disabled the cumulative slowdown until the next shot when firing the M16 in automatic mode. Firing the M16 in automatic mode will cumulatively reduce the chance of a critical with each additional shot. This is intended to represent the loss in accuracy due to recoil.
- Set some traits to be mutually exclusive to remove exploits or illogical combinations.
- Hot-Wiring a vehicle will have a low chance of causing a car alarm. The chance for this is decreased further for higher electronics skill levels.
- Zombies pushing up against a previously unentered stationary vehicle have a chance to set off an alarm.
- Removed the undesired RNG check that made vehicle alarms go off only 20% of the time.
- Fixed car hoods being unable to trigger vehicle alarms.
- Disabled being able to make melee attacks while inside a vehicle with the window rolled down.
- Randomized the fall damage that zombies take. This randomized spread will average out to the previous damage before it was randomized; this will have a minor impact (hohoho) on the damage that zombies that fall suffer, but slightly more of them will be able to be killed by this than before.
- Made it so groin injuries from not-crawler zombies are less common, and that crawlers can also inflict uncommon groin injuries.
- Increased the yield of metal parts when scrapping wrecked vehicles by 33%.
- Added a new procedural container, "CratePropane", to garages and shed.
- Increased the spawn rates for Propane Tanks in the distributions.
- Increased the spawnrate of Thread and added the chance of Sewing Kits to spawn in gloveboxes.
- Trailer capacity now reduces slightly when damaged, as there was no point in repairing them before.
- Changed Bowling Ball Bag capacity from 2 to 8.
- Increase number of Plaster uses to 10, same as Paint.
- Allow plastic bags and money to be used as tinder
- Adjusted duration of the stationary Pistol Whip animation, it's now the same length as the shove animation.
- Adjusted the capacities of pistol and revolver cases from 7 down to 4.
- Adjusted Encumbrance of the sturdy stick item to 1 to be more consistent with other items.
- Adjusted Encumbrance of fire extinguishers to 2, to be consistent with other items.
- Decreased Encumbrance of Walkie-Talkies.
- Adjusted Encumbrance of the TreeBranch item to match that of a crafted spear, to 1.7 from 1;
- The Encumbrance discrepancy has been remarked upon repeatedly, and this also serves in making item Encumbrance more consistent.
- Adjusted the amount of fuel that spawns in fuel pumps at Low and Very Low.
- Updated the nutritional value for Canned Evaporated Milk. Calories 472; Carbs, Lipids, and Proteins at 23.6
- Changed the days until rotten for Bagels from 2 to 6.
- Gave the Stir Fry and roast script items a default hunger value of 10. This was previously reported as a bug when players spawned the item in instead of making it via the evolved recipe.
- Maggots are slightly more poisonous.
- Fewer maggots spawn, especially in spring and fall (maggots don't spawn during winter).
- Maggots are now a default item in the world item removal lists. Added a comment for the world item removal lists explaining that Base.Maggots should stay in the list due to corpse maggots.
- Additional safeguard to prevent errors when using mods that remove maggots altogether.
DEBUG / MODDING
- Added a search bar to the LootZed cheat panel.
- Added vehicle distributions to LootZed.
- Improved inventory check-in Check Stats panel.
- Right-clicking on a fuel pump in debug mode will display the amount of fuel in the pump in the right-click context menu.
- Added logging of player injuries caused by zombies to the console when in debug mode.
- Added isStartValid function check for BaseTimedAction. Allows checking if an action is valid before the action starts.
- Added saving ModData from IsoGameCharacter to IsoDeadBody and from IsoDeadBody to IsoZombie.
- Added "OnPlayerGetDamage" event.
- Added event "OnWeaponHitThumpable" (Args: character, weapon, object)
- Added a trigger for the OnFillContainer Event when vehicle part containers are filled.
- Added the tag "CarBattery" which can be used with mod item car batteries so they can be charged with the vanilla car battery charger.
- Added the event "OnThrowableExplode", which transmits the IsoTrap and IsoSquare when one detonates.
- Added a toggle option in the vehicle debug context menu that will show if a vehicle's alarm is enabled or disabled.
- Changed Fast Move cheat in debug. Players can now levitate on different height levels via the PageUP/PageDown keys, and move around via the Arrow Keys on the different height levels.
- Made ImageScale, SeatOffsetY and SeatOffsetX global and not local in ISVehicleSeatUI.
- "Missing translation", "ignoring invalid ItemPicker item type", and "VEHICLE MISSING CONT DISTRIBUTION" console messages will now only appear when using debug mode.
- Exposed the MediaData.MediaLineData class.
- When the Sound.WorldSound.Render debug option is enabled, world sounds are rendered according to the Hearing sandbox option.
- For Hearing=Random (where each zombie may have a different radius) sounds are rendered using the Hearing=Normal radius.
- This does not mean that their hearing radius is not randomized, it only means that a world sound radius cannot be rendered on a per zombie basis in debug mode.
- For Hearing=Pinpoint/Normal/Poor, meta-zombie hearing radius is handled properly.
- FileDifferent, FileNotOnServer, and FileNotOnClient errors will now display the absolute paths of both files. This should make it clearer that a mod might just have been using the wrong capitalization for a folder.
- Fixed characters in godmode still changing body weight.
- Fixed instances of the Cheat Menu not working after a player died.
- Fixed removing bodies via Horde manager not working in SP.
- Fixed being stuck in a vehicle after trying to uninstall/install a car part through the Mechanics Cheat, when a character was inside the vehicle.
- Fixed bug with health panel: Fully healing a body part now also removes its muscle fatigue.
- Fixed mod texture packs being loaded before Core.TileScale was set based on the double-sized-textures option. This would result in 2x texture packs being loaded instead of 1x texture packs.
- Fixed issues with the Tile picker:
- Fixed being unable to lock Doors placed via Tile Picker.
- Fixed Tree Tile issues.
- Fixed electronic tiles (TV, radio, generators, etc).
- Fixed Garage Doors.
- Fixed Street Light tiles.
- Fixed Search Bar issues.
- Fixed Light Switches.
- Fixed not showing all tiles.
- Fixed Fireplace objects.
- Fixed Wells and Lights.
FIXES
- Fixed only being able to add Maple syrup to "PancakesRecipe" and not to "PancakesCraft" or "Pancakes".
- Fixed not being able to make 2 or 4 bowls of Rice or Pasta with a Saucepan anymore.
- Fixed lipstick not being appliable when player had Foundation Makeup in inventory
- Fixed Make-Up not being appliable when in a car.
- Fixes and changes to item categories.
- Fixed destroying a wall with a Lightswitch on it not destroying the Lightswitch too.
- Fixed making 2/4 bowls from a Saucepan returning a Cooking Pot.
- Fixed putting a hat on a Mohawk resetting hair growth timer.
- Fixed not being able to make a Molotov with an Empty Beer bottle.
- Fixed repeatedly building/disassembling some carpentry objects increasing the number of Planks sometimes.
- Fixed Sand/Gravel Bag wall behaviour when built at an angle.
- Fixed selected part of a garment in the "Inspect" UI being too faint.
- Fixed Shirts and other clothing items getting auto-removed from the world.
- Fixed unnecessary extra Muffin recipe. United the two existing Muffin recipes into one.
- Fixed being able to make Cake Batter using rotten ingredients below level 7.
- Fixed unused Zombie Decomposition sandbox option still being listed.
- Fixed NullPointerException in bThump animation variable when the object isn't loaded.
- Fixed being unable to click on open doors in an adjacent room.
- Fixed the starting house in "A Really CDDAy" challenge sometimes not being on fire.
- Fixed possible Lua error in MOBarricade.lua when a barricade sprite is on the east or south edge of a chunk.
- Fixed minor issues in ISZoneDisplay UI and text colours.
- Fixed Foraging icons rerolling when a search focus was selected.
- Fixed ISSearchManager check for valid zoneData when loading icons.
- Fixed not being able to rip Jeans/Leather Jackets when they're on the ground instead of the player inventory.
- Fixed disassembly of Favourited items.
- Fixed randomized crashed cars not having the correct car keys spawned for them.
- Fixed Mouse Trap related collision.
- Fixed sound issue when pressing W and S at the same time.
- Fixed sound issue when switching Seats while Cruise Control was enabled.
- Fixed Refill tool not updating the container visually.
- Fixed incorrectly named recipe for making Wooden Box Traps.
- Fixed several tile and cutaway issues.
- Fixed Lighters draining completely when used with a Molotov.
- When a Lighter is equipped it will no longer automatically become lit, instead it will do so only if activated using the flashlight keybind or radial menu, or using the inventory context menu option to activate them.
- Fixed evolved recipe error in scripts for Lemons and Lime.
- Fixed Machetes not losing condition when used to craft spears from branches/planks.
- Fixed Empty Beer Bottle using the wrong icons.
- Fixed the space before commas in evolved recipe item names.
- Fixed missing recipe for Opening Canned Fruit Beverage.
- Changed "Canned Condensed Milk" to "Canned Evaporated Milk" because people are really passionate about milk in can lore.
- Fixed melted ice cream not rotting.
- Fixed house keys spawning with a long string of numbers in their display name.
- Fixed climb sheet rope speed.
- Fixed water collision bug when placing Stairs on water.
- Fixed missing textures for Flatpack model.
- Fixed ISInventoryPaneContextMenu.doEvorecipeMenu error.
- Fixed the on-screen keyboard returning asterisks instead of the actual text when entering passwords.
- Fixed microwaves not stopping the StoveTimer sound when turned off.
- Fixed missing context menu translation string for "Item Water Capacity".
- Fixed missing movables translation strings for Oak Bars.
- Fixed missing translation string for foodtype cocoa.
- Fixed wrong tooltip for Onion Slices.
- Fixed pies and cakes being able to be sliced when uncooked.
- Fixed frozen ice cream cones causing boredom and unhappiness; added the "GoodFrozen" tag for such items that should still be enjoyable when frozen.
- Fixed characters not limping when they had their groin bitten.
- Fixed being able to fill a square over its capacity by using the Place Item interface.
- Fixed cooking rotten eggs producing fresh boiled eggs; now if food is rotten and has a "replace on cooked" value, it will not be replaced but will still be cooked, i.e. you will get a cooked rotten egg when you cook a rotten egg.
- Fixed Propane Torch not being used for disassembling objects.
- Fixed Walking and sprinting not burning more calories than standing still.
- Fixed NullPointerExeption when throwing a bomb from above ground level with a controller.
- Fixed not being able to pick items that were dropped to a removed seat slot.
- Fixed being stuck on a seat when trying to change seat twice in different places.
- Fixed being able to do Fitness during sleep and while sitting in a car.
- Fixed the eternal fire after destroying a lit campfire with a sledgehammer.
- Fixed Map objects disappearing when a player aims at a stealthing player.
- Fixed bug with item icons in halo text when foraging.
- Fixed a bug with locking/unlocking doors inside buildings.
- Fixed different values between standard and evolved recipes for Soup.
- Fixed an issue where the interaction between the two different separate zombie population sandbox settings was inconsistent between singleplayer and multiplayer sandbox setting interfaces.
- Fixed equipping "Bandana (face)" placing the bandana on the head.
- Fixed not being able to get a key ring. Some zombies will now have their house or vehicle key in a key ring, and key rings can also sometimes be found in store displays with watches.
- Fixed that it was impossible for a randomized name to be "Pat Bren".
- Fixed adding poisonous berries or mushrooms to an evolved recipe did not make the product poisonous.
- Fixed missing icon for Scrambled Eggs.
- Fixed currently nonfunctional bayonet and gunlight items not being commented out in the distribution files.
- Fixed missing models/textures for Fountain Cups, Recipe Pizza and Recipe Bread.
- Fixed missing "Obsolete" parameter to BakingTrayBread as it's an unused test item without a model.
- Fixed missing checks to prevent buildings with inappropriate randomized dead survivor stories from being alarmed.
- Fixed being able to use the place item option to place infinite items in a floor square.
- Fixed cut and paste error in the unused function HandWeapon.getToHitMod.
- Fixed an exploit where players, especially ones with desensitized, were able to sleep immediately after breaking LOS with zombies.
- Fixed a couple of inconsistencies between the default MP settings and the Apocalypse setting on account of the loot setting changes.
- Fixed CannedMilk not having the parameter CannedFood = TRUE.
- Fixed only pouring 50 units when selecting the option to put 100 units of water into a farming plot.
- Fixed an issue with the vehicle alarm debug tool, BaseVehicle.setAlarmed also needed to set previouslyEntered to false for the vehicle when enabling an alarm.
- Fixed car horns continuing when switching seats while honking.
- Fixed being able to hold down keys while AFKing to grind nimble; now a check is made to ensure that the character has actually moved before awarding XP.
- Fixed error with broken glass script name in distro files.
- Fixed hazmat suit missing blood locations.
- Fixed being able to put uncooked bacon into tacos and burritos.
- Fixed Pink Hair Dye not being in the distribution lists.
- Fixed not being able to put Black Beans into a salad.
- Fixed Strength XP levels causing slower Sheet Rope climbing at certain levels, especially at level 10.
- Fixed bugged interaction with building metal objects and the Propane Torch.
- Fixed not being able to disassemble car wrecks due to a missing Propane Torch, even though it was in inventory. This needs Balance feedback since the usage per Torch was also changed.
- Fixed interaction when pressing shift+e near passenger seat to move to the drivers seat.
- Fixed ISBuryCorpse action validity check.
- Fixed using a firearm to repair another firearm evaporating the ammo, magazine, and attachments of the first weapon. The items will now be placed in the player's inventory.
- Fixed being unable to read in a car when the engine was running.
- Fixed zombies spawning inside buildings when the zombie populations is set to 0.
- Fixed missing world static model for Bag_ShotgunDblSawnoffBag.
- Fixed search window tooltips still appearing on hover when the world map is open.
- Fixed player able to walk away while equipping items to scrap or destroy an object to perform the actions from afar.
- Fixed dismantling floors with the character on top by moving character to an adjacent square where possible.
- Fixed disassembly context menu issue: Added highlighting of target object in world and object texture in disassembly tooltips.
- Fixed reflective and shooting glasses having reversed icons.
- Fixed some events of ZomboidSoundMP.bank not playing for remote clients. This is to potentially fix sounds cutting out when several players are together.
- Fixed players being unable to fire guns from inside vehicles under some circumstances.
- Fixed firearm damage being affected by the distance to the target.
- Fixed the infinite timed-action progress bar being displayed for actions that set useProgressBar=false.
- Fixed recently introduced bug that caused sounds to attract zombies from too far away.
- Fixed WorldSoundManager.getSoundAttract() not using IsoZombie.hearing.
- Fixed masking problems with Hoodie and Poncho being worn together.
- Fixed transparency issue with trouser texture.
- Fixed the rate of moodle and the heart (health panel) icon wiggling not handling ui offscreen rendering and uncapped framerate.
- Fixed incorrect pathing for masks on some clothing items which should fix clipping issues.
- Fixed spamming the 'manual floor attack' and 'shove' keys while aiming resulting in firing empty firearms and shoving distant zombies.
- Fixed not-crawler zombies sometimes injuring the feet or legs.
- Fixed assorted errors in food items' EvolvedRecipe parameters.
- Fixed error with randomized zombie senses.
- Fixed the Disable Bleach Poisoning setting in multiplayer causing issues when adding food to Evolved Recipes.
- Fixed sawing off a Double Barrel Shotgun not changing its encumbrance.
- Fixed not being able to host locally with a nonsteam server.
- Fixed zombie hearing radius being too large.
- Fixed being unable to rip Varsity Jackets.
- Fixed ripping all clothing unintentionally ripping clothing worn by the player.
- Fixed zombie Pinpoint hearing not working as intended.
- Fixed not being able to empty rotten sacks of produce.
- Fixed infinite Propane Torch glitch when disassembling items.
- Fixed Encoding of Radio and TV content for Chinese languages.
- Fixed lightbulb lifespan sandbox value error.
- Fixed in-game map position of a shed in cell 35,32.
[ 2022-11-10 17:10:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Recipes for a Disaster
We released 41.78 to Unstable last week, and released a fix-up patch yesterday. Therell probably be another update to it before we consider it safe for a full stable release, but there hasnt been too much to mop up this time around so our thanks to Blair who was the chief coder on this release. One thing it might be nice to get in before we wrap 41 and the long wait till 42 begins, are the products of our investigations into ways to make it clearer to modders and users alike where errors in their mod setup lies when it comes to different capitalisations in folder paths and different file orders between server and clients. These often result in error messages that are confusing and/or unclear, making things hard to troubleshoot for modders and our support team. Itd be nice to bring about some clarity before we leave 41 for pastures new so thats the main thing were waiting on now.
Slightly technical details from the land of 42, but something that Blair has also been moving onto is working on the architecture of our recipes system to make it more foolproof and effective for both us and modders. We are streamlining our evolved recipes using templates similar to the tags we use for individual items. This will make it more straightforward and simple for both us and the modding community to add in new evolved recipes and food items. The system as is in Build 41 has a sizable amount of clunk debt associated with it that gets compounded by the number of food items we have in the game. The way we are restructuring things strips out some of the complexity, and lets us add new stuff easily while simultaneously managing our existing recipes and foodstuffs. Next up, we also have more ideas about further streamlining this using item tags to offload a lot of the recipe ingredient stuff to tags and templates. Weve also got the roots in place of an Evolved Recipe name system that will notice you putting ham and pineapple on a pizza and call it a Hawaiian Pizza. Or name a sandwich a BLT if youve added bacon, lettuce and tomato. On top of this theres a lot of wash and brush up of existing features. Theres a lot of big name gameplay stuff going into B42, but when it eventually rolls around we want to underline that therell be a bunch of more iterative improvements on existing PZ too. For example, right now were working on making the randomized profession house stuff more cool and obvious- right now you probably arent aware when youre in a carpenters or an electricians home as there arent enough indicators. Weve got stuff going in to make it clearer and more thematic. Likewise were improving the procedural loot system to make loot and looting more interesting in of itself. There are also new zed story events to come across where costumed zombies will tell a story gun store sieges, hillbilly hoedowns, kids party raves in the forests, a variety of campsites to come across etc. Oh, and well be widening the melee weapons pool a bit also. Theyre not in-game yet, and no SFX for them yet either, but heres a quick look at some of whatll be on offer.
This weeks prison visit from Abby. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2022-10-27 19:33:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hola, zomberinos. Short-ish blog this week, but some fun info-nuggets none-the-less.
FINAL 41 PATCH
We released 41.78 to Unstable last week, and released a fix-up patch yesterday. Therell probably be another update to it before we consider it safe for a full stable release, but there hasnt been too much to mop up this time around so our thanks to Blair who was the chief coder on this release. One thing it might be nice to get in before we wrap 41 and the long wait till 42 begins, are the products of our investigations into ways to make it clearer to modders and users alike where errors in their mod setup lies when it comes to different capitalisations in folder paths and different file orders between server and clients. These often result in error messages that are confusing and/or unclear, making things hard to troubleshoot for modders and our support team. Itd be nice to bring about some clarity before we leave 41 for pastures new so thats the main thing were waiting on now.
WORK ON 42
Slightly technical details from the land of 42, but something that Blair has also been moving onto is working on the architecture of our recipes system to make it more foolproof and effective for both us and modders. We are streamlining our evolved recipes using templates similar to the tags we use for individual items. This will make it more straightforward and simple for both us and the modding community to add in new evolved recipes and food items. The system as is in Build 41 has a sizable amount of clunk debt associated with it that gets compounded by the number of food items we have in the game. The way we are restructuring things strips out some of the complexity, and lets us add new stuff easily while simultaneously managing our existing recipes and foodstuffs. Next up, we also have more ideas about further streamlining this using item tags to offload a lot of the recipe ingredient stuff to tags and templates. Weve also got the roots in place of an Evolved Recipe name system that will notice you putting ham and pineapple on a pizza and call it a Hawaiian Pizza. Or name a sandwich a BLT if youve added bacon, lettuce and tomato. On top of this theres a lot of wash and brush up of existing features. Theres a lot of big name gameplay stuff going into B42, but when it eventually rolls around we want to underline that therell be a bunch of more iterative improvements on existing PZ too. For example, right now were working on making the randomized profession house stuff more cool and obvious- right now you probably arent aware when youre in a carpenters or an electricians home as there arent enough indicators. Weve got stuff going in to make it clearer and more thematic. Likewise were improving the procedural loot system to make loot and looting more interesting in of itself. There are also new zed story events to come across where costumed zombies will tell a story gun store sieges, hillbilly hoedowns, kids party raves in the forests, a variety of campsites to come across etc. Oh, and well be widening the melee weapons pool a bit also. Theyre not in-game yet, and no SFX for them yet either, but heres a quick look at some of whatll be on offer.
This weeks prison visit from Abby. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2022-10-27 19:33:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.78 UNSTABLE Released
- Added a prompt for the updated Terms of Service as we are a big boy game now and have to fit in with the other biggerer boys. - Added sandbox option to disable Fake Dead Reanimation. Disabled Fake deads in MP by default. - Added more control over fake dead behaviour to the sandbox options; having zombies that were "killed" having a chance to become fake dead is an option that is off by default. - Added sandbox option that allows Corpse Maggot spawning to be disabled or limited to corpse inventory. - Added sandbox option that allows poisoning food to be disabled, or for poisoning food with bleach to be disabled. - Added sandbox option to disable the Tainted Water Tooltip/Warning for hardcore play - Added sandbox option for enabling/disabling XP multipliers affecting passive skills, which is false by default. - Added sandbox option that prevents survivor vehicles from spawning. - Added sandbox option "Light Bulb Lifespan". This does not affect Light Bulbs in vehicles, only in light fixture tiles. - Added "Randomize" options to Zombie sandbox options for Memory, Sight, and Hearing. - Added loot rarity settings "Incredibly Rare" and "None", as well as a "Super Low" option for Fuel Pump content. - Items from table stories/randomized stories/etc will still spawn when loot rarity is set to none. - Renamed Item "Weight" to "Encumbrance" in the UI and context menu. - Added an Accessibility Option that makes the player character automatically walk to a click container within a short radius of 3 tiles. - Added the ability to set custom "Good" and "Bad" highlighting colours in the Accessibility Options menu. This is applied to things like traits, tooltips, and the aiming outline. - Added an option to bind "Walk To" to a key instead of having to go through the RMB menu. - Added highlighting to clicked Crates so it's easier to tell which crate is selected. - Added a Context Menu entry that enables/disables Auto-Drink. - Tiles that are being disassembled will now be highlighted in the "bad colour", red being the default. - Resolutions higher than 1440p will have their zoom levels adjusted to allow closer zoom-in, bringing it more in line with lower resolutions. - Disabled some Randomized Survivor Safehouses from occurring in instances where a building has over 10 rooms, or is a spawn location. The limit is 10 for some and 20 for other Randomized Survivor Safehouses. This also means the Toilet Paper story is now disabled in buildings that have over 10 rooms or are spawn locations, which will likely reduce the amount of Reddit posts about it by 50%. - Added a check to prevent any of the randomized burnt building stories from occurring if the building is a spawn location. - Added "HasMetal" tag for items. This tag was added to food and water items in metal containers, which will now set microwaves on fire when microwaved. - Adjusted the mechanics UI so that both the Battery Charge and Condition are included in the Battery entry in the list of parts. - Modified the vehicle mechanics UI to prominently feature the % of a full tank of gas it has, in addition to the battery charge. - Added a few more existing clothing options to the character creation. - Added the ability to destroy only one wall when selecting corner walls. - Replaced the bucket world static model textures with metal icons and textures and not plastic ones, as buckets are now metal and not plastic. - Updated the BucketEmpty and BucketWaterFull scripts with tooltips and IsCookable to reflect that they are now metal and not plastic. - Changed the icon of the Watering Can With Water to match the Empty Water Can and the Watering Can models. - Added a stale tooltip for perishable food to display, when appropriate, that such food is neither fresh nor rotten. - Added tooltip to Club Hammers and Mallets explaining that they are unsuitable for driving nails. - Flatpack model is applied to movable items that use the Flatpack icon. - Made more food items capable of being added to tacos and burritos. - Bell Pepper can now be added to Stews. - Added a check so cooked eggs cannot be used for inappropriate non-evolved recipes. - Removed the requirement for hot water to make a bowl of oats. - Changed the Violet FoodType to NoExplicit. - Trash tiles (Movable items) and Plastic Bags can now be used as tinder and fuel for fires. - Changed the Sawed-off Shotgun recipes to only use the hacksaw, and not the garden saw; a wood saw would be unable to cut through the metal barrel of a shotgun. - Added the Meat Cleaver to the Slice Onions recipe. Removed it from the Jack-o'-lantern recipe. - Changed the Cigarettes script to prioritize using Matches before a Lighter if both are in the same inventory. - Added a new Doctor's bag and military duffel bag. - Renamed "Hemophobic" trait to "Fear of Blood". - Vehicle Spawn Chance rate can now be a float value instead of just an int. - Added a check to prevent items that "weigh" over 50 units from being put in vehicle seats. This is an ongoing issue with bags/containers that are modded over capacity, which get stuck once placed in vehicle seats when the bag + contents have an Encumbrance of >50. - Changed translation strings to make bottle names more consistent. - Changed IGUI_HouseKey from "House Key" to "Key" to avoid issues with non-residential keys. - Removed the numeric information tooltip provided when selecting eat all/half/quarter food item context options. - Commented out the tool definitions in ClothingRecipesDefinitions as they currently are nonfunctional and serve no purpose aside from confusing modders. - Commented out the WoodenLance in the safehouse weapons distro lists; that item is redundant vs SpearCrafted, and also doesn't work with spear recipes. SpearCrafted already spawns with safehouse weapons. - Replaced AmmoStraps in the safehouse armor distro list with AmmoStraps_Bullets and AmmoStraps_Shells. - Changed the display name translation string for the wearable AmmoStraps items to Bandolier on account of consistent confusion with the weapon attachment that is also called Ammo Straps. - Changed the display name translation string for firearm magazines to use the firearm it is for, and not the caliber, as the prefix. Solves having two .308 Magazines, for both the MSR788 and the M14, and also that's how they're named in real life. - Added a tooltip to firearm magazines that displays the ammunition type that it accepts. - Added missing models for Candy Corn, Candied Fruit Slices, Hot Sauce, Fountain Cups, JuJubes, Nettles, Shrimp Dumplings, Poached Eggs, Scrambled Eggs, Packaged Corn, Pickled Ginger, Sugar Cookies, Fish Sushi, Radio Receivers,Radio Transmitters, Gummy Bears, Gummy Worms, and Tent Kits.
- Added server option "KnockedDownAllowed" to enable/disable the PVP knockdown. This is a stopgap change to give servers an option to make PVP combat less frustrating before we can address PVP combat more directly in the future. - Added auto-completion for player nicknames when pressing TAB while typing in the Chatbox. - Added RCON command "checkModsNeedUpdate" to check for mods that need to be updated. - Allow other non-admin permission levels to delete items in inventory/containers. - Fixed the multiplayer "whisper" command corrupting the Lua environment due to multithreading. - Fixed being unable to claim a safehouse unless standing on the ground floor. - Fixed not checking upper floors for other players or zombies when claiming a safehouse. - Fixed an exception on the server when food rots into a new item in a container that isn't in the world any longer. - Fixed new stubble getting added to remote players after each appearance change. - Fixed text annotations not appearing on annotated maps in multiplayer. - Fixed Endurance sync in the Admin Health Tool. - Fixed a bug that didn't display mods in the mod list of a server in the ESC menu. - Fixed admins being unable to remove car hoods while inside the vehicle. - Fixed players being unable to interact with Radios they placed themselves. - Fixed a safehouse owner always respawning in their safehouse when the option to do so is unchecked.
- Modified the M16 & M14 critical values to be more consistent with other rifles. - M16 CriticalChance changed from 30 to 25. - Added CritDmgMultiplier 10 - Added AimingPerkCritModifier 12 - M14 CriticalChance changed from 0 to 30. - Added CritDmgMultiplier 10 - AimingPerkCritModifier 15 - Disabled the cumulative slowdown until the next shot when firing the M16 in automatic mode. Firing the M16 in automatic mode will cumulatively reduce the chance of a critical with each additional shot. This is intended to represent the loss in accuracy due to recoil. - Set some traits to be mutually exclusive to remove exploits or illogical combinations. - Hot-Wiring a vehicle will have a low chance of causing a car alarm. The chance for this is decreased further for higher electronics skill levels. - Zombies pushing up against a previously unentered stationary vehicle have a chance to set off an alarm. - Removed the undesired RNG check that made vehicle alarms go off only 20% of the time. - Fixed car hoods being unable to trigger vehicle alarms. - Disabled being able to make melee attacks while inside a vehicle with the window rolled down. - Randomized the fall damage that zombies take. This randomized spread will average out to the previous damage before it was randomized; this will have a minor impact (hohoho) on the damage that zombies that fall suffer, but slightly more of them will be able to be killed by this than before. - Made it so groin injuries from not-crawler zombies are less common, and that crawlers can also inflict uncommon groin injuries. - Increased the yield of metal parts when scrapping wrecked vehicles by 33%. - Added a new procedural container, "CratePropane", to garages and shed. - Increased the spawn rates for Propane Tanks in the distributions. - Trailer capacity now reduces slightly when damaged, as there was no point in repairing them before. - Changed Bowling Ball Bag capacity from 2 to 8. - Increase number of Plaster uses to 10, same as Paint. - Allow plastic bags and money to be used as tinder - Adjusted the capacities of pistol and revolver cases from 7 down to 4. - Adjusted Encumbrance of the sturdy stick item to 1 to be more consistent with other items. - Adjusted Encumbrance of fire extinguishers to 2, to be consistent with other items. - Decreased Encumbrance of Walkie-Talkies. - Adjusted Encumbrance of the TreeBranch item to match that of a crafted spear, to 1.7 from 1; The Encumbrance discrepancy has been remarked upon repeatedly, and this also serves in making item Encumbrance more consistent. - Adjusted the amount of fuel that spawns in fuel pumps at Low and Very Low. - Updated the nutritional value for Canned Evaporated Milk. Calories 472; Carbs, Lipids, and Proteins at 23.6 - Changed the days until rotten for Bagels from 2 to 6. - Gave the Stir Fry and roast script items a default hunger value of 10. This was previously reported as a bug when players spawned the item in instead of making it via the evolved recipe. - Maggots are slightly more poisonous. - Fewer maggots spawn, especially in spring and fall (maggots don't spawn during winter). - Maggots are now a default item in the world item removal lists. Added a comment for the world item removal lists explaining that Base.Maggots should stay in the list due to corpse maggots. - Additional safeguard to prevent errors when using mods that remove maggots altogether.
- Added a search bar to the LootZed cheat panel. - Added vehicle distributions to LootZed. - Improved inventory check-in Check Stats panel. - Right-clicking on a fuel pump in debug mode will display the amount of fuel in the pump in the right-click context menu. - Added isStartValid function check for BaseTimedAction. Allows checking if an action is valid before the action starts. - Added saving ModData from IsoGameCharacter to IsoDeadBody and from IsoDeadBody to IsoZombie. - Added "OnPlayerGetDamage" event. - Added event "OnWeaponHitThumpable" (Args: character, weapon, object) - Added a trigger for the OnFillContainer Event when vehicle part containers are filled. - Added the tag "CarBattery" which can be used with mod item car batteries so they can be charged with the vanilla car battery charger. - Added the event "OnThrowableExplode", which transmits the IsoTrap and IsoSquare when one detonates. - Added a toggle option in the vehicle debug context menu that will show if a vehicle's alarm is enabled or disabled. - Changed Fast Move cheat in debug. Players can now levitate on different height levels via the PageUP/PageDown keys, and move around via the Arrow Keys on the different height levels. - Made ImageScale, SeatOffsetY and SeatOffsetX global and not local in ISVehicleSeatUI. - "Missing translation", "ignoring invalid ItemPicker item type", and "VEHICLE MISSING CONT DISTRIBUTION" console messages will now only appear when using debug mode. - Fixed characters in godmode still changing body weight. - Fixed instances of the Cheat Menu not working after a player died. - Fixed removing bodies via Horde manager not working in SP. - Fixed being stuck in a vehicle after trying to uninstall/install a car part through the Mechanics Cheat, when a character was inside the vehicle. - Fixed bug with health panel: Fully healing a body part now also removes its muscle fatigue. - Fixed mod texture packs being loaded before Core.TileScale was set based on the double-sized-textures option. This would result in 2x texture packs being loaded instead of 1x texture packs. - Fixed issues with the Tile picker: - Fixed being unable to lock Doors placed via Tile Picker. - Fixed Tree Tile issues. - Fixed electronic tiles (TV, radio, generators, etc). - Fixed Garage Doors. - Fixed Street Light tiles. - Fixed Search Bar issues. - Fixed Light Switches. - Fixed not showing all tiles. - Fixed Fireplace objects. - Fixed Wells and Lights.
- Fixed only being able to add Maple syrup to "PancakesRecipe" and not to "PancakesCraft" or "Pancakes". - Fixed not being able to make 2 or 4 bowls of Rice or Pasta with a Saucepan anymore. - Fixed lipstick not being appliable when player had Foundation Makeup in inventory - Fixed Make-Up not being appliable when in a car. - Fixes and changes to item categories. - Fixed destroying a wall with a Lightswitch on it not destroying the Lightswitch too. - Fixed making 2/4 bowls from a Saucepan returning a Cooking Pot. - Fixed putting a hat on a Mohawk resetting hair growth timer. - Fixed not being able to make a Molotov with an Empty Beer bottle. - Fixed repeatedly building/disassembling some carpentry objects increasing the number of Planks sometimes. - Fixed Sand/Gravel Bag wall behaviour when built at an angle. - Fixed selected part of a garment in the "Inspect" UI being too faint. - Fixed Shirts and other clothing items getting auto-removed from the world. - Fixed unnecessary extra Muffin recipe. United the two existing Muffin recipes into one. - Fixed being able to make Cake Batter using rotten ingredients below level 7. - Fixed unused Zombie Decomposition sandbox option still being listed. - Fixed NullPointerException in bThump animation variable when the object isn't loaded. - Fixed being unable to click on open doors in an adjacent room. - Fixed the starting house in "A Really CDDAy" challenge sometimes not being on fire. - Fixed possible Lua error in MOBarricade.lua when a barricade sprite is on the east or south edge of a chunk. - Fixed minor issues in ISZoneDisplay UI and text colours. - Fixed Foraging icons rerolling when a search focus was selected. - Fixed ISSearchManager check for valid zoneData when loading icons. - Fixed not being able to rip Jeans/Leather Jackets when they're on the ground instead of the player inventory. - Fixed disassembly of Favourited items. - Fixed randomized crashed cars not having the correct car keys spawned for them. - Fixed Mouse Trap related collision. - Fixed sound issue when pressing W and S at the same time. - Fixed sound issue when switching Seats while Cruise Control was enabled. - Fixed Refill tool not updating the container visually. - Fixed incorrectly named recipe for making Wooden Box Traps. - Fixed several tile and cutaway issues. - Fixed Lighters draining completely when used with a Molotov. When a Lighter is equipped it will no longer automatically become lit, instead it will do so only if activated using the flashlight keybind or radial menu, or using the inventory context menu option to activate them. - Fixed evolved recipe error in scripts for Lemons and Lime. - Fixed Machetes not losing condition when used to craft spears from branches/planks. - Fixed Empty Beer Bottle using the wrong icons. - Fixed the space before commas in evolved recipe item names. - Fixed missing recipe for Opening Canned Fruit Beverage. - Changed "Canned Condensed Milk" to "Canned Evaporated Milk" because people are really passionate about milk in can lore. - Fixed melted ice cream not rotting. - Fixed house keys spawning with a long string of numbers in their display name. - Fixed climb sheet rope speed. - Fixed water collision bug when placing Stairs on water. - Fixed missing textures for Flatpack model. - Fixed ISInventoryPaneContextMenu.doEvorecipeMenu error. - Fixed the on-screen keyboard returning asterisks instead of the actual text when entering passwords. - Fixed microwaves not stopping the StoveTimer sound when turned off. - Fixed missing context menu translation string for "Item Water Capacity". - Fixed missing movables translation strings for Oak Bars. - Fixed missing translation string for foodtype cocoa. - Fixed wrong tooltip for Onion Slices. - Fixed pies and cakes being able to be sliced when uncooked. - Fixed frozen ice cream cones causing boredom and unhappiness; added the "GoodFrozen" tag for such items that should still be enjoyable when frozen. - Fixed characters not limping when they had their groin bitten. - Fixed being able to fill a square over its capacity by using the Place Item interface. - Fixed cooking rotten eggs producing fresh boiled eggs; now if food is rotten and has a "replace on cooked" value, it will not be replaced but will still be cooked, i.e. you will get a cooked rotten egg when you cook a rotten egg. - Fixed Propane Torch not being used for disassembling objects. - Fixed Walking and sprinting not burning more calories than standing still. - Fixed NullPointerExeption when throwing a bomb from above ground level with a controller. - Fixed not being able to pick items that were dropped to a removed seat slot. - Fixed being stuck on a seat when trying to change seat twice in different places. - Fixed being able to do Fitness during sleep and while sitting in a car. - Fixed the eternal fire after destroying a lit campfire with a sledgehammer. - Fixed Map objects disappearing when a player aims at a stealthing player. - Fixed bug with item icons in halo text when foraging. - Fixed a bug with locking/unlocking doors inside buildings. - Fixed different values between standard and evolved recipes for Soup. - Fixed an issue where the interaction between the two different separate zombie population sandbox settings was inconsistent between singleplayer and multiplayer sandbox setting interfaces. - Fixed equipping "Bandana (face)" placing the bandana on the head. - Fixed not being able to get a key ring. Some zombies will now have their house or vehicle key in a key ring, and key rings can also sometimes be found in store displays with watches. - Fixed that it was impossible for a randomized name to be "Pat Bren". - Fixed adding poisonous berries or mushrooms to an evolved recipe did not make the product poisonous. - Fixed missing icon for Scrambled Eggs. - Fixed currently nonfunctional bayonet and gunlight items not being commented out in the distribution files. - Fixed missing models/textures for Fountain Cups, Recipe Pizza and Recipe Bread. - Fixed missing "Obsolete" parameter to BakingTrayBread as it's an unused test item without a model. - Fixed missing checks to prevent buildings with inappropriate randomized dead survivor stories from being alarmed. - Fixed being able to use the place item option to place infinite items in a floor square. - Fixed cut and paste error in the unused function HandWeapon.getToHitMod. - Fixed an exploit where players, especially ones with desensitized, were able to sleep immediately after breaking LOS with zombies. - Fixed a couple of inconsistencies between the default MP settings and the Apocalypse setting on account of the loot setting changes. - Fixed CannedMilk not having the parameter CannedFood = TRUE. - Fixed only pouring 50 units when selecting the option to put 100 units of water into a farming plot. - Fixed an issue with the vehicle alarm debug tool, BaseVehicle.setAlarmed also needed to set previouslyEntered to false for the vehicle when enabling an alarm. - Fixed car horns continuing when switching seats while honking. - Fixed being able to hold down keys while AFKing to grind nimble; now a check is made to ensure that the character has actually moved before awarding XP. - Fixed error with broken glass script name in distro files. - Fixed hazmat suit missing blood locations. - Fixed being able to put uncooked bacon into tacos and burritos. - Fixed Pink Hair Dye not being in the distribution lists. - Fixed not being able to put Black Beans into a salad. - Fixed Strength XP levels causing slower Sheet Rope climbing at certain levels, especially at level 10. - Fixed bugged interaction with building metal objects and the Propane Torch. - Fixed not being able to disassemble car wrecks due to a missing Propane Torch, even though it was in inventory. This needs Balance feedback since the usage per Torch was also changed. - Fixed interaction when pressing shift+e near passenger seat to move to the drivers seat. - Fixed ISBuryCorpse action validity check. - Fixed using a firearm to repair another firearm evaporating the ammo, magazine, and attachments of the first weapon. The items will now be placed in the player's inventory. - Fixed being unable to read in a car when the engine was running. - Fixed zombies spawning inside buildings when the zombie populations is set to 0. - Fixed missing world static model for Bag_ShotgunDblSawnoffBag. - Fixed search window tooltips still appearing on hover when the world map is open. - Fixed player able to walk away while equipping items to scrap or destroy an object to perform the actions from afar. - Fixed dismantling floors with the character on top by moving character to an adjacent square where possible. - Fixed disassembly context menu issue: added highlighting of target object in world and object texture in disassembly tooltips - Fixed reflective and shooting glasses having reversed icons. - Fixed some events of ZomboidSoundMP.bank not playing for remote clients. This is to potentially fix sounds cutting out when several players are together.
[ 2022-10-20 22:47:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
NEW
- Added a prompt for the updated Terms of Service as we are a big boy game now and have to fit in with the other biggerer boys. - Added sandbox option to disable Fake Dead Reanimation. Disabled Fake deads in MP by default. - Added more control over fake dead behaviour to the sandbox options; having zombies that were "killed" having a chance to become fake dead is an option that is off by default. - Added sandbox option that allows Corpse Maggot spawning to be disabled or limited to corpse inventory. - Added sandbox option that allows poisoning food to be disabled, or for poisoning food with bleach to be disabled. - Added sandbox option to disable the Tainted Water Tooltip/Warning for hardcore play - Added sandbox option for enabling/disabling XP multipliers affecting passive skills, which is false by default. - Added sandbox option that prevents survivor vehicles from spawning. - Added sandbox option "Light Bulb Lifespan". This does not affect Light Bulbs in vehicles, only in light fixture tiles. - Added "Randomize" options to Zombie sandbox options for Memory, Sight, and Hearing. - Added loot rarity settings "Incredibly Rare" and "None", as well as a "Super Low" option for Fuel Pump content. - Items from table stories/randomized stories/etc will still spawn when loot rarity is set to none. - Renamed Item "Weight" to "Encumbrance" in the UI and context menu. - Added an Accessibility Option that makes the player character automatically walk to a click container within a short radius of 3 tiles. - Added the ability to set custom "Good" and "Bad" highlighting colours in the Accessibility Options menu. This is applied to things like traits, tooltips, and the aiming outline. - Added an option to bind "Walk To" to a key instead of having to go through the RMB menu. - Added highlighting to clicked Crates so it's easier to tell which crate is selected. - Added a Context Menu entry that enables/disables Auto-Drink. - Tiles that are being disassembled will now be highlighted in the "bad colour", red being the default. - Resolutions higher than 1440p will have their zoom levels adjusted to allow closer zoom-in, bringing it more in line with lower resolutions. - Disabled some Randomized Survivor Safehouses from occurring in instances where a building has over 10 rooms, or is a spawn location. The limit is 10 for some and 20 for other Randomized Survivor Safehouses. This also means the Toilet Paper story is now disabled in buildings that have over 10 rooms or are spawn locations, which will likely reduce the amount of Reddit posts about it by 50%. - Added a check to prevent any of the randomized burnt building stories from occurring if the building is a spawn location. - Added "HasMetal" tag for items. This tag was added to food and water items in metal containers, which will now set microwaves on fire when microwaved. - Adjusted the mechanics UI so that both the Battery Charge and Condition are included in the Battery entry in the list of parts. - Modified the vehicle mechanics UI to prominently feature the % of a full tank of gas it has, in addition to the battery charge. - Added a few more existing clothing options to the character creation. - Added the ability to destroy only one wall when selecting corner walls. - Replaced the bucket world static model textures with metal icons and textures and not plastic ones, as buckets are now metal and not plastic. - Updated the BucketEmpty and BucketWaterFull scripts with tooltips and IsCookable to reflect that they are now metal and not plastic. - Changed the icon of the Watering Can With Water to match the Empty Water Can and the Watering Can models. - Added a stale tooltip for perishable food to display, when appropriate, that such food is neither fresh nor rotten. - Added tooltip to Club Hammers and Mallets explaining that they are unsuitable for driving nails. - Flatpack model is applied to movable items that use the Flatpack icon. - Made more food items capable of being added to tacos and burritos. - Bell Pepper can now be added to Stews. - Added a check so cooked eggs cannot be used for inappropriate non-evolved recipes. - Removed the requirement for hot water to make a bowl of oats. - Changed the Violet FoodType to NoExplicit. - Trash tiles (Movable items) and Plastic Bags can now be used as tinder and fuel for fires. - Changed the Sawed-off Shotgun recipes to only use the hacksaw, and not the garden saw; a wood saw would be unable to cut through the metal barrel of a shotgun. - Added the Meat Cleaver to the Slice Onions recipe. Removed it from the Jack-o'-lantern recipe. - Changed the Cigarettes script to prioritize using Matches before a Lighter if both are in the same inventory. - Added a new Doctor's bag and military duffel bag. - Renamed "Hemophobic" trait to "Fear of Blood". - Vehicle Spawn Chance rate can now be a float value instead of just an int. - Added a check to prevent items that "weigh" over 50 units from being put in vehicle seats. This is an ongoing issue with bags/containers that are modded over capacity, which get stuck once placed in vehicle seats when the bag + contents have an Encumbrance of >50. - Changed translation strings to make bottle names more consistent. - Changed IGUI_HouseKey from "House Key" to "Key" to avoid issues with non-residential keys. - Removed the numeric information tooltip provided when selecting eat all/half/quarter food item context options. - Commented out the tool definitions in ClothingRecipesDefinitions as they currently are nonfunctional and serve no purpose aside from confusing modders. - Commented out the WoodenLance in the safehouse weapons distro lists; that item is redundant vs SpearCrafted, and also doesn't work with spear recipes. SpearCrafted already spawns with safehouse weapons. - Replaced AmmoStraps in the safehouse armor distro list with AmmoStraps_Bullets and AmmoStraps_Shells. - Changed the display name translation string for the wearable AmmoStraps items to Bandolier on account of consistent confusion with the weapon attachment that is also called Ammo Straps. - Changed the display name translation string for firearm magazines to use the firearm it is for, and not the caliber, as the prefix. Solves having two .308 Magazines, for both the MSR788 and the M14, and also that's how they're named in real life. - Added a tooltip to firearm magazines that displays the ammunition type that it accepts. - Added missing models for Candy Corn, Candied Fruit Slices, Hot Sauce, Fountain Cups, JuJubes, Nettles, Shrimp Dumplings, Poached Eggs, Scrambled Eggs, Packaged Corn, Pickled Ginger, Sugar Cookies, Fish Sushi, Radio Receivers,Radio Transmitters, Gummy Bears, Gummy Worms, and Tent Kits.
MULTIPLAYER
- Added server option "KnockedDownAllowed" to enable/disable the PVP knockdown. This is a stopgap change to give servers an option to make PVP combat less frustrating before we can address PVP combat more directly in the future. - Added auto-completion for player nicknames when pressing TAB while typing in the Chatbox. - Added RCON command "checkModsNeedUpdate" to check for mods that need to be updated. - Allow other non-admin permission levels to delete items in inventory/containers. - Fixed the multiplayer "whisper" command corrupting the Lua environment due to multithreading. - Fixed being unable to claim a safehouse unless standing on the ground floor. - Fixed not checking upper floors for other players or zombies when claiming a safehouse. - Fixed an exception on the server when food rots into a new item in a container that isn't in the world any longer. - Fixed new stubble getting added to remote players after each appearance change. - Fixed text annotations not appearing on annotated maps in multiplayer. - Fixed Endurance sync in the Admin Health Tool. - Fixed a bug that didn't display mods in the mod list of a server in the ESC menu. - Fixed admins being unable to remove car hoods while inside the vehicle. - Fixed players being unable to interact with Radios they placed themselves. - Fixed a safehouse owner always respawning in their safehouse when the option to do so is unchecked.
BALANCE
- Modified the M16 & M14 critical values to be more consistent with other rifles. - M16 CriticalChance changed from 30 to 25. - Added CritDmgMultiplier 10 - Added AimingPerkCritModifier 12 - M14 CriticalChance changed from 0 to 30. - Added CritDmgMultiplier 10 - AimingPerkCritModifier 15 - Disabled the cumulative slowdown until the next shot when firing the M16 in automatic mode. Firing the M16 in automatic mode will cumulatively reduce the chance of a critical with each additional shot. This is intended to represent the loss in accuracy due to recoil. - Set some traits to be mutually exclusive to remove exploits or illogical combinations. - Hot-Wiring a vehicle will have a low chance of causing a car alarm. The chance for this is decreased further for higher electronics skill levels. - Zombies pushing up against a previously unentered stationary vehicle have a chance to set off an alarm. - Removed the undesired RNG check that made vehicle alarms go off only 20% of the time. - Fixed car hoods being unable to trigger vehicle alarms. - Disabled being able to make melee attacks while inside a vehicle with the window rolled down. - Randomized the fall damage that zombies take. This randomized spread will average out to the previous damage before it was randomized; this will have a minor impact (hohoho) on the damage that zombies that fall suffer, but slightly more of them will be able to be killed by this than before. - Made it so groin injuries from not-crawler zombies are less common, and that crawlers can also inflict uncommon groin injuries. - Increased the yield of metal parts when scrapping wrecked vehicles by 33%. - Added a new procedural container, "CratePropane", to garages and shed. - Increased the spawn rates for Propane Tanks in the distributions. - Trailer capacity now reduces slightly when damaged, as there was no point in repairing them before. - Changed Bowling Ball Bag capacity from 2 to 8. - Increase number of Plaster uses to 10, same as Paint. - Allow plastic bags and money to be used as tinder - Adjusted the capacities of pistol and revolver cases from 7 down to 4. - Adjusted Encumbrance of the sturdy stick item to 1 to be more consistent with other items. - Adjusted Encumbrance of fire extinguishers to 2, to be consistent with other items. - Decreased Encumbrance of Walkie-Talkies. - Adjusted Encumbrance of the TreeBranch item to match that of a crafted spear, to 1.7 from 1; The Encumbrance discrepancy has been remarked upon repeatedly, and this also serves in making item Encumbrance more consistent. - Adjusted the amount of fuel that spawns in fuel pumps at Low and Very Low. - Updated the nutritional value for Canned Evaporated Milk. Calories 472; Carbs, Lipids, and Proteins at 23.6 - Changed the days until rotten for Bagels from 2 to 6. - Gave the Stir Fry and roast script items a default hunger value of 10. This was previously reported as a bug when players spawned the item in instead of making it via the evolved recipe. - Maggots are slightly more poisonous. - Fewer maggots spawn, especially in spring and fall (maggots don't spawn during winter). - Maggots are now a default item in the world item removal lists. Added a comment for the world item removal lists explaining that Base.Maggots should stay in the list due to corpse maggots. - Additional safeguard to prevent errors when using mods that remove maggots altogether.
DEBUG / MODDING
- Added a search bar to the LootZed cheat panel. - Added vehicle distributions to LootZed. - Improved inventory check-in Check Stats panel. - Right-clicking on a fuel pump in debug mode will display the amount of fuel in the pump in the right-click context menu. - Added isStartValid function check for BaseTimedAction. Allows checking if an action is valid before the action starts. - Added saving ModData from IsoGameCharacter to IsoDeadBody and from IsoDeadBody to IsoZombie. - Added "OnPlayerGetDamage" event. - Added event "OnWeaponHitThumpable" (Args: character, weapon, object) - Added a trigger for the OnFillContainer Event when vehicle part containers are filled. - Added the tag "CarBattery" which can be used with mod item car batteries so they can be charged with the vanilla car battery charger. - Added the event "OnThrowableExplode", which transmits the IsoTrap and IsoSquare when one detonates. - Added a toggle option in the vehicle debug context menu that will show if a vehicle's alarm is enabled or disabled. - Changed Fast Move cheat in debug. Players can now levitate on different height levels via the PageUP/PageDown keys, and move around via the Arrow Keys on the different height levels. - Made ImageScale, SeatOffsetY and SeatOffsetX global and not local in ISVehicleSeatUI. - "Missing translation", "ignoring invalid ItemPicker item type", and "VEHICLE MISSING CONT DISTRIBUTION" console messages will now only appear when using debug mode. - Fixed characters in godmode still changing body weight. - Fixed instances of the Cheat Menu not working after a player died. - Fixed removing bodies via Horde manager not working in SP. - Fixed being stuck in a vehicle after trying to uninstall/install a car part through the Mechanics Cheat, when a character was inside the vehicle. - Fixed bug with health panel: Fully healing a body part now also removes its muscle fatigue. - Fixed mod texture packs being loaded before Core.TileScale was set based on the double-sized-textures option. This would result in 2x texture packs being loaded instead of 1x texture packs. - Fixed issues with the Tile picker: - Fixed being unable to lock Doors placed via Tile Picker. - Fixed Tree Tile issues. - Fixed electronic tiles (TV, radio, generators, etc). - Fixed Garage Doors. - Fixed Street Light tiles. - Fixed Search Bar issues. - Fixed Light Switches. - Fixed not showing all tiles. - Fixed Fireplace objects. - Fixed Wells and Lights.
FIXES
- Fixed only being able to add Maple syrup to "PancakesRecipe" and not to "PancakesCraft" or "Pancakes". - Fixed not being able to make 2 or 4 bowls of Rice or Pasta with a Saucepan anymore. - Fixed lipstick not being appliable when player had Foundation Makeup in inventory - Fixed Make-Up not being appliable when in a car. - Fixes and changes to item categories. - Fixed destroying a wall with a Lightswitch on it not destroying the Lightswitch too. - Fixed making 2/4 bowls from a Saucepan returning a Cooking Pot. - Fixed putting a hat on a Mohawk resetting hair growth timer. - Fixed not being able to make a Molotov with an Empty Beer bottle. - Fixed repeatedly building/disassembling some carpentry objects increasing the number of Planks sometimes. - Fixed Sand/Gravel Bag wall behaviour when built at an angle. - Fixed selected part of a garment in the "Inspect" UI being too faint. - Fixed Shirts and other clothing items getting auto-removed from the world. - Fixed unnecessary extra Muffin recipe. United the two existing Muffin recipes into one. - Fixed being able to make Cake Batter using rotten ingredients below level 7. - Fixed unused Zombie Decomposition sandbox option still being listed. - Fixed NullPointerException in bThump animation variable when the object isn't loaded. - Fixed being unable to click on open doors in an adjacent room. - Fixed the starting house in "A Really CDDAy" challenge sometimes not being on fire. - Fixed possible Lua error in MOBarricade.lua when a barricade sprite is on the east or south edge of a chunk. - Fixed minor issues in ISZoneDisplay UI and text colours. - Fixed Foraging icons rerolling when a search focus was selected. - Fixed ISSearchManager check for valid zoneData when loading icons. - Fixed not being able to rip Jeans/Leather Jackets when they're on the ground instead of the player inventory. - Fixed disassembly of Favourited items. - Fixed randomized crashed cars not having the correct car keys spawned for them. - Fixed Mouse Trap related collision. - Fixed sound issue when pressing W and S at the same time. - Fixed sound issue when switching Seats while Cruise Control was enabled. - Fixed Refill tool not updating the container visually. - Fixed incorrectly named recipe for making Wooden Box Traps. - Fixed several tile and cutaway issues. - Fixed Lighters draining completely when used with a Molotov. When a Lighter is equipped it will no longer automatically become lit, instead it will do so only if activated using the flashlight keybind or radial menu, or using the inventory context menu option to activate them. - Fixed evolved recipe error in scripts for Lemons and Lime. - Fixed Machetes not losing condition when used to craft spears from branches/planks. - Fixed Empty Beer Bottle using the wrong icons. - Fixed the space before commas in evolved recipe item names. - Fixed missing recipe for Opening Canned Fruit Beverage. - Changed "Canned Condensed Milk" to "Canned Evaporated Milk" because people are really passionate about milk in can lore. - Fixed melted ice cream not rotting. - Fixed house keys spawning with a long string of numbers in their display name. - Fixed climb sheet rope speed. - Fixed water collision bug when placing Stairs on water. - Fixed missing textures for Flatpack model. - Fixed ISInventoryPaneContextMenu.doEvorecipeMenu error. - Fixed the on-screen keyboard returning asterisks instead of the actual text when entering passwords. - Fixed microwaves not stopping the StoveTimer sound when turned off. - Fixed missing context menu translation string for "Item Water Capacity". - Fixed missing movables translation strings for Oak Bars. - Fixed missing translation string for foodtype cocoa. - Fixed wrong tooltip for Onion Slices. - Fixed pies and cakes being able to be sliced when uncooked. - Fixed frozen ice cream cones causing boredom and unhappiness; added the "GoodFrozen" tag for such items that should still be enjoyable when frozen. - Fixed characters not limping when they had their groin bitten. - Fixed being able to fill a square over its capacity by using the Place Item interface. - Fixed cooking rotten eggs producing fresh boiled eggs; now if food is rotten and has a "replace on cooked" value, it will not be replaced but will still be cooked, i.e. you will get a cooked rotten egg when you cook a rotten egg. - Fixed Propane Torch not being used for disassembling objects. - Fixed Walking and sprinting not burning more calories than standing still. - Fixed NullPointerExeption when throwing a bomb from above ground level with a controller. - Fixed not being able to pick items that were dropped to a removed seat slot. - Fixed being stuck on a seat when trying to change seat twice in different places. - Fixed being able to do Fitness during sleep and while sitting in a car. - Fixed the eternal fire after destroying a lit campfire with a sledgehammer. - Fixed Map objects disappearing when a player aims at a stealthing player. - Fixed bug with item icons in halo text when foraging. - Fixed a bug with locking/unlocking doors inside buildings. - Fixed different values between standard and evolved recipes for Soup. - Fixed an issue where the interaction between the two different separate zombie population sandbox settings was inconsistent between singleplayer and multiplayer sandbox setting interfaces. - Fixed equipping "Bandana (face)" placing the bandana on the head. - Fixed not being able to get a key ring. Some zombies will now have their house or vehicle key in a key ring, and key rings can also sometimes be found in store displays with watches. - Fixed that it was impossible for a randomized name to be "Pat Bren". - Fixed adding poisonous berries or mushrooms to an evolved recipe did not make the product poisonous. - Fixed missing icon for Scrambled Eggs. - Fixed currently nonfunctional bayonet and gunlight items not being commented out in the distribution files. - Fixed missing models/textures for Fountain Cups, Recipe Pizza and Recipe Bread. - Fixed missing "Obsolete" parameter to BakingTrayBread as it's an unused test item without a model. - Fixed missing checks to prevent buildings with inappropriate randomized dead survivor stories from being alarmed. - Fixed being able to use the place item option to place infinite items in a floor square. - Fixed cut and paste error in the unused function HandWeapon.getToHitMod. - Fixed an exploit where players, especially ones with desensitized, were able to sleep immediately after breaking LOS with zombies. - Fixed a couple of inconsistencies between the default MP settings and the Apocalypse setting on account of the loot setting changes. - Fixed CannedMilk not having the parameter CannedFood = TRUE. - Fixed only pouring 50 units when selecting the option to put 100 units of water into a farming plot. - Fixed an issue with the vehicle alarm debug tool, BaseVehicle.setAlarmed also needed to set previouslyEntered to false for the vehicle when enabling an alarm. - Fixed car horns continuing when switching seats while honking. - Fixed being able to hold down keys while AFKing to grind nimble; now a check is made to ensure that the character has actually moved before awarding XP. - Fixed error with broken glass script name in distro files. - Fixed hazmat suit missing blood locations. - Fixed being able to put uncooked bacon into tacos and burritos. - Fixed Pink Hair Dye not being in the distribution lists. - Fixed not being able to put Black Beans into a salad. - Fixed Strength XP levels causing slower Sheet Rope climbing at certain levels, especially at level 10. - Fixed bugged interaction with building metal objects and the Propane Torch. - Fixed not being able to disassemble car wrecks due to a missing Propane Torch, even though it was in inventory. This needs Balance feedback since the usage per Torch was also changed. - Fixed interaction when pressing shift+e near passenger seat to move to the drivers seat. - Fixed ISBuryCorpse action validity check. - Fixed using a firearm to repair another firearm evaporating the ammo, magazine, and attachments of the first weapon. The items will now be placed in the player's inventory. - Fixed being unable to read in a car when the engine was running. - Fixed zombies spawning inside buildings when the zombie populations is set to 0. - Fixed missing world static model for Bag_ShotgunDblSawnoffBag. - Fixed search window tooltips still appearing on hover when the world map is open. - Fixed player able to walk away while equipping items to scrap or destroy an object to perform the actions from afar. - Fixed dismantling floors with the character on top by moving character to an adjacent square where possible. - Fixed disassembly context menu issue: added highlighting of target object in world and object texture in disassembly tooltips - Fixed reflective and shooting glasses having reversed icons. - Fixed some events of ZomboidSoundMP.bank not playing for remote clients. This is to potentially fix sounds cutting out when several players are together.
[ 2022-10-20 22:47:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
Flame On
We released 41.77 into the stable beta last week, which fixed up linux servers and also improved client to server connections by preferring a direct connection to the server. It was mission successful in most regards, but a minority of users still had issues connecting which we have been addressing over the past few days via hotfixes in the Unstable beta. If you were one of the frustrated souls impacted by this, then let us know if you are still suffering on Unstable (hopefully not) on this thread on the Steam Board. Our current plan is to get these final people back on board the connection train, then move onto releasing the final 41 patch into the freshly vacated Unstable beta next week. Weve now locked coder submissions to this patch (necessary fixes aside) and the final changelist looks like this.
Weve blogged a bunch of stuff that were working towards getting into 42 now, but this week we thought it also worth mentioning that work has re-begun on the fire revamp. The fire revamp is something that got a lot of coverage in doids around two years ago, so it probably predates the knowledge of a fair few readers who have come on board in more recent times during B41s MP launch and consequent hi-jinks. Work on revamped fire had to be put to one side in favour of bolstering the Multiplayer code team, and ever since then it has been sitting on a dusty shelf and getting a little stale. The tldr of it when last we left it runs as follows:
The team would like to officially welcome Kirrus to the TIS locker-room! Kirrus has been a long-term contributor, helper and cool head in troubled times throughout the history of Project Zomboid but has never been officially on the team. Hes now a full time member of the gang, and our new Sys Admin. Big Spiffo hug incoming! This weeks office space from Sr.Cannoli. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us, especially if youre an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.
[ 2022-10-13 19:40:55 CET ] [ Original post ]
Evening all.
NOW
We released 41.77 into the stable beta last week, which fixed up linux servers and also improved client to server connections by preferring a direct connection to the server. It was mission successful in most regards, but a minority of users still had issues connecting which we have been addressing over the past few days via hotfixes in the Unstable beta. If you were one of the frustrated souls impacted by this, then let us know if you are still suffering on Unstable (hopefully not) on this thread on the Steam Board. Our current plan is to get these final people back on board the connection train, then move onto releasing the final 41 patch into the freshly vacated Unstable beta next week. Weve now locked coder submissions to this patch (necessary fixes aside) and the final changelist looks like this.
LATER
Weve blogged a bunch of stuff that were working towards getting into 42 now, but this week we thought it also worth mentioning that work has re-begun on the fire revamp. The fire revamp is something that got a lot of coverage in doids around two years ago, so it probably predates the knowledge of a fair few readers who have come on board in more recent times during B41s MP launch and consequent hi-jinks. Work on revamped fire had to be put to one side in favour of bolstering the Multiplayer code team, and ever since then it has been sitting on a dusty shelf and getting a little stale. The tldr of it when last we left it runs as follows:
- A realistic spread of fire, with combustible materials that make sense.
- A system that takes into account temperature, material types, weight, volume, surface area, heating energy, cooling energy etc
- A set-up on both a solo map and an MP network that means that the game can remember what is going on in terms of a spreading fire when players leave the area.
- Fire spread that uses the direction and speed of the wind, with in-game rain helping with fires being put out.
- Improved effects and visuals.
WELCOME KIRRUS!
The team would like to officially welcome Kirrus to the TIS locker-room! Kirrus has been a long-term contributor, helper and cool head in troubled times throughout the history of Project Zomboid but has never been officially on the team. Hes now a full time member of the gang, and our new Sys Admin. Big Spiffo hug incoming! This weeks office space from Sr.Cannoli. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us, especially if youre an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.
[ 2022-10-13 19:40:55 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.77 Released
- Improved client connection. Important for server providers: Servers now have two ports for clients to connect to. The game port (UDP 16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (UDP 16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection. These ports can be configured through the server options. Clients will first try to use a direct connection. If direct connection fails, clients will try to connect via Steam. The non-Steam version works as usual. UPnP rules were changed accordingly (UPnP is used in cases to prevent manual port-forwarding). The client will show the warning message "WARNING: SERVER HAS PORT %1 CLOSED. PERFORMANCE MAY BE SEVERELY AFFECTED" if the client can't connect through direct connection. - ZNet libraries rebuilt for Windows, Linux, and Mac. - ZNet, Connection, and Kick logs are improved. - Improved Type5, and Type21-24 Anti-Cheat behaviour to reduce false positives. A note that if you do not run a public server (i.e. a server exclusively for you and your family & friends without the worry of griefing and cheating), you can entirely circumvent any sort of frustration with false positives by disabling all AntiCheat protections in the servers .ini file. - Split the large ConnectionDetails packet into several smaller packets with one of the ConnectionDetailsPacket.State enum values indicating which data is requested. - Improved algorithm for the transmission of large files while playing. - Loading screen now shows the download status of large files when connecting to a server. - Extended checksum logs for debugging CRC differences. - Increased kick delay for CRC differences. - Additional logs were added. - Fixed ObjectModData packets not being sent while the server was in the FastForward state. - Fixed bug in world dictionary when an item in a different module but with a similar name as an vanilla item was removed. - Fixed a new stubble Beard getting added to remote players after each appearance change, which resulted in receivePlayerZombieDescriptors errors. - Fixed kicks after disabling VOIP. - Fixed connecting to host after disconnection from a dedicated server. - Fixed infinite connection attempt to non-steam server when it's not up. - Fixed the client displaying "Disconnected" instead of "Wrong username or password". - Fixed players being able to change their saved password for an already created account in some instances. - Fixed Type21 black screen at connection stage when Type21 anti-cheat check is disabled. - Fixed the character model always using media/textures/Body/Masks instead a clothing item's UnderlayMasks folder. - Fixed black screen issues with certain mod constellations. - Fixed the timed-action progress bar position not being updated during actions without a fixed duration. - Fixed the animation speed of the timed-action progress bar at different framerates.
- Added a looping progress bar for timed actions that have no defined end. This is mainly a stopgap "fix" for entering cars, to visualize that there is an ongoing unfinished action until we can have visually open doors, etc. Specifically added for the scenarios where players reported being bitten through the car door after they had entered a car and interrupted the "enter car" action before it could finish (e.g. by opening the map, etc), i.e. before the door was "closed". This bar extends to other "infinite" actions like Walk To.
- Added new body locations: Jacket_Bulky, JacketHat_Bulky, TorsoExtraVest, and JacketSuit. - Assigned new body locations to existing clothing items to avoid clipping. - Tweaked and added many clothing masks to avoid clipping through each other. - Adjusted several clothing models and bone weighting to improve clipping. - Removed Bowling shirt model from Bowling shirt definitions and made Bowling Shirt a texture. The model was left in the files in case mods use it. - Improved base Body mask to help with clipping. - Re-exported ALICE packs as some straps were missing.
[ 2022-10-04 17:09:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Compliled changelist (41.74-41.77). These small updates were intended to address the crashes affecting Linux MP servers and improve the client-to-server connections.
MP
- Improved client connection. Important for server providers: Servers now have two ports for clients to connect to. The game port (UDP 16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (UDP 16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection. These ports can be configured through the server options. Clients will first try to use a direct connection. If direct connection fails, clients will try to connect via Steam. The non-Steam version works as usual. UPnP rules were changed accordingly (UPnP is used in cases to prevent manual port-forwarding). The client will show the warning message "WARNING: SERVER HAS PORT %1 CLOSED. PERFORMANCE MAY BE SEVERELY AFFECTED" if the client can't connect through direct connection. - ZNet libraries rebuilt for Windows, Linux, and Mac. - ZNet, Connection, and Kick logs are improved. - Improved Type5, and Type21-24 Anti-Cheat behaviour to reduce false positives. A note that if you do not run a public server (i.e. a server exclusively for you and your family & friends without the worry of griefing and cheating), you can entirely circumvent any sort of frustration with false positives by disabling all AntiCheat protections in the servers .ini file. - Split the large ConnectionDetails packet into several smaller packets with one of the ConnectionDetailsPacket.State enum values indicating which data is requested. - Improved algorithm for the transmission of large files while playing. - Loading screen now shows the download status of large files when connecting to a server. - Extended checksum logs for debugging CRC differences. - Increased kick delay for CRC differences. - Additional logs were added. - Fixed ObjectModData packets not being sent while the server was in the FastForward state. - Fixed bug in world dictionary when an item in a different module but with a similar name as an vanilla item was removed. - Fixed a new stubble Beard getting added to remote players after each appearance change, which resulted in receivePlayerZombieDescriptors errors. - Fixed kicks after disabling VOIP. - Fixed connecting to host after disconnection from a dedicated server. - Fixed infinite connection attempt to non-steam server when it's not up. - Fixed the client displaying "Disconnected" instead of "Wrong username or password". - Fixed players being able to change their saved password for an already created account in some instances. - Fixed Type21 black screen at connection stage when Type21 anti-cheat check is disabled. - Fixed the character model always using media/textures/Body/Masks instead a clothing item's UnderlayMasks folder. - Fixed black screen issues with certain mod constellations. - Fixed the timed-action progress bar position not being updated during actions without a fixed duration. - Fixed the animation speed of the timed-action progress bar at different framerates.
NEW
- Added a looping progress bar for timed actions that have no defined end. This is mainly a stopgap "fix" for entering cars, to visualize that there is an ongoing unfinished action until we can have visually open doors, etc. Specifically added for the scenarios where players reported being bitten through the car door after they had entered a car and interrupted the "enter car" action before it could finish (e.g. by opening the map, etc), i.e. before the door was "closed". This bar extends to other "infinite" actions like Walk To.
MODELS
- Added new body locations: Jacket_Bulky, JacketHat_Bulky, TorsoExtraVest, and JacketSuit. - Assigned new body locations to existing clothing items to avoid clipping. - Tweaked and added many clothing masks to avoid clipping through each other. - Adjusted several clothing models and bone weighting to improve clipping. - Removed Bowling shirt model from Bowling shirt definitions and made Bowling Shirt a texture. The model was left in the files in case mods use it. - Improved base Body mask to help with clipping. - Re-exported ALICE packs as some straps were missing.
[ 2022-10-04 17:09:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Upstairs Downstairs
This week we released version 41.77 into our Unstable beta. This is primarily aimed at fixing the Linux crashes that have been plaguing server hosts, and so far seems to be a mission success in that regard. It also improves client to server connections by preferring a direct connection to the server. Servers now have two ports for clients to connect to, configurable through the server options. The game port (UDP 16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (UDP 16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection. Weve had a successful wider test of 41.77 with more than 30 people on a server without any crashes, and weve tested a modded setup afterwards as well. Upon release there were servers running mods with 41.77 just fine, but unfortunately it seemed that some mod setup constellations caused conflicts that resulted in black screens for some servers. We have just pushed a hotfix we believe will resolve this. If, however, you run a 41.77 server and you are still experiencing players unable to log on (only seeing a black screen) then please send us: the list of ModIDs (specifically the Mods= line from their server.ini, the workshop= line, and your server logs. Posting these in the forum release thread or in our Discord techsupport channel would probably be best. Likewise, any reports of ongoing server instability or general misbehaviour please let us know ASAP.
Were still adding tweaks and polish to our final B41 patch that well put out once the current network improvements are fully tested, released and stable. This is the current changelist, with notable additions in the past few weeks on show here if you already read up on what was incoming in our last blog.
Build 42 will be a very big update, and it will appear a sizable amount of time after Build 41 is fully wrapped. Weve announced most of the things that we currently have brewing for it, but theres one thing weve only hinted at so far and which is very likely to feature. As regular readers may remember, a while ago we wrote a blog called Techdoid that detailed some of the big engine improvements we have slated for 42. Amongst them is a new rendering pipeline which allows for entire chunks to be cached with a depth buffer, which will afford us MASSIVE rendering and scene construction improvements and should rid us of all the performance issues weve been plagued with due to the isometric draw order over the years. [previewyoutube=G6t5h0_Sfqc;full][/previewyoutube] Theres also a new light propagation system, which allows for light to naturally leak through doors and windows, providing much more atmospheric and believable lighting [previewyoutube=9_0TiPQ-JQA;full][/previewyoutube] We also got rid of the 8 storey limit on chunks: specifically we allowed each chunk to have its own unique defined height up to 32 levels. Finally, we discussed that wed fixed the many areas of the codebase that used static casts to round the players position to determine what chunk or tile they were on to using Math.floors instead. This method allows for negative coordinates to work where prior the calculations would have failed if the player was stood on a tile with a negative coordinate. This in theory will allow for us, or modders, to build north or west to the same extents as we currently build to the east and south, effectively quadrupling the maximum size the map could be extended to and open up a great deal of extra land to populate should we need to in future. Whilst all these features are gamechangers in themselves, they were also done in service of another very specific feature weve had planned for a long time, which required each of them to be made feasible in any way. The current in-game lighting system means that the indoor ambience levels are defined solely by the time of day. If its daytime, the ambient light levels inside a building are above zero, giving just sub-daylight levels, even if there are no sources of natural light that should fall on a tile just by virtue of it being day. That wouldnt work very well if we were wanting to do a certain other feature. The previous eight level hard limit and high rendering cost of multiple levels was rather restrictive if we were to want to do a certain something. The lack of support for negative coordinates for character positions? Well that was IMMENSELY restrictive if we were to want to do a certain something. A few people may have been able to read between the lines of what all these lead toward. Many more will have just watched the video already. [previewyoutube=1KgbGw9lnW4;full][/previewyoutube] The plan we have for basements and sub-levels is an interesting one, as it will provide a lot more replayability to the game map, which is otherwise completely static at the moment. Essentially in 42 we, or modders, can list positions on the map (along with staircase orientation) that have the space for a basement and can be allocated the potential to have one. However, no basements are placed within the map itself. When an area is streamed in for the first time, an appropriate basement building created in the building editor and exported as a binary file is selected randomly from the list of all possible basements and will be injected into the map as it is loaded. We could add tags to make it pick an appropriate category of basement to fit the specific house, though right now the code has it set as completely random. Each basement has stairs leading up from its top floor and these stairs will be aligned to the correct position when it is injected into the map. This means that despite the map being static, any areas with basements will yield surprises in every playthrough. This will also, clearly, cause the least disruption to the existing map development, modded maps and everything else. Whilst most of the basements will be modest basement rooms, that will have their own unique layout and lootable containers and will change on every new world and be populated with our own collection as well as any collections of mod basements that are subscribed to. There may be a few, however, which are more extensive, the player could happen upon a super rare and extensive underground complex. We have 32 levels to work with that can be distributed in any way above or below ground per chunk as required, so therell be few limits particularly in what modders can do with this. We can also hardcode some specific basement levels, so we could say provide key buildings within the map with bespoke basement levels that fit that particular building and will always be the same on every map. Also, with the new light propagation system, you better bring a torch because unless there are light switches, its gonna be dark even if its daytime! Were also considering the possibility of other sub-surface structures, such as sewers for locations like Louisville. Were still researching what would be appropriate and sufficiently realistic for this, however, and its not certain what could/would appear in b42 beyond whats discussed above at this stage.
If you are a Terraria player then right now you are likely enjoying the amazing Labor of Love update, and maybe youve even discovered a certain someone has made the jump into another game heralding the beginning of some sort of Spiffo Cinematic Universe. Our endless thanks to everyone at Re-Logic for letting our little dude spread his wings (or spin his tail, I guess) and treating him so well. [previewyoutube=fqmd3c0GwSQ;full][/previewyoutube] This weeks stunning outdoor scene from Citro. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us, especially if youre an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.
[ 2022-09-29 18:51:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
Now then, survivors. Lets do the thing.
NEXT
This week we released version 41.77 into our Unstable beta. This is primarily aimed at fixing the Linux crashes that have been plaguing server hosts, and so far seems to be a mission success in that regard. It also improves client to server connections by preferring a direct connection to the server. Servers now have two ports for clients to connect to, configurable through the server options. The game port (UDP 16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (UDP 16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection. Weve had a successful wider test of 41.77 with more than 30 people on a server without any crashes, and weve tested a modded setup afterwards as well. Upon release there were servers running mods with 41.77 just fine, but unfortunately it seemed that some mod setup constellations caused conflicts that resulted in black screens for some servers. We have just pushed a hotfix we believe will resolve this. If, however, you run a 41.77 server and you are still experiencing players unable to log on (only seeing a black screen) then please send us: the list of ModIDs (specifically the Mods= line from their server.ini, the workshop= line, and your server logs. Posting these in the forum release thread or in our Discord techsupport channel would probably be best. Likewise, any reports of ongoing server instability or general misbehaviour please let us know ASAP.
THEN
Were still adding tweaks and polish to our final B41 patch that well put out once the current network improvements are fully tested, released and stable. This is the current changelist, with notable additions in the past few weeks on show here if you already read up on what was incoming in our last blog.
OOH, 42
Build 42 will be a very big update, and it will appear a sizable amount of time after Build 41 is fully wrapped. Weve announced most of the things that we currently have brewing for it, but theres one thing weve only hinted at so far and which is very likely to feature. As regular readers may remember, a while ago we wrote a blog called Techdoid that detailed some of the big engine improvements we have slated for 42. Amongst them is a new rendering pipeline which allows for entire chunks to be cached with a depth buffer, which will afford us MASSIVE rendering and scene construction improvements and should rid us of all the performance issues weve been plagued with due to the isometric draw order over the years. [previewyoutube=G6t5h0_Sfqc;full][/previewyoutube] Theres also a new light propagation system, which allows for light to naturally leak through doors and windows, providing much more atmospheric and believable lighting [previewyoutube=9_0TiPQ-JQA;full][/previewyoutube] We also got rid of the 8 storey limit on chunks: specifically we allowed each chunk to have its own unique defined height up to 32 levels. Finally, we discussed that wed fixed the many areas of the codebase that used static casts to round the players position to determine what chunk or tile they were on to using Math.floors instead. This method allows for negative coordinates to work where prior the calculations would have failed if the player was stood on a tile with a negative coordinate. This in theory will allow for us, or modders, to build north or west to the same extents as we currently build to the east and south, effectively quadrupling the maximum size the map could be extended to and open up a great deal of extra land to populate should we need to in future. Whilst all these features are gamechangers in themselves, they were also done in service of another very specific feature weve had planned for a long time, which required each of them to be made feasible in any way. The current in-game lighting system means that the indoor ambience levels are defined solely by the time of day. If its daytime, the ambient light levels inside a building are above zero, giving just sub-daylight levels, even if there are no sources of natural light that should fall on a tile just by virtue of it being day. That wouldnt work very well if we were wanting to do a certain other feature. The previous eight level hard limit and high rendering cost of multiple levels was rather restrictive if we were to want to do a certain something. The lack of support for negative coordinates for character positions? Well that was IMMENSELY restrictive if we were to want to do a certain something. A few people may have been able to read between the lines of what all these lead toward. Many more will have just watched the video already. [previewyoutube=1KgbGw9lnW4;full][/previewyoutube] The plan we have for basements and sub-levels is an interesting one, as it will provide a lot more replayability to the game map, which is otherwise completely static at the moment. Essentially in 42 we, or modders, can list positions on the map (along with staircase orientation) that have the space for a basement and can be allocated the potential to have one. However, no basements are placed within the map itself. When an area is streamed in for the first time, an appropriate basement building created in the building editor and exported as a binary file is selected randomly from the list of all possible basements and will be injected into the map as it is loaded. We could add tags to make it pick an appropriate category of basement to fit the specific house, though right now the code has it set as completely random. Each basement has stairs leading up from its top floor and these stairs will be aligned to the correct position when it is injected into the map. This means that despite the map being static, any areas with basements will yield surprises in every playthrough. This will also, clearly, cause the least disruption to the existing map development, modded maps and everything else. Whilst most of the basements will be modest basement rooms, that will have their own unique layout and lootable containers and will change on every new world and be populated with our own collection as well as any collections of mod basements that are subscribed to. There may be a few, however, which are more extensive, the player could happen upon a super rare and extensive underground complex. We have 32 levels to work with that can be distributed in any way above or below ground per chunk as required, so therell be few limits particularly in what modders can do with this. We can also hardcode some specific basement levels, so we could say provide key buildings within the map with bespoke basement levels that fit that particular building and will always be the same on every map. Also, with the new light propagation system, you better bring a torch because unless there are light switches, its gonna be dark even if its daytime! Were also considering the possibility of other sub-surface structures, such as sewers for locations like Louisville. Were still researching what would be appropriate and sufficiently realistic for this, however, and its not certain what could/would appear in b42 beyond whats discussed above at this stage.
SPIFFO: BEYOND
If you are a Terraria player then right now you are likely enjoying the amazing Labor of Love update, and maybe youve even discovered a certain someone has made the jump into another game heralding the beginning of some sort of Spiffo Cinematic Universe. Our endless thanks to everyone at Re-Logic for letting our little dude spread his wings (or spin his tail, I guess) and treating him so well. [previewyoutube=fqmd3c0GwSQ;full][/previewyoutube] This weeks stunning outdoor scene from Citro. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us, especially if youre an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.
[ 2022-09-29 18:51:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.77 UNSTABLE Released
- Improved client connection. Important for server providers: Servers now have two ports for clients to connect to. The game port (UDP 16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (UDP 16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection. These ports can be configured through the server options. Clients will first try to use a direct connection. If direct connection fails, clients will try to connect via Steam. The non-Steam version works as usual. UPnP rules were changed accordingly (UPnP is used in cases to prevent manual port-forwarding). The client will show the warning message "WARNING: SERVER HAS PORT %1 CLOSED. PERFORMANCE MAY BE SEVERELY AFFECTED" if the client can't connect through direct connection. - ZNet libraries rebuilt for Windows, Linux, and Mac. - ZNet, Connection, and Kick logs are improved. - Additional logs were added. - Fixed kicks after disabling VOIP. - Fixed connecting to host after disconnection from a dedicated server. - Fixed infinite connection attempt to non-steam server when it's not up. - Fixed the client displaying "Disconnected" instead of "Wrong username or password". - Fixed players being able to change their saved password for an already created account in some instances.
- Added a looping progress bar for timed actions that have no defined end. This is mainly a stopgap "fix" for entering cars, to visualize that there is an ongoing unfinished action until we can have visually open doors, etc. Specifically added for the scenarios where players reported being bitten through the car door after they had entered a car and interrupted the "enter car" action before it could finish (e.g. by opening the map, etc), i.e. before the door was "closed". This bar extends to other "infinite" actions like Walk To.
- Added new body locations: Jacket_Bulky, JacketHat_Bulky, TorsoExtraVest, and JacketSuit. - Assigned new body locations to existing clothing items to avoid clipping. - Tweaked and added many clothing masks to avoid clipping through each other. - Adjusted several clothing models and bone weighting to improve clipping. - Removed Bowling shirt model from Bowling shirt definitions and made Bowling Shirt a texture. The model was left in the files in case mods use it. - Improved base Body mask to help with clipping. - Re-exported ALICE packs as some straps were missing.
[ 2022-09-27 12:35:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
MP
- Improved client connection. Important for server providers: Servers now have two ports for clients to connect to. The game port (UDP 16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (UDP 16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection. These ports can be configured through the server options. Clients will first try to use a direct connection. If direct connection fails, clients will try to connect via Steam. The non-Steam version works as usual. UPnP rules were changed accordingly (UPnP is used in cases to prevent manual port-forwarding). The client will show the warning message "WARNING: SERVER HAS PORT %1 CLOSED. PERFORMANCE MAY BE SEVERELY AFFECTED" if the client can't connect through direct connection. - ZNet libraries rebuilt for Windows, Linux, and Mac. - ZNet, Connection, and Kick logs are improved. - Additional logs were added. - Fixed kicks after disabling VOIP. - Fixed connecting to host after disconnection from a dedicated server. - Fixed infinite connection attempt to non-steam server when it's not up. - Fixed the client displaying "Disconnected" instead of "Wrong username or password". - Fixed players being able to change their saved password for an already created account in some instances.
NEW
- Added a looping progress bar for timed actions that have no defined end. This is mainly a stopgap "fix" for entering cars, to visualize that there is an ongoing unfinished action until we can have visually open doors, etc. Specifically added for the scenarios where players reported being bitten through the car door after they had entered a car and interrupted the "enter car" action before it could finish (e.g. by opening the map, etc), i.e. before the door was "closed". This bar extends to other "infinite" actions like Walk To.
MODELS
- Added new body locations: Jacket_Bulky, JacketHat_Bulky, TorsoExtraVest, and JacketSuit. - Assigned new body locations to existing clothing items to avoid clipping. - Tweaked and added many clothing masks to avoid clipping through each other. - Adjusted several clothing models and bone weighting to improve clipping. - Removed Bowling shirt model from Bowling shirt definitions and made Bowling Shirt a texture. The model was left in the files in case mods use it. - Improved base Body mask to help with clipping. - Re-exported ALICE packs as some straps were missing.
[ 2022-09-27 12:35:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Good Life
The situation with Linux server instability remains ongoing, with the MP team working on another update to the Unstable beta and an internal test of their work tonight. The good news from the Unstable release of 41.76 was that overall network and connection speeds were improved, and will be beneficial to all online players once fully released, but the far more pressing issue was that residual errors in our zombienet library carried over server instability. Getting this, finally, sorted is currently the teams number one priority. This issue doesnt impact all our players, but we recognise how frustrating it must be for those who play regularly on Linux servers and above all those who operate them. We can only apologise for the continued outage and ongoing work, and recognise that patience has been running understandably thin. In our travels fixing the issues, the networking has been changed so as to more directly communicate between server and client. The server now has 2 ports to connect to. The game port (16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection, and thus circumnavigate the data travelling through the steam network which was impacting latency and throughput significantly. These ports can be configured through the server options. Were aware this may cause a bit of disruption when we first release this to stable. However, the positive impact this will have on server performance, reducing lag and improving syncing of the game is too great to ignore, and should be just an additional port for server operators to be aware of and shouldnt affect the vast majority of players connecting. The non-Steam version, meanwhile, will just work as usual.
Most of the non-MP team are now fully on B42 development, but we do have a few brave soldiers working on the final 41 patch thats currently backlogged behind the aforementioned MP fixes. The intention of this patch is to be as non-disruptive as possible, and to leave 41 in the best possible condition during the next period of extensive Build 42 development. As such its primarily fix-based and polish, but there are also some expanded sandbox options. You can see the topline of new changes in the screenshot below.
You can thankfully also view the full current changelist by following this hotlink. This build will go into the unstable beta once MP servers are fully patched up and stable.
Weve got a couple of videos from RJ this week to show his current work on domestic animals. They are fairly self-explanatory when you watch them, but PLEASE NOTE everything you see is heavily WIP. RJ is working in something of a development debug sandbox here, and as such everything will have rough edges and likewise some player actions will have more appropriate animations, animal sizes will be improved, sound effects, further polished UI etc. etc. [previewyoutube=HPLWnNsQ3QY;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=C3mI85QPcGo;full][/previewyoutube] Finally, just to give you the shivers, heres a sample of the Sound Teams latest work on sprinter screams. Dont have nightmares. [previewyoutube=DW2VtgaKpTQ;full][/previewyoutube] This weeks book club from Kawri. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us, especially if youre an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.
[ 2022-09-15 15:33:33 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone.
NEXT
The situation with Linux server instability remains ongoing, with the MP team working on another update to the Unstable beta and an internal test of their work tonight. The good news from the Unstable release of 41.76 was that overall network and connection speeds were improved, and will be beneficial to all online players once fully released, but the far more pressing issue was that residual errors in our zombienet library carried over server instability. Getting this, finally, sorted is currently the teams number one priority. This issue doesnt impact all our players, but we recognise how frustrating it must be for those who play regularly on Linux servers and above all those who operate them. We can only apologise for the continued outage and ongoing work, and recognise that patience has been running understandably thin. In our travels fixing the issues, the networking has been changed so as to more directly communicate between server and client. The server now has 2 ports to connect to. The game port (16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection, and thus circumnavigate the data travelling through the steam network which was impacting latency and throughput significantly. These ports can be configured through the server options. Were aware this may cause a bit of disruption when we first release this to stable. However, the positive impact this will have on server performance, reducing lag and improving syncing of the game is too great to ignore, and should be just an additional port for server operators to be aware of and shouldnt affect the vast majority of players connecting. The non-Steam version, meanwhile, will just work as usual.
THEN
Most of the non-MP team are now fully on B42 development, but we do have a few brave soldiers working on the final 41 patch thats currently backlogged behind the aforementioned MP fixes. The intention of this patch is to be as non-disruptive as possible, and to leave 41 in the best possible condition during the next period of extensive Build 42 development. As such its primarily fix-based and polish, but there are also some expanded sandbox options. You can see the topline of new changes in the screenshot below.
You can thankfully also view the full current changelist by following this hotlink. This build will go into the unstable beta once MP servers are fully patched up and stable.
42
Weve got a couple of videos from RJ this week to show his current work on domestic animals. They are fairly self-explanatory when you watch them, but PLEASE NOTE everything you see is heavily WIP. RJ is working in something of a development debug sandbox here, and as such everything will have rough edges and likewise some player actions will have more appropriate animations, animal sizes will be improved, sound effects, further polished UI etc. etc. [previewyoutube=HPLWnNsQ3QY;full][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=C3mI85QPcGo;full][/previewyoutube] Finally, just to give you the shivers, heres a sample of the Sound Teams latest work on sprinter screams. Dont have nightmares. [previewyoutube=DW2VtgaKpTQ;full][/previewyoutube] This weeks book club from Kawri. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us, especially if youre an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.
[ 2022-09-15 15:33:33 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.76 UNSTABLE Released
- Improved Steam Networking API implementation. - Selected game data is no longer transmitted through the Steam P2P API but through UDP instead. - Adjusted Anti-Cheat Types 21-24 to result in fewer false positives. A note that if you do not run a public server (i.e. a server exclusively for you and your family & friends without the worry of griefing and cheating), you can entirely circumvent any sort of frustration with false positives by disabling all AntiCheat protections in the servers .ini file. - Split the large ConnectionDetails packet into several smaller packets with one of the ConnectionDetailsPacket.State enum values indicating which data is requested. - Improved algorithm for the transmission of large files while playing. - Loading screen now shows the download status of large files when connecting to a server. - ZNet library was rebuilt on all platforms. - Fixed ObjectModData packets not being sent while the server was in the FastForward state. - Fixed bug in world dictionary when an item in a different module but with a similar name as an vanilla item was removed. - Fixed a new stubble Beard getting added to remote players after each appearance change, which resulted in receivePlayerZombieDescriptors errors.
[ 2022-09-08 13:37:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
We skipped public testing for 41.75.
The TL;DR of the changes from 41.74 to 41.76 is that the Steam Networking API implementation was improved; Linux crashes should be fixed and overall networking performance has been improved alongside connection stability in internal tests.
In essence, the game will now also use direct communication with dedicated servers, instead of going entirely through Steams own networking API, improving performance and stability for dedicated servers.
MP
- Improved Steam Networking API implementation. - Selected game data is no longer transmitted through the Steam P2P API but through UDP instead. - Adjusted Anti-Cheat Types 21-24 to result in fewer false positives. A note that if you do not run a public server (i.e. a server exclusively for you and your family & friends without the worry of griefing and cheating), you can entirely circumvent any sort of frustration with false positives by disabling all AntiCheat protections in the servers .ini file. - Split the large ConnectionDetails packet into several smaller packets with one of the ConnectionDetailsPacket.State enum values indicating which data is requested. - Improved algorithm for the transmission of large files while playing. - Loading screen now shows the download status of large files when connecting to a server. - ZNet library was rebuilt on all platforms. - Fixed ObjectModData packets not being sent while the server was in the FastForward state. - Fixed bug in world dictionary when an item in a different module but with a similar name as an vanilla item was removed. - Fixed a new stubble Beard getting added to remote players after each appearance change, which resulted in receivePlayerZombieDescriptors errors.
[ 2022-09-08 13:37:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
Broadened HorizonZ
Weve left Linux server operators hanging out to dry a bit over the last two weeks and feel awful about it especially ones with larger/busier servers. 41.73 came with crashes on Linux servers, and the version with the updated Steam API we put into the Unstable beta in 41.74 turned out to bring in as many issues as it solved. As such Yuri and Andrei are currently working on another approach that will be going into Unstable beta (and then Stable) as soon as we can muster which will have the crashes fixed, and should also have increased networking performance and improved connection stabilities for everyone. Were hoping to conduct an internal test on it tomorrow. In essence the game will now also use direct communication with dedicated servers, instead of going entirely through Steams own networking. This should improve things for all players on dedicated servers including the Linux servers that were sadly the canary in the coalmine that flagged up the fact that something needed to be done here. Again, our apologies to those impacted we are thinking of ways to repair some of the damage done during the outage and appreciate your frustration.
We have a staging branch backstage that all our coders are feeding aspects of their work that they wouldnt want people to have to wait until Build 42 for so no big features, but instead a lot of fixes and balance. We will also be trying to limit mod disruption and big/controversial changes, as this will be the version that we leave folks with for quite a while when all of us are 100% working on new features alongside the existing 42 team. (Apart from anything urgent we might need to attend to on 41, clearly). The sorts of things were currently testing for this patch include: many and various visual issues with the cutaway system, colour blind accessibility options, better crate highlights, many recipe improvements, better ways for the game to handle car alarms and (hopefully) fixes for sounds cutting out in busy MP situations. Theres also some new 3D models where weve had icon mismatches, new tooltips to better explain what different items can do, weight/encumbrance rebalancing on some items, the lighter/Molotov fix we mentioned last time and many and varied other fixes. Weve also done some work improving the in-game server browser that we would certainly like to include as well. Theres a lot of other stuff too, but you probably get the gist. Nothing thats going to rock the boat, but also enough stuff to keep the boat sailing until we reach the glittering shores of 42.
While we cant and wont go into forensic detail on which towns and what design themes were going for, its perhaps time to talk about the next map expansion which will most likely hit with 42. Xeonyx and Ayrton are essentially pushing the map out on all sides, apart from beyond the games traditional Ohio River boundary.
The map team are returning to fictionalised versions of real places on the Kentucky map Riverside and March Ridge being entirely fictional. We dont want to name exactly which ones, but it might be worth mentioning one of them will be Ekron. The location currently commonly known as Ekron within the community is not supposed to be our version of that place, and (for reasons that will become explicit when viewed on the PZ map) is internally known as Fallas Lake. We will erect a sign in Build 42 to make this information more prominent. Heres a few WIP screens of some of our future locations to keep you all going.
Other things currently being worked on for B42 inclusion that we havent mentioned before are:
Thanks all, and thanks for your patience. Well see you next time. This weeks foggy overview from the Universe of Gamer. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us, especially if youre an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.
[ 2022-09-01 20:06:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Okay, so heres a run down on our current basic plans for finalizing Build 41, and then beyond.
NEXT
Weve left Linux server operators hanging out to dry a bit over the last two weeks and feel awful about it especially ones with larger/busier servers. 41.73 came with crashes on Linux servers, and the version with the updated Steam API we put into the Unstable beta in 41.74 turned out to bring in as many issues as it solved. As such Yuri and Andrei are currently working on another approach that will be going into Unstable beta (and then Stable) as soon as we can muster which will have the crashes fixed, and should also have increased networking performance and improved connection stabilities for everyone. Were hoping to conduct an internal test on it tomorrow. In essence the game will now also use direct communication with dedicated servers, instead of going entirely through Steams own networking. This should improve things for all players on dedicated servers including the Linux servers that were sadly the canary in the coalmine that flagged up the fact that something needed to be done here. Again, our apologies to those impacted we are thinking of ways to repair some of the damage done during the outage and appreciate your frustration.
THEN
We have a staging branch backstage that all our coders are feeding aspects of their work that they wouldnt want people to have to wait until Build 42 for so no big features, but instead a lot of fixes and balance. We will also be trying to limit mod disruption and big/controversial changes, as this will be the version that we leave folks with for quite a while when all of us are 100% working on new features alongside the existing 42 team. (Apart from anything urgent we might need to attend to on 41, clearly). The sorts of things were currently testing for this patch include: many and various visual issues with the cutaway system, colour blind accessibility options, better crate highlights, many recipe improvements, better ways for the game to handle car alarms and (hopefully) fixes for sounds cutting out in busy MP situations. Theres also some new 3D models where weve had icon mismatches, new tooltips to better explain what different items can do, weight/encumbrance rebalancing on some items, the lighter/Molotov fix we mentioned last time and many and varied other fixes. Weve also done some work improving the in-game server browser that we would certainly like to include as well. Theres a lot of other stuff too, but you probably get the gist. Nothing thats going to rock the boat, but also enough stuff to keep the boat sailing until we reach the glittering shores of 42.
MAP NEXT
While we cant and wont go into forensic detail on which towns and what design themes were going for, its perhaps time to talk about the next map expansion which will most likely hit with 42. Xeonyx and Ayrton are essentially pushing the map out on all sides, apart from beyond the games traditional Ohio River boundary.
The map team are returning to fictionalised versions of real places on the Kentucky map Riverside and March Ridge being entirely fictional. We dont want to name exactly which ones, but it might be worth mentioning one of them will be Ekron. The location currently commonly known as Ekron within the community is not supposed to be our version of that place, and (for reasons that will become explicit when viewed on the PZ map) is internally known as Fallas Lake. We will erect a sign in Build 42 to make this information more prominent. Heres a few WIP screens of some of our future locations to keep you all going.
ALSO
Other things currently being worked on for B42 inclusion that we havent mentioned before are:
- The Sound Team are working on sprinter zed growls and screams our first inspirations here will be the Dawn of the Dead remake but we will iterate until we get it right. Formosa have also created a variety of bullet impact noises (on cars, dirt, glass, plastic, trees, walls and wood) that we will be integrating come 42, alongside the further improvement of the dynamic music system. They will also clearly have their hands full with the cows, chickens, sheep, improved fishing and many and various new post-apocalypse items and actions that B42 will bring along with it.
- RJ is currently experimenting with rats, which could also become part of the Knox Event alongside domestic animals. Martin, meanwhile, has been working on animal transportation namely new trailers and potential new vehicles.
- Pat_Bren has been expanding the breadth of different TV and radio channels available to tune into at the start of the outbreak, and is now moving onto some other frequencies that players might be lucky enough to come across later on within the PZ timeline too. Right now hes added Public Access TV, a Music channel, a Sports channel, a movie channel, a new entertainment channel and a radio station called Upper South Radio.
Thanks all, and thanks for your patience. Well see you next time. This weeks foggy overview from the Universe of Gamer. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us, especially if youre an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.
[ 2022-09-01 20:06:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Camp GigaMart
Slightly logjammed behind 41.74 is a wide-ranging patch full of many and various things. To minimise future disruption to B41 players we are thinking that it may well be the last major patch before all coders are moved to B42 and more feature-based development. Clearly there will still be fixes and maintenance where necessary. Well be wanting to leave 41 in the best state that we can, and with as many annoyances removed as possible. Plans can change of course, but this currently our direction. Some of the logjammed items ready-coded and awaiting internal integration and testing are:New flatpack model for movable icons. Cleared up plastic/metal bucket confusion. New watering cans.
Added compass support for the forthcoming compass item. When an item with the Compass tag is in a players inventory, the tooltip on mouseover will include text indicating which direction the character is facing.
Recipe improvements: more food items capable of being added to tacos and burritos.
Rebalanced weights/encumbrance of: walkie talkies (for French speakers: talkie walkies), fire extinguishers, branches, spears, more.
Adjusted the capacities of pistol and revolver cases from 7 down to 4. Changed the sawed off shotgun recipes to only use the hacksaw, and not the garden saw.
Longstanding bugbear that using lighters with Molotovs completely drains them fixed. Also when a Lighter is equipped it will no longer automatically become lit, instead it will do so only if activated using the flashlight keybind or radial menu, or using the inventory context menu option to activate them.
Several new zed and building stories.
Added a new sandbox setting EnablePoisoning which has the settings True (default), False, and Bleach is Disabled. It governs if poison, or only bleach, is disallowed from being added to foods. Although this is primarily intended for MP servers, as an anti-griefing/no-PVP allowance, it has been requested for singleplayer as well, thus why it is a sandbox setting and not a server setting.
Building keys spawn on zombies and corpses when they spawn inside buildings, when appropriate, instead of when they die inside of one. (WIP may be B42)
Set some traits to be mutually exclusive to remove exploits or illogical combinations: Brave & Agoraphobic/Claustrophobic; Adrenaline Junkie & Agoraphobic/Claustrophobic/Cowardly.
Rebalanced the maggots that spawn on corpses so that they spawn less often in spring and fall, and also so that the maggots that spawn on zombie corpses have a poison value of 5 instead of 3.
Improved how current fakedead zombie spawns function.
Improvement to buffs and debuffs in terms of XP and moodles shown.
Fixed issues that involve spawning in barricaded/burnt/randomized locations.
House keys will no longer spawn with a long string of numbers in their display name. (Shouldve improved this previously apologies)
Added attachments to most food models so they appear in the players hand while eating
/gunshot command can now target a specific player
Some work-in-progress changes to zombie behaviour. Random offset to where zombies think a sound came from for unseen squares. Rain increases zombie hearing random offset range and decreases chance for zombies to react to player sounds. Zombies wander more during heavy rain. (Potentially B42 content)
Fixes and improvements to the admin tile picker system in MP.
Some logical improvements to clothing items. Motorcycle helmets protect from head fractures, firefighter gear protects from fire etc.
A fix to how youre unable to claim a safehouse unless standing on the ground floor, and how game currently doesnt check upper floors for other players or zombies when claiming.
Streamer Mode audio option which changes vehicle siren sounds to avoid bizarre copyright strikes.
Various improvements and fixes to the cutaway system.
Colour-blind friendly accessibility addition letting you add:another variant to red/green in aiming outline and also to reduce difficulty when zed is standing on snow.
Added highlight to crates so its easier to differentiate which one player is interacting with.
Optional Sandbox Setting To Disable The Tainted Water Tooltip/Warning For Hardcore Play
Improvements to level of damage burnt food does to players with weak stomach trait
Changes to how car alarms function in-game, seeing as currently they are an extremely rare threat.
Although its early days yet, and unconfirmed for B42, we are also currently spending some time doing some backstage experimentation with basements and improvements to our loot/inventory UIs. If these are successful we may well see them surface in future blogs.
Thanks all!
This weeks supermarket camping trip from . A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us? Details here.
[ 2022-08-18 19:37:06 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, weve had our heads deep in MP stuff this past ten days so please excuse a blog thats heavy on busywork and housekeeping.
We released 41.73 to stable last week, which came with an unanticipated issue that saw Linux servers (of which there are many) having frequent crashes generally when multiple users tried to connect at the same time.
This wasnt great, to say the least, so a lot of the B41 teams bandwidth has gone into investigating, testing and finding a solution for this over the last ten days.
Weve recently released version 41.74 to the Unstable beta, which has fixed the crash issue at our end and we would ask that anyone who hasnt been able to play due to linux server crashes to try it out. This includes a full update to Valves latest Steam API.
If you continue to experience crashes on the Unstable branch after this patch, please head to our Discord techsupport channel or forums and send us your hs_err_pid**.log file (youll find this in the server installation folder) in addition to a download link to a .zip file of your Home/Zomboid folder (remove the Saves folder from it to save space).
Doing a wholesale update to the Steam networking interface like this isnt small beans, and it has thrown up a few issues that we will be remedying in the coming days but in the interest of getting folks missing out on their PZ ASAP we have released the fix to Unstable to get people back on-board, and report back on any other misbehaviour.
We will also be making some of the new anti-cheat additions far less twitchy, as these too caused issues for some people on 41.73 launch.
NEXT PATCH
Slightly logjammed behind 41.74 is a wide-ranging patch full of many and various things. To minimise future disruption to B41 players we are thinking that it may well be the last major patch before all coders are moved to B42 and more feature-based development. Clearly there will still be fixes and maintenance where necessary. Well be wanting to leave 41 in the best state that we can, and with as many annoyances removed as possible. Plans can change of course, but this currently our direction. Some of the logjammed items ready-coded and awaiting internal integration and testing are:
[ 2022-08-18 19:37:06 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.74 UNSTABLE Released
Migrated to newer Steam API.
ZNet library was rebuilt on all platforms.
Steam network logs are added.
SteamGeneric packet was removed.
Old steam session info was removed.
SteamGameServer.BUpdateUserData method call is removed as deprecated.
Error descriptions for the ESteamNetConnectionEnd and EResult were added.
Fixes to Steam logging.
[ 2022-08-17 20:41:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
Note: Parts of this patch were previously released as a 41.73 Unstable hotfix.*
A version bump ensures players running the Stable client get a clearer error (version mismatch) when connecting to servers running the Unstable branch.
This patch addressed the Linux server crashes.
Please let us know about any remaining crashes and the performance you're experiencing.
If you continue to experience crashes on the Unstable branch after this patch, please send us your hs_err_pid**.log file (you'll find this in the server installation folder) in addition to a .zip file of your Home/Zomboid folder (remove the "Saves" folder from it to save space). If you're submitting them outside of our Discord techsupport channel, please make sure to provide a download link from your filesharing service of choice.
MP
[ 2022-08-17 20:41:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.73 Released
Due to character limitations, the full changelog can be found on our forums and in the pastebin below: https://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/58075-4173-released https://pastebin.com/PW9F8TNn
- Added the MapRemotePlayerVisibility server option for Multiplayer. 1 = Remote players aren't visible on the in-game map 2 = Remote players in the same faction or sharing a safehouse are visible 3 = Remote players are always visible - The OPT button in the in-game map that was previously visible only in debug mode or for admins is now always visible. When not in debug mode, these options are available: - Players - Remote Players (client only) - Player Names (client only) - Symbols - Added MapRemotePlayerVisibility server option to the server-settings editor and admin panel. - Added a new volume slider to the Audio options which affects the jump-scare sound. - Fixed updates to the map causing zombies to spawn inside previously cleared buildings. - Fixed BuildingDef.calculateMetaID() and RoomDef.calculateMetaID() possibly creating the same ID for different buildings or rooms. This was why zombies would respawn in some already-seen rooms. - Give zombies that are targeting a player higher priority for pathfinding than other zombies. - Added new loot maps from Pat Bren. - Split the single Louisville map-item into nine separate maps. - Added Louisville maps to the loot tables. - Gas container tooltip tweaks: 1) When adding fuel to a generator, tooltips show the percentage the generator's fuel percentage will increase. 2) When adding/siphoning fuel to/from a vehicle, tooltips show the item capacity in liters (to match the mechanics ui). 3) When taking fuel from a gas pump, tooltips show the item capacity in drainable units. - Updated Community Translations - Added icons + textures for Medical/Trauma Bag and Canned Fruit Beverage. - Added highlighting to changed Zombie Lore Sandbox Options (options that differ from Apocalypse mode are highlighted). - Added an "AttachedToGlass" tile prop to fix signs attached to windows not being removed when breaking the window. - Prevent the loot window from popping open when clicking on objects when using the furniture-manipulation tools. - Added "Default=" to combobox sandbox-option tooltips. - Allow empty bottles to store gasoline. - Added water capacity in context tooltip when filling water container (if only 1 item type) - Updated community translations. - Updated credits. - Improved icon draw for context menu - Added ISContextMenu.addDebugOption() which adds an option with iconTexture=media/ui/BugIcon.png. - Added a way to rename a savefile in the load-game "More..." panel. - Added the various pictures frame missing (not spawning yet, also no inventory icon yet - currently using empty frame icon) - Allow building double doors inside buildings. This is to fix a bug where double doors couldn't be built on some outer walls of buildings. - Added checks for wall-like obstacles that should prevent opening or closing double doors. - Don't allow building stairs where there are walls or obstacles at the top. The player will pass through these when going up the stairs. Building walls or obstacles at the top of stairs was already disallowed. - Incorporated Baph's latest additions, which include: new movable script items; new modder-orientated procedural distributions tables; new zombie outfit distributions; new vehicle distributions; more through junk tables; new items. - Longer evolved recipe names; now up to 3 ingredients will be displayed in the display name of compound recipe items. - Updated ISAddItemToRecipe and translation text with translation string support for new recipe naming system. - Added a panel to the Attachment Editor (Shift-F7) that is displayed when a "world" attachment is selected. This new panel displays the selected model as it would appear on the ground. - Removed the -Xss1280k stack-size JVM parameter from Linux ProjectZomboid.json files. - Increased Linux and Mac -Xmx=2048m to -Xmx=3072m max-heap JVM parameter to match Windows.
- Updated sound banks. - New action music track. - Fixed one male zombie voice looping the Hit sound. - Added missing sound for taking water from a dispenser. - Added an ambient sound to the Gas-2-Go pumps. - Set the value of the FMOD parameter "Generator" on powered items so they play a sound when powered by a generator. - Added ZombieCrawlLungeSwing and ZombieCrawlLungeHit sounds for zombie fence/window crawling attacks. - Zombies play their Attack and GettingUp sounds during fence/window crawling attack animation.
- Full export of the current Knox Event map. This will be the final B41 map update. - Updates many farms and farmsteads - Improves upper class areas in Louisville - Adds many new tiles on the tilesheets - Fixes many and various community-reported map issues and bugs
- New Ice Cream Cones now melt and produce a Melted Ice Cream Cone item. - New Gravy Boat, Baloney Slices, Salami, Salami Slices, and Snack Cakes models. - New Canned Condensed Milk item; can be used for the same recipes as milk. - Balance adjusted assorted values of food items and recipes. - Appropriate bottles can now hold gasoline. - Baloney and salami can be sliced. - Many food items have more options for being used as evolved recipe ingredients. - Recipes for Onigiri; Baguette Dough; Biscuit Dough; Meat Patty; Scooping Ice Cream; and Trays of Cookie Dough. - Crayons can be used to write notes and mark the map. - Toast can be made from Bread Slices by cooking them. - New recipe for a Cheese Sandwich item; cook a Cheese Sandwich to make it into a Grilled Cheese Sandwich. - Evolved Recipes for Ice Cream Cones; Sweet Pies; Bread; Toast; Bowls of Oatmeal; Mixed Beverages; and Glasses of Wine and Beer. This makes it possible to make foods such as Ice Cream Cones with candy and fruit on them, chocolate, cheese, or sunflower seed Bread, Toast with beans or avocado on it, Bowls of Oatmeal with berries and honey, cocktails, and such. - Whole Pizza item added. - Glasses and cup items can be filled with water. - WildGarlic item replaced by WildGarlic2 which is edible; this was done so that Wild Garlic could be a food item and be used in recipes. Otherwise identical to the old Wild Garlic. - Canned Condensed Milk item; can be used for the same recipes as milk. - Maggots that spawn with zombie corpses will be mildly poisonous. - Added evolved recipe item PizzaRecipe; "Pizza(Uncooked)" can be used to make an evolved recipe pizza with toppings. - When Hot Drink beverages are made using Black Sage, Common Mallow, or Lemon Grass the medicinal properties of those items are transferred to the Beverage, "Herbal Teas". - For herbal tea purposes, Hot Drinks are more flexible re ingredients and have special naming. - Coffee and Espresso Machine stoves will now only accept mugs and other appropriate items. - Added placeholder texture for Bag_MedicalBag. - Added BrokenGlass tag to broken glass movables and smashed bottle, and added recipecode code for the tag, for modding purposes. - Added support for the tag "SewingNeedle"; this will allow modders to add new mod items that can perform tailoring and wound stitching tasks. - More flexible Tag support for writing notes. - Added Tomato Paste item for pizza crafting. - Added Prepare Pizza recipe to make a RecipePizza base evolved recipe item.
- Baloney, Salami, Ham, Onions, and Watermelon must be sliced before being able to be used in evolved recipes. - Watermelon must be sliced or smashed before being able to eat it. - Values of many food items adjusted for balance, consistency, and QOL purposes such as allowing one instance of an item to be used in more evolved recipe portions. - Only Bread Slices and Toast can be placed inside Toasters. - Some recipes now require a bowl as well as a spatula, spoon or fork, to mix ingredients. - Many recipes adjusted to allow for more ingredient flexibility. - Hot water is now required to make Bowls of Oatmeal. Tim is now satisfied. - Added new param to Recipe: "InSameInventory". When this param true items gets only from same outermost inventory. (Need for fix Rip clothing only from player inventory or only from Floor/Container) - Changed Rip Clothing recipe - HandWeapon.weaponSprite is saved if it is different than the item-script's value. - Slightly increased zed attraction to gunshots in MP - Reduced the endurance loss when missing a hit (especially when pushing). - Set sprite properties on the "Wood Pegboard" and "Wood Top Workbench" in location_business_machinery_01 so they are movable. - Added all the missing translations to Moveables_EN.txt. Any missing translations for this are printed to the console when loading a game. - Added a "Slice Onion" recipe so Fried Onion Rings can be made. - Made the Composter thumpable by zombies. - Sometimes the corpses that spawn as the player explores the world will be fake dead. - As corpses progress in rot stages they have a chance of becoming fake dead. - Additional appropriate corpses spawned in randomized world stories will rarely be fake dead. - As corpses progress in rot stages they have a chance of spawning maggots in their inventory and in their square. - Food value and evolved recipe name adjustments for more flexible recipe usage and shorter compound names. - Obese is now mutually exclusive with Light Eater and Very Underweight is mutually exclusive with Hearty Appetite at character creations. - Adjusted weight of Spears - Floor tiles will now provide a maximum of 1 nail when dismantled. - Eggs are dangerous uncooked but now with a greatly reduced chance of causing food sickness. - Ice Cream Cones now melt and produce a Melted Ice Cream Cone item. - Ginseng now provides an Endurance Buff when used to make a Hot Beverage as a spice. - Added Basil to more recipes. - Better handling of evolved recipe item name when they only have spice ingredients. - Added the ability to install Makeshift Radios into vehicles; this was done for consistency with the requested fix of allowing Makeshift HAM radios to be installed in Ham radio vehicles. - Allow vehicles that have HAM radios to allow any sort of HAM radio installed in them; Luxury and Modern Cars will also always spawn with Premium Radios installed. - CDs in Premium radios will transfer to/from the vehicle they are being installed into/uninstalled from.
- Added new fill from bourbon bottle anim - Changed fill from bourbon bottle xml to use new anim Emote Wheel adjustments: - Adjusted some emote bone masks to reduce clipping - Added some stealth emote versions to reduce clipping and posing awkwardness - Added emote states for different weapon poses - Added an eating animation for WaterPotPasta WaterPotRice. The animation is the same as for drinking out of a pot. Idle extension adjustments: - Adjusted normal stance extensions bone masks to avoid clipping and awkward poses - Added normal stance extensions anims, where appropriate - Added normal stance extension xml for different weapon stances, where appropriate - Added masks to extended idle xmls to not clip as much, - Added relevant extended idle anims where needed - Capped off hoodieUP xfiles to stop transparency - Adjusted hoodieUP texture for new cap - Added blood locations to a couple of missing shirts - Re-exported female and zombie female base textures after eliminating some erroneous pixels causing holes - Adjusted Hat_Spiffo mask to display properly on character - re-exported missed zombie body textures that had outlying pixels - Adjusted male and female HighViz vests to visually work similar to hunting vests - Reworked Male and Female HighViz vests - Changed HighViz vest body location - Tweaked Hunting vest masks to work better with underlying clothes
- Various anti-cheat improvements - Sync and physics improvements for vehicles. - Refactored and decreased vehicle physics packet size. - Vehicle interpolation was refactored and improved . - Improved towing physics and behaviour. - Updated PZBullet library on all platforms. - Rope constraint is added to PZBullet. Now used for vehicles instead of z-offset for point-to-point constraint. - Optimized Vehicle authorization on exit - Allow admins to repair clothes via Edit -> Condition, and remove holes when the item is set to max condition when the item is in their inventory. - Visual data for damaged/fixed clothing will now sync between clients. - Hit reaction translation length is now calculated by appropriate animation clip - Use WaveSignal packet on client - Improve auth/towing for cases with two drivers/swap tow - Stopped clients updating rotting corpses and fake-dead corpses. - Added check for IsoDeadBody.getHumanVisual() being null. - Server will send the success result of recipes checksum validation if the client is untouchable. - The game will calculate the checksum using the original recipe name. - The driver now stops the vehicle before they exit from the vehicle or switch seat. - Added ISBaseTimedAction timed action. - The BaseVehicle.setForceBrake function was added. Calling this function activates the brakes for 1 second. - The SystemDisabler.doDisableTunePhysicDelay variable was added - If FPS is capped the updatePhysic function receives time delta uses the PerformanceSettings.getLockFPS function. - The game server will not send the PlayerUpdateReliable packets from players who are far away. - Improvements for some anti-cheat checks - ServerOptions to enable/disable AntiCheatProtectionType checks for types 21-24 are added. - Added log message for LUA debugger - Improve vehicle logging - Add DebugLogStream noise methods - Logs can be filtered by severity - Reformatted log streams for damage, death, and multiplayer log types - Added server log command for vehicle traces (ex.: "log vehicle trace" or "log ve t" for short) - Command entered in general chat tab changes severity on the client - Command entered in admin chat tab changes severity on the server - Increased allowed map_meta.bin and map_zone.bin file size from 20MB to 50MB in multiplayer. - Fixed Zed appearance not syncing between players. - Fixed one player being able to use two radios / walkie talkies. - Fixed text not displaying above the placed HAM radio if there is a Walkie talkie in your hands. - Fixed vehicle radio using wrong coordinates. - Fixed vehicle radio not working in the same way as world placed radio. - Fixed other vehicle radio issues (radio stations, text, chat, VOIP). - Fixed vehicle radio text processing. - Fixed trailer authorizations / floaty trailers. - Fixed Item Remove tool not removing items from containers on a server. - Fixed clients sending StopSound packets to the server for zombie vocals. - Fixed clients sending climb-over-fence sounds and climb-through-window sounds for players and zombies. It seems each client runs the ClimbOverFenceState and ClimbThroughWindowState, so these sounds may be kept local. - Fixed clients sending climb-over-wall sounds. - Fixed seat authorizations. - Fixed null pointer exception in the VehicleManager.serverPacket function. - Fixed incorrect delay-tuning algorithm. - Fixed issues with Handle BufferOverflowException sending map_meta.bin and map_zone.bin for servers that use many map mods. - Fixed issues when characters are hit by trailers. - Fixed corpses disappeared when killed by trailer - Fixed issues with vehicle physics debug log messages. - Fixed Admin being kicked because of incorrect checksum. - Fixed car changing its place after re-login. - Fixed normal vehicle not being removable in mods. - Fixed movement sound when vehicle is stopped. - Fixed movement sound when player changed seat from driver to passenger. Redundant vehicle packet EngineSound flag is removed. - Fixed disappearing trailers. - Fixed physics update limits. - Fixed a vehicle and towed vehicle having different physic delays right after they were attached, causing clients to see the two closer than they actually were. - Fixed attached cars being disconnected after re-login. - Fixed passenger not being able to exit attached car if they occupy driver's seat while the car is being towed. - Fixed attached trailer twitching after player gets in car. The server gives authorization for a short time to a player if both vehicles don't have drivers. - Fixed empty RequestGetFull being sent. - Fixed vehicle passenger could have vehicle authorization after collision. - Fixed vehicle collision owner. - Fixed tow re-attach. - Fixed vehicle seat switching. - Fixed passengers seeing black boxes at high speeds. - Fixed vehicle not damaging players after re-login. - Fixed vehicle local simulation pass through another vehicle. - Fixed player can't become owner of pushed vehicle. - Fixed bouncing vehicle authorization at the end of local simulation. - Fixed player can exit or sleep in moving car. - Fixed rare incorrect vehicles authorization after towing. - Fixed engine sound disappearing without a driver. - Fixed car not stopping when driver changes their place due to cruise control. - Fixed error when try to type "[" in Item list viewer. - Fixed bug in the GameTime class. The class had insufficient precision when calculating the time in the syncServerTime function. - Fixed car stopping condition. The vehicle is stopped if the speed is less than 0.8 kmph. - Fixed clipping vehicles. - Fixed remote cars lag. The stepSimulation function will receive fixed update period. This period will not depend from FPS. - Fixed Vehicle simulation speed depending on locked fps. - Fixed the server kicking players when SystemDisabler.doAllowDebugConnections variable was set to true. - Added MapRemotePlayerVisibility server option to the server-settings editor and admin panel.
- Improved log for lua errors. Now it shows if it modified file error - Added list of mods in Pause menu + this list show mods that cause errors - Added additional check to Vehicle Create, Update and Install Radios that may help prevent mods that modify what data is sent to it from causing errors.
- Adjusted the position of foraging pin icons and direction arrows. The arrows always pointed to the northwest corner of a square, which didn't look right for dropped items. - Turn the player to face a forage item when picking it up. - Fixed the foraging system not handling non-rectangular zones (i.e., polygon or thick polyline zones). - Zone.getRandomSquareInZone() now handles polygon and thick polyline zones. - Zone.getTotalArea() returns the area of polygon and thick polyline zones. Note this isn't an accurate count of the squares in such zones, it is the sum of the area of each triangle that forms the polygon. For other types of zones, width * height is returned. - Added the OnLoadedMapZones event which is called after map_zone.bin is loaded. As before, the existing OnLoadMapZones event is triggered before map_zone.bin is loaded. - forageSystem.init() is called by the new OnLoadedMapZones event instead of OnLoadMapZones. - forageSystem.integrityCheck() checks whether the original map zone represented by each ForageZone still exists. - Changed double click behaviour of search mode pins to place items into the current selected player inventory panel if possible - Adjusted the search mode snow cover penalty limit as snowy weather combination could easily hit the penalty cap - Fixed an exploit with search focus when spamming the search mode button which could force items to change type - Fixed a visual issue with search focus trigger after spotting items which caused picked up items to sometimes be the original item
- Added Brush Tool for copying, destroying, and building specific Tiles, as well as a Fire, Smoke, and Explosion-Brush. . - Controls: - Turn on Brush Tool cheat via the Debug Menu -> "Cheats" -> "Brush Tool".. - Right-Click on any tile -> "Brush Tool Manager", "Copy tile", "Destroy Tile". - When a tile was picked from the Bruth Tool Manager -> keys "[" and "]" for scrolling between tiles. - Added trigger thunder tool (for admins). - Added respawn new loot in container by RMC-ContextOption on container button (when LootZed cheat on or isAdmin). - Changed LootZed manager opening on RMC-ContextOption on container button. - Allowed admin to create any VHS out of spawned VHS-home (like in debug). - Added sync for Health panel cheats. - Trailers debug is improved. - Small fix to Lua closure. - Improved spawn vehicle menu. - Added ability to change weight in Player Stats window. - Added destroying objects without a sledgehammer if building cheat is on. - Added sliders for change weight and calories in debug panel. - Added Step Into, Step Over, and Resume buttons to the Lua debugger. - Improved ContextMenu - Now you can add icons for context options: local myOption = context:addOption("My option name", ...) myOption.iconTexture = getTexture("media/ui/MyIconForOption.png") - Added new functions for context: insertOptionAfter(...), insertOptionBefore(...), removeOptionByName(...), getMenuOptionNames(...) - Improved Debug/Admin options. - Added new options for doors - Now you can set a building ID for doors and force-lock doors inside buildings. - Added Door Options can be found in the Right-Click Context Menu -> Objects. - To lock a door inside a building, set a Building Key ID for the door, set Force-Lock to "True" and click "Objects" -> "Door Lock" in the context menu. A key for the door can be spawned via the "Get Key" option. - Added 'make noise' options to attract zombies. - Added option for removing all zombies in a zone to the Admin tools. - Added icons in context menu for ADMIN/DEBUG options. - Added elapsed time since server started in server statistics info. - Added access to some Admin tools for moderators. - Added an external anim debug UI for Martin. - Removed the line "Press Esc to open Admin panel" from Server toolbox UI
[ 2022-08-09 09:09:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.73 compiled changelist, also including 41.72 from the unstable branch
Due to character limitations, the full changelog can be found on our forums and in the pastebin below: https://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/58075-4173-released https://pastebin.com/PW9F8TNn
NEW
- Added the MapRemotePlayerVisibility server option for Multiplayer. 1 = Remote players aren't visible on the in-game map 2 = Remote players in the same faction or sharing a safehouse are visible 3 = Remote players are always visible - The OPT button in the in-game map that was previously visible only in debug mode or for admins is now always visible. When not in debug mode, these options are available: - Players - Remote Players (client only) - Player Names (client only) - Symbols - Added MapRemotePlayerVisibility server option to the server-settings editor and admin panel. - Added a new volume slider to the Audio options which affects the jump-scare sound. - Fixed updates to the map causing zombies to spawn inside previously cleared buildings. - Fixed BuildingDef.calculateMetaID() and RoomDef.calculateMetaID() possibly creating the same ID for different buildings or rooms. This was why zombies would respawn in some already-seen rooms. - Give zombies that are targeting a player higher priority for pathfinding than other zombies. - Added new loot maps from Pat Bren. - Split the single Louisville map-item into nine separate maps. - Added Louisville maps to the loot tables. - Gas container tooltip tweaks: 1) When adding fuel to a generator, tooltips show the percentage the generator's fuel percentage will increase. 2) When adding/siphoning fuel to/from a vehicle, tooltips show the item capacity in liters (to match the mechanics ui). 3) When taking fuel from a gas pump, tooltips show the item capacity in drainable units. - Updated Community Translations - Added icons + textures for Medical/Trauma Bag and Canned Fruit Beverage. - Added highlighting to changed Zombie Lore Sandbox Options (options that differ from Apocalypse mode are highlighted). - Added an "AttachedToGlass" tile prop to fix signs attached to windows not being removed when breaking the window. - Prevent the loot window from popping open when clicking on objects when using the furniture-manipulation tools. - Added "Default=" to combobox sandbox-option tooltips. - Allow empty bottles to store gasoline. - Added water capacity in context tooltip when filling water container (if only 1 item type) - Updated community translations. - Updated credits. - Improved icon draw for context menu - Added ISContextMenu.addDebugOption() which adds an option with iconTexture=media/ui/BugIcon.png. - Added a way to rename a savefile in the load-game "More..." panel. - Added the various pictures frame missing (not spawning yet, also no inventory icon yet - currently using empty frame icon) - Allow building double doors inside buildings. This is to fix a bug where double doors couldn't be built on some outer walls of buildings. - Added checks for wall-like obstacles that should prevent opening or closing double doors. - Don't allow building stairs where there are walls or obstacles at the top. The player will pass through these when going up the stairs. Building walls or obstacles at the top of stairs was already disallowed. - Incorporated Baph's latest additions, which include: new movable script items; new modder-orientated procedural distributions tables; new zombie outfit distributions; new vehicle distributions; more through junk tables; new items. - Longer evolved recipe names; now up to 3 ingredients will be displayed in the display name of compound recipe items. - Updated ISAddItemToRecipe and translation text with translation string support for new recipe naming system. - Added a panel to the Attachment Editor (Shift-F7) that is displayed when a "world" attachment is selected. This new panel displays the selected model as it would appear on the ground. - Removed the -Xss1280k stack-size JVM parameter from Linux ProjectZomboid.json files. - Increased Linux and Mac -Xmx=2048m to -Xmx=3072m max-heap JVM parameter to match Windows.
SFX
- Updated sound banks. - New action music track. - Fixed one male zombie voice looping the Hit sound. - Added missing sound for taking water from a dispenser. - Added an ambient sound to the Gas-2-Go pumps. - Set the value of the FMOD parameter "Generator" on powered items so they play a sound when powered by a generator. - Added ZombieCrawlLungeSwing and ZombieCrawlLungeHit sounds for zombie fence/window crawling attacks. - Zombies play their Attack and GettingUp sounds during fence/window crawling attack animation.
MAP
- Full export of the current Knox Event map. This will be the final B41 map update. - Updates many farms and farmsteads - Improves upper class areas in Louisville - Adds many new tiles on the tilesheets - Fixes many and various community-reported map issues and bugs
FOOD AND RECIPES
- New Ice Cream Cones now melt and produce a Melted Ice Cream Cone item. - New Gravy Boat, Baloney Slices, Salami, Salami Slices, and Snack Cakes models. - New Canned Condensed Milk item; can be used for the same recipes as milk. - Balance adjusted assorted values of food items and recipes. - Appropriate bottles can now hold gasoline. - Baloney and salami can be sliced. - Many food items have more options for being used as evolved recipe ingredients. - Recipes for Onigiri; Baguette Dough; Biscuit Dough; Meat Patty; Scooping Ice Cream; and Trays of Cookie Dough. - Crayons can be used to write notes and mark the map. - Toast can be made from Bread Slices by cooking them. - New recipe for a Cheese Sandwich item; cook a Cheese Sandwich to make it into a Grilled Cheese Sandwich. - Evolved Recipes for Ice Cream Cones; Sweet Pies; Bread; Toast; Bowls of Oatmeal; Mixed Beverages; and Glasses of Wine and Beer. This makes it possible to make foods such as Ice Cream Cones with candy and fruit on them, chocolate, cheese, or sunflower seed Bread, Toast with beans or avocado on it, Bowls of Oatmeal with berries and honey, cocktails, and such. - Whole Pizza item added. - Glasses and cup items can be filled with water. - WildGarlic item replaced by WildGarlic2 which is edible; this was done so that Wild Garlic could be a food item and be used in recipes. Otherwise identical to the old Wild Garlic. - Canned Condensed Milk item; can be used for the same recipes as milk. - Maggots that spawn with zombie corpses will be mildly poisonous. - Added evolved recipe item PizzaRecipe; "Pizza(Uncooked)" can be used to make an evolved recipe pizza with toppings. - When Hot Drink beverages are made using Black Sage, Common Mallow, or Lemon Grass the medicinal properties of those items are transferred to the Beverage, "Herbal Teas". - For herbal tea purposes, Hot Drinks are more flexible re ingredients and have special naming. - Coffee and Espresso Machine stoves will now only accept mugs and other appropriate items. - Added placeholder texture for Bag_MedicalBag. - Added BrokenGlass tag to broken glass movables and smashed bottle, and added recipecode code for the tag, for modding purposes. - Added support for the tag "SewingNeedle"; this will allow modders to add new mod items that can perform tailoring and wound stitching tasks. - More flexible Tag support for writing notes. - Added Tomato Paste item for pizza crafting. - Added Prepare Pizza recipe to make a RecipePizza base evolved recipe item.
BALANCE
- Baloney, Salami, Ham, Onions, and Watermelon must be sliced before being able to be used in evolved recipes. - Watermelon must be sliced or smashed before being able to eat it. - Values of many food items adjusted for balance, consistency, and QOL purposes such as allowing one instance of an item to be used in more evolved recipe portions. - Only Bread Slices and Toast can be placed inside Toasters. - Some recipes now require a bowl as well as a spatula, spoon or fork, to mix ingredients. - Many recipes adjusted to allow for more ingredient flexibility. - Hot water is now required to make Bowls of Oatmeal. Tim is now satisfied. - Added new param to Recipe: "InSameInventory". When this param true items gets only from same outermost inventory. (Need for fix Rip clothing only from player inventory or only from Floor/Container) - Changed Rip Clothing recipe - HandWeapon.weaponSprite is saved if it is different than the item-script's value. - Slightly increased zed attraction to gunshots in MP - Reduced the endurance loss when missing a hit (especially when pushing). - Set sprite properties on the "Wood Pegboard" and "Wood Top Workbench" in location_business_machinery_01 so they are movable. - Added all the missing translations to Moveables_EN.txt. Any missing translations for this are printed to the console when loading a game. - Added a "Slice Onion" recipe so Fried Onion Rings can be made. - Made the Composter thumpable by zombies. - Sometimes the corpses that spawn as the player explores the world will be fake dead. - As corpses progress in rot stages they have a chance of becoming fake dead. - Additional appropriate corpses spawned in randomized world stories will rarely be fake dead. - As corpses progress in rot stages they have a chance of spawning maggots in their inventory and in their square. - Food value and evolved recipe name adjustments for more flexible recipe usage and shorter compound names. - Obese is now mutually exclusive with Light Eater and Very Underweight is mutually exclusive with Hearty Appetite at character creations. - Adjusted weight of Spears - Floor tiles will now provide a maximum of 1 nail when dismantled. - Eggs are dangerous uncooked but now with a greatly reduced chance of causing food sickness. - Ice Cream Cones now melt and produce a Melted Ice Cream Cone item. - Ginseng now provides an Endurance Buff when used to make a Hot Beverage as a spice. - Added Basil to more recipes. - Better handling of evolved recipe item name when they only have spice ingredients. - Added the ability to install Makeshift Radios into vehicles; this was done for consistency with the requested fix of allowing Makeshift HAM radios to be installed in Ham radio vehicles. - Allow vehicles that have HAM radios to allow any sort of HAM radio installed in them; Luxury and Modern Cars will also always spawn with Premium Radios installed. - CDs in Premium radios will transfer to/from the vehicle they are being installed into/uninstalled from.
ANIMS
- Added new fill from bourbon bottle anim - Changed fill from bourbon bottle xml to use new anim Emote Wheel adjustments: - Adjusted some emote bone masks to reduce clipping - Added some stealth emote versions to reduce clipping and posing awkwardness - Added emote states for different weapon poses - Added an eating animation for WaterPotPasta WaterPotRice. The animation is the same as for drinking out of a pot. Idle extension adjustments: - Adjusted normal stance extensions bone masks to avoid clipping and awkward poses - Added normal stance extensions anims, where appropriate - Added normal stance extension xml for different weapon stances, where appropriate - Added masks to extended idle xmls to not clip as much, - Added relevant extended idle anims where needed - Capped off hoodieUP xfiles to stop transparency - Adjusted hoodieUP texture for new cap - Added blood locations to a couple of missing shirts - Re-exported female and zombie female base textures after eliminating some erroneous pixels causing holes - Adjusted Hat_Spiffo mask to display properly on character - re-exported missed zombie body textures that had outlying pixels - Adjusted male and female HighViz vests to visually work similar to hunting vests - Reworked Male and Female HighViz vests - Changed HighViz vest body location - Tweaked Hunting vest masks to work better with underlying clothes
MP
- Various anti-cheat improvements - Sync and physics improvements for vehicles. - Refactored and decreased vehicle physics packet size. - Vehicle interpolation was refactored and improved . - Improved towing physics and behaviour. - Updated PZBullet library on all platforms. - Rope constraint is added to PZBullet. Now used for vehicles instead of z-offset for point-to-point constraint. - Optimized Vehicle authorization on exit - Allow admins to repair clothes via Edit -> Condition, and remove holes when the item is set to max condition when the item is in their inventory. - Visual data for damaged/fixed clothing will now sync between clients. - Hit reaction translation length is now calculated by appropriate animation clip - Use WaveSignal packet on client - Improve auth/towing for cases with two drivers/swap tow - Stopped clients updating rotting corpses and fake-dead corpses. - Added check for IsoDeadBody.getHumanVisual() being null. - Server will send the success result of recipes checksum validation if the client is untouchable. - The game will calculate the checksum using the original recipe name. - The driver now stops the vehicle before they exit from the vehicle or switch seat. - Added ISBaseTimedAction timed action. - The BaseVehicle.setForceBrake function was added. Calling this function activates the brakes for 1 second. - The SystemDisabler.doDisableTunePhysicDelay variable was added - If FPS is capped the updatePhysic function receives time delta uses the PerformanceSettings.getLockFPS function. - The game server will not send the PlayerUpdateReliable packets from players who are far away. - Improvements for some anti-cheat checks - ServerOptions to enable/disable AntiCheatProtectionType checks for types 21-24 are added. - Added log message for LUA debugger - Improve vehicle logging - Add DebugLogStream noise methods - Logs can be filtered by severity - Reformatted log streams for damage, death, and multiplayer log types - Added server log command for vehicle traces (ex.: "log vehicle trace" or "log ve t" for short) - Command entered in general chat tab changes severity on the client - Command entered in admin chat tab changes severity on the server - Increased allowed map_meta.bin and map_zone.bin file size from 20MB to 50MB in multiplayer. - Fixed Zed appearance not syncing between players. - Fixed one player being able to use two radios / walkie talkies. - Fixed text not displaying above the placed HAM radio if there is a Walkie talkie in your hands. - Fixed vehicle radio using wrong coordinates. - Fixed vehicle radio not working in the same way as world placed radio. - Fixed other vehicle radio issues (radio stations, text, chat, VOIP). - Fixed vehicle radio text processing. - Fixed trailer authorizations / floaty trailers. - Fixed Item Remove tool not removing items from containers on a server. - Fixed clients sending StopSound packets to the server for zombie vocals. - Fixed clients sending climb-over-fence sounds and climb-through-window sounds for players and zombies. It seems each client runs the ClimbOverFenceState and ClimbThroughWindowState, so these sounds may be kept local. - Fixed clients sending climb-over-wall sounds. - Fixed seat authorizations. - Fixed null pointer exception in the VehicleManager.serverPacket function. - Fixed incorrect delay-tuning algorithm. - Fixed issues with Handle BufferOverflowException sending map_meta.bin and map_zone.bin for servers that use many map mods. - Fixed issues when characters are hit by trailers. - Fixed corpses disappeared when killed by trailer - Fixed issues with vehicle physics debug log messages. - Fixed Admin being kicked because of incorrect checksum. - Fixed car changing its place after re-login. - Fixed normal vehicle not being removable in mods. - Fixed movement sound when vehicle is stopped. - Fixed movement sound when player changed seat from driver to passenger. Redundant vehicle packet EngineSound flag is removed. - Fixed disappearing trailers. - Fixed physics update limits. - Fixed a vehicle and towed vehicle having different physic delays right after they were attached, causing clients to see the two closer than they actually were. - Fixed attached cars being disconnected after re-login. - Fixed passenger not being able to exit attached car if they occupy driver's seat while the car is being towed. - Fixed attached trailer twitching after player gets in car. The server gives authorization for a short time to a player if both vehicles don't have drivers. - Fixed empty RequestGetFull being sent. - Fixed vehicle passenger could have vehicle authorization after collision. - Fixed vehicle collision owner. - Fixed tow re-attach. - Fixed vehicle seat switching. - Fixed passengers seeing black boxes at high speeds. - Fixed vehicle not damaging players after re-login. - Fixed vehicle local simulation pass through another vehicle. - Fixed player can't become owner of pushed vehicle. - Fixed bouncing vehicle authorization at the end of local simulation. - Fixed player can exit or sleep in moving car. - Fixed rare incorrect vehicles authorization after towing. - Fixed engine sound disappearing without a driver. - Fixed car not stopping when driver changes their place due to cruise control. - Fixed error when try to type "[" in Item list viewer. - Fixed bug in the GameTime class. The class had insufficient precision when calculating the time in the syncServerTime function. - Fixed car stopping condition. The vehicle is stopped if the speed is less than 0.8 kmph. - Fixed clipping vehicles. - Fixed remote cars lag. The stepSimulation function will receive fixed update period. This period will not depend from FPS. - Fixed Vehicle simulation speed depending on locked fps. - Fixed the server kicking players when SystemDisabler.doAllowDebugConnections variable was set to true. - Added MapRemotePlayerVisibility server option to the server-settings editor and admin panel.
MODS
- Improved log for lua errors. Now it shows if it modified file error - Added list of mods in Pause menu + this list show mods that cause errors - Added additional check to Vehicle Create, Update and Install Radios that may help prevent mods that modify what data is sent to it from causing errors.
FORAGING
- Adjusted the position of foraging pin icons and direction arrows. The arrows always pointed to the northwest corner of a square, which didn't look right for dropped items. - Turn the player to face a forage item when picking it up. - Fixed the foraging system not handling non-rectangular zones (i.e., polygon or thick polyline zones). - Zone.getRandomSquareInZone() now handles polygon and thick polyline zones. - Zone.getTotalArea() returns the area of polygon and thick polyline zones. Note this isn't an accurate count of the squares in such zones, it is the sum of the area of each triangle that forms the polygon. For other types of zones, width * height is returned. - Added the OnLoadedMapZones event which is called after map_zone.bin is loaded. As before, the existing OnLoadMapZones event is triggered before map_zone.bin is loaded. - forageSystem.init() is called by the new OnLoadedMapZones event instead of OnLoadMapZones. - forageSystem.integrityCheck() checks whether the original map zone represented by each ForageZone still exists. - Changed double click behaviour of search mode pins to place items into the current selected player inventory panel if possible - Adjusted the search mode snow cover penalty limit as snowy weather combination could easily hit the penalty cap - Fixed an exploit with search focus when spamming the search mode button which could force items to change type - Fixed a visual issue with search focus trigger after spotting items which caused picked up items to sometimes be the original item
ADMIN/DEBUG
- Added Brush Tool for copying, destroying, and building specific Tiles, as well as a Fire, Smoke, and Explosion-Brush. . - Controls: - Turn on Brush Tool cheat via the Debug Menu -> "Cheats" -> "Brush Tool".. - Right-Click on any tile -> "Brush Tool Manager", "Copy tile", "Destroy Tile". - When a tile was picked from the Bruth Tool Manager -> keys "[" and "]" for scrolling between tiles. - Added trigger thunder tool (for admins). - Added respawn new loot in container by RMC-ContextOption on container button (when LootZed cheat on or isAdmin). - Changed LootZed manager opening on RMC-ContextOption on container button. - Allowed admin to create any VHS out of spawned VHS-home (like in debug). - Added sync for Health panel cheats. - Trailers debug is improved. - Small fix to Lua closure. - Improved spawn vehicle menu. - Added ability to change weight in Player Stats window. - Added destroying objects without a sledgehammer if building cheat is on. - Added sliders for change weight and calories in debug panel. - Added Step Into, Step Over, and Resume buttons to the Lua debugger. - Improved ContextMenu - Now you can add icons for context options: local myOption = context:addOption("My option name", ...) myOption.iconTexture = getTexture("media/ui/MyIconForOption.png") - Added new functions for context: insertOptionAfter(...), insertOptionBefore(...), removeOptionByName(...), getMenuOptionNames(...) - Improved Debug/Admin options. - Added new options for doors - Now you can set a building ID for doors and force-lock doors inside buildings. - Added Door Options can be found in the Right-Click Context Menu -> Objects. - To lock a door inside a building, set a Building Key ID for the door, set Force-Lock to "True" and click "Objects" -> "Door Lock" in the context menu. A key for the door can be spawned via the "Get Key" option. - Added 'make noise' options to attract zombies. - Added option for removing all zombies in a zone to the Admin tools. - Added icons in context menu for ADMIN/DEBUG options. - Added elapsed time since server started in server statistics info. - Added access to some Admin tools for moderators. - Added an external anim debug UI for Martin. - Removed the line "Press Esc to open Admin panel" from Server toolbox UI
[ 2022-08-09 09:09:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
Slapdashdoid
So for those who havent dipped their toe into unstable, heres a few highlights of what to expect:Optionally see other players from your safehouse / faction on the map.
Lots of extra security and anti-cheat to MP
Lots of improvements to recipes, new foodstuffs, improved containers, expanded recipes.
Improved error reporting for diagnosing mod errors or conflicts.
Lots of map polish, bug fixes, improvements.
Improved MP Admin tools.
About ten gazillion bug fixes.
Since Formosa UK (formerly Noiseworks) added the adaptive, reactive action music it went down really well. Making the music react to whats happening on-screen makes a big difference to immersing yourself into whats going on. The next stage of this plan is being put into place now, which will involve creating reactive versions of all the other tracks in the game. Not just action ones, but also all the various tracks and ambiences that currently exist. The idea is to allow for the non-action music to change in intensity from background ambient, to how it currently is now, to a more intense version, depending on what the player is doing. Do they leave their house after being in their house for some time? Maybe the ambient music bumps up a notch. Get into your car in the morning to go out on a looting run? Enter a house to loot? Find a rare item? There are countless little game moments we can tie into a music change, that will just help to make the music feel like its telling part of the story and provide much more variety in the music tracks through play.
Weve got a couple of sexy flowcharts from lead crafting crafter Turbo detailing some of the new post-apocalyptic professions that readers can pour over to get an idea of whats coming in Build 42. We intended to save this stuff until you could see it in-game, but it doesnt hurt to have a sneak peak. As shown with the liquid system a few weeks back, actual code-side work on the crafting is still mostly foundational. Getting and expanding systems in there to cater for different ingredients used for the new crafting and make them expandable and more in-depth, adding new properties and new systems to items to allow them to track more detail than just condition, but also quality and other parameters that will impact how they are used and what the results of their usage is. Allowing more nuance in spawning items so for example bottles of beer in a convenience store will likely be full, where a bottle in a house may be half empty, empty, or even contain another liquid entirely. Items in general will have more nuanced conditions and qualities, the crafting system being able to operate on nearby crafting stations which affect the results and also what recipes are available to the player. Also allowing for multi-tile machines that will operate as single objects, and allowing for tiles to be connected to cooperate with each other. A ton of foundational stuff that needs to be in place before the trees that have been designed are implemented, and progress has been good however there is still more to do, which limits what can be shown in videos at this point. At the moment we have about ten post-apocalypse professions, each with their own crafting tree, various multi tile workstations that are upgradable, and each with many produce that often includes ingredients from other professions, or can feed into other professions. This image does not expand for spoiler purposes, but is just to give an idea of how in-depth the crafting design is at this point these trees are only part of the full picture, and were still far from done with it:
If we look at, for example, the stone working profession you will see the level of detail we are going into with the new crafting. (please note these are early designs, and will likely be incomplete, and also we still need to balance and figure out the right level of detail from playtesting, as we want crafting to be in-depth, cooperative, but not drawn out and too grindy to be enjoyable) Below is an overview of the stonecutting profession.
As stated before, the goal with the crafting is to be able to produce anything that it would be realistically feasible for characters with those skills to produce, to dip our toe a bit more into the rebuild society than we previously did, for the sake of providing a better long-term MP (and SP with NPCs) experience for those who dont die screaming within the first week. Players will not be building computers or nuclear reactors, but any of the more primitive to medieval technology that makes sense we hope to be an option. It should be possible to spawn on a blank map with just wilderness and natural resources and have an engaging crafting and community building game, and adding the towns, cities and zombies to the mix will only make that more interesting. Heres another example, the bowyer:
As you can see, the goal is that each profession will be involved enough, with enough variety, and also enough interaction with other professions, to make it an interesting experience that a player can focus on within a community. We need to find the right balance between involved and not too drawn out, and also provide mechanisms for SP players to be able to use sandbox to allow them to dabble in professions alone, prior to NPCs, without running into a wall of specialisation limit meaning they cant function in all the professions required to create any items. And also not make the process of crafting an item so drawn out as to be discouraging players from taking part. Well go into more detail on the professions when they are starting to be implemented, and were more sure on the designs working out within the game. Its a hard balance to find, and well know more once these recipes and crafting trees get into the game once the systems are in place to accommodate them, and once these go out to the community we can get further feedback to balance the satisfaction vs grind balance of the depth of them.
Checking in with the multiplayer team, they have been working on a big refactor of the MP codebase in their ongoing work for moving player inventories to the server. This will pretty much eliminate all inventory cheating. In addition, they have been working on character creation being moved to the server too, which will forbid clients from cheating with character inventory, skills and perks before the character is added to the servers database. Were also going to be looking into a real anti cheat solution that should reduce the occurrences of cheaters significantly. While anti-cheat can be circumnavigated and its unlikely to get rid of any cheating whatsoever, as we are not a competitive FPS, we hope that there wont be quite the market for selling cheats for the cheat developers to be as willing to fight in the arms race required, and it will push cheat development above the skill level of most casual cheat makers. The MP team have also been making further improvements to vehicle syncing in MP, improving collisions and avoiding vehicles clipping into each other.
[ 2022-08-04 10:47:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello all! Afraid this will be a more hastily put together than usual Thursdoid, usual Thursdoid writer is away this week, and we originally planned to do a stable release today.
Last minute, however, literally a couple of hours ago in fact, we concluded that this would be a bad idea not only in the middle of the Steam Survival Sale, but also a big week long and rather huge Spanish streamer event (go check it out!) that heralded some of our biggest Twitch numbers ever (thanks again to Silithur for organizing it!).
Stable releases are always nerve-wracking, but doubled up with the zombie respawn issues that weve been struggling with on unstable it just felt like a bad time to throw any dice. We believe those issues are fixed, and have done significant internal testing, however throwing it in front of a huge number of players on stable we cant be absolutely sure it wont still cause problems, particularly with mods, so doing a release today under these circumstances seemed a risky endeavour with so many new people being exposed to the game.
As such, we will likely wait until the coming Monday to flip the switch. This gives us a few more days to see if the zombie spawning reports on the unstable branch start to disappear after the fix went live and is probably the safer option, as eager as we are to see the update out and free up the team for bigger commits toward the next update.
41.73
So for those who havent dipped their toe into unstable, heres a few highlights of what to expect:
ADAPTIVE MUSIC
Since Formosa UK (formerly Noiseworks) added the adaptive, reactive action music it went down really well. Making the music react to whats happening on-screen makes a big difference to immersing yourself into whats going on. The next stage of this plan is being put into place now, which will involve creating reactive versions of all the other tracks in the game. Not just action ones, but also all the various tracks and ambiences that currently exist. The idea is to allow for the non-action music to change in intensity from background ambient, to how it currently is now, to a more intense version, depending on what the player is doing. Do they leave their house after being in their house for some time? Maybe the ambient music bumps up a notch. Get into your car in the morning to go out on a looting run? Enter a house to loot? Find a rare item? There are countless little game moments we can tie into a music change, that will just help to make the music feel like its telling part of the story and provide much more variety in the music tracks through play.
B42 CRAFTING
Weve got a couple of sexy flowcharts from lead crafting crafter Turbo detailing some of the new post-apocalyptic professions that readers can pour over to get an idea of whats coming in Build 42. We intended to save this stuff until you could see it in-game, but it doesnt hurt to have a sneak peak. As shown with the liquid system a few weeks back, actual code-side work on the crafting is still mostly foundational. Getting and expanding systems in there to cater for different ingredients used for the new crafting and make them expandable and more in-depth, adding new properties and new systems to items to allow them to track more detail than just condition, but also quality and other parameters that will impact how they are used and what the results of their usage is. Allowing more nuance in spawning items so for example bottles of beer in a convenience store will likely be full, where a bottle in a house may be half empty, empty, or even contain another liquid entirely. Items in general will have more nuanced conditions and qualities, the crafting system being able to operate on nearby crafting stations which affect the results and also what recipes are available to the player. Also allowing for multi-tile machines that will operate as single objects, and allowing for tiles to be connected to cooperate with each other. A ton of foundational stuff that needs to be in place before the trees that have been designed are implemented, and progress has been good however there is still more to do, which limits what can be shown in videos at this point. At the moment we have about ten post-apocalypse professions, each with their own crafting tree, various multi tile workstations that are upgradable, and each with many produce that often includes ingredients from other professions, or can feed into other professions. This image does not expand for spoiler purposes, but is just to give an idea of how in-depth the crafting design is at this point these trees are only part of the full picture, and were still far from done with it:
If we look at, for example, the stone working profession you will see the level of detail we are going into with the new crafting. (please note these are early designs, and will likely be incomplete, and also we still need to balance and figure out the right level of detail from playtesting, as we want crafting to be in-depth, cooperative, but not drawn out and too grindy to be enjoyable) Below is an overview of the stonecutting profession.
As stated before, the goal with the crafting is to be able to produce anything that it would be realistically feasible for characters with those skills to produce, to dip our toe a bit more into the rebuild society than we previously did, for the sake of providing a better long-term MP (and SP with NPCs) experience for those who dont die screaming within the first week. Players will not be building computers or nuclear reactors, but any of the more primitive to medieval technology that makes sense we hope to be an option. It should be possible to spawn on a blank map with just wilderness and natural resources and have an engaging crafting and community building game, and adding the towns, cities and zombies to the mix will only make that more interesting. Heres another example, the bowyer:
As you can see, the goal is that each profession will be involved enough, with enough variety, and also enough interaction with other professions, to make it an interesting experience that a player can focus on within a community. We need to find the right balance between involved and not too drawn out, and also provide mechanisms for SP players to be able to use sandbox to allow them to dabble in professions alone, prior to NPCs, without running into a wall of specialisation limit meaning they cant function in all the professions required to create any items. And also not make the process of crafting an item so drawn out as to be discouraging players from taking part. Well go into more detail on the professions when they are starting to be implemented, and were more sure on the designs working out within the game. Its a hard balance to find, and well know more once these recipes and crafting trees get into the game once the systems are in place to accommodate them, and once these go out to the community we can get further feedback to balance the satisfaction vs grind balance of the depth of them.
FUTURE MP WORK
Checking in with the multiplayer team, they have been working on a big refactor of the MP codebase in their ongoing work for moving player inventories to the server. This will pretty much eliminate all inventory cheating. In addition, they have been working on character creation being moved to the server too, which will forbid clients from cheating with character inventory, skills and perks before the character is added to the servers database. Were also going to be looking into a real anti cheat solution that should reduce the occurrences of cheaters significantly. While anti-cheat can be circumnavigated and its unlikely to get rid of any cheating whatsoever, as we are not a competitive FPS, we hope that there wont be quite the market for selling cheats for the cheat developers to be as willing to fight in the arms race required, and it will push cheat development above the skill level of most casual cheat makers. The MP team have also been making further improvements to vehicle syncing in MP, improving collisions and avoiding vehicles clipping into each other.
[ 2022-08-04 10:47:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Liquid Zedball
We have the next patch to the stable branch primed and ready to go, however an issue that our fantastic Unstable beta testers have flagged is keeping it held in its pen for a little longer. Players reported that some houses theyd cleared were spawning zeds upon booting up the new build, which alerted us to a snag in our map export process not dealing with map boundaries changing with map expansions. All previous map expansions came along with forced save incompatibility so this crept through unnoticed until now. While its an aggravation rather than a save-breaker, we didnt want to send a build with a known issue out to the masses and have spent the last few days setting up a fix. This will need some testing, after which well be looking to pump out the latest version next week. If youre interested in the changelist, or want to jump in to try it out, then you can find the unstable release notes for 41.72 and 41.73 behind the hotlinks.
One of the focus points of Build 42 is on extended survival in the months and years beyond the initial Knox Event outbreak. For this, we are revamping our crafting system and Turbos role has been in laying new foundations for a set-up that allows for: crafted items that have more RPG-like variable attributes based on the crafters skill, stats of input items that are reflected in the attributes of a final output item, and the ability of the game itself to recognise all these different attributes when an item is being passed between all of its various different locations and systems. The next stage of this work, meanwhile, has been in taking this same sort of mentality to the liquids in the game and also making them ever more interesting in our new crafting set-up.
Lets start with a video, and then move into some explanation. [previewyoutube=WI8ESJBOZt4;full][/previewyoutube] So what exactly does this mean for the water, paint, gas, alcohol, washing detergent and bleach of the Knox Event? Essentially all fluids will be defined and stored in a global registry, which is where we as devs can add new vanilla liquids but also will make the system very moddable. Each definition will store basic info such as ID, name, colour etc then has different categories it can belong to like Beverage, Alcoholic, Fuel, Flammable and such. Beyond that we also tie in properties per litre of this particular fluid: for example Carbs, Proteins, Alcohol percentage or Energy if its a flammable fuel. Liquids that are hazardous or poisonous can also have modifiers that configure the maximum poison effect, and how the effect behaves when mixed. So yes, were going to have the most realistic bleach-drinking ever seen in gaming.
Containers are the coding class that actually store the fluids, and are the way in which the game code interacts with the above definitions. Inventory items, objects found in the world and vehicles will all have a fluid container which will allow them to store and use the liquids/fuels/whatever that they contain. Each container also has information stored with it that shows what particular fluids have been mixed in, and their content percentages relative to each other. The system calculates and caches the summary of all the containing fluids properties based on their percentages. So, if you add 80% Soda and 20% pure alcohol the mixture fluid in the container will have 80% of the sodas carbs, proteins etc and 20% alcohol. Then, when transferred again, the right ratios will still be maintained.
Finally, we hear you cry, cocktail mixing will be a part of the apocalypse! Yes, but also consider the applications this will bring to post-apocalyptic crafting as well as to more basic stuff like mixing paints to create different colours, providing different fuels and different ways to tamper with said fuels. Certain versions of our planned workstations, say one for brewing, could have one or more fluidcontainers attached while also allowing other ingredients as item inputs. Likewise we can have recipes that require more precise mixing and concentrations should we desire it.
The system does retain some control over your Georges Marvellous Medicine creations. We can put limits around what can, and cannot, be mixed however were not 100% on how many limitations we will put on things right now. This will probably come through testing later down the line. Unrestricted mixing would mean, for example, that any Fluid can be mixed with Fuel, which would mean that the energy value property per litre would go down when mixed, and that anything using the fuel such as a car or generator would have its operation and potential damage governed by the sort of fuel that had been put in. The ability to recognise tampered fuel, poison etc. would (as usual) be gated behind the games professions so a mechanic might smell something suspicious with watered down gas, or a chef might spot something odd with a mild concentration of something nasty in a bottle of juice. When it comes to poisonous liquids, each has a maximum effect (mild, medium, severe, deadly etc) and control parameters such as a minimum volume and mix ratio. So, if a poison has max effect deadly and the minimum amount required for death is 200ml and you have 100ml mixed into a bottle then the final effect when drinking will most likely be a medium poisoning. The new system will also add new depth to such things as filling up a vehicle with gas, or siphoning gas from a cars tank but well also retain the games current quick context options like fill bottle from tap to keep things speedy.
Domestic and wild animals, albeit with fairly basic AI brains, will also be a part of Build 42 and we have already shown our cows, sheep and deer. A fairly realistic take on poultry-keeping will also be part of this. Please note the following UI is super WIP! We may well end up with icons instead of the 3D chickens.
Based on our own experiences with keeping chickens if you have a henhouse you will have to close its door every night after your brood have gone in to roost. Otherwise theres a very real chance of Fantastic Mister Fox paying a visit and stealing a few, and potentially leave others dead in their pen. Youd be advised not to forget to let your hens back out in the morning either for fear of them losing their condition, and adding to the mess in the henhouse that will need cleaning out. Hens will also enter the nesting boxes within the henhouse to lay their eggs, and from which youll have to collect the eggs on a regular basis if you havent collected recently then hens will choose to lay outside in their pen instead, where theres an added risk of them being eaten by wild animals or going bad.
While were going in DEEP (as is generally our way) on stuff like the above Build 42 will also feature all manner of other improvements to the game engine, MP systems and general zombie survival and early game stuff too. So dont fret too much if aspects of the above dont exactly match your own play-style. It should also be said that its still some ways off partly because of dev illness (and recovery!) that weve discussed before, and partly because a proportion of the team are still maintaining and improving Build 41. From now on youll likely notice the changelist of 41 patches shrink a little, as team members are taken off 41 and plugged into work on features within the 42 matrix.
We are back on the hunt for an Animations Engineer / Technical Wizard most likely someone from the AAA game development space who has pines for joining a close-knit team of indie devs. If this is you, or someone you know, then our job page lives here! This weeks forlorn firemen from OtakuYazawa. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us? Details here.
[ 2022-07-21 19:25:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Haylo survivors.
41.73 STABLE
We have the next patch to the stable branch primed and ready to go, however an issue that our fantastic Unstable beta testers have flagged is keeping it held in its pen for a little longer. Players reported that some houses theyd cleared were spawning zeds upon booting up the new build, which alerted us to a snag in our map export process not dealing with map boundaries changing with map expansions. All previous map expansions came along with forced save incompatibility so this crept through unnoticed until now. While its an aggravation rather than a save-breaker, we didnt want to send a build with a known issue out to the masses and have spent the last few days setting up a fix. This will need some testing, after which well be looking to pump out the latest version next week. If youre interested in the changelist, or want to jump in to try it out, then you can find the unstable release notes for 41.72 and 41.73 behind the hotlinks.
42 CONTENT
One of the focus points of Build 42 is on extended survival in the months and years beyond the initial Knox Event outbreak. For this, we are revamping our crafting system and Turbos role has been in laying new foundations for a set-up that allows for: crafted items that have more RPG-like variable attributes based on the crafters skill, stats of input items that are reflected in the attributes of a final output item, and the ability of the game itself to recognise all these different attributes when an item is being passed between all of its various different locations and systems. The next stage of this work, meanwhile, has been in taking this same sort of mentality to the liquids in the game and also making them ever more interesting in our new crafting set-up.
WET STUFF
Lets start with a video, and then move into some explanation. [previewyoutube=WI8ESJBOZt4;full][/previewyoutube] So what exactly does this mean for the water, paint, gas, alcohol, washing detergent and bleach of the Knox Event? Essentially all fluids will be defined and stored in a global registry, which is where we as devs can add new vanilla liquids but also will make the system very moddable. Each definition will store basic info such as ID, name, colour etc then has different categories it can belong to like Beverage, Alcoholic, Fuel, Flammable and such. Beyond that we also tie in properties per litre of this particular fluid: for example Carbs, Proteins, Alcohol percentage or Energy if its a flammable fuel. Liquids that are hazardous or poisonous can also have modifiers that configure the maximum poison effect, and how the effect behaves when mixed. So yes, were going to have the most realistic bleach-drinking ever seen in gaming.
CONTAINERS
Containers are the coding class that actually store the fluids, and are the way in which the game code interacts with the above definitions. Inventory items, objects found in the world and vehicles will all have a fluid container which will allow them to store and use the liquids/fuels/whatever that they contain. Each container also has information stored with it that shows what particular fluids have been mixed in, and their content percentages relative to each other. The system calculates and caches the summary of all the containing fluids properties based on their percentages. So, if you add 80% Soda and 20% pure alcohol the mixture fluid in the container will have 80% of the sodas carbs, proteins etc and 20% alcohol. Then, when transferred again, the right ratios will still be maintained.
USAGE
Finally, we hear you cry, cocktail mixing will be a part of the apocalypse! Yes, but also consider the applications this will bring to post-apocalyptic crafting as well as to more basic stuff like mixing paints to create different colours, providing different fuels and different ways to tamper with said fuels. Certain versions of our planned workstations, say one for brewing, could have one or more fluidcontainers attached while also allowing other ingredients as item inputs. Likewise we can have recipes that require more precise mixing and concentrations should we desire it.
The system does retain some control over your Georges Marvellous Medicine creations. We can put limits around what can, and cannot, be mixed however were not 100% on how many limitations we will put on things right now. This will probably come through testing later down the line. Unrestricted mixing would mean, for example, that any Fluid can be mixed with Fuel, which would mean that the energy value property per litre would go down when mixed, and that anything using the fuel such as a car or generator would have its operation and potential damage governed by the sort of fuel that had been put in. The ability to recognise tampered fuel, poison etc. would (as usual) be gated behind the games professions so a mechanic might smell something suspicious with watered down gas, or a chef might spot something odd with a mild concentration of something nasty in a bottle of juice. When it comes to poisonous liquids, each has a maximum effect (mild, medium, severe, deadly etc) and control parameters such as a minimum volume and mix ratio. So, if a poison has max effect deadly and the minimum amount required for death is 200ml and you have 100ml mixed into a bottle then the final effect when drinking will most likely be a medium poisoning. The new system will also add new depth to such things as filling up a vehicle with gas, or siphoning gas from a cars tank but well also retain the games current quick context options like fill bottle from tap to keep things speedy.
HUTCHES
Domestic and wild animals, albeit with fairly basic AI brains, will also be a part of Build 42 and we have already shown our cows, sheep and deer. A fairly realistic take on poultry-keeping will also be part of this. Please note the following UI is super WIP! We may well end up with icons instead of the 3D chickens.
Based on our own experiences with keeping chickens if you have a henhouse you will have to close its door every night after your brood have gone in to roost. Otherwise theres a very real chance of Fantastic Mister Fox paying a visit and stealing a few, and potentially leave others dead in their pen. Youd be advised not to forget to let your hens back out in the morning either for fear of them losing their condition, and adding to the mess in the henhouse that will need cleaning out. Hens will also enter the nesting boxes within the henhouse to lay their eggs, and from which youll have to collect the eggs on a regular basis if you havent collected recently then hens will choose to lay outside in their pen instead, where theres an added risk of them being eaten by wild animals or going bad.
OTHER STUFF
While were going in DEEP (as is generally our way) on stuff like the above Build 42 will also feature all manner of other improvements to the game engine, MP systems and general zombie survival and early game stuff too. So dont fret too much if aspects of the above dont exactly match your own play-style. It should also be said that its still some ways off partly because of dev illness (and recovery!) that weve discussed before, and partly because a proportion of the team are still maintaining and improving Build 41. From now on youll likely notice the changelist of 41 patches shrink a little, as team members are taken off 41 and plugged into work on features within the 42 matrix.
JOB AD AGAIN
We are back on the hunt for an Animations Engineer / Technical Wizard most likely someone from the AAA game development space who has pines for joining a close-knit team of indie devs. If this is you, or someone you know, then our job page lives here! This weeks forlorn firemen from OtakuYazawa. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us? Details here.
[ 2022-07-21 19:25:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.73 UNSTABLE Released
Gas container tooltip tweaks:
1) When adding fuel to a generator, tooltips show the percentage the generator's fuel percentage will increase.
2) When adding/siphoning fuel to/from a vehicle, tooltips show the item capacity in liters (to match the mechanics ui).
3) When taking fuel from a gas pump, tooltips show the item capacity in drainable units.
Updated Community Translations
Added icons + textures for Medical/Trauma Bag and Canned Fruit Beverage.
Added masks to extended idle xmls to not clip as much,
Added relevant extended idle anims where needed
Capped off hoodieUP xfiles to stop transparency
Adjusted hoodieUP texture for new cap
Added blood locations to a couple of missing shirts
Re-exported female and zombie female base textures after eliminating some erroneous pixels causing holes
Adjusted Hat_Spiffo mask to display properly on character
Re-exported missed zombie body textures that had outlying pixels
Adjusted male and female HighViz vests to visually work similar to hunting vests
Reworked Male and Female HighViz vests
Changed HighViz vest body location
Tweaked Hunting vest masks to work better with underlying clothes
Added additional check to Vehicle Create, Update and Install Radios that may help prevent mods that modify what data is sent to it from causing errors.
Changed double click behaviour of search mode pins to place items into the current selected player inventory panel if possible
Adjusted the search mode snow cover penalty limit as snowy weather combination could easily hit the penalty cap
Fixed an exploit with search focus when spamming the search mode button which could force items to change type
Fixed a visual issue with search focus trigger after spotting items which caused picked up items to sometimes be the original item
Ginseng now provides an Endurance Buff when used to make a Hot Beverage as a spice.
Added Basil to more recipes.
Better handling of evolved recipe item name when they only have spice ingredients.
Added the ability to install Makeshift Radios into vehicles; this was done for consistency with the requested fix of allowing Makeshift HAM radios to be installed in Ham radio vehicles.
Allow vehicles that have HAM radios to allow any sort of HAM radio installed in them; Luxury and Modern Cars will also always spawn with Premium Radios installed.
CDs in Premium radios will transfer to/from the vehicle they are being installed into/uninstalled from.
Fixed mapper-placed broken windows not being smashed IsoWindow objects.
Fixed vehicle lightbar lights and siren continuing to operate after the part condition drops to zero (due to zombie thumping).
The SirenShutoffHours sandbox option already exists to prevent griefing in multiplayer. Is there any need for zombies to destroy the lightbar?
Fixed the lightbar option not appearing in the vehicle radio menu after the part is destroyed.
The option appears now, but the lights and siren won't operate at zero condition.
Fixed multiple lightbar parts appearing in the vehicle mechanics ui.
Fixed incorrect effect of distance on critical-hit chance with firearms.
Fixed pans holding less water than pots.
Fixed issue with zombie maggots + fishing; zombie corpses now spawn poisoned Base.Maggots and not Base.Maggots2 which are now obsolete.
Fixed issues with new gas bottles and containers in backpacks.
Fixed missing distributions for barbequestore and bathroom/shelves.
Fixed Canned Fruit Beverage not having reduce thirst value.
Fixed Obese and Fit not being fully mutually exclusive in MainCreationMethods.lua.
Fixed missing translation string ContextMenu_FuelCapacity.
Fixed inconsistent GoodHot from WildEggs tooltip.
Fixed ContextMenu_PanicNoSleep not being translated in one instance.
Fixed IsWaterSource parameter from BleachBottleGasoline.
Fixed issues with eating quarter and half portions of small amounts of food.
Fixed recipes to tear denim and leather - temporary fix pending improvement.
Fixed adding whole and uncooked animal as a bait, removing and butchering it returning a "full" hunger reduction value animal
Fixed missing tooltip for SafehouseAllowNonResidential server option
Fixed ContextMenu_ContextMenu_FuelCapacity typo.
Fixed the wrong sprites being used for windows sometimes.
Fixed one of the molotov cocktail producing unwanted empty bottles.
Fixed added AddIngredientIfCooked:true to the Burger evolved recipe so baked bread slices can be used to make burgers
Fixed missing period in Tooltip_item_RainFromGroundOnlyPurifyMicrowave.
Fixed missing period in Tooltip_item_RainFromGround.
Fixed hot drinks with alcohol being too strong.
Fixed better tooltips for tainted water items in plastic containers that can only be boiled in microwaves.
Fixed baked bread slices not being usable when making sandwiches; this was on account of them being cooked, the evolved recipe for sandwiches was changed to allow cooked bread slices.
Fixed missing item Violets that got accidentally removed
Fixed Peaches having evolved recipe food type "Berry"
Fixed various mapping issues
[ 2022-07-18 17:15:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
Barring any necessary hotfixes, this will likely be the last unstable patch before pushing the contents of 41.72 and 41.73 into the main stable branch.
NEW
MODELS AND ANIMS
MODDING
FORAGING / SEARCH MODE
BALANCE
FIXES
[ 2022-07-18 17:15:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.72 UNSTABLE Released
Added the MapRemotePlayerVisibility server option for Multiplayer.
1 = Remote players aren't visible on the in-game map
2 = Remote players in the same faction or sharing a safehouse are visible
3 = Remote players are always visible
The OPT button in the in-game map that was previously visible only in debug mode or for admins is now always visible.
When not in debug mode, these options are available:
- Players
- Remote Players (client only)
- Player Names (client only)
- Symbols
Added MapRemotePlayerVisibility server option to the server-settings editor and admin panel.
Give zombies that are targeting a player higher priority for pathfinding than other zombies.
Added a panel to the Attachment Editor (Shift-F7) that is displayed when a "world" attachment is selected. This new panel displays the selected model as it would appear on the ground.
Added new loot maps from Pat Bren.
Split the single Louisville map-item into nine separate maps.
Added Louisville maps to the loot tables.
Added highlighting to changed Zombie Lore Sandbox Options (options that differ from Apocalypse mode are highlighted).
Added an "AttachedToGlass" tile prop to fix signs attached to windows not being removed when breaking the window.
Prevent the loot window from popping open when clicking on objects when using the furniture-manipulation tools.
Added "Default=" to combobox sandbox-option tooltips.
Allow empty bottles to store gasoline.
Added water capacity in context tooltip when filling water container (if only 1 item type)
Updated community translations.
Updated credits.
Improved icon draw for context menu
Added ISContextMenu.addDebugOption() which adds an option with iconTexture=media/ui/BugIcon.png.
Added a way to rename a savefile in the load-game "More..." panel.
Added the various pictures frame missing (not spawning yet, also no inventory icon yet - currently using empty frame icon)
Allow building double doors inside buildings. This is to fix a bug where double doors couldn't be built on some outer walls of buildings.
Added checks for wall-like obstacles that should prevent opening or closing double doors.
Don't allow building stairs where there are walls or obstacles at the top. The player will pass through these when going up the stairs. Building walls or obstacles at the top of stairs was already disallowed.
Incorporated Baph's latest additions, which include: new movable script items; new modder-orientated procedural distributions tables; new zombie outfit distributions; new vehicle distributions; more through junk tables; new items.
Longer evolved recipe names; now up to 3 ingredients will be displayed in the display name of compound recipe items.
Updated ISAddItemToRecipe and translation text with translation string support for new recipe naming system.
Updated sound banks.
- New action music track.
- Fixed one male zombie voice looping the Hit sound.
- Added missing sound for taking water from a dispenser.
Added an ambient sound to the Gas-2-Go pumps.
Set the value of the FMOD parameter "Generator" on powered items so they play a sound when powered by a generator.
Added ZombieCrawlLungeSwing and ZombieCrawlLungeHit sounds for zombie fence/window crawling attacks.
Zombies play their Attack and GettingUp sounds during fence/window crawling attack animation.
Full export of the current Knox Event map, not including new areas being worked on. This will be the final B41 map update.
Updates many farms and farmsteads
Improves upper class areas in Louisville
Adds many new tiles on the tilesheets
Fixes many and various community-reported map issues and bugs
New Ice Cream Cones now melt and produce a Melted Ice Cream Cone item.
New Gravy Boat, Baloney Slices, Salami, Salami Slices, and Snack Cakes models.
New Canned Condensed Milk item; can be used for the same recipes as milk.
Balance adjusted assorted values of food items and recipes.
Appropriate bottles can now hold gasoline.
Baloney and salami can be sliced.
Many food items have more options for being used as evolved recipe ingredients.
Recipes for Onigiri; Baguette Dough; Biscuit Dough; Meat Patty; Scooping Ice Cream; and Trays of Cookie Dough.
Crayons can be used to write notes and mark the map.
Toast can be made from Bread Slices by cooking them.
New recipe for a Cheese Sandwich item; cook a Cheese Sandwich to make it into a Grilled Cheese Sandwich.
Evolved Recipes for Ice Cream Cones; Sweet Pies; Bread; Toast; Bowls of Oatmeal; Mixed Beverages; and Glasses of Wine and Beer. This makes it possible to make foods such as Ice Cream Cones with candy and fruit on them, chocolate, cheese, or sunflower seed Bread, Toast with beans or avocado on it, Bowls of Oatmeal with berries and honey, cocktails, and such.
Whole Pizza item added.
Glasses and cup items can be filled with water.
WildGarlic item replaced by WildGarlic2 which is edible; this was done so that Wild Garlic could be a food item and be used in recipes. Otherwise identical to the old Wild Garlic.
Canned Condensed Milk item; can be used for the same recipes as milk.
Maggots that spawn with zombie corpses will be mildly poisonous.
Added evolved recipe item PizzaRecipe; "Pizza(Uncooked)" can be used to make an evolved recipe pizza with toppings.
When Hot Drink beverages are made using Black Sage, Common Mallow, or Lemon Grass the medicinal properties of those items are transferred to the Beverage, "Herbal Teas".
For herbal tea purposes, Hot Drinks are more flexible re ingredients and have special naming.
Coffee and Espresso Machine stoves will now only accept mugs and other appropriate items.
Added placeholder texture for Bag_MedicalBag.
Added BrokenGlass tag to broken glass movables and smashed bottle, and added recipecode code for the tag, for modding purposes.
Added support for the tag "SewingNeedle"; this will allow modders to add new mod items that can perform tailoring and wound stitching tasks.
More flexible Tag support for writing notes.
Added Tomato Paste item for pizza crafting.
Added Prepare Pizza recipe to make a RecipePizza base evolved recipe item.
Baloney, Salami, Ham, Onions, and Watermelon must be sliced before being able to be used in evolved recipes.
Watermelon must be sliced or smashed before being able to eat it.
Values of many food items adjusted for balance, consistency, and QOL purposes such as allowing one instance of an item to be used in more evolved recipe portions.
Only Bread Slices and Toast can be placed inside Toasters.
Some recipes now require a bowl as well as a spatula, spoon or fork, to mix ingredients.
Many recipes adjusted to allow for more ingredient flexibility.
Hot water is now required to make Bowls of Oatmeal. Tim is now satisfied.
Added new param to Recipe: "InSameInventory". When this param true items gets only from same outermost inventory. (Need for fix Rip clothing only from player inventory or only from Floor/Container)
Changed Rip Clothing recipe
HandWeapon.weaponSprite is saved if it is different than the item-script's value.
Slightly increased zed attraction to gunshots in MP
Reduced the endurance loss when missing a hit (especially when pushing).
Set sprite properties on the "Wood Pegboard" and "Wood Top Workbench" in location_business_machinery_01 so they are movable.
Added all the missing translations to Moveables_EN.txt. Any missing translations for this are printed to the console when loading a game.
Added a "Slice Onion" recipe so Fried Onion Rings can be made.
Made the Composter thumpable by zombies.
Sometimes the corpses that spawn as the player explores the world will be fake dead.
As corpses progress in rot stages they have a chance of becoming fake dead.
Additional appropriate corpses spawned in randomized world stories will rarely be fake dead.
As corpses progress in rot stages they have a chance of spawning maggots in their inventory and in their square.
Food value and evolved recipe name adjustments for more flexible recipe usage and shorter compound names.
Obese is now mutually exclusive with Light Eater and Very Underweight is mutually exclusive with Hearty Appetite at character creations.
Adjusted weight of Spears
Floor tiles will now provide a maximum of 1 nail when dismantled.
Eggs are dangerous uncooked but now with a greatly reduced chance of causing food sickness.
Ice Cream Cones now melt and produce a Melted Ice Cream Cone item.
Added new fill from bourbon bottle anim
Changed fill from bourbon bottle xml to use new anim
Emote Wheel adjustments:
Adjusted some emote bone masks to reduce clipping
Added some stealth emote versions to reduce clipping and posing awkwardness
Added emote states for different weapon poses
Added an eating animation for WaterPotPasta WaterPotRice. The animation is the same as for drinking out of a pot.
Idle extension adjustments:
Adjusted normal stance extensions bone masks to avoid clipping and awkward poses
Added normal stance extensions anims, where appropriate
Added normal stance extension xml for different weapon stances, where appropriate
Various anti-cheat improvements
Sync and physics improvements for vehicles.
- Refactored and decreased vehicle physics packet size.
- Vehicle interpolation was refactored and improved .
Improved towing physics and behaviour.
- Updated PZBullet library on all platforms.
- Rope constraint is added to PZBullet. Now used for vehicles instead of z-offset for point-to-point constraint.
Optimized Vehicle authorization on exit
Allow admins to repair clothes via Edit -> Condition, and remove wholes when the item is set to max condition when the item is in their inventory.
Visual data for damaged/fixed clothing will now sync between clients.
Hit reaction translation length is now calculated by appropriate animation clip
Use WaveSignal packet on client
Improve auth/towing for cases with two drivers/swap tow
Stopped clients updating rotting corpses and fake-dead corpses.
Added check for IsoDeadBody.getHumanVisual() being null.
Server will send the success result of recipes checksum validation if the client is untouchable.
- The game will calculate the checksum using the original recipe name.
The driver now stops the vehicle before they exit from the vehicle or switch seat.
- Added ISBaseTimedAction timed action.
- The IGUI_PlayerText_CanNotExitFromMovingCar string is not used now.
- The BaseVehicle.setForceBrake function was added. Calling this function activates the brakes for 1 second.
The SystemDisabler.doDisableTunePhysicDelay variable was added
If FPS is capped the updatePhysic function receives time delta uses the PerformanceSettings.getLockFPS function.
The game server will not send the PlayerUpdateReliable packets from players who are far away.
Improvements for some anti-cheat checks
ServerOptions to enable/disable AntiCheatProtectionType checks for types 21-24 are added.
Added log message for LUA debugger
Improve vehicle logging
- Add DebugLogStream noise methods
- Logs can be filtered by severity
Reformatted log streams for damage, death, and multiplayer log types
Added server log command for vehicle traces (ex.: "log vehicle trace" or "log ve t" for short)
- Command entered in general chat tab changes severity on the client
- Command entered in admin chat tab changes severity on the server
Fixed Zed appearance not syncing between players.
Fixed one player being able to use two radios / walkie talkies.
Fixed text not displaying above the placed HAM radio if there is a Walkie talkie in your hands.
Fixed vehicle radio using wrong coordinates.
Fixed vehicle radio not working in the same way as world placed radio.
Fixed other vehicle radio issues (radio stations, text, chat, VOIP).
Fixed vehicle radio text processing.
Fixed trailer authorizations / floaty trailers.
Fixed Item Remove tool not removing items from containers on a server.
Fixed clients sending StopSound packets to the server for zombie vocals.
Fixed clients sending climb-over-fence sounds and climb-through-window sounds for players and zombies. It seems each client runs the ClimbOverFenceState and ClimbThroughWindowState, so these sounds may be kept local.
Fixed clients sending climb-over-wall sounds.
Fixed seat authorizations.
Fixed null pointer exception in the VehicleManager.serverPacket function.
Fixed incorrect delay-tuning algorithm.
Fixed issues with Handle BufferOverflowException sending map_meta.bin and map_zone.bin for servers that use many map mods.
Fixed issues when characters are hit by trailers.
Fixed corpses disappeared when killed by trailer
Fixed issues with vehicle physics debug log messages.
Fixed Admin being kicked because of incorrect checksum.
Fixed car changing its place after re-login.
Fixed normal vehicle not being removable in mods.
Fixed movement sound when vehicle is stopped.
Fixed movement sound when player changed seat from driver to passenger. Redundant vehicle packet EngineSound flag is removed.
Fixed disappearing trailers.
Fixed physics update limits.
Fixed a vehicle and towed vehicle having different physic delays right after they were attached, causing clients to see the two closer than they actually were.
Fixed attached cars being disconnected after re-login.
Fixed passenger not being able to exit attached car if they occupy driver's seat while the car is being towed.
Fixed attached trailer twitching after player gets in car. The server gives authorization for a short time to a player if both vehicles don't have drivers.
Fixed empty RequestGetFull being sent.
Fixed vehicle passenger could have vehicle authorization after collision.
Fixed vehicle collision owner.
Fixed tow re-attach.
Fixed vehicle seat switching.
Fixed passengers seeing black boxes at high speeds.
Fixed vehicle not damaging players after re-login.
Fixed vehicle local simulation pass through another vehicle.
Fixed player can't become owner of pushed vehicle.
Fixed bouncing vehicle authorization at the end of local simulation.
Fixed player can exit or sleep in moving car.
Fixed rare incorrect vehicles authorization after towing.
Fixed engine sound disappearing without a driver.
Fixed car not stopping when driver changes their place due to cruise control.
Fixed error when try to type "[" in Item list viewer.
Fixed bug in the GameTime class. The class had insufficient precision when calculating the time in the syncServerTime function.
Fixed car stopping condition. The vehicle is stopped if the speed is less than 0.8 kmph.
Fixed clipping vehicles.
Fixed remote cars lag. The stepSimulation function will receive fixed update period. This period will not depend from FPS.
Fixed Vehicle simulation speed depending on locked fps.
Fixed the server kicking players when SystemDisabler.doAllowDebugConnections variable was set to true.
Added MapRemotePlayerVisibility server option to the server-settings editor and admin panel.
Improved log for lua errors. Now it shows modified file errors
Added list of mods in Pause menu + this list shows mods that cause errors
Adjusted the position of foraging pin icons and direction arrows. The arrows always pointed to the northwest corner of a square, which didn't look right for dropped items.
Turn the player to face a forage item when picking it up.
Fixed the foraging system not handling non-rectangular zones (i.e., polygon or thick polyline zones).
Zone.getRandomSquareInZone() now handles polygon and thick polyline zones.
Zone.getTotalArea() returns the area of polygon and thick polyline zones.
Note this isn't an accurate count of the squares in such zones, it is the sum of the area of each triangle that forms the polygon.
For other types of zones, width * height is returned.
Added the OnLoadedMapZones event which is called after map_zone.bin is loaded.
As before, the existing OnLoadMapZones event is triggered before map_zone.bin is loaded.
forageSystem.init() is called by the new OnLoadedMapZones event instead of OnLoadMapZones.
forageSystem.integrityCheck() checks whether the original map zone represented by each ForageZone still exists.
Added Brush Tool for copying, destroying, and building specific Tiles, as well as a Fire, Smoke, and Explosion-Brush. .
- Controls:
- Turn on Brush Tool cheat via the Debug Menu -> "Cheats" -> "Brush Tool"..
- Right-Click on any tile -> "Brush Tool Manager", "Copy tile", "Destroy Tile".
- When a tile was picked from the Bruth Tool Manager -> keys "[" and "]" for scrolling between tiles.
Added trigger thunder tool (for admins).
Added respawn new loot in container by RMC-ContextOption on container button (when LootZed cheat on or isAdmin).
Changed LootZed manager opening on RMC-ContextOption on container button.
Allowed admin to create any VHS out of spawned VHS-home (like in debug).
Added sync for Health panel cheats.
Trailers debug is improved.
Small fix to Lua closure.
Improved spawn vehicle menu.
Added ability to change weight in Player Stats window.
Added destroying objects without a sledgehammer if building cheat is on.
Added sliders for change weight and calories in debug panel.
Added Step Into, Step Over, and Resume buttons to the Lua debugger.
Improved ContextMenu
Now you can add icons for context options:
local myOption = context:addOption("My option name", ...)
myOption.iconTexture = getTexture("media/ui/MyIconForOption.png")
Added new functions for context: insertOptionAfter(...), insertOptionBefore(...), removeOptionByName(...), getMenuOptionNames(...)
Improved Debug/Admin options.
Added new options for doors - Now you can set a building ID for doors and force-lock doors inside buildings.
- Added Door Options can be found in the Right-Click Context Menu -> Objects.
- To lock a door inside a building, set a Building Key ID for the door, set Force-Lock to "True" and click "Objects" -> "Door Lock" in the context menu. A key for the door can be spawned via the "Get Key" option.
Added 'make noise' options to attract zombies.
Added option for removing all zombies in a zone to the Admin tools.
Added icons in context menu for ADMIN/DEBUG options.
Added elapsed time since server started in server statistics info.
Added access to some Admin tools for moderators.
Added an external anim debug UI for Martin.
Removed the line "Press Esc to open Admin panel" from Server toolbox UI
Fixed radio batteries spawning at 100% charge no matter how much time has passed. They should be depleted after about 4-5 days.
Fixed radio batteries sometimes not draining after loading a game after quitting to the main menu.
Fixed Weapon-part models (for scopes, etc) not being displayed for weapons on the ground.
Fixed ability to disassemble the floor at the top of a staircase. It was already forbidden to destroy such a floor using a sledgehammer.
Fixed the composter becoming unusable after moving it.
Fixed being able to move a composter if it has compost in it.
Fixed food unhappiness being reset to the default value when loading the item, when it was set to zero after being cooked.
Fixed clothing dryers and washers not consuming fuel from generators.
- Fixed generator fuel consumption not being updated properly when turning things on and off.
Fixed picking up and placing powered objects not updating generator fuel consumption.
Fixed battery-powered radios consuming generator fuel.
Fixed requiring 2 or more units of gas in a can to refill a generator, rather than 1 or more.
Fixed playing VehicleAddFuel instead of GeneratorAddFuel when refilling a generator.
Fixed opening a smashed window when holding down the E key, when a vehicle blocks the other side.
Fixed "Grabbing XYZ" appearing in the crafting UI when putting items back into containers.
Fixed IsoGenerator.setSurroundingElectricity() calling IsoObject.checkHaveElectricity() before each chunk's list of active generators was updated.
Fixed exterior doors and windows not playing ambient sounds if they are on the west or north edge of a chunk but the adjacent chunk hasn't been loaded yet.
Fixed VehicleAmbiance stopping immediately after starting sometimes.
- Fixed some object ambient sounds that don't use the Generator parameter stopping immediately after starting.
Fixed Base.BareHands.HitFloorSound. It was trying to play the non-existent default BatOnFloor sound.
Fixed hot food not cooling down when placed on the ground.
Fixed incorrect weights of weapons with upgrade parts.
Fixed equipping an already-equipped item causing the item to drop on the ground when the player's inventory is near 50.
Fixed hearing rain hitting a vehicle when the vehicle is inside a building.
Fixed ambient sound playing at "outside" volume when inside a vehicle that is inside a building.
Fixed ISVehicleMechanics.OnMechanicActionDone() calling undefined noise() function.
Fixed Lua errors on the Steam Deck after disabling the "Steam Virtual Gamepad" in the controller options UI.
Fixed not being able to upgrade wall frames or walls when there is no floor to the east or south of the wall.
Fixed incorrect math applying a model's "world" attachment when displaying an item on the ground.
Fixed MagazineGround and MagazineOpenGround models appearing off-center when on the ground.
Fixed and adjusted many model "world" attachments.
Fixed bug when character weight does not decrease if day length > 1 hour
Fixed equipped radios only updating for one splitscreen player.
Fixed stacking of military crates and the popcorn machine.
Fixed the freeze the first time a vehicle is entered. This was due to loading all the vehicle-dashboard textures.
Fixed "Min= Max= Default=" not being displayed in server-option tooltips as is done for sandbox options.
Fixed accidental change of Muldraugh map bounds to Louisville area.
Fixed mapper-placed open doors not being IsoDoor objects. There are some open doors at the Louisville stables that couldn't be interacted with.
Fixed each part of a double door being randomly locked or unlocked on creation. Now they are always unlocked.
Fixed the wrong type of item being returned when the foraging "search focus" causes an existing item to change type. There is still an issue where an already-seen item may change type by spamming the End key.
Fixed ISForageIcon.lua overriding ISBaseIcon.checkIsForageable() by mistake.
Fixed (again) incorrect placement of the foraging pin icon over the item icon. ISBaseIcon.textureCenter is no longer used after this change.
Fixed the animation played when filling Bourbon and Wine bottles.
Fixed bunker tiles cutaways.
Fixed blood appearing on destroyed windows.an destroyed fences.
Fixed holding SHIFT made weight decrease faster.
Fixed holding SHIFT without moving having the same impact as running on hunger.
Fixed sitting on a chair giving a different endurance regen than sitting on ground.
Fixed car's engine not taking damage when running over zombies when the hood was removed by player.
Fixed not losing endurance when stomping zombies in the legs.
Fixed more cases where indoor zombies can spawn in inaccessible locations.
Fixed picking up and placing WallOverlay movables (like mirrors) on the east and south edge of a square.
Fixed LuaClosure.toString2() exception when a function has no filename. This includes everything in the built-in stdlib.lua code.
Fixed missing tile properties on the Public Garbage Bin (and added translation).
Fixed the Small Crate (found in Greene's Grocery) not being stackable.
Fixed police cars at blockades with their headlights and flashers on not spawning with the battery drained according to the amount of time that's passed.
Fixed the properties on some new stove sprites. They became IsoThumpable instead of IsoStove.
Fixed weapon parts not appearing on equipped weapons on corpses or on the character-info avatar.
Fixed stepping over a Lua function in the debugger that adds a UI element adding the UI element in the debugger instead of in the game.
Fixed the Lua debugger not handling changes to screen resolution.
Fixed bug in vehicle skin editor in SP.
Fixed bug with fast transfer leaving item in inventory after crafting (for example stacked logs).
Fixed tile properties on a stair railing creating invisible walls.
Fixed CornerNorthWall and CornerWestWall not having tile properties.
Fixed zombies only playing their Hurt sound one time when hit on the ground.
Fixed spear-charge zombie kills not being counted.
Fixed the container highlight color not being displayed for painted crates.
Fixed not being able to sleep on brown picnic table.
Fixed Spiffo's green arrow requiring farming skill to be picked up.
Fixed some desks that couldn't be picked up.
Fixed some office whiteboards that couldn't be picked up.
Fixed (again) aspects of Composter sprites as RJ BROKE EVERYTHING.
Fixed bug when generator can charge vehicle battery.
Fixed water containers not getting fully emptied when watering crops.
Fixed clicking "Health icon" while Health Panel info is open adding spaces in the bottom of the text.
Fixed players being able to start changing parts of vehicles when inside a certain vehicle.
Fixed Dirty Rags being used to build a Log Wall when there are exactly 4 Ripped Sheets in inventory.
Fixed missing translation for new movable Medical Desk.
Fixed bug with rip clothing menu.
Fixed bug with double checking fishing net.
Fixed being able to dismantle favorited Electronics.
Fixed bug player not takeing nearest item in inventory for smoking.
Fixed character info panel showing male player model when the character was female.
Fixed zombies colliding with the player's vehicle when walking into a different, nearby vehicle. This only affects singleplayer.
Fixed debug rendering of vehicle trailer positions. Only one of the two locations was drawn in red when obstructed.
Fixed radios with dead batteries still being turned on.
Fixed missing space after the water amount in the farming tooltip
Fixed the animation speed of the wind effect on water being faster at higher framerates.
Fixed fog from a previous game appearing briefly when loading a different game.
Fixed the character Info and Protection panels displaying no help text when the "i" button in the titlebar is pressed. These two panels have no translations, so the help dialog is now hidden when either is displayed.
Fixed the character-info-window help dialog not resizing to match the height of the text.
Fixed ISAdminPanelUI.updateButtons() overwriting self.climateOptionsBtn and self.showStatisticsBtn.
Fixed the 'pinned' state of the character-info window not being preserved.
Fixed the 'pinned' and 'visible' states of the forage ui not being preserved.
Fixed flashlights no longer falling out of hands when climbing over walls
Fixed lack of shoveling sound when filling in graves.
Fixed being unable to dismantle Electronics with a favorited Screwdriver.
Fixed Flashlights falling out of hands when climbing over walls.
Fixed dried foods and Ramen noodles transferring their thirst values when used in evolved recipes.
Fixed granola bars and cookies being perishable.
Fixed missing fruit cocktail item.
Fixed items being used in evolved recipes not having their thirst values reduced.
Fixed Pancakes being unable to be burnt.
Fixed evolved recipe tooltip displaying uncooked icons for cooked ingredients.
Fixed partially eaten food not getting lighter in some circumstances.
Fixed cutting Bacon Rashers into Bacon Bits producing rotten Bacon Bits.
Fixed the names used for ingredients in evolved recipe names to be shorter.
Fixed the junk tables entries in the loot distribution tables being affected by zombie population density.
Fixed PiePrep not having a debuff.
Fixed Ice Cream Cones now melt and produce a Melted Ice Cream Cone item.
Fixed added several missing models.
Fixed renamed items are now limited to a new name of 28 characters or less.
Fixed Display Category for the PetrolBleachBottle and PetrolPopBottle items
Fixed missing models for Muffin Tray, Carving Fork, Gravy, Gravy Mix, Spatula, Teacup, Baloney Slices, Salami, Salami Slices and Snack Cakes
Fixed renamed items being able to have new names of more than 28 characters
Fixed animal-in-trap sounds not being sent from the server. Currently this only happens every 10 minutes so they're easy to miss.
Fixed music not restarting after creating a new character in-game.
Fixed missing PikeRotten.png and PikeCookedRotten.png - which is currently unused. Food models are rendered as Cooked or Rotten but not both.
Fixed not being able to navigate out of the Sandbox options preset panel with D-pad left and right.
Fixed previously-loaded buildings possibly being randomized (burned down, etc) after a server soft reset. This could happen any time map_meta.bin was deleted since that is where the "has this building been checked before" flag is kept. Now, a building will only be randomized if it hasn't been checked before and if at least one of the chunks covered by the building was loaded for the first time.
Fixed the custom weight of trapped animals not being preserved.
Fixed inaccurate weights for partially eaten food items with custom weights.
Fixed renamed items not being limited to a new name of 28 characters or less.
Fixed accurate weights for partially eaten food items with custom weights.
Fixed claustrophobic characters being able sleep in small rooms by right-clicking the bed from outside the room.
Fixed two-way radios installed in vehicles not transmitting text chat; needs testing for VOIP.
Fixed vehicles with premium radios installed not being able to play CDs in them.
Fixed Gravy Boat, Baloney Slices, Salami, Salami Slices and Snack Cakes models.
Fixed missing models for Muffin Tray, Carving Fork, Gravy, Gravy Mix, Spatula, Teacup, Baloney Slices, Salami, Salami Slices and Snack Cakes.
Fixed missing Sport T-shirt icons.
Fixed missing tooltip explaining that to purify some water containers, a microwave must be used.
Fixed error with Baguettes being unable to be used to make sandwiches.
Fixed missing add-all option in the fill menu for Generators.
Fixed not being able to equip a weapon as secondary when a handgun is equipped as primary.
Fixed Sweet Pies being unavailable in the crafting UI.
Changed ZomboidFileSystem.getGameModeCacheDir() to not append a trailing File.separator.
Most callers of getGameModeCacheDir() already appended a File.separator, resulting in two separator characters. These duplicate separators didn't seem to hurt anything.
[ 2022-07-07 15:59:06 CET ] [ Original post ]
NEW
SFX
MAP
FOOD AND RECIPES
BALANCE
ANIMS
MP
MODS
FORAGING
ADMIN/DEBUG
FIXES
CODE / ENGINE
[ 2022-07-07 15:59:06 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.72 Unstable
Lots of general stability and security work has gone into MP and specifically work on vehicles when you are driving alongside (or are a passenger sitting next to) players with far higher or lower pings than your good self.
The first of several layers of polish to the games food and recipes. New foodstuffs, improved containers, expanded recipes and all manner of different things to put together to feed yourself and your doomed friends. Various elements of balance too and, as mentioned before, no more footballs that can be jammed into a toaster.
Fellow co-op, faction and safehouse member positions can now be seen on your in-game map should you choose to enable it.
An improvement to the way in which mod errors are reported. A list of mods has been added to the pause menu, and whenever one is erroring out then itll be flagged within the list. This is going in alongside an improved lua error log that shows whether any files reported in call stacks are being overridden by mods. This should help modders and our support teams no end.
The games foraging system will now understand polygonal foraging zones on the map, rather than rely on its former basic rectangular brain. This should help with decreasing the amount of non-forageable spaces on the map.
A slight tweak to zed pathfinding, which means zombies targeting players have a higher priority in the game code than those shambling around more aimlessly.
The final large map export that well be doing before Build 42, most likely. This is primarily to fix user reported map bugs, but also contains improved farmsteads, scarecrows (that might be bugged and appear as mannequins currently sorry) and improved Louisville upper class districts.
Alongside the above there are various new tiles going into the game: including baby cribs, heavy factory machinery, standing floor lamps, farm related tiles, ATM machines, heavy safes, medical related tiles, and car wash tiles.
For MP: new admin powers and tools for example a brush tool that will allow server chiefs to create tiles, walls, fire, smoke, water etc. in-game. Also: a thunder trigger, better synced health panels, improved vehicle/trailer spawning, player weight changing and heightened control over zombie movement, zed spawning and locked doors.
[previewyoutube=re09QALrvl8;full][/previewyoutube]
New loot maps for Louisville which previously didnt have any. There are nine different maps in all, due to the size of LV, which all unlock the area they show in your in-game map alongside a wide range of different survivor treasure map annotations.
A smidgen of improvement to corpses. More of these will now be fake dead zombies, alongside improvement to their rotting such as the chance of spawning maggots in their inventory and on the floor around them. Handy for fishing!
Polish to player emotes and idles. Better representation of weapon-part upgrades. Generator/battery improvements. New action music track. Fixed blood appearing on destroyed objects, and about a million other fixes best to check the changelist!
While we have your attention: another quick flag to the fact that we are back on the hunt for an Animations Engineer / Technical Wizard. This will most likely be someone from the AAA game development space who has pines for joining a close-knit team of indie devs. If this is you, or someone you know, then our job page lives here! This weeks exciting and no doubt doom-laden story-via-map from Athiuk! A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us? Details here. Oh, and Spanish-speaking community! Be aware of a biiiig PZ streaming event on Twitch starting this Sunday, hosted by @EscocesSL. Spiffo hopes everyone has fun!
[ 2022-07-07 15:28:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
Today we are releasing version 41.72 to the Unstable beta.
If you need directions to this, then heres a handy gif!
As always with the Unstable beta be aware that some mods might break.
We dont anticipate a huge amount of disruption with 41.72, but should any of your workshop mods become non-operational then please inform the relevant creators and be patient while they find the time to update their wares. They have jobs / families / lives too!
So whats in 41.72? Well the changelist can be found here on our forums, and theres a lot of small tweaks and fixes to scroll through, but well detail the main stuff here also.
Its always HUGELY helpful for us when people, and server owners, jump over to the unstable beta so please dive in and let us know how you find it.
41.72
JOBZ
While we have your attention: another quick flag to the fact that we are back on the hunt for an Animations Engineer / Technical Wizard. This will most likely be someone from the AAA game development space who has pines for joining a close-knit team of indie devs. If this is you, or someone you know, then our job page lives here! This weeks exciting and no doubt doom-laden story-via-map from Athiuk! A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us? Details here. Oh, and Spanish-speaking community! Be aware of a biiiig PZ streaming event on Twitch starting this Sunday, hosted by @EscocesSL. Spiffo hopes everyone has fun!
[ 2022-07-07 15:28:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
Migration vs Craft
We are still working on the next update to Build 41, which we are hoping to release to an Unstable beta as soon as we possibly can. The hold-up (we were originally planning to put this out two weeks ago) is due to us wanting to smoothen out MP issues that arise when driving alongside (or in the same car as) players with a far higher or lower ping than yourself. It becomes very stop-start, and quite unplayable. These are essentially the edge-case ramifications of the necessary decision we made to remove physics-calculations from the server, but there are a lot of people playing PZ these days so edge-cases arent an inconsiderable number of players. The MP team have put a LOT of work into improving this over the past two weeks, and as soon as weve had a successful internal test with their latest changes we will feel in a position to punt the build out into unstable. A top line of major changes in 41.72 includes: fellow players optionally visible on the in-game map, new loot maps, new SFX and a new music track, polished emotes and a new way for players to be able to identify exactly which mods are misbehaving when they throw errors. Also an admin brush tool letting server chiefs paint items and walls etc. onto an ongoing game, and reams of small issue bug fixes. Additions that have gone in over the last two weeks also include:A huge amount of polish to the games food and recipes from BlairAlgol: filling in illogical gaps, expanding recipes, making foodstuffs previously absent from food crafting part of the system and making sure that you can no longer store a football in a toaster. Also a fair amount of food-related balance and common sense additions.
An improvement beneath the hood to foraging meaning that the game will be able to recognise polygonal foraging zones on the map, rather than the more inaccurate squares and rectangles it currently works from.
The map team are also currently gearing up to do a final export of the current Build 41 map ready for the 41.72 unstable release. This will contain all the polish recently mixed into the main map, after which the team will turn to concentrate purely on mapping new areas beyond the current boundaries.
Theres nothing huge in this map update, we are primarily releasing it so that all the map bugs the community have been reporting are fixed up before the team moves onto Build 42 content, but there are a few treats:
Improved farms and farmsteads in readiness for 42s animals, these include scarecrows that can be dressed up in the same way as shop mannequins.
Improved rich district houses in Louisville
Various new tiles like baby cribs, heavy factory machinery, standing floor lamps, farm related tiles, atm machines, heavy safes, medical related tiles, and new car wash tiles. [And no, baby cribs are not a harbinger of baby zeds]
We are now at a point at which its increasingly becoming a pain keeping 41 and 42 content separate on our internal build. We wont be calling time on 41 patches any time super-soon, well leave it polished and stable, but were certainly now well on the way the flipping the switch and working purely on Build 42 content. (Clearly we will still be able to return to implement super-important fixes and changes though)
We havent spotlit much from Build 42 recently partly because one of its primary coders had been seriously ill (now recovered), and partly because a lot of whats been done recently isnt super visual yet. However, if youll forgive the primarily textual blog, heres a few updates on whats been happening. First from our newly-healthy Turbo, who is responsible for our crafting update.
Hello! This is Turbo! As mentioned in earlier blogs, the new craft update introduces a good bunch of new professions, new items, crafting tree and profession work stations etc as well as some other changes to how the game code creates and records things. To explain what Im currently working on and why, Ill focus on a few aspects of the update: A) Crafted items that have more RPG-like variable attributes that are based on the crafters skill. B) Stats of input items that may also influence the attributes of a final output item. C) The fact that a newly crafted item will be able to be placed as what we call a worldobject, then picked up again to item form with all its attributes transferred in the game code between the two. As an example, we are currently working on crafting that will occur deep into the apocalypse: so a blacksmith may be making a hammer which requires a wooden tool handle and a hammerhead as the input. The wooden tool handle may have a quality and condition attribute with values that are based on the skill of carpenter who made it, and perhaps for the quality of the wood used by them. Likewise, the hammerhead may have similar attributes based on the skills of the blacksmith who made it, and the attributes of the ore/iron used in the craft. Mixed into this we also have to take into account aspects such as the skill levels of the crafter and also take in a random factor so that not everything produced is of a uniform quality. The attribute system Im currently working on should help with these kind of things, and it will not only be used for the new stuff in 42s crafting update but we will also be able to refactor things currently in the games existing crafting systems to work with it all really easily. Lastly, a simple use case example. (And this is an example not a promise of item inclusion!)Consider a shotgun item that can be crafted with attributes like damage, range and condition based on the skills of the player who has been upgrading, improving and caring for it.
The shotgun is then crafted into a new shotgun trap item, where the attributes of the original shotgun are copied over.
The trap item is placed on the world as what we call an IsoObject and the attributes are once again carried over to it. The range and damage attributes are now being used for the traps code.
The trap gets triggered a few times lowering the condition attribute.
Another player decides to disassemble the trap to retrieve the shotgun from it, and the newly instanced shotgun item copies the attributes from the trap and we end up with the correct damage and range values as it was originally crafted with. However, it now also has a lowered condition due to its activity while it was being used in the trap.
With the new system Im coding, this daisychain of steps can be achieved with very minimal additional coding required.
Hello everyone! RJ here. Okay, so everything thats outside of your current surroundings in PZ doesnt really exist. It exists as meta it isnt streamed in, and the game calculates hordes moving around in distant places. For animals, however this needs to change somewhat. You need to be able to travel the distance of the map, but for the game to still remember things about them that dont matter for shambling zombies. Animals need to age, eat and drink if you leave them too long they cant be in perfect condition when you get back. They, most likely, need to be dead. Not only are there lots of things to consider with animal, but there could also be a LOT of them on the map although were current not 100% on our final list we have models for rats, squirrels, larger birds, deer and domesticated animals. So, even though the game knows everything about them and their movement theres a risk that when theyre properly streamed it might get too intensive for the CPU. To avoid this I have coded it so that their stats (hunger, thirst, age etc) are updated every in-game hour. Realistically youll likely only have one or two cows, but if you want to breed rats for some inexplicable reason you could end up with a ton of them. We dont want players with 100+ animals having their stats updated every tick, or things could melt. As such, animals wont be updated real-time while they are off-screen (except for animals in a migration path, more on that below) but they will update themselves once you (or anyone else) returns to them. So be sure to fill up their feeding trough before you head out on loot run!
We dont want wild animals to always spawn in the same place. So for creatures like deer, we need to have them follow a set path as they usually do in real life. This is being done through additions that Tim has made to WorldZed and where we can simply draw all the paths that animals could take with nodes all along it where they can eat, drink, etc. Itll be up to the player to try to understand and learn these paths, so youll know where you could find your animals to hunt. We can also perhaps provide lootable items that can mark up rough hunting trails on your in-game map too. This aspect of animals will be updated in the meta though, as animals need to always be on the move and some animal paths will cross with others meaning that a group of deer could decide to change its path if it chooses to. A deer group will contain all relevant members of the deer family. If you kill the buck in a deer group, they wont have fawns for quite some time until they find another buck to add into their group. As such, it will be important for players to recognise what animals they should kill: which are still too young, which might be pregnant etc. Its not done for B42 yet, but we are planning tracking to an extent via the deer excrement they leave behind and its freshness all discovered via the foraging system. This way youll start to know on your server/game, what are the path animals are currently on, and could quite easily track back to them to collect your meat. Again, this aspect isnt 100% up for inclusion yet but hopefully shines a light on our plans.
Sadly due to unforeseen circumstances we are back on the hunt for an Animations Engineer / Technical Wizard most likely someone from the AAA game development space who has pines for joining a close-knit team of indie devs. If this is you, or someone you know, then our job page lives here! Todays Rosewood base from Poffie_was_here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us? Details here.
[ 2022-06-23 19:46:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello survivors! Today marks the beginning of one of the most significant and important periods in the modern worlds social and religious calendar: the Steam Summer Sale!
Because of this, all you existing survivors will no doubt get a little swamped with all the fresh meat turning up for the PZ grinder.
The Zomboid community has always been amazing in terms of supporting new players, and this time wont be any different, but our tech and support teams will be working flat-out most likely.
As such we just thought wed say that (entirely fictitious and non-existent) bonus Spiffo points will be available for those who jump into threads to give advice or survival tips to survivors fresh to the Knox Event.
Likewise if you are one of the aforementioned noobs: hello! This is a dev blog we do every two weeks.
PATCH 41.72
We are still working on the next update to Build 41, which we are hoping to release to an Unstable beta as soon as we possibly can. The hold-up (we were originally planning to put this out two weeks ago) is due to us wanting to smoothen out MP issues that arise when driving alongside (or in the same car as) players with a far higher or lower ping than yourself. It becomes very stop-start, and quite unplayable. These are essentially the edge-case ramifications of the necessary decision we made to remove physics-calculations from the server, but there are a lot of people playing PZ these days so edge-cases arent an inconsiderable number of players. The MP team have put a LOT of work into improving this over the past two weeks, and as soon as weve had a successful internal test with their latest changes we will feel in a position to punt the build out into unstable. A top line of major changes in 41.72 includes: fellow players optionally visible on the in-game map, new loot maps, new SFX and a new music track, polished emotes and a new way for players to be able to identify exactly which mods are misbehaving when they throw errors. Also an admin brush tool letting server chiefs paint items and walls etc. onto an ongoing game, and reams of small issue bug fixes. Additions that have gone in over the last two weeks also include:
We are now at a point at which its increasingly becoming a pain keeping 41 and 42 content separate on our internal build. We wont be calling time on 41 patches any time super-soon, well leave it polished and stable, but were certainly now well on the way the flipping the switch and working purely on Build 42 content. (Clearly we will still be able to return to implement super-important fixes and changes though)
42 CONTENT
We havent spotlit much from Build 42 recently partly because one of its primary coders had been seriously ill (now recovered), and partly because a lot of whats been done recently isnt super visual yet. However, if youll forgive the primarily textual blog, heres a few updates on whats been happening. First from our newly-healthy Turbo, who is responsible for our crafting update.
CRAFTING IMPROVEMENTS
Hello! This is Turbo! As mentioned in earlier blogs, the new craft update introduces a good bunch of new professions, new items, crafting tree and profession work stations etc as well as some other changes to how the game code creates and records things. To explain what Im currently working on and why, Ill focus on a few aspects of the update: A) Crafted items that have more RPG-like variable attributes that are based on the crafters skill. B) Stats of input items that may also influence the attributes of a final output item. C) The fact that a newly crafted item will be able to be placed as what we call a worldobject, then picked up again to item form with all its attributes transferred in the game code between the two. As an example, we are currently working on crafting that will occur deep into the apocalypse: so a blacksmith may be making a hammer which requires a wooden tool handle and a hammerhead as the input. The wooden tool handle may have a quality and condition attribute with values that are based on the skill of carpenter who made it, and perhaps for the quality of the wood used by them. Likewise, the hammerhead may have similar attributes based on the skills of the blacksmith who made it, and the attributes of the ore/iron used in the craft. Mixed into this we also have to take into account aspects such as the skill levels of the crafter and also take in a random factor so that not everything produced is of a uniform quality. The attribute system Im currently working on should help with these kind of things, and it will not only be used for the new stuff in 42s crafting update but we will also be able to refactor things currently in the games existing crafting systems to work with it all really easily. Lastly, a simple use case example. (And this is an example not a promise of item inclusion!)
LES ANIMAUX
Hello everyone! RJ here. Okay, so everything thats outside of your current surroundings in PZ doesnt really exist. It exists as meta it isnt streamed in, and the game calculates hordes moving around in distant places. For animals, however this needs to change somewhat. You need to be able to travel the distance of the map, but for the game to still remember things about them that dont matter for shambling zombies. Animals need to age, eat and drink if you leave them too long they cant be in perfect condition when you get back. They, most likely, need to be dead. Not only are there lots of things to consider with animal, but there could also be a LOT of them on the map although were current not 100% on our final list we have models for rats, squirrels, larger birds, deer and domesticated animals. So, even though the game knows everything about them and their movement theres a risk that when theyre properly streamed it might get too intensive for the CPU. To avoid this I have coded it so that their stats (hunger, thirst, age etc) are updated every in-game hour. Realistically youll likely only have one or two cows, but if you want to breed rats for some inexplicable reason you could end up with a ton of them. We dont want players with 100+ animals having their stats updated every tick, or things could melt. As such, animals wont be updated real-time while they are off-screen (except for animals in a migration path, more on that below) but they will update themselves once you (or anyone else) returns to them. So be sure to fill up their feeding trough before you head out on loot run!
LA MIGRATION DES ANIMAUX
We dont want wild animals to always spawn in the same place. So for creatures like deer, we need to have them follow a set path as they usually do in real life. This is being done through additions that Tim has made to WorldZed and where we can simply draw all the paths that animals could take with nodes all along it where they can eat, drink, etc. Itll be up to the player to try to understand and learn these paths, so youll know where you could find your animals to hunt. We can also perhaps provide lootable items that can mark up rough hunting trails on your in-game map too. This aspect of animals will be updated in the meta though, as animals need to always be on the move and some animal paths will cross with others meaning that a group of deer could decide to change its path if it chooses to. A deer group will contain all relevant members of the deer family. If you kill the buck in a deer group, they wont have fawns for quite some time until they find another buck to add into their group. As such, it will be important for players to recognise what animals they should kill: which are still too young, which might be pregnant etc. Its not done for B42 yet, but we are planning tracking to an extent via the deer excrement they leave behind and its freshness all discovered via the foraging system. This way youll start to know on your server/game, what are the path animals are currently on, and could quite easily track back to them to collect your meat. Again, this aspect isnt 100% up for inclusion yet but hopefully shines a light on our plans.
JOB AD MK II
Sadly due to unforeseen circumstances we are back on the hunt for an Animations Engineer / Technical Wizard most likely someone from the AAA game development space who has pines for joining a close-knit team of indie devs. If this is you, or someone you know, then our job page lives here! Todays Rosewood base from Poffie_was_here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us? Details here.
[ 2022-06-23 19:46:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
BaZil Brush
While its not exactly excitement dynamite, we know, this week we hit a point at which our internal tasklist board got a bit silly. When you have been making a game for as long as we have there is a tendency for minor tasks, small bug fixes and easy win suggestions to stack up, and up, and up The boards were just clogged, and it was hard to see the wood for the trees and as such we pulled some coders from their features to blitz through and give our testing and production staff some temporary relief. Not sexy: we know, but also necessary for the sanity of some of our team. This sort of stuff:
Having made a sizable dent in this sort of bug, everyone is now back at their usual post but Enforced Small Task Clearance Week also culminated in an event that will hopefully mean that we dont have to have one of these mandated periods again in future. Prolific modder Blair Algol has joined the team, and his role will be clearing out as many of the remaining hundreds (!) of these minor (but sometimes time-consuming) issues as he can. Blairs many mods touch so many different areas of the game that it seemed like a very natural fit for such a duty, while he also, of course, comes packaged with many ideas of how to make modding life easier for others in the community too. Once the boards have been cleared, and Blair has a firmer grip on the codebase, its also our hope that he will be able to bring some of his own ideas and ingenuity into the game proper.
Much like the Marvel movies, our soundscape improvement operations have worked in phases and we recently had the meeting that kicked off Phase 3. The following are Noiseworks/Formosas next primary missions:
We are currently debating whether to release the map teams current work (fixes, polish, improved farm buildings and agricultural areas, more defined Louisville upper class suburbs) in a 41 patch, or whether to outright say that the next export will be for 42 later down the line alongside some sizable planned expansion into other towns and conurbations that would be beyond the edges of our current area. More on that, and where we are taking the Knox Event location-wise, in future blogs. As we mentioned last time, were coming off the back of Turbos serious illness currently so its been something of a month of consolidation rather than massive exciting strides ahead. That said, sometimes strides ahead come in the form of things that will pay off in the far-flung future. Ever since the success of the 41 release we have had a lot more resources at our command, and have been able to invest it in both middleware that could bring PZ to new heights and the talent to integrate it with our codebase. As we all know, one of the weakest things about PZ is the UI. We all get on with it fine, but lets face it: it aint a looker, and it can be a bit clunky, fiddly and slow. Weve always said wed give it an overhaul, but its always been a daunting prospect. Since March, alongside our friends at General Arcade, we have been experimenting with some super fancy AAA high-end UI tech middleware that will make this process easier, and will make the end result better. For the past few months weve been making sure that its compatible with the game, doesnt negatively impact performance and will still allow for lua UI for our modders and it has been this week that we feel comfortable enough to say out loud to each other that its going to work, and is safe to proceed. So next time you see someone moaning that the PZ UI isnt exactly glamorous just tell them they know, and itll take a while but theyre working on it. Itll be some considerable time till we talk about this again, but we just wanted to let you know that this is another iron that we have in the fire. Todays pile-up campfire from Mr.Crab763. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Want to work with us? Details here.
[ 2022-06-09 20:58:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, heres a quick update on what we are all up to.
Our initial plan was to release our next 41.72 patch to the Unstable beta today, but annoyingly last nights internal playtest had too many niggles with vehicle gameplay for us to comfortably let you loose on it.
This is slightly annoying in terms of todays blog, but probably not quite as annoying as you happily downloading the new version only for MP passengers to be stuck revving on the tarmac while their drivers whizz off towards Louisville.
Still, once the MP Strike Force have checked everything out and weve had another (more successful) test then this is some of the stuff that will be punted out for you to try out:
- As mentioned in the last blog, the opt-in ability to see fellow MP players in your faction or safehouse on your in-game map.
- A huge range of new and improved admin powers that should breathe a little more life into online play. First and foremost of these is a brush tool that will allow admins to create tiles, walls, fire, smoke, water etc. in-game. Theres also the ability to easily trigger thunder, a more synced health panel, improved spawning of vehicles and trailers and the ability to change player weights. Also, also are more zombie-attracting options, improved zed spawns and some powers over whether doors are locked or not. Heres a quick video Aiteron has made to show it all off: [previewyoutube=re09QALrvl8;full][/previewyoutube]
- Another more minor, but quite pleasant all the same, addition from Aiteron is the possibility of adding icons to the context menu. As seen here.
- New loot maps. Previously we didnt have any loot maps for Louisville, but Tim has now integrated a bunch from the hand of Pat_Bren into the loot table. There are nine different maps in all, which means that as well as the usual treasure map aspects you will be able to reveal a ninth of the Louisville map upon reading them.
- Also of note in .72 is an improvement to the way in which mod errors are reported. We have added a list of mods to the pause menu, and if one of them is causing errors and the red box of doom then the culprit will be highlighted within the list.
- Perhaps of greater import to mod authors and our tech support team, however, is the improved lua error log that goes with the above: this will show if any files reported in call stacks are overridden by mods. We hope that this will allow modders, players and our own community liaison peeps to easier find mod conflicts and other issues.
SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF
While its not exactly excitement dynamite, we know, this week we hit a point at which our internal tasklist board got a bit silly. When you have been making a game for as long as we have there is a tendency for minor tasks, small bug fixes and easy win suggestions to stack up, and up, and up The boards were just clogged, and it was hard to see the wood for the trees and as such we pulled some coders from their features to blitz through and give our testing and production staff some temporary relief. Not sexy: we know, but also necessary for the sanity of some of our team. This sort of stuff:
Having made a sizable dent in this sort of bug, everyone is now back at their usual post but Enforced Small Task Clearance Week also culminated in an event that will hopefully mean that we dont have to have one of these mandated periods again in future. Prolific modder Blair Algol has joined the team, and his role will be clearing out as many of the remaining hundreds (!) of these minor (but sometimes time-consuming) issues as he can. Blairs many mods touch so many different areas of the game that it seemed like a very natural fit for such a duty, while he also, of course, comes packaged with many ideas of how to make modding life easier for others in the community too. Once the boards have been cleared, and Blair has a firmer grip on the codebase, its also our hope that he will be able to bring some of his own ideas and ingenuity into the game proper.
SOUND PHASE III
Much like the Marvel movies, our soundscape improvement operations have worked in phases and we recently had the meeting that kicked off Phase 3. The following are Noiseworks/Formosas next primary missions:
- Improvements to how the sound system deals with multiplayer characters and sound priorities. Primary work here is to try and solve the issues where sounds drop out due to clashes in sound priorities and limits when multiple players are around.
- Expand the reactive music beyond action moments. The ultimate goal is to allow the other non-action tracks to evolve and change: triggered by walking into buildings, looting a container, or any other little action that may trigger a change in the track thats playing. Likewise making sure that they all also blend more organically between each other.
- Gameplay related sound effects, like modelling the realistic effects of using firearms in enclosed spaces without ear protectors. Also: improved noises for large crowds of zeds, sprinters and bullet world impacts if the coding team can provide their support for implementation.
OTHER STUFF
We are currently debating whether to release the map teams current work (fixes, polish, improved farm buildings and agricultural areas, more defined Louisville upper class suburbs) in a 41 patch, or whether to outright say that the next export will be for 42 later down the line alongside some sizable planned expansion into other towns and conurbations that would be beyond the edges of our current area. More on that, and where we are taking the Knox Event location-wise, in future blogs. As we mentioned last time, were coming off the back of Turbos serious illness currently so its been something of a month of consolidation rather than massive exciting strides ahead. That said, sometimes strides ahead come in the form of things that will pay off in the far-flung future. Ever since the success of the 41 release we have had a lot more resources at our command, and have been able to invest it in both middleware that could bring PZ to new heights and the talent to integrate it with our codebase. As we all know, one of the weakest things about PZ is the UI. We all get on with it fine, but lets face it: it aint a looker, and it can be a bit clunky, fiddly and slow. Weve always said wed give it an overhaul, but its always been a daunting prospect. Since March, alongside our friends at General Arcade, we have been experimenting with some super fancy AAA high-end UI tech middleware that will make this process easier, and will make the end result better. For the past few months weve been making sure that its compatible with the game, doesnt negatively impact performance and will still allow for lua UI for our modders and it has been this week that we feel comfortable enough to say out loud to each other that its going to work, and is safe to proceed. So next time you see someone moaning that the PZ UI isnt exactly glamorous just tell them they know, and itll take a while but theyre working on it. Itll be some considerable time till we talk about this again, but we just wanted to let you know that this is another iron that we have in the fire. Todays pile-up campfire from Mr.Crab763. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Want to work with us? Details here.
[ 2022-06-09 20:58:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
Bad Red vs. Good Green
Seeing as we already have a fair amount of MP changes, fixes and balance in the pot for .72 at the moment it feels like it wont be too long until we move it into the Unstable beta unless of course a more disruptive feature comes to the boil over the next week or so and requires added internal testing. The current changelist for what we have in this patch can be seen here if you are interested. Primary items of note involve a lot of fixes and polish to radio use in-game, improvements to the representation of weapon-part upgrades in 3D models, and various issues with generators and batteries. Also in the patch will be the opt-in ability for fellow faction and safehouse members to be visible on your in-game map.
And also some support for our colour-blind survivors, who will now be able to choose their favoured new text colours instead of BAD RED and GOOD GREEN. Thanks to Fox for this one.
There are many advantages of having a tight small team when making a game like PZ. However, one of the biggest disadvantages is that when serious irl stuff happens to any of us it makes aspects of development difficult. Weve never really mentioned it before, and still wont go into any detail, but this was one of the reasons that Build 41 itself took a long time to come to complete fruition. The reason we are bringing this up is because one of the primary architects of the revamped B42 crafting system, Turbo, has been very ill (and often hospitalized) for much of the last three-four months. Turbs said it was okay to let you all know this, as it clearly has meant that while RJs work on domestic animals and some roaming beasts has been rocketing on ahead Turbos own work on the post-apoc crafting, tech-trees and recipes has had to be on hold. We are so, so relieved and happy that Turbos treatment led up to an operation and a complete return to health to the extent that he has been back working with us again this week. Its been awesome having him about the place again. We dont yet know how much this will impact on build content, timings etc, and will be working out whats what in the week or two ahead tho B43 stuff is being worked on in parallel, so it hasnt been detrimental to that. Sorry if this has been a bit of a too much info update, its probably not something youd catch in a Call of Duty blog, but with Turbos permission, we thought it would give everyone a more accurate insight into where were at with things. We also hope that everyone will join us in wishing Turbs continued good health a phrase for which the Dutch probably have their own term for and that we will google later on. To circle back around to more developmental matters-at-hand, heres an image from RJ and Tims work on ways in which our non-domestic animals will roam the map. These are AnimalZone paths that share points, and allow for both long paths that cross cell boundaries and branching paths too.
We love seeing the maps our community produces each with their own flavours, design and challenge. To support all our mappers today we are releasing almost 1500 buildings and associated assets of our own in-game housing, garages, sheds and patio sets for use in community maps. These should help map-builders flesh out their worlds without having to rely purely on their own constructed (and shared community) houses, flats and outbuildings. If you are a mapper then you can find the released assets here. We are not releasing special and governmental/military buildings but there are many, many houses, apartments, sheds, shacks, shops and restaurants here for folks to use in their own apocalyptic zombie nightmares. In terms of our own future map improvement and expansion, meanwhile, check out what Ayrton has been doing to our Louisville rich districts. To bring more diversity to some locations of Louisville, I am converting some streets or blocks into Victorian-style districts, it should enable us to add a new layer of complexity to the urban plan with areas that are more/less wealthy, ancient, etc. Those new tiles are also being added across existing relevant buildings.
Elsewhere Aiteron is playing around with his improved fishing system to mix in some added fun quota alongside the improved anims/visuals we showed last time round. Long-term work on server-side items and timed actions for MP continues, and the Noiseworks/Formosa soundscape revolution continues with their next missions due to be discussed in the coming week. Pat_Bren is also, meanwhile, crafting a bunch more annotated survivor maps to bolster our current stock and also to cover Louisville and other newer areas of the Knox Event map.
Following the success of Build 41, we find ourselves in a position where we can hunt down other experienced Games Programmers to join the Project Zomboid team. We are looking for coders willing and able to refresh some of our older systems, polish the existing ones and then to delve further into the features that will be part of the Knox Events exciting future. Interested applicants should check our jobs page, but we should underline that we currently dont have any entry-level positions available. You will need to have a fair amount of experience we are afraid. This weeks touching crime scene from hp.tf. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2022-05-26 18:48:42 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, heres a Thursday round-up. We released version 41.71 last Thursday. Were big on Thursdays around here.
41.71 contained a huge range of stuff, but topline features included: new and improved dynamic action music, a raft of improvements for Steam Deck players, new items, scarecrows, less wobbly and less performance-costly 3D items on your safehouse floor, loads of MP improvements under the hood, the fabled one-watch VHS video fix, new ambient and shutdown noises, modding improvements and tons more.
Better to read the forum release post than a long paragraph in the blog, I guess, if you are in need of a catch-up.
Since last week we hotfixed some issues with sound cut-outs on busy servers and with rapid-fire weapons, and so now we find ourselves moving onto
41.72
Seeing as we already have a fair amount of MP changes, fixes and balance in the pot for .72 at the moment it feels like it wont be too long until we move it into the Unstable beta unless of course a more disruptive feature comes to the boil over the next week or so and requires added internal testing. The current changelist for what we have in this patch can be seen here if you are interested. Primary items of note involve a lot of fixes and polish to radio use in-game, improvements to the representation of weapon-part upgrades in 3D models, and various issues with generators and batteries. Also in the patch will be the opt-in ability for fellow faction and safehouse members to be visible on your in-game map.
And also some support for our colour-blind survivors, who will now be able to choose their favoured new text colours instead of BAD RED and GOOD GREEN. Thanks to Fox for this one.
BEYOND
There are many advantages of having a tight small team when making a game like PZ. However, one of the biggest disadvantages is that when serious irl stuff happens to any of us it makes aspects of development difficult. Weve never really mentioned it before, and still wont go into any detail, but this was one of the reasons that Build 41 itself took a long time to come to complete fruition. The reason we are bringing this up is because one of the primary architects of the revamped B42 crafting system, Turbo, has been very ill (and often hospitalized) for much of the last three-four months. Turbs said it was okay to let you all know this, as it clearly has meant that while RJs work on domestic animals and some roaming beasts has been rocketing on ahead Turbos own work on the post-apoc crafting, tech-trees and recipes has had to be on hold. We are so, so relieved and happy that Turbos treatment led up to an operation and a complete return to health to the extent that he has been back working with us again this week. Its been awesome having him about the place again. We dont yet know how much this will impact on build content, timings etc, and will be working out whats what in the week or two ahead tho B43 stuff is being worked on in parallel, so it hasnt been detrimental to that. Sorry if this has been a bit of a too much info update, its probably not something youd catch in a Call of Duty blog, but with Turbos permission, we thought it would give everyone a more accurate insight into where were at with things. We also hope that everyone will join us in wishing Turbs continued good health a phrase for which the Dutch probably have their own term for and that we will google later on. To circle back around to more developmental matters-at-hand, heres an image from RJ and Tims work on ways in which our non-domestic animals will roam the map. These are AnimalZone paths that share points, and allow for both long paths that cross cell boundaries and branching paths too.
MAPPING
We love seeing the maps our community produces each with their own flavours, design and challenge. To support all our mappers today we are releasing almost 1500 buildings and associated assets of our own in-game housing, garages, sheds and patio sets for use in community maps. These should help map-builders flesh out their worlds without having to rely purely on their own constructed (and shared community) houses, flats and outbuildings. If you are a mapper then you can find the released assets here. We are not releasing special and governmental/military buildings but there are many, many houses, apartments, sheds, shacks, shops and restaurants here for folks to use in their own apocalyptic zombie nightmares. In terms of our own future map improvement and expansion, meanwhile, check out what Ayrton has been doing to our Louisville rich districts. To bring more diversity to some locations of Louisville, I am converting some streets or blocks into Victorian-style districts, it should enable us to add a new layer of complexity to the urban plan with areas that are more/less wealthy, ancient, etc. Those new tiles are also being added across existing relevant buildings.
Elsewhere Aiteron is playing around with his improved fishing system to mix in some added fun quota alongside the improved anims/visuals we showed last time round. Long-term work on server-side items and timed actions for MP continues, and the Noiseworks/Formosa soundscape revolution continues with their next missions due to be discussed in the coming week. Pat_Bren is also, meanwhile, crafting a bunch more annotated survivor maps to bolster our current stock and also to cover Louisville and other newer areas of the Knox Event map.
JOB AD AGAIN
Following the success of Build 41, we find ourselves in a position where we can hunt down other experienced Games Programmers to join the Project Zomboid team. We are looking for coders willing and able to refresh some of our older systems, polish the existing ones and then to delve further into the features that will be part of the Knox Events exciting future. Interested applicants should check our jobs page, but we should underline that we currently dont have any entry-level positions available. You will need to have a fair amount of experience we are afraid. This weeks touching crime scene from hp.tf. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2022-05-26 18:48:42 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.71 - Released
(Includes changes from builds 41.69 to 41.71 from the unstable branch.)
New action music system
Instead of switching between tracks mid-combat, the music is reactive and can increase and decrease in intensity during combat and other dramatic moments.
Added "Stubble" checkboxes to the Hair and Beard sections in the character-creation ui.
Added new items + updated 3D models
Added new forage items
Added the skeleton mannequin and scarecrow.
Added additional item categories and addressed some blunders
Added compilation of new hair types
Added option to "add all" to partially full Thread, Duct Tape, Twine etc
Added media/scripts/mannequins.txt which describes the model/texture/animation/etc for different mannequins.
Added BackupsOnVersionChange server option.
Added a second set of translations to the Survival Guide that are displayed when using a controller.
Added formatting to rich text, where XXX is the name of a Joypad.Texture.XXX texture.
Device options can now be opened when radio is on floor, in loot window or when radio just dropped from inventory
Added methods Texture.saveToCurrentSavefileDirectory(filename) and Texture.saveToZomboidDirectory(filename).
The filename may contain folder names, but not "..", to prevent saving to arbitrary locations.
These methods replace the broken Texture.save(filename) method.
Clicking and holding the left mouse button when placing items now locks the item to the clicked square.
Added XBOX_Menu.png and XBOX_View.png controller icons.
Added autouse new sack of gravel/sand/etc when pouring it on ground
Renamed Skill books so that they are easier to categorise.
ISClothingExtraAction now sets the item's job type to "Wear" and displays the progress of the action in the inventory window.
Updated credits
Updated community translations.
3D items now shown as textures instead of models. They shouldn't slide around as much when the player moves.
This helps a lot with framerates when there are 100 nails on the ground, for example.
In debug mode, holding the HOME key will disable the item atlas and render models as before.
Added IsoSprite.ItemHeight and IsoSprite.Surface debug options to display a rectangle around surfaces that items can be placed on.
Changed some ItemHeight and Surface tile properties.
Added a title bar to the mini-map window which allows the mini-map to be repositioned. The title bar and bottom row of buttons are hidden unless the mouse is over the mini-map.
Changed setHaveConstruction to apply only when constructing and placing objects
Changed Diamond Pattern Sweater Vest and V-neck Sweater Vest to use Sweater body location
Changed High Viz vest to use Sweater body location
Added a different animation played when destroying floors with a sledgehammer.
Removed vehicle physics from server (not client) to address some of the vehicular weirdness sometimes seen online
do not apply impulses to static / kinematic vehicles
limit changes of linear and angular velocities
Passengers no longer allowed to exit the car while moving
Enable packet processing on the server
MultiplayerSeeNonPvpZones debug only option is added
Local admin check is delayed after set-access-level command
Player update replay is commented out
Check for local admin kick is improved
Turn on player teleport logs on the server
Admin is not kickable from safehouse
Burnt or smashed vehicle check is added for dismantle vehicle command
Car wreck is removed via new "dismantle" vehicle command
Only admin can delete vehicle via "remove" vehicle command
Add vehicle UI allows creation of burnt and smashed car wrecks
Anti-cheat: fixed kick local admin issue
Cancel auth ticket on client shutdown
Toggle timer is disabled in non-pvp area
MultiplayerLightAmbient debug option is removed
Refactored SafetySystem
Server option process cycles for SafetySystemManager are simplified
PVP safety is now set to true when PVP is disabled on server
Set the default Host server memory to 4GB on 64-bit systems. This is the value displayed in the "Server memory" combobox which is saved in Zomboid/Lua/host.ini.
Don't create a backup of the server savefile in Zomboid/backups/version if BackupsOnStart=false. This backup is created when a new version of the game is released, but only for the first server that is launched.
Hide the black overlay when the sleeping players are killed
Improvements to how the MP game handles dead player bodies
DeadBody creation is moved to the server
DeadBody ID is added (World version 192)
Client does not allocate dead body ID
Fixed player death animations
Fixed desaturation being set for dead player
Fixed reanimation delay timer starting immediately without 10 seconds delay
Fixed reanimation delay of 0-30 seconds
Fixed player death final animation
Fixed possible null point exception when zombie bites dead player
Fixed dead body grabbing breaking reanimation
Fixed dead body id not changing when added to world
Fixed desync of safety cooldown timer
Fixed sleeping player not being woken up in case of kick from safehouse
Fixed PVP icon being located over the map
Fixed players who could be kicked when admin removes that player from safehouse
Fixed when a non-owner player quits a safe house, other players also getting kicked.
Fixed when safehouse owner goes offline, the non-safehouse-members get teleported immediately
Fixed PVP button becoming inactive for each player across the map if Admin shot\got shot by a player"
Fixed player being kicked when admin creates or removes PVP zone
Fixed SyncNonPvpZone packet send/receive loop
Fixed newly connected player not having all the non PVP zones
Fixed possible nullpointer in checkForNearbyRadios
Fixed zed texture 4 being used for player texture 5 instead of random index
Fixed reanimated player corpse disappearing
Fixed being able to turn pvp on when server option PVP set to false.
Fixed BufferUnderflowException on the server in SneezeCough packet processing
Fixed possible NullPointerException in ClientPlayerDB.getAllSavedPlayers().
Fixed player appearance sync in multiplayer with greater than 32 connections.
Fixed erosion growth not being suppressed when building floors or digging graves in multiplayer.
Fixed radio sync in MP
Fixed players outside the Non-PVP zone being able to kill a player with a bomb located in that zone
Fixed player being able to remove PVP button cooldown in non-PVP zone
Fixed unexpected anti-cheat kick just after leaving non-PVP zone
Fixed being able to turn pvp on when server option PVP is set to false.
Fixed player being able to remove PVP button cooldown when in a non-PVP zone. (Safety cooldown timer is now stored/restored when player enters/leaves non-pvp-zone)
VHS Fix
Fixed listened-to media lines being saved globally instead of for each player. This could add over 200KB to each player's saved data if every line is listened to.
Fixed ClientPlayerDB handling of WorldVersion.
Transfer known media lines from recorded_media.bin to the player on the first load.
Check for null arguments to RecordedMedia.hasListenedToAll(). A mod seems to pass null for the IsoPlayer argument, which was ok when listened-to lines were stored globally instead of per-player.
The mod file is es.info.books.main.lua.
MODDER WARNING: This could break any mods that modify ISRadioInteractions.lua or are using the OnDeviceText event (which gained a new parameter).
Fixed mod animations not being loaded if they aren't in a subdirectory of anims_X, or aren't in a subdirectory registered in animations_meshes.txt. Any such animations are added to the MaleBody model by default.
Item tagging changes
MODDERS: PLEASE READ ADDENDUM DOCUMENTATION FOR INFO
Added new tags to some items: BlowTorch, Fork, GasMask, Glue, HazmatSuit, Knife, Razor, Scissors, Sledgehammer, Spoon, StartFire, WeldingMask. These tags are used in multiple places instead of looking for specific item types.
Added methods ItemContainer.getBestConditionEvalArg() and ItemContainer.getBestConditionEvalArgRecurse().
Script properties item.staticModel and item.worldStaticModel are set to the fully-qualified "module.type" after loading scripts. This is to fix mod items not finding "model" scripts that aren't in the Base module.
Added a new item-script property ReplaceTypes which supersedes ReplaceOnUseOn (which is still supported).
The format is "ReplaceTypes=Key1 Type1;Key2 Type2;..." where each key is some string (such as WaterSource) and each type is an item type.
ReplaceTypes allows specifying different replacement item types for different uses of an item, for example, filling an empty item with water and/or with gasoline.
It is used for the same thing as ReplaceOnUseOn, but allows multiple key/type mappings instead of only one.
These new methods were added to both Item and InventoryItem classes:
String getReplaceType()
HashMap getReplaceTypes()
String getReplaceType(String key)
boolean hasReplaceType(String key)
The existing ReplaceOnUseOn lines in items.txt add a new value to the item's ReplaceTypes HashMap.
Added global parameters Electricity, RoomType, and Water.
Added a new tile property named "AmbientSound" to support custom ambient sounds from objects. Current values assigned to some tiles are:
FactoryMachineAmbiance
HotdogMachineAmbiance
PayPhoneAmbiance
StreetLightAmbiance
NeonLightAmbiance
NeonSignAmbiance
JukeboxAmbiance
ControlStationAmbiance
ClockAmbiance
GasPumpAmbiance
LightBulbAmbiance
The FMOD global parameter "Electricity" is set to 0.0 when the new WorldEventElectricityShutdown event passes the "ElectricityOff" timeline marker.
Added FMOD parameter value RoomType=Factory.
Changed debugSetRoomType() to accept an integer instead of the name of an enum value.
Added sounds:
ArcadeMachineAmbiance
CanisterAddFuelFromGasPump
CanisterAddFuelSiphon
VehicleAddFuelFromCanister
VehicleAddFuelFromGasPump
VehicleHeadlightsOn
VehicleHeadlightsOff
VehicleWindowHandleOpen
VehicleWindowHandleClose
VehicleWindowElectricOpen
VehicleWindowElectricClose
Synchronize room lights and other objects losing power with the ElectricityOff timeline marker.
Added PlaceOneSound and PlaceMultipleSound item script properties.
These are played when placing items using the "Place Item" command.
The default sound played if these aren't defined is PutItemInBag (the same sound played when dropping items).
Added BoxOfRoundsOpenOne and BoxOfShellsOpenOne sounds to some recipes.
Increased the time of these recipes to allow the sound to play. The time is still quite short (was 5 ticks, now 15 ticks). Probably nobody will die waiting.
Added FountainBigAmbiance sound played to the multi-tile water fountain.
The sound doesn't seem to loop and stops after several seconds.
Added RepairWithWrench sound played when plumbing sinks and for the moveables Wrench tool sound.
Added value MetalGate to the FenceTypeLow and TripObstacleType parameters.
Added sounds:
BBQPropaneTankInsert
BBQPropaneTankRemove
BBQPropaneRunning
BBQRegularAddFuel
BBQRegularLight
BBQRegularRunning
CampfireAddFuel
CampfireRunning
CampfireLight
CampfireBuild
FireplaceAddFuel
FireplaceRunning
FireplaceLight
ZombieTrip
ZombieThumpGarageDoor
Added EquippedBaggageContainer FMOD parameter.
Added "SoundParameter = Name Value" item-script property.
Added FMOD parameter SinkType=Generic|Ceramic|Metallic which affects the WaterDrip sound.
Hitting trees with weapons and bare hands plays the weapon's HitSound instead of ChopTree.
A melee weapon's SwingSound is now played via animation events instead of at the start of SwipeStatePlayer.
This allows using different sounds for different attack animations.
Currently this is used to play a different sound for spear stab versus spear slash attacks.
Play the WorldEventElectricityShutdown event from the nearest square in a building when outdoors.
Set the FMOD parameter "RoomType" using RoomType objects added in WorldEd.
Changed how ambient sounds are played from doors and windows.
Instead of choosing random objects, only the nearest exterior objects will play sound.
Different sounds are played depending on whether the door or window is open or closed.
This will be used for playing rain and wind sounds when the player is inside.
Fixed the BurningFlesh sound not stopping in multiplayer after a player dies.
Fixed the barbecue and fireplace extinguish sounds stopping instead of being triggered to fade out.
Play an animation when turning a propane barbecue on and off.
Fixed crouching when extinguishing a charcoal barbecue.
Fixed SFX and music cutting out in busy situations (often seen on MP servers)
Reimplemented ZombieVocalsManager to limit zombie voice events to the nearest 20 zombies.
Optimized sorting objects in DoorAndWindowEmitters and ZombieVocalsManager.
Changed handling of object ambient sounds so they only play from the nearest 20 objects. This includes doors, fridges, trees, windows and any sprite with the AmbientSound property set.
Removed DoorAndWindowEmitters. This is combined with ObjectAmbientEmitters.
Fixed ZombieVocalsManager not actually stopping vocal events when one of the 20 slots was reassigned to a different zombie.
ProjectZomboid64.exe will disable the -XX:+UseZGC option if a required function is undefined in Kernel32.dll.
Steam Proton does not define the MapViewOfFile3() function, which prevents the Windows version of the game starting on the Steam Deck.
Conveniently, MapViewOfFile3() is only available on Windows 10 1803, the same version ZGC requires.
When options.ini doesn't exist on startup, set the display to fullscreen desktop resolution.
When options.ini doesn't exist on startup on Steam Deck, call Core.setOptionActiveController() to enable the controller.
Allow precise positioning when placing items using a controller. This is done by holding the Y button and using either D-pad or the left joystick to move the item around the square. When there is more than one surface, it can be changed by pressing the right shoulder button while the Y button is held down.
Enabled the on-screen keyboard in CoopUserName.lua.
Leave room for two lines of tooltip text at the bottom of the character-creation profession ui.
Several panels in the main menu can be scrolled using the right joystick.
The Start/Menu button will display the main menu in single-player, or resume normal game speed.
This is instead of pressing once to pause the game and double-pressing to display the main menu.
The game can still be paused using the Back/View button radial menu.
Added controller navigation in the Workshop ui (for submitting Workshop items). NOTE: The controller doesn't work in the Steam overlay, which some buttons display.
Allow mouse clicks etc in the inventory and loot windows when a controller is active.
Added controller navigation to the Temperature tab of the character info window.
Made the selection in the Health panel easier to see.
Made the character-info window more opaque.
Made CharacterCreationMain wider at lower resolutions to avoid overlap.
Added a button to the on-screen keyboard to hide and show password text.
Enabled controller navigation in the server browser ui.
Enabled controller navigation in the server-settings editor.
Put the inventory and loot windows in their default positions if the controller is disconnected and "Use Keyboard and Mouse" is selected.
When placing items, the inventory and loot windows are collapsed if they aren't pinned open.
When placing items, mouse clicks on world objects are ignored to prevent the loot window popping open.
Set the width of ISEquippedItem to match its buttons. This fixes the wider invisible area blocking mouse clicks.
Set the texture compression option to be on by default.
Fixed navigation in the Multiplayer tab in the options.
Fixed editing server spawn regions with a controller.
Fixed the filter checkboxes going outside the ui on small screens.
Fixed being unable to navigate to the filter checkboxes and some other buttons.
Fixed controller focus when creating a splitscreen player.
Fixed toggling the mod under the mouse pointer when pressing the controller A button.
Fixed several cases of improper controller focus after clicking buttons with the mouse.
Fixed Lua error in MapSpawnSelect when the filename entry is hidden.
Fixed LoadingQueueState disconnecting immediately due to the A button being pressed, after pressing it in the last character-creation panel.
Fixed ISGameLoadingUI not receiving the controller focus when an unexpected error occurred while loading.
Fixed BootstrapConnectPopup, ServerConnectPopup and ServerWorkshopItemScreen not working with a controller.
Fixed Build 41 popup and DebugScenarios ui appearing overtop BootstrapConnectPopup.
Fixed cancellation in ServerWorkshopItemScreen throwing an exception in ConnectToServerState due to GameClient.connection being null.
Fixed using the controller X button to "Toggle Vision Info" in the foraging ui.
Fixed rendering the post-death ui for split-screen players 3 and 4 in the top half of the screen.
Fixed a Lua error pressing the Y button when moving furniture when the player isn't on a square.
Added BedType property to the Pizza-Whirled seats which fixes pizza spawning on them.
Added amount of bait items to Fishing UI
Added dismantling cameras for scrap/skill points
Plastic bags and paper money can now be used as tinder.
Doors broken by zombies now give unusable wood instead of planks.
Container items now grouped together into their type in the context menu, so you can 'fill all' of a certain container.
Players now able to stack and unstack logs on the ground
Cars now remember their cruise control setting
Breaking vehicle windows now produces broken glass
Decrease zed attraction volume of remove broken glass action"
Updated and fixed item categorizations
Updated evolvedrecipes.txt and items_food.txt.
Removed Cookable:true from the Burger evolved recipe.
Added the "|Cooked" flag to Burger ingredients in farming.txt.
Updated distributions Lua files
Muffins produced by the "Get 6 Muffins" recipe have the name of the ingredient added to the muffins, if any, such as "Apple Muffin".
Muffins produced by the "Get 6 Muffins" recipe are marked "Cooked", so the hunger-reduction bonus due to being cooked is applied.
Fixed adding a spice to a stale Taco increases boredom and unhappiness.
Added new methods to the Food class (to fix the above issue):
getBoredomChangeUnmodified()
getEnduranceChangeUnmodified()
getStressChangeUnmodified()
getThirstChangeUnmodified()
getUnhappyChangeUnmodified()
Higher level carpentry crates now have more space.
Can now move empty composter.
Can now move military crates.
Updated Debug context menu.
Updated Debug Menu UI.
Added Z param to teleport.
Added change vehicle skin option to debug.
Added Sync for changing color, blood and skin of vehicles.
Refactored "Remove Item"-tool UI.
Added option to the F11 UI: Disable Welcome message (Works only in debug mode).
Added Reload Lua button to main screen (only in debug mode).
Added Cheats Panel in debug menu. Updated cheat list (merged in options from Admin and F11 menu).
Added fast move cheat (Controls: Arrow keys, Page Up/Down) (Debug and Admin panel).
Added Admin context menu options (some options from debug).
Added cheat Spawn Key door
Added LootZed tool
Added LootZed tool cheat (Check what can spawn in a container with what chance)
Added remove items tools
Added Remove items tools in Debug mode (Option for remove items from container menu and option in Debug UI for remove items in area)
Added options to the "[DEBUG] Objects" menu to:
1) Change a mannequin's script.
2) Create a Moveable item in the player's inventory for a chosen mannequin script.
Changes to the debug Items List UI:
Don't recreate the ui each time it is displayed, because it's slow.
Keyboard focus is set to the "Type" text-entry box each time the ui is displayed.
Pressing the Tab key switches focus between the "Type" and "Name" text-entry boxes when either one has the focus.
Fixed the player's head being semi-transparent where hair and beard stubble appears. This also fixes semi-transparency that has always been there around the edges of holes in clothing.
Fixed the controller tooltip text in the character-creation profession ui not displaying.
Fixed the overly-long delay before changing the volume of a cd player or television when using a controller.
Fixed spam messages about CDplayer's invalid world sprite.
Fixed the player not running when moving too slowly to sprint.
Fixed the character-creation Add Trait button being covered by the controller tooltip text.
Fixed placing multiple items locking the items to the first square that is clicked.
Fixed controller focus not being set to the "Check back cover" ui.
Fixed exploit holding down the Escape key before starting certain actions.
Fixed taking damage when walking down stairs while faster-forwarding.
Fixed a NullPointerException in InventoryItem.update() when an item's ReplaceOnUseOn refers to an invalid item type.
Fixed the post-death ui appearing in the main menu in multiplayer, if the player dies while the main menu is displayed.
Fixed use of an undefined variable in SPlantGlobalObject.stateToIsoObject().
Fixed buggy player rendering in the in-game map when the player is attacked.
Fixed "Decaying Corpse Health Impact" health reduction for "Low" and "High" both being less than "Normal".
Fixed some duplications and formatting in MainCreationMethods.lua.
Fixed custom Sandbox floats displaying too many decimals in the tooltip.
Fixed walls in Fire station in LV remaining cutaway for no reason.
Fixed character being able to rest on seats seen through some windows.
Fixed siren and light bar shutting off once you get a certain distance away from the vehicle. Now even when you go over 1000 blocks away and come back, the lights and sirens on cars are still going off.
Fixed not being able to attach sheet ropes at certain locations.
Fixed cars not remembering their cruise control setting.
Fixed "Place item on ground" ignoring item's favourite status when placing items.
Fixed being able to interact with rain collectors through the wall.
Fixed player-built doors inside houses being transparent at any angle of view.
Fixed Walkie-Talkies not showing new "equipped" weight when equipped.
Fixed Metalwork locker container name being "Crate" in the loot window.
Fixed a spawned bowl of pasta or rice not being edible.
Fixed Painted Crates becoming white after Pick up / Place down.
Fixed Rotten food showing in right click menu as (Fresh) when newly spawned.
Fixed Applying Disinfectant to an un-infected wound making that body part immune to infection.
Fixed player-built walls cutting away completely when built inside of another building.
Fixed typo in AdjacentFreeTileFinder.lua.
Fixed "Cake Preparation" not spawning rotten in 6 Months Later scenario.
Fixed Dish Towel having option to "dry self" even if char is dry.
Fixed Hair/Beard types grow back to their dyed colour, instead of their natural colour.
Fixed Coffee / coffee beverage fatigue reduction values not saving on quit / restart.
Fixed replacing disassembled floors with dirt tiles above ground level.
Fixed clock Size option not being changable while in game.
Fixed nil variable in ISWorldObjectContextMenu.doSleepOption() when tired enough to sleep on the ground.
Fixed disassmbling floors playing the standing animation instead of crouching.
Fixed saved Radio Stations being removed when a radio is removed and reinstalled.
Fixed Foundation Makeup requiring a mirror when it already comes with one.
Fixed characters not using a Knive that was equipped or in main inventory when crafting while a better Knive was in a nearby container.
Fixed ISPaintMenu error when near a placed radio.
Fixed weirdness installing and uninstalling radios in vehicles.
Fixed NullPointerException in ParameterInside.
Fixed Composters not having a container icon and title.
Fixed blank VHS Home tapes spawning. They are now replaced with a random Retail VHS when spawning loot.
Fixed an occasional exception in ISInventoryPane.sortItemsByTypeAndWeight() caused by a bad item-sorting comparison function.
Fixed parts of weather effects not being rendered sometimes. This resulted in some clouds not being rendered at different zoom levels, causing the scene color to change when zooming in/out, for example.
Fixed items replaced by their ReplaceOnCooked type not being synced in multiplayer correctly.
Fixed Lua error when the mini-map doesn't exist.
Fixed jumbo item-atlas textures being drawn the first time models are loaded.
Fixed mannequins that spawn in containers being invisible when placing them the first time.
Fixed being unable to transfer the same item between containers until a timeout expires, if the first attempt was interrupted. This happened in multiplayer only.
Fixed item models being drawn jumbo-sized for one frame when they are still loading, when using the old way of rendering 3D items.
Fixed item-atlas textures being drawn in the incorrect position sometimes.
Fixed items floating in air or remaining on the ground after removing or placing furniture.
Fixed items on furniture being visible through walls. Item alpha is set to match that of the furniture it is placed on.
Fixed not setting the keyboard focus on the debug Items List ui the first time it is displayed.
Fixed the character-creation profession screen displaying controller icons after activating mods in the New Game ui, when no controller is active.
Fixed building Wallframe using two planks but giving three when disassembled
Fixed cooking an egg showing the progress bar twice
Fixed shirts and other clothing items getting auto-removed from the world when they shouldn't be.
Fixed the character-creation profession screen displaying controller icons after activating mods in the New Game ui, when no controller is active.
Fixed ISMap.canWrite() and ISMap:canErase() not using the Write and Eraser tags.
Fixed support pillars for stairs not being created on the server or other clients.
Fixed inability to burn corpses in MP
Fixed Millipede and Millepede2 in forageDefinitions.lua both using type=Base.Centipede.
Fixed forageSystem.modifyItemDef() incorrect use of _itemDef.type.
Fixed forageSystem.removeItemDef() possibly using a nil _itemDef variable when printing a warning.
Fixed HumanVisual.naturalBeardColor possibly being uninitialized before being copied in HumanVisual.copyFrom().
Fixed OldBrake1 VehicleType being 3 instead of 1.
Fixed the "Enable left joystick radial menu" option not being saved.
Fixed a Lua error pressing the Toggle Search Mode key before starting a game.
Fixed the Toggle Search Mode key getting in the way when the game is paused.
Fixed crafted radios getting less maximum range at higher Electricity levels.
Fixed crafted Ham Radios weighing 1.5-3 pounds instead of 20.
Changes to food and balancing can be read on our forums, since they would have this post hit the character limit. https://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/54121-4171-released/
[ 2022-05-22 12:15:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.71 compiled changelist
(Includes changes from builds 41.69 to 41.71 from the unstable branch.)
NEW
MODELS/ANIMS
MP
MODDING
SOUND CHANGES
CONTROLLER / STEAMDECK IMPROVEMENTS
BALANCE
DEBUG
FIXES
AND MORE
Changes to food and balancing can be read on our forums, since they would have this post hit the character limit. https://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/54121-4171-released/
[ 2022-05-22 12:15:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
Howard Ze(n)d
Meanwhile, new stuff continues to build for future updates to Build 41. The MP team continue their long-term work on having all items operate server-side to prevent item-spawn cheating, while also providing improvements to 41s more iterative patches. At the moment theres also MP work in the can on stuff like vehicle radios now receiving radio stations, VOIP and radio chat messages in bubble text over the car. Likewise improvements have been made to your client predicting where your friends are falling/dying which is resulting in resulting in far less corpse placement weirdness. Work is also currently going into the smoothness of vehicles being controlled by other folks on the server especially when they are moving at high speed. On the TIS side, meanwhile, EP has been integrating a new feature into the in-game map system that will be of great interest to admins and server owners: the ability to see where individual players are on Build 41s in-game map. Server operators will also have the option of allowing members of safehouses or factions be able to see each other on their own map, if that suits their playstyle more than the usual default of having absolute no idea where your friends are.
While its still not imminent, Aiteron is also integrating new animations into his fishing system that are starting to look really cool. This is super WIP and will get a lot of polish, but this is what it looked like this morning. Please note that in the vid the character is following the cursor: the cursor doesnt represent fish placement. Gameplay hasnt been fully tied to the anims yet. [previewyoutube=R6DGtmEdhkw;full][/previewyoutube] We are also looking for feedback and local knowledge from PZ players from Kentucky (and nearby surrounding regions) who enjoy fishing themselves. If this means you, then please check out the questions on this Google form. Massive thanks to those who previously emailed and have already given us some direction also!
Avid TIS followers will know that for a while we have been on the hunt for an Animation Engine Specialist to join the Project Zomboid team, and we are delighted to welcome one Howard Smith to our ranks. Howard is a big PZ fan, and also has big brains that have previously worked on the likes of Call of Duty, Halo and (wait for it) Left 4 Dead. Truth be told, in the big push for MP our work on our animations tech stalled somewhat and theres still many, many aspects of PZ combat and movement that we want to streamline and improve, and likewise many complex systems wed dearly love to integrate in the future. Howard has a tasklist a mile long covering areas in which our animator has been logjammed recently, and as such will be something of a busy boy. Something else, meanwhile, that this gets us back on track with is work towards a release of our internal AnimZed animation tools to the community. This wont be an imminent thing, but part of Howards work while getting bedded down in our code will be in building documentation and making some improvements both for us and the modding community.
Following the success of Build 41, we also find ourselves in a position where we can hunt down other experienced Games Programmers to join the Project Zomboid team. We are looking for coders willing and able to refresh some of our older systems, polish the existing ones and then to delve further into the features that will be part of the Knox Events exciting future. Interested applicants should check our jobs page, but we should underline that we currently dont have any entry-level positions available. You will need to have a fair amount of experience we are afraid.
Thats all the major news for this blog, but tomorrow we will have a surprise treat for denizens of the PZ subreddit. Pat_Bren has tracked down and interviewed a community hero, which has finally allowed us to say
This weeks arboreal scene from a S1ngle Man. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2022-05-12 20:59:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
For our last blog we released the new unstable beta version of Build 41 which was 41.69 (nice). Today we are releasing 41.71, which follows last Thursdays 41.70.
You can subscribe to the Unstable beta branch and download 41.71 by right-clicking PZ in your Steam library, and selecting Properties. Now go to the Betas tab and select the "unstable" branch from the dropdown menu.
These have generally been iterative patches, polishing the unstable beta up to a standard that we hope to be ready for a wider stable release next week.
This weeks primary task has been our Sound Team and coder brains fixing out some nasty total sound cut-outs that had been cropping up on busy servers.
Another primary thing weve been adding patch-by-patch is our new approach to action music. Instead of switching between tracks mid-combat, the music is reactive and can increase and decrease in intensity during combat and other dramatic moments. The familiar tune can cross-fade into a high action version, essentially.
So far weve been getting a very positive reaction from players on the beta. With 41.71 we will have ten out of the fourteen action tracks working in this way, so let us know what you think!
Otherwise in these patches weve been fixing lots of different longstanding niggles with the game, so have a peek at the changelists and jump in if you fancy on the unstable beta to let us know whether you think the build is ready for wider public consumption.
Finally, if you notice that the Unstable beta is misbehaving with your favourite mods, then please let your favourite mod authors know though please also be patient with them as they all exist in the real world with real lives/jobs/families/pets/TV shows to watch.
Finally finally+ a reminder that we will be removing some legacy builds from the Steam betas once the latest unstable beta goes stable. If you are playing on an older Build 41 beta, then please return to the mainline if at all possible.
NEXT
Meanwhile, new stuff continues to build for future updates to Build 41. The MP team continue their long-term work on having all items operate server-side to prevent item-spawn cheating, while also providing improvements to 41s more iterative patches. At the moment theres also MP work in the can on stuff like vehicle radios now receiving radio stations, VOIP and radio chat messages in bubble text over the car. Likewise improvements have been made to your client predicting where your friends are falling/dying which is resulting in resulting in far less corpse placement weirdness. Work is also currently going into the smoothness of vehicles being controlled by other folks on the server especially when they are moving at high speed. On the TIS side, meanwhile, EP has been integrating a new feature into the in-game map system that will be of great interest to admins and server owners: the ability to see where individual players are on Build 41s in-game map. Server operators will also have the option of allowing members of safehouses or factions be able to see each other on their own map, if that suits their playstyle more than the usual default of having absolute no idea where your friends are.
While its still not imminent, Aiteron is also integrating new animations into his fishing system that are starting to look really cool. This is super WIP and will get a lot of polish, but this is what it looked like this morning. Please note that in the vid the character is following the cursor: the cursor doesnt represent fish placement. Gameplay hasnt been fully tied to the anims yet. [previewyoutube=R6DGtmEdhkw;full][/previewyoutube] We are also looking for feedback and local knowledge from PZ players from Kentucky (and nearby surrounding regions) who enjoy fishing themselves. If this means you, then please check out the questions on this Google form. Massive thanks to those who previously emailed and have already given us some direction also!
NEW HIRE
Avid TIS followers will know that for a while we have been on the hunt for an Animation Engine Specialist to join the Project Zomboid team, and we are delighted to welcome one Howard Smith to our ranks. Howard is a big PZ fan, and also has big brains that have previously worked on the likes of Call of Duty, Halo and (wait for it) Left 4 Dead. Truth be told, in the big push for MP our work on our animations tech stalled somewhat and theres still many, many aspects of PZ combat and movement that we want to streamline and improve, and likewise many complex systems wed dearly love to integrate in the future. Howard has a tasklist a mile long covering areas in which our animator has been logjammed recently, and as such will be something of a busy boy. Something else, meanwhile, that this gets us back on track with is work towards a release of our internal AnimZed animation tools to the community. This wont be an imminent thing, but part of Howards work while getting bedded down in our code will be in building documentation and making some improvements both for us and the modding community.
MORE NEW HIRE?
Following the success of Build 41, we also find ourselves in a position where we can hunt down other experienced Games Programmers to join the Project Zomboid team. We are looking for coders willing and able to refresh some of our older systems, polish the existing ones and then to delve further into the features that will be part of the Knox Events exciting future. Interested applicants should check our jobs page, but we should underline that we currently dont have any entry-level positions available. You will need to have a fair amount of experience we are afraid.
TILL NEXT TIME
Thats all the major news for this blog, but tomorrow we will have a surprise treat for denizens of the PZ subreddit. Pat_Bren has tracked down and interviewed a community hero, which has finally allowed us to say
This weeks arboreal scene from a S1ngle Man. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2022-05-12 20:59:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.69 Unstable - Niiice
Elsewhere work continues on Build 42 and 43 content continues, with RJ still focusing on farm animals, and also the introduction of some basic AI versions of wild beasts also. Please consider these WIP!
Also coming to you today with a WIP tag (as we are working on far better player directional strain and lean animations rather than a repeated pull animation) is a video from Aiteron showing his current work on the fishing update. A lot of work these past few weeks has also been into making it work online, and our testers have been having some impromptu fishing competitions already. Here, also, you can see:
[ 2022-04-28 18:02:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
Heya everyone, so today were pushing the 41.69 patch out into the Unstable beta, which you can subscribe to by right-clicking PZ in your Steam library, selecting Properties, now go to the Betas tab and select the "unstable" branch from the dropdown menu.
This is a the first release of a wide-ranging version that touches many parts of the codebase including some fairly foundational stuff to improve the smooth running of MP, some handy new hooks for modders and many and various different fixes and improvements.
The full and unexpurgated changelistis pretty vast, but a quick topline run-through of its contents will now follow:
- In MP: improvements to car physics, admin improvements, anti-cheat fixes, better handling of dead bodies, PvP and safehouse fixes, fixed grass growing through safehouse floors and much much more.
- VHS fix an end to the peril of one-time-use video tapes on servers.
- A raft of Steamdeck compatibility improvements.
- New items, new forage finds, updated 3D models, new hair types and more.
- Scarecrows and Lab Skeleton mannequins that can be kitted out in player clothes.
- Quality of life features: renamed Skill books, better item placing, movable minimap and many and various other things.
- 3D items now shown as textures rather than models. As such they now slide around less when the player moves, and have far less of a performance impact when all piled up.
- New/improved tag system for modders, and other general mod-side improvements.
- Added ambiance noise for different areas on the map tied to particular buildings and items, such as a little bit of mall muzak.
- Relevant power down noises for the above-mentioned sounds to flag the power/water cutting out.
- New sounds for arcade machines, gas pumping, vehicle headlights and car window opening (both via handle and electric windows). Also BBQ noises, campfire sounds, fireplaces and more zed trip/thump stuff.
- Improved treatment of inside/outside sounds depending on whether doors and windows are open or closed.
- Loads of UI and controller improvements that are universally handy, but have primarily been put in for (you lucky!) Steamdeck users. 41.68 works okay with the new handheld device, but 41.69 should provide some vast improvements.
- Lots of general balance, including a spotlight on foods and recipes.
- A shitload of general fixes.
OTHER STUFF
Elsewhere work continues on Build 42 and 43 content continues, with RJ still focusing on farm animals, and also the introduction of some basic AI versions of wild beasts also. Please consider these WIP!
Also coming to you today with a WIP tag (as we are working on far better player directional strain and lean animations rather than a repeated pull animation) is a video from Aiteron showing his current work on the fishing update. A lot of work these past few weeks has also been into making it work online, and our testers have been having some impromptu fishing competitions already. Here, also, you can see:
- Water splashes (visuals WIP) to show placement of groups of fish, ultimately we plan to move to a more constant surface disturbance to show the positions of fish at any given time, as well as use the current splashes instead when the fish is struggling on the line.
- Lines and hooks that can be changed on the fishing rod that have an impact on your fishing.
- A fishing net you can catch items in, and a new generic trash item that can also become snared up in your tackle and provide you with a random item (not always a shoe!)
[ 2022-04-28 18:02:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
Lone Survivor
First, 41.69 (nice) build is still in progress, were testing a bunch of changes at the moment and are eager to get it out there, but are still weighing up the cost of disrupting the MP servers with the benefit of the goodies within, and making the call on when well push to unstable and start the release process. Well let you know when we know more. Heres the changelist of 41.69 thus far! https://pastebin.com/ZhRhKVZi
For the blog, we figured a good way to give people something real tasty to sink their teeth into regardless of the lack of fancy vids or pics, would be to show off the text results of our future Narrative NPC system that we discussed a few weeks back planned for Build 43. As we detailed in our first NPC meta system explanation, we have a powerful narrative event system that can be used to add context-driven storylets together into a somewhat convincing narrative for NPCs when they are away from the streamed-in world. These would define the goals of the NPCs, as well as evolve their situation so that when the player runs into them they have a convincing backstory, or events can transpire to affect those groups when they are not around for the player to witness. They will also drive events with npcs while the player IS present, leading to interesting generated story events for the player to interact with. These events set flags on characters, move their virtual presence along road networks and between houses of which all the rooms on the entire map are accessible even when the tiles themselves have not been streamed in. We can add extra data and tags that change the NPCs states and allow them to experience simplified narrative events that will branch and trigger randomly, and each of these events can have numerous outcomes of which we can attach a line of dialogue recounting the event later, so the characters will be able to sit around a campfire and let the rest know their story, or group members can recount the events of an eventful trip the player wasnt part of, or what transpired at the safehouse while the player was away. Context-sensitive text scripting is used to modify these lines of dialogue to fit the situation. For example, a tag for a characters name in the dialogue can be substituted with my mother-in-law, X or my nephew, Y tracking the relationship between the two characters, or even between the character being spoken about and a third character (Xs brother, Y). Other things such as a town location can be substituted where necessary, and there can be variant lines that are picked based on the characters, their flags, or other environmental conditions. Or just raw RNG, to mix things up a bit. Pat_Bren has been busy coming up with a whole metric ton of varied events and mini-narratives, and Lemmy has been integrating these into the event system. Theres a lot more to add yet, but it's starting to yield some cool results. Heres a few narrative outputs. Full disclosure: some massaging of the results has taken place here, its somewhat curated as the system is still capable of some very odd results and the pool is not yet large enough to avoid arrow to the knee situations, if we just threw in the first 10 results itd probably not be so impressive at this stage, so weve picked ones with the least overlap though youll likely notice a few repeated statements (in most cases this also demonstrates the variants or alternate paths we have there to mix it up) our goal is, ultimately, with progressive builds, to widen the library of narrative events and lines to the point where each story feels completely unique (easier to do without voiced dialogue, but we apologise profusely to our translators). Please be aware these are still work in progress, and we still need to do some work to make these flow as naturally as possible as if recounted later to another character rather than as a straight log of events that can seem a bit terse and unnatural, so none of the text is remotely final and we still need to figure out a good balance of information that would feel natural to share to a third party potentially weeks later (Its very important to note that, at present, these narratives are limited mainly to the meta, and while we talk about how they will impact characters the player witnesses, there is still a lot of work to do in that department. This is all very super work-in-progress, and while a metric ton of work has been done across the NPC codebase, it's still a big job to piece it all together to work as one.) [quote]I knew the electricity would be cut off. We stocked up and ate the fresh food first, then we lived on cans. We already had a generator and we used it for a while, until it caught fire The flames spread quickly. Juan got the extinguisher, but it wasnt enough. The smoke got to Keith, but we were able to drag him out of there. The whole house was on fire, and we lost everything. I thought the Murphys might help us out, but they wouldnt let us inside, they said it was too dangerous We were so desperate, we moved into a nearby house. We pushed a bookcase in front of the back door. Broke apart a table and used the pieces to secure the windows Then we just held out there as long as we could[/quote] [quote]There were four of us. We were holding up in West Point. It was crazy! My brother-in-law, Jason, just abandoned us, left us to fend for ourselves. We never saw him again. We tried to find a store that was safe. We had to go out and look for anything we could get our hands on But those things were everywhere. We couldnt get anything There were too many of those things! We had nothing, food had run out. Then a couple of days later, someone started banging on one of the windows. We had no idea who it was! It was Jim, a neighbor of ours, wanting to come inside. But what if he was sick? We couldnt risk it. I hope he made it[/quote] [quote]Those things broke through the barricades and poured inside. I did the best I could, but there were just too many! We panicked and ranlost Lang and Dillon, I dont know if they got away, or I think they got away. Theyve got to have, right?[/quote] [quote]Just before the shit hit the fan, my sister Annie got sick. We tried to take her to the hospital but the highway was blocked with traffic. By that time we realised it was too late, the car was blocked in, there was no way out. We had to abandon the car and make our way on foot. Annie was real bad, her fever was getting worse. Bryan, her husband, had to carry her. There was nothing I could do for her I did what I could, but it just wasnt enough. We didnt know. We had no idea what would happen! When she turned, she bit Bryan on the back of the neck. We left them both out there, God help us. We left them both walking around out there![/quote] [quote]I tried to get home to my family. When I got home theyd already bugged out, they left a note saying theyd gone up to Riverside to my inlaws. Why didnt they wait? I know Ive got to get over there, before[/quote] [quote]There was little I could do for him.. I did the best I could, but we didnt have enough supplies. He knew what was going to happen. He asked me for pills and locked himself in the bathroom We buried him out back that is, after we[/quote] [quote]Just before the shit hit the fan, Joe got sick. We tried to take him to the hospital, but the streets were clogged with traffic, so we came back. Joe said he didnt want to become like those things He asked me for a rope and barricaded himself in, but he still came back The barricades werent strong enough. He escaped and bit Sergei. I had to put him down too. Ill never be able to forgive myself. Its like a nightmare[/quote] [quote]Alanna, my wife, had a fever that morning, but she hadnt been bitten. In less than an hour she kept getting worse until she turned and tried to bite me. I had to oh God Her bodys still there I tried to get to my brother Jacks house. Those things started chasing me but I stole a car and got away I had to keep on the move to get away from the infected. Then I hit someone with my car. There was no time to brake The man wasnt badly injured, thank God. He introduced himself as Kevin Jones, a plumber from Rosewood. He was alone, I think hed lost someone. When we finally reached Jacks house, he and his wife Carol were okay, thank God. They couldnt believe we werent infected. That was the worst day of my life. At least, up till then[/quote] Lets pick one of them and break down how it works: [quote]Just before the shit hit the fan, my sister Annie got sick. We tried to take her to the hospital but the highway was blocked with traffic. By that time we realised it was too late, the car was blocked in, there was no way out. We had to abandon the car and make our way on foot. Annie was real bad, her fever was getting worse. Bryan, her husband, had to carry her. There was nothing I could do for her I did what I could, but it just wasnt enough. We didnt know. We had no idea what would happen! When she turned, she bit Bryan on the back of the neck. We left them both out there, God help us. We left them both walking around out there! [/quote] As is probably clear, this is all too self-consistent to be completely random. This isnt just a bunch of random disconnected events triggering one after another, but rather a mini-narrative that is comprised of several related events, each of which has various ways they can pan out and also conditions that can lead to them triggering in the first place, leading to a whole host of other outcomes that will affect the group in different ways. To show this, youll see another branching version of this same narrative in the list of outputs above, starting with Just before the shit hit the fan, Joe got sick. Though it sharing the specific phrase shit hit the fan text was a coincidence, it could have equally started with Just before things got really bad or Before all of this. Narratives have natural endpoints that can end that narrative, or instead, they potentially lead naturally into another if relevant. In other cases they can set flags on characters or groups that will lead to other events, or even other narratives, having a chance of triggering on them in the future. This is the way the narratives can ultimately serve as larger building blocks to make longer character stories that flow into each other convincingly. So back to this demo narrative above: [quote]Just before the shit hit the fan, my sister Annie got sick.[/quote] As detailed before, we generate the starting NPC groups from various families, with some other elements to mix things up. In the first event of this narrative, we pick an appropriate member of the household to get sick. This will set the first constant within this narrative that will be referenced and used throughout. Then the second event in the narrative is thus [quote]We tried to take her to the hospital but the highway was blocked with traffic.[/quote] This event will trigger the characters of the group (however it was generated) including the unfortunate Annie, to set a goal to travel to the Louisville hospital. Wherever they are in the world, a path will be generated along roads to that location. Even though the characters, nor a vehicle, are streamed into the world, and they exist virtually in the meta, we can randomly assign them an appropriate car and start them moving at approximately car speed along the roads en route to Louisville. If the player were to cross paths with this virtual radar blip of these characters, it would spawn in the car with them inside, moving in the correct direction at the appropriate speed, and the more direct vehicle controlling AI would take over with the same destination in mind. This event can play out in various ways, hitting the military blockade, crashing the car, getting stuck amongst a group of zombies. Getting stuck in traffic has various outcomes, including for example a car-jacking attempt, or the person being carried turning in the car. Some of these may lead to more generic events or narratives or may continue the main mini-narrative to a further conclusion. Assuming all this carries on within the virtual meta world, they will make their way until they hit one of the traffic jam zones on the highway, which in this case causes it to trigger the next event in the narrative. [quote]By that time we realised it was too late, the car was blocked in, there was no way out. We had to abandon the car and make our way on foot.[/quote] Alternatively, it could be they managed to drive back home or get through the jam and onto the next problem. But, in this case, the narrative branches to this outcome. We flag they have lost their car, and are now on foot. We set their goal to still be heading toward Louisville hospital, however, now they are flagged as on foot and the groups radar blip moves at a much slower rate along the road. If a player intersected with their journey, wed spawn the characters all on foot, and the AI would take over from there with the same pathing goal. Now they are on foot, this opens the door for other events linked to this narrative to fire that wouldnt be possible within a vehicle. One such event that can randomly trigger is a worsening of the health condition of whomever was chosen to be the sick one, which is what happens next. [quote]Annie was real bad, her fever was getting worse. Bryan, her husband, had to carry her.[/quote] True, at this time we dont have any way to make this real should the player happen upon this group, since we dont have support for characters carrying others at the moment. We hope to add this, and should we do this, then when we spawn the characters in the flesh we would set them up as appropriate to the event but regardless, at the moment these narratives in particular take place way too early for players to actually intersect with, so we can take a few liberties in these particular narratives anyway. Notice Bryan is referred to as her husband, which is automatically generated using Annie as the context character, and the code examining the closest relationship between these two characters. We could instead have an alternate line of dialogue using the speaking character (Annies sibling) as the context and it would instead read my brother-in-law, Bryan, finding the shortest link between the speaking character and Bryan was through Annie. We plan for this to be expanded in the future to automatically modify based on all manner of things, such as character opinion, and/or characters traits (My idiot brother-in-law, Bryan, for example) though this may not be present in the first iterations of the system. So now, we have flagged that the ill person is being carried, and is being carried by Bryan. This opens up the potential for new events to be triggered, and indeed that is what happens. Poor Bryan. Again, some choices, what they do with the zombie Annie and Bryan, there could be a third victim in attempting to put them down. These branches are, relatively, painless to write, and can be expanded on far into the future. It means we can have many small narrative threads, ones that last days, or ones that last months, that thread-in appropriate events to steer the story in believable directions, with written or designed outcomes that make sense and feel like a real story, in a manageable and expandable way. The quests that we have with our story generation will likely fit in line with this above narrative system. Is a character split from their loved ones, on their way to another town to find them? Maybe you can help? Were hoping for a more organic structure of interaction and transaction with NPCs that emerges from this narrative system and leads to some really cool and believable stories being told with our NPCs. Header Image pilfered from a previous blog out of laziness, sorry! You can find all our previous blogs here. Block of italized text has nothing more to say today, bye bye!
[ 2022-04-14 13:56:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello! The last couple of weeks has had an unusually high number of absentees, by coincidental combinations of gaming conference attendees, long-planned family visits, and even an unforeseen emergency hospital stay (that turned out fine, dont worry) meaning weve been running on a somewhat diminished team of late, but that should be sorted out by next week and well be running at full steam again! so unfortunately, there arent any sexy vids or pics to show off. However, still we have some super interesting stuff to talk about! However, itll likely take the form of lotsa text so prepare yourself for that!
41.69
First, 41.69 (nice) build is still in progress, were testing a bunch of changes at the moment and are eager to get it out there, but are still weighing up the cost of disrupting the MP servers with the benefit of the goodies within, and making the call on when well push to unstable and start the release process. Well let you know when we know more. Heres the changelist of 41.69 thus far! https://pastebin.com/ZhRhKVZi
NPC Narratives
For the blog, we figured a good way to give people something real tasty to sink their teeth into regardless of the lack of fancy vids or pics, would be to show off the text results of our future Narrative NPC system that we discussed a few weeks back planned for Build 43. As we detailed in our first NPC meta system explanation, we have a powerful narrative event system that can be used to add context-driven storylets together into a somewhat convincing narrative for NPCs when they are away from the streamed-in world. These would define the goals of the NPCs, as well as evolve their situation so that when the player runs into them they have a convincing backstory, or events can transpire to affect those groups when they are not around for the player to witness. They will also drive events with npcs while the player IS present, leading to interesting generated story events for the player to interact with. These events set flags on characters, move their virtual presence along road networks and between houses of which all the rooms on the entire map are accessible even when the tiles themselves have not been streamed in. We can add extra data and tags that change the NPCs states and allow them to experience simplified narrative events that will branch and trigger randomly, and each of these events can have numerous outcomes of which we can attach a line of dialogue recounting the event later, so the characters will be able to sit around a campfire and let the rest know their story, or group members can recount the events of an eventful trip the player wasnt part of, or what transpired at the safehouse while the player was away. Context-sensitive text scripting is used to modify these lines of dialogue to fit the situation. For example, a tag for a characters name in the dialogue can be substituted with my mother-in-law, X or my nephew, Y tracking the relationship between the two characters, or even between the character being spoken about and a third character (Xs brother, Y). Other things such as a town location can be substituted where necessary, and there can be variant lines that are picked based on the characters, their flags, or other environmental conditions. Or just raw RNG, to mix things up a bit. Pat_Bren has been busy coming up with a whole metric ton of varied events and mini-narratives, and Lemmy has been integrating these into the event system. Theres a lot more to add yet, but it's starting to yield some cool results. Heres a few narrative outputs. Full disclosure: some massaging of the results has taken place here, its somewhat curated as the system is still capable of some very odd results and the pool is not yet large enough to avoid arrow to the knee situations, if we just threw in the first 10 results itd probably not be so impressive at this stage, so weve picked ones with the least overlap though youll likely notice a few repeated statements (in most cases this also demonstrates the variants or alternate paths we have there to mix it up) our goal is, ultimately, with progressive builds, to widen the library of narrative events and lines to the point where each story feels completely unique (easier to do without voiced dialogue, but we apologise profusely to our translators). Please be aware these are still work in progress, and we still need to do some work to make these flow as naturally as possible as if recounted later to another character rather than as a straight log of events that can seem a bit terse and unnatural, so none of the text is remotely final and we still need to figure out a good balance of information that would feel natural to share to a third party potentially weeks later (Its very important to note that, at present, these narratives are limited mainly to the meta, and while we talk about how they will impact characters the player witnesses, there is still a lot of work to do in that department. This is all very super work-in-progress, and while a metric ton of work has been done across the NPC codebase, it's still a big job to piece it all together to work as one.) [quote]I knew the electricity would be cut off. We stocked up and ate the fresh food first, then we lived on cans. We already had a generator and we used it for a while, until it caught fire The flames spread quickly. Juan got the extinguisher, but it wasnt enough. The smoke got to Keith, but we were able to drag him out of there. The whole house was on fire, and we lost everything. I thought the Murphys might help us out, but they wouldnt let us inside, they said it was too dangerous We were so desperate, we moved into a nearby house. We pushed a bookcase in front of the back door. Broke apart a table and used the pieces to secure the windows Then we just held out there as long as we could[/quote] [quote]There were four of us. We were holding up in West Point. It was crazy! My brother-in-law, Jason, just abandoned us, left us to fend for ourselves. We never saw him again. We tried to find a store that was safe. We had to go out and look for anything we could get our hands on But those things were everywhere. We couldnt get anything There were too many of those things! We had nothing, food had run out. Then a couple of days later, someone started banging on one of the windows. We had no idea who it was! It was Jim, a neighbor of ours, wanting to come inside. But what if he was sick? We couldnt risk it. I hope he made it[/quote] [quote]Those things broke through the barricades and poured inside. I did the best I could, but there were just too many! We panicked and ranlost Lang and Dillon, I dont know if they got away, or I think they got away. Theyve got to have, right?[/quote] [quote]Just before the shit hit the fan, my sister Annie got sick. We tried to take her to the hospital but the highway was blocked with traffic. By that time we realised it was too late, the car was blocked in, there was no way out. We had to abandon the car and make our way on foot. Annie was real bad, her fever was getting worse. Bryan, her husband, had to carry her. There was nothing I could do for her I did what I could, but it just wasnt enough. We didnt know. We had no idea what would happen! When she turned, she bit Bryan on the back of the neck. We left them both out there, God help us. We left them both walking around out there![/quote] [quote]I tried to get home to my family. When I got home theyd already bugged out, they left a note saying theyd gone up to Riverside to my inlaws. Why didnt they wait? I know Ive got to get over there, before[/quote] [quote]There was little I could do for him.. I did the best I could, but we didnt have enough supplies. He knew what was going to happen. He asked me for pills and locked himself in the bathroom We buried him out back that is, after we[/quote] [quote]Just before the shit hit the fan, Joe got sick. We tried to take him to the hospital, but the streets were clogged with traffic, so we came back. Joe said he didnt want to become like those things He asked me for a rope and barricaded himself in, but he still came back The barricades werent strong enough. He escaped and bit Sergei. I had to put him down too. Ill never be able to forgive myself. Its like a nightmare[/quote] [quote]Alanna, my wife, had a fever that morning, but she hadnt been bitten. In less than an hour she kept getting worse until she turned and tried to bite me. I had to oh God Her bodys still there I tried to get to my brother Jacks house. Those things started chasing me but I stole a car and got away I had to keep on the move to get away from the infected. Then I hit someone with my car. There was no time to brake The man wasnt badly injured, thank God. He introduced himself as Kevin Jones, a plumber from Rosewood. He was alone, I think hed lost someone. When we finally reached Jacks house, he and his wife Carol were okay, thank God. They couldnt believe we werent infected. That was the worst day of my life. At least, up till then[/quote] Lets pick one of them and break down how it works: [quote]Just before the shit hit the fan, my sister Annie got sick. We tried to take her to the hospital but the highway was blocked with traffic. By that time we realised it was too late, the car was blocked in, there was no way out. We had to abandon the car and make our way on foot. Annie was real bad, her fever was getting worse. Bryan, her husband, had to carry her. There was nothing I could do for her I did what I could, but it just wasnt enough. We didnt know. We had no idea what would happen! When she turned, she bit Bryan on the back of the neck. We left them both out there, God help us. We left them both walking around out there! [/quote] As is probably clear, this is all too self-consistent to be completely random. This isnt just a bunch of random disconnected events triggering one after another, but rather a mini-narrative that is comprised of several related events, each of which has various ways they can pan out and also conditions that can lead to them triggering in the first place, leading to a whole host of other outcomes that will affect the group in different ways. To show this, youll see another branching version of this same narrative in the list of outputs above, starting with Just before the shit hit the fan, Joe got sick. Though it sharing the specific phrase shit hit the fan text was a coincidence, it could have equally started with Just before things got really bad or Before all of this. Narratives have natural endpoints that can end that narrative, or instead, they potentially lead naturally into another if relevant. In other cases they can set flags on characters or groups that will lead to other events, or even other narratives, having a chance of triggering on them in the future. This is the way the narratives can ultimately serve as larger building blocks to make longer character stories that flow into each other convincingly. So back to this demo narrative above: [quote]Just before the shit hit the fan, my sister Annie got sick.[/quote] As detailed before, we generate the starting NPC groups from various families, with some other elements to mix things up. In the first event of this narrative, we pick an appropriate member of the household to get sick. This will set the first constant within this narrative that will be referenced and used throughout. Then the second event in the narrative is thus [quote]We tried to take her to the hospital but the highway was blocked with traffic.[/quote] This event will trigger the characters of the group (however it was generated) including the unfortunate Annie, to set a goal to travel to the Louisville hospital. Wherever they are in the world, a path will be generated along roads to that location. Even though the characters, nor a vehicle, are streamed into the world, and they exist virtually in the meta, we can randomly assign them an appropriate car and start them moving at approximately car speed along the roads en route to Louisville. If the player were to cross paths with this virtual radar blip of these characters, it would spawn in the car with them inside, moving in the correct direction at the appropriate speed, and the more direct vehicle controlling AI would take over with the same destination in mind. This event can play out in various ways, hitting the military blockade, crashing the car, getting stuck amongst a group of zombies. Getting stuck in traffic has various outcomes, including for example a car-jacking attempt, or the person being carried turning in the car. Some of these may lead to more generic events or narratives or may continue the main mini-narrative to a further conclusion. Assuming all this carries on within the virtual meta world, they will make their way until they hit one of the traffic jam zones on the highway, which in this case causes it to trigger the next event in the narrative. [quote]By that time we realised it was too late, the car was blocked in, there was no way out. We had to abandon the car and make our way on foot.[/quote] Alternatively, it could be they managed to drive back home or get through the jam and onto the next problem. But, in this case, the narrative branches to this outcome. We flag they have lost their car, and are now on foot. We set their goal to still be heading toward Louisville hospital, however, now they are flagged as on foot and the groups radar blip moves at a much slower rate along the road. If a player intersected with their journey, wed spawn the characters all on foot, and the AI would take over from there with the same pathing goal. Now they are on foot, this opens the door for other events linked to this narrative to fire that wouldnt be possible within a vehicle. One such event that can randomly trigger is a worsening of the health condition of whomever was chosen to be the sick one, which is what happens next. [quote]Annie was real bad, her fever was getting worse. Bryan, her husband, had to carry her.[/quote] True, at this time we dont have any way to make this real should the player happen upon this group, since we dont have support for characters carrying others at the moment. We hope to add this, and should we do this, then when we spawn the characters in the flesh we would set them up as appropriate to the event but regardless, at the moment these narratives in particular take place way too early for players to actually intersect with, so we can take a few liberties in these particular narratives anyway. Notice Bryan is referred to as her husband, which is automatically generated using Annie as the context character, and the code examining the closest relationship between these two characters. We could instead have an alternate line of dialogue using the speaking character (Annies sibling) as the context and it would instead read my brother-in-law, Bryan, finding the shortest link between the speaking character and Bryan was through Annie. We plan for this to be expanded in the future to automatically modify based on all manner of things, such as character opinion, and/or characters traits (My idiot brother-in-law, Bryan, for example) though this may not be present in the first iterations of the system. So now, we have flagged that the ill person is being carried, and is being carried by Bryan. This opens up the potential for new events to be triggered, and indeed that is what happens. Poor Bryan. Again, some choices, what they do with the zombie Annie and Bryan, there could be a third victim in attempting to put them down. These branches are, relatively, painless to write, and can be expanded on far into the future. It means we can have many small narrative threads, ones that last days, or ones that last months, that thread-in appropriate events to steer the story in believable directions, with written or designed outcomes that make sense and feel like a real story, in a manageable and expandable way. The quests that we have with our story generation will likely fit in line with this above narrative system. Is a character split from their loved ones, on their way to another town to find them? Maybe you can help? Were hoping for a more organic structure of interaction and transaction with NPCs that emerges from this narrative system and leads to some really cool and believable stories being told with our NPCs. Header Image pilfered from a previous blog out of laziness, sorry! You can find all our previous blogs here. Block of italized text has nothing more to say today, bye bye!
[ 2022-04-14 13:56:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
Milky Milky
We are currently partway through the journey to the 41.69 patch. Planned patches to Build 41 are intended to be, generally, not feature-led and instead focus on balance, QOL, fixes and polish. The current contents of 41.69 includes:
Although its not clear where it will land in terms of a build release yet, this week Aiterons new fishing system had its first internal test. This was largely a bug-chasing exercise, especially in terms of MP, but the testers had fun. Theres still a lot of work to be done, and we will need better and more appropriate anims to really sell how it works, but the current mission statement is to get it all working so we can then add some polish. We also need to bring the mechanics closer to realism, through exploring what is caught (and how) in Kentucky and what different types of lines, hooks, lures, bait and catch options we should include to increase/decrease your chances of catching a particular sort of fish. Likewise, clearly stuff like your location, the weather, the time of day and your fishing skill will all come into play. We wont go into detail, as its still distant, but something else thats in the design phase while Aiteron implements fishing is bringing elements of his lockpicking mod over into the main game in a new and improved package to boot. Locks will vary in type and challenge, and the tools required may differ. Through this, stashes with useful loot will be added to the map hidden behind locked doors. This will also enable locked doors within houses, chests, locked gun cabinets etc.
The map teams ongoing mission to improve the Knox Event map continues. Amidst other tasks focussing on the Many Years Later challenge map, converting and building new farms to fit in with our animal plans, and plotting for future expansion heres a few extra fun things that will be appearing in an exclusion zone near you.
On top of the gameplay improvements mentioned last time, the guys at Formosa UK (formerly Noiseworks) are working on a first draft of a rework of the action music. Instead of switching between tracks mid-fight, the plan is to cross-fade between different intensity levels of the same track. The base intensity will be the regular track that you are used to, but then there will also be a high action version that has been beefed up a bit. When the action subsides, or the number of zombies youre fighting declines, the music will enter a low state and eventually fade out.
Work on the introduction of farmed animals continues for their planned introduction in Build 42. All the following information and videos are SUPER WORK IN PROGRESS and will improve a bunch as we move forward. Please dont worry/complain/laugh/faint/query/weep about em. (Usual caveats apply basically! Some bullet points on the current integration!
[ 2022-03-31 22:08:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
How do, all. Lets visit a few different PZ departments to see whats cooking.
41 PATCHING
We are currently partway through the journey to the 41.69 patch. Planned patches to Build 41 are intended to be, generally, not feature-led and instead focus on balance, QOL, fixes and polish. The current contents of 41.69 includes:
- New items and 3D models
- New foraging discoveries.
- Many improvements for controller and Steamdeck play
- Many improvements to the MP experience in areas such as: the sometimes weird vehicle physics, the PvP safety system, the PvP cooldown timer, safehouse bugs, sleeping and radio/VHS sync.
FISHING AND LOCKPICKING
Although its not clear where it will land in terms of a build release yet, this week Aiterons new fishing system had its first internal test. This was largely a bug-chasing exercise, especially in terms of MP, but the testers had fun. Theres still a lot of work to be done, and we will need better and more appropriate anims to really sell how it works, but the current mission statement is to get it all working so we can then add some polish. We also need to bring the mechanics closer to realism, through exploring what is caught (and how) in Kentucky and what different types of lines, hooks, lures, bait and catch options we should include to increase/decrease your chances of catching a particular sort of fish. Likewise, clearly stuff like your location, the weather, the time of day and your fishing skill will all come into play. We wont go into detail, as its still distant, but something else thats in the design phase while Aiteron implements fishing is bringing elements of his lockpicking mod over into the main game in a new and improved package to boot. Locks will vary in type and challenge, and the tools required may differ. Through this, stashes with useful loot will be added to the map hidden behind locked doors. This will also enable locked doors within houses, chests, locked gun cabinets etc.
MAP WORK
The map teams ongoing mission to improve the Knox Event map continues. Amidst other tasks focussing on the Many Years Later challenge map, converting and building new farms to fit in with our animal plans, and plotting for future expansion heres a few extra fun things that will be appearing in an exclusion zone near you.
- New tiles to improve the appearance of existing locations.
- Some older, and very distinguished, buildings for the richfolk of the area.
MUSIC
On top of the gameplay improvements mentioned last time, the guys at Formosa UK (formerly Noiseworks) are working on a first draft of a rework of the action music. Instead of switching between tracks mid-fight, the plan is to cross-fade between different intensity levels of the same track. The base intensity will be the regular track that you are used to, but then there will also be a high action version that has been beefed up a bit. When the action subsides, or the number of zombies youre fighting declines, the music will enter a low state and eventually fade out.
FARM ANIMALS
Work on the introduction of farmed animals continues for their planned introduction in Build 42. All the following information and videos are SUPER WORK IN PROGRESS and will improve a bunch as we move forward. Please dont worry/complain/laugh/faint/query/weep about em. (Usual caveats apply basically! Some bullet points on the current integration!
- All animals are defined in lua definition tables, which will allow for maximum modding possibilities: its via these definitions that you can essentially adjust animal behaviour.
- When in their pen farm animals will wander around, emote by flapping wings or rootling for food on the ground, sit, rest, lie down etc.
- Relevant animals can graze grass, which then regrows after an appropriate amount of time which can be defined in a new sandbox option.
- Animals will eat from a trough, which is something youll either construct or loot from a farm.
- Animals all have different growth stages for example calves become cows/bulls, and grow in size. Their growth will be guided by various parameters like their hunger, thirst, general health and the size of their enclosure.
- Baby animals will stick by their mothers side, and even take milk directly from the udder.
- The bigger the animal size, the more meat it will produce when it is butchered.
- There will be various breeds in-game so you could have a meat breed (Angus) or a milk breed (Holstein) and maybe even something in between like a Simmental.
- Growth rates will be realistic, so a cow will take two full years to be at its full size, but this will be modifiable via sandbox options.
- Cows will generate milk for a certain period after delivering a calf. The more you continue to milk the cow, the more milk youll get each day. Leaving a cow with a full udder, however, will cause issues and a decrease in lactation.
- Sheep grow wool that you can retrieve with a shear, and also have a milking system if you enjoy sheep milk.
- Hens can lay eggs. If a henhouse is present theyll lay eggs in it, otherwise theyll do it on the ground. They can be fertilized by a rooster, so if left for a time can hatch out chicks.
- You will need to shut the door to the henhouse every night, and open it back up every morning, or will you risk visits from Mister Fox and see the resulting bloodstains to boot.
[ 2022-03-31 22:08:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.68 RELEASED
(Also including 41.67 from the unstable branch)
[ 2022-03-14 16:26:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.68 compiled changelist
(Also including 41.67 from the unstable branch)
MP
- Cheat control
- Each anti-cheat can now be disabled via server option
- Several anti-cheats can now be configured via server option
- Anti-cheats are disabled by default for co-op hosted servers
- Max/Min/Default values hint is added to ServerOptionChange UI window for double and integer server options
- Old SafetySystem tooltip text is changed in accordance with new icon
- GhostMod and NoClip are removed when admin gets player access level
- Adjusted anti-cheat thresholds
- Player is not kicked on coop host server
- Adjust MP gain XP limit by sandbox XPMultiplier value
- Fixed typo in UI\_ValidationFailed\_Type9
- System property "rconlo" is added to make RCON server listen on loopback interface only
- New IsoObjectID class replaces ZombieIDMap.
- Limit the "mods" string reported by Steam servers to 128 characters. A new keyvalue "modCount" reports the actual number of mods used by the server.The server browser and favorites list will display "... and N more" after the list of mods, when there are more mods than are displayed.This is to fix some servers reporting ??? as their version number, which prevents people from joining.
- The server will exit if there are syntax errors in the servername\_SandboxVars.lua file.
- The server's servername\_SandboxVars.lua is saved after loading it to update it to the latest version with comments.
- Added missing buttons to disable toggle in admin panel UI
- Added closing admin panel UI if player has no access level or revoked privileges
- Added closing safezone tool UI if player has no access level or revoked privileges
- Clarified safehouse tooltip - show all reasons why a safehouse cannot be claimed
- Added server option "SafehouseAllowNonResidential" to allow claiming all buildings
- Added confirmation before releasing a safe house
- Fixed the owner sometimes showing in safehouse member list
- Added check when releasing safehouse if player is the current owner or an admin
- Fixed DisableSafehouseWhenPlayerConnected teleporting players outside when a player is removed while there are members online
- Fixed DisableSafehouseWhenPlayerConnected never replacing the safehouse after a player disconnects
- Added updating of the safehouse online member count periodically
- Added allow changing safehouse owner to players which are a member
- Added extended server quit logging
- Print 'command entered via server console (System.in): "xxx"' in GameServer.launchCommandHandler().
- Added isConsistent() call to GameServer.receiveSyncClothing().
- Fixed both options on yes/no confirmation when quitting a safehouse removed the player
- Fixed zombie that can be deleted by admin or zombie owner
- Fixed server hanging on quit command because of active RCON connection
- Fixed CD and VHS tapes possibly being different for each client.
- Fixed GlobalModData.save() not being called on the server.
- Fixed ZomboidRadio.Save() not being called when other things are saved on the server. It was called every 10 game-world minutes, however.
- Fixed Lua error in ISPlayerStatsManageInvUI after calling the /additem command in multiplayer.
- Fixed issues with the Stitch packet.
- Fixed repeated exceptions in GameClient.sendAddedRemovedItems() when a container object is null for some reason.
- Fixed adding items to or removing items from containers not being synced in multiplayer if the player teleports before the changes are reported to the server. This was one cause of the issue fixed above.
NEW
- Added "Enable left joystick radial menu" accessibility option.
- Updated community translations.
- Added 3D models (not all in-game yet)
ENGINE
- Updated Windows and Linux FMOD to 2.02.05.
- Added error checking and logging when initializing FMOD. The sound system is disabled when errors occur.
MODDING
- Made the maximum allowed tiledef file number 16382. File numbers 0-99 are reserved for the game, as was already the case. The old unenforced maximum was 1000, which some mods ignored. Sprite IDs must fit in a signed 32-bit integer (2,147,483,647). Each tiledef file is reserved 512 tilesheets of 512 tiles each. However: please note that values higher than 8190 result in NEGATIVE sprite IDs. Numbers higher than 16382 definitely aren't allowed due to using 32-bit integers to hold sprite IDs.
FORAGING
- Added Search Focus system for foraging
- focus is set in the investigate area window
- only one focus may be active at a time
- increases chance to find certain categories of item when searching
- player must be skilled enough to identify the item category to focus on it
- focus effectiveness is determined by player skill and category
- hidden item categories will not be rerolled (rare find protection)
- square must be valid to roll the item type (cannot be used to find plants on roads)
- Fixed duplicate clothing effect displayed in ZoneDisplay tooltip
- Fixed missing per player render flag in ISBaseIcon
- Tidied spriteAffinities definitions
- General tidying and alignment of tables
- Removed stone/firewood identify category skill requirement
- Added translations for search focus functions
- Added controller support for search focus
- Fixed medicinal herbs requirement - check for recipe instead of trait "Herbalist"
- Fixed tooltips flickering in Zone Display
- Added tooltip to make long tips easier to read without scrolling
- Added zone display tip for using search focus
- Updated focus check to occur before item preview is placed
- Added blocking search focus for sprite affinity items
BALANCE
- Fixed Axeman not applying bonus for swing speed
- Added correct adjustment of exercise fatigue.
- Updated community translations.
FIXES
- Fixed car dashboard delay when taking damage
- Fixed doors missing their glass, and the triangle-shaped floors\_exterior\_natural\_01 dirt tile.
- Fixed disassembling player-built floors resulting in two floor tiles after reloading, an auto-generated wood floor plus a dirt tile.
- Fixed the result of FMOD[noparse]::[/noparse][noparse]Studio::[/noparse][noparse]System::[/noparse]getCoreSystem() not being checked properly for errors.
- Fixed Lua error clicking the close button in the titlebar of the Horde Manager debug ui.
- Fixed a BufferOverflowException when the number of reanimated player zombies is high. (It was taking about 600 player zombies (assuming 1.6KB per descriptor and 1e6KB packet buffer)to be loaded for this exception to happen)
- Fixed dragging VHS tapes from world containers to the Device Options ui not being synced in multiplayer.
- Fixed repairing a hole in a long Leather Jacket with level 8 Tailoring not restoring condition.
- Fixed phantom item-transfer actions playing after crafting sometimes.
- Fixed IndexOutOfBoundsException in WorldItemModelDrawer.renderMain().
- Fixed starting the MusicCombined event doing network stuff.
- Fixed the MusicCombined event being stopped and then restarted the first time Lua is reloaded.
- Fixed split-screen players, except the last, being unable to drive vehicles in multiplayer.
- Fixed unnecessary pause when starting in debug
[ 2022-03-14 16:26:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
Project Zomboid UNSTABLE 41.68 Released
- Added allow changing safehouse owner to players which are a member - Added extended server quit logging - Print 'command entered via server console (System.in): "xxx"' in GameServer.launchCommandHandler(). - Added isConsistent() call to GameServer.receiveSyncClothing().
- Updated focus check to occur before item preview is placed - Added blocking search focus for sprite affinity items
- Fixed the result of FMOD Studio System getCoreSystem() not being checked properly for errors. - Fixed Lua error clicking the close button in the titlebar of the Horde Manager debug ui. - Fixed a BufferOverflowException when the number of reanimated player zombies is high. (It was taking about 600 player zombies (assuming 1.6KB per descriptor and 1e6KB packet buffer) to be loaded for this exception to happen) - Fixed dragging VHS tapes from world containers to the Device Options ui not being synced in multiplayer. - Fixed repairing a hole in a long Leather Jacket with level 8 Tailoring not restoring condition. - Fixed phantom item-transfer actions playing after crafting sometimes. - Fixed IndexOutOfBoundsException in WorldItemModelDrawer.renderMain(). - Fixed starting the MusicCombined event doing network stuff. - Fixed the MusicCombined event being stopped and then restarted the first time Lua is reloaded.
[ 2022-03-07 18:38:14 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.68 RELEASED TO UNSTABLE BETA
NEW
- Added allow changing safehouse owner to players which are a member - Added extended server quit logging - Print 'command entered via server console (System.in): "xxx"' in GameServer.launchCommandHandler(). - Added isConsistent() call to GameServer.receiveSyncClothing().
FORAGING
- Updated focus check to occur before item preview is placed - Added blocking search focus for sprite affinity items
FIXES
- Fixed the result of FMOD Studio System getCoreSystem() not being checked properly for errors. - Fixed Lua error clicking the close button in the titlebar of the Horde Manager debug ui. - Fixed a BufferOverflowException when the number of reanimated player zombies is high. (It was taking about 600 player zombies (assuming 1.6KB per descriptor and 1e6KB packet buffer) to be loaded for this exception to happen) - Fixed dragging VHS tapes from world containers to the Device Options ui not being synced in multiplayer. - Fixed repairing a hole in a long Leather Jacket with level 8 Tailoring not restoring condition. - Fixed phantom item-transfer actions playing after crafting sometimes. - Fixed IndexOutOfBoundsException in WorldItemModelDrawer.renderMain(). - Fixed starting the MusicCombined event doing network stuff. - Fixed the MusicCombined event being stopped and then restarted the first time Lua is reloaded.
[ 2022-03-07 18:38:14 CET ] [ Original post ]
Project Zomobid UNSTABLE 41.67 Released
[ 2022-03-04 11:35:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
Find it on Steam Betas unstable branch. Saves should be fine but you'd be advised to back them up to be sure.
41.67 changelist
MP
Cheat control
- Each anti-cheat can now be disabled via server option
- Several anti-cheats can now be configured via server option
- Anti-cheats are disabled by default for co-op hosted servers
- Max/Min/Default values hint is added to ServerOptionChange UI window for double and integer server options
- Old SafetySystem tooltip text is changed in accordance with new icon
- GhostMod and NoClip are removed when admin gets player access level
- Adjusted anti-cheat thresholds
- Player is not kicked on coop host server
- Adjust MP gain XP limit by sandbox XPMultiplier value
- Fixed typo in UI_ValidationFailed_Type9
- System property "rconlo" is added to make RCON server listen on loopback interface only
- New IsoObjectID class replaces ZombieIDMap.
Limit the "mods" string reported by Steam servers to 128 characters. A new keyvalue "modCount" reports the actual number of mods used by the server.
- The server browser and favorites list will display "... and N more" after the list of mods, when there are more mods than are displayed.
- This is to fix some servers reporting ??? as their version number, which prevents people from joining.
- The server will exit if there are syntax errors in the servername_SandboxVars.lua file.
- The server's servername_SandboxVars.lua is saved after loading it to update it to the latest version with comments.
- Added missing buttons to disable toggle in admin panel UI
- Added closing admin panel UI if player has no access level or revoked privileges
- Added closing safezone tool UI if player has no access level or revoked privileges
- Clarified safehouse tooltip show all reasons why a safehouse cannot be claimed
- Added server option "SafehouseAllowNonResidential" to allow claiming all buildings
- Added confirmation before releasing a safe house
- Fixed the owner sometimes showing in safehouse member list
- Added check when releasing safehouse if player is the current owner or an admin
- Fixed DisableSafehouseWhenPlayerConnected teleporting players outside when a player is removed while there are members online
- Fixed DisableSafehouseWhenPlayerConnected never replacing the safehouse after a player disconnects
- Added updating of the safehouse online member count periodically
- Fixed both options on yes/no confirmation when quitting a safehouse removed the player
- Fixed zombie that can be deleted by admin or zombie owner
- Fixed server hanging on quit command because of active RCON connection
- Fixed CD and VHS tapes possibly being different for each client.
- Fixed GlobalModData.save() not being called on the server.
- Fixed ZomboidRadio.Save() not being called when other things are saved on the server. It was called every 10 game-world minutes, however.
- Fixed Lua error in ISPlayerStatsManageInvUI after calling the /additem command in multiplayer.
- Fixed issues with the Stitch packet.
- Fixed repeated exceptions in GameClient.sendAddedRemovedItems() when a container object is null for some reason.
- Fixed adding items to or removing items from containers not being synced in multiplayer if the player teleports before the changes are reported to the server. This was one cause of the issue fixed above.
SOUND
- Updated Windows and Linux FMOD to 2.02.05.
- Added error checking and logging when initializing FMOD. The sound system is disabled when errors occur.
FORAGING
Added Search Focus system for foraging
- focus is set in the investigate area window
- only one focus may be active at a time
- increases chance to find certain categories of item when searching
- player must be skilled enough to identify the item category to focus on it
- focus effectiveness is determined by player skill and category
- hidden item categories will not be rerolled (rare find protection)
- square must be valid to roll the item type (cannot be used to find plants on roads)
- Fixed duplicate clothing effect displayed in ZoneDisplay tooltip
- Fixed missing per player render flag in ISBaseIcon
- Tidied spriteAffinities definitions
- General tidying and alignment of tables
- Removed stone/firewood identify category skill requirement
- Added translations for search focus functions
- Added controller support for search focus
- Fixed medicinal herbs requirement check for recipe instead of trait "Herbalist"
- Fixed tooltips flickering in Zone Display
- Added tooltip to make long tips easier to read without scrolling
- Added zone display tip for using search focus
BALANCE
- Fixed Axeman not applying bonus for swing speed
- Added correct adjustment of exercise fatigue.
- Updated community translations.
FIXES
- Fixed car dashboard delay when taking damage
- Fixed doors missing their glass, and the triangle-shaped floors_exterior_natural_01 dirt tile.
- Fixed disassembling player-built floors resulting in two floor tiles after reloading, an auto-generated wood floor plus a dirt tile.
[ 2022-03-04 11:35:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
41.66 RELEASED
[ 2022-02-25 11:41:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Server operators will find .zip files with their server backups, should they need to revert. 5 cycling incremental backups each server run, and a special backup per version change. It can also be configured to backup periodically while the server is running, but you may expect a few seconds of lag if you do this. This update pushes 41.66 to the stable branch. Full 41.66 Changelog on our forums: https://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/49523-4166-released/ Or Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/pKp2puZ9 Changes since 41.66 Unstable:
- Fixed double-door opening and closing not being synced properly in multiplayer.
- Fixed desync when a player heals via "godmode" at the same time as a character dies.
- Fixed SafetyToggle timer speed and SafetyCooldown logic.
- Increased speed of mouse-wheel scrolling in the Survival Guide.
- Added several new items, mostly flavour. Plushies (friends for Spiffo), Boardgames, Poker Chips. etc. Some of them do not have 3D models attached to them yet.
- Updated max values for HoursForWorldItemRemoval and HoursForCorpseRemoval sandbox settings.
- Fixed boxing gloves 'hole' on the back of the hand issue.
- Fixed Poncho showing no legs by capping the bottom.
- Fixed Bullet Vest clipping with some other clothing items.
- First pass on fixing underlying mesh on female, clipping Leather Jackets.
- Fixed ClothingItemExtra script property not working for items that aren't in the Base module.*
- Fixed double "Place Item" options for: Radio, Battery Charger, PortaDisc.
- Fixed not being able to interact with a Radio that was placed as a 3D item.
- Fixed "Investigate Area" tooltips being displayed at the mouse pointer position when using a controller.
- Fixed player character holding a Newspaper model in hand when reading the in-game map.
- Fixed possible exception due to a vehicle not having an Engine part but the engine is running.
- Fixed cases where a player would be able to start the game before "Click to Start" appeared, causing errors.
- Fixed a case where players were able to grab items through closed/barricaded windows.
- Fixed a bug with the mediadata converter that caused all tapes to have incorrect colored text colours.
- Fixed the LootRespawn and SeenHoursPreventLootRespawn sandbox options not being displayed in the single-player sandbox settings UI.
- Fixed the SeenHoursPreventLootRespawn sandbox option not being displayed in the single-player and multiplayer sandbox settings UIs.
- Fixed missing food types in Evolved Recipe items.
- Fixed Search Mode / Foraging being usable in the Tutorial scenario.
- Fixed "Foraging has changed" warning from right-click context menu still being there.
[ 2022-02-25 11:41:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 41.66 - UNSTABLE test release
Increased experimental maximum player limit to 100. Default remains at 32. Servers with more than 32 players will likely result in poor map streaming and desync, so proceed with caution.
Optional Login Queue system for MP servers added.
- Players connecting to a full server will be placed in a login queue, connecting automatically once a slot freed up. The queue will advance after the client has finished loading the game.
- LoginQueueConnectTimeout=60 server option determines for how long the server should wait for a connection of the client before they are timed out.
Added options for automatic server backups. Several cheating security fixes to prevent unwanted admin access as well as unwanted actions performed by clients.
Several improvements and fixes for VOIP. Added Automatic Gain Control options. Allow VOIP and text to travel to radios tuned into the same frequency. Non-equipped stationary radios now two-way for text comms.
Added admin panel tool for creating custom safehouses/safezones Added new PvP icons. Moved to the left hand side with the other UI icons. It will be moved up further before hitting the stable branch. Servers now set a Steam server rule named "PVP" with a value of "1" or "0" depending on the value of the "PVP" server option. This can be used by server browsers to distinguish between pure PVE and PVP enabled servers. Added a "SledgehammerOnlyInSafehouse" server option:
- if AllowDestructionBySledgehammer is enabled, you can set SledgehammerOnlyInSafehouse to true to allow destroying stuff with sledge only in player's safehouse.
Added buildUtil.setHaveConstruction
- This is a function to set the haveConstruction flag on a zone to prevent loot respawn if ConstructionPreventsLootRespawn is enabled in the server sandbox settings.
- set haveConstruction on zone for building, movable, barricading events and when claiming a safehouse, so a home won't spawn loot after being claimed, even if a player hasn't built anything in them yet.
Updated /rainstart /rainstop and /thunder commands Added /lightning /startstorm and /stopweather commands Added providing optional reason in KickUserCommand Added providing optional coordinates in AddVehicleCommand Updated text for server commands Updated ShowOptionsCommand to allow use by non admins Disabled doubled-up commands AddAllToWhiteListCommand and AddUserToWhiteListCommand Removed unnecessary server options.
Updated overhead username display
- with only ShowFirstAndLastName enabled, show player nam
- with only DisplayUserName enabled, show username
- with both options enabled, show player name with username in brackets
Server .ini file now has the tooltips for the various options and settings attached as comments Added limit for server public names to 64 characters and public descriptions to 256 characters Disabled NightLengthModifier since it is currently non-functional. Will be reintroduced soon. Added check and teleport for safehouse trespassing.
- Fixes issue with players becoming trapped when a safehouse owner goes offline with DisableSafehouseWhenPlayerConnected enabled
- Fixes issue with players intruding in safezone areas via movement exploits
Safehouse fixes:
admins and moderators can quit safehouse (if not owner)
admins and moderators can invite themselves to a safehouse
do not show the 'Quit Safehouse' button to admins who are not in this safehouse
Fixed non-relevant Lucky/Unlucky traits being usable in MP. Fixed some duplication exploits. Fixed being unable to access/change player inventory as admin. Fixed Ping Limiter not working. Fixed showing the "ADMIN POWER:" debug text in multiplayer. Fixed some cases where crashes at low speeds cause fatal injuries. Fixes for some instances where black boxing could still occur when players were passengers in vehicles. Fixed an exploit that allowed bypassing container item limits. Fixed non-members being able to perform moveables actions inside safehouses. Fixed admins in ghost/invisible mode still making sounds. Fixed "Medical check" on another char in a car causing chars to be stuck in a car Fixed crawlers sometimes teleporting when trying to path to a player. They will now turn to the target. Fixed, via removal, defunct server option "LogLocalChat". Fixed kicks in relation to Safehouse creations. Fixed being able to exit a vehicle when inside a safehouse without having appropriate permissions. Fixed a bug that rendered passengers unable to leave a car. Fixed death by bleeding while driving causing a kick from the server Fixed not being able to die near other players until hp drops down, and not being able to move if char died while other players try to rescue. Fixed looting animation stopping when another player attempts to grab the bag/container.
Added back the "Toggle Music" key binding, bound to nothing by default. It appears under the new "Audio" category near the bottom of the key-binding UI. Players can now dismantle several player-built structures (floors, etc) Corner pillars will now be built automatically when placing walls/fences etc. Updated Kingsmouth and Studio maps. Room definitions, bed and foundation fixes, added video cameras, military equipment, and more. Added tooltip information on what mod an item is from. Can be turned off in main options. Added "Inventory Container Button Size" Display option to change the size of the buttons on the right-hand side of the inventory and loot windows. Updated Survival Guide. Merged into a single window and also made to work with a controller Added trait reset button to character creation screen. Implemented the blue combination washer/dryer appliance. Use the context menu to switch between washer and dryer mode. Context Menu is now usable in the loot panel backpack list. Added more CDs and VHS tapes, including Dog Goblin sequels. Updated ISCraftingUI and CraftTooltip to display multiple choice item counts, as well as heat requirements for recipe ingredients Added AllowFrozenItem parameter to recipes and evolved recipes Added Perogies, Peppermint, Potato Pancakes. Added OnCreate item script property.
Setting Cruise Control now starts at current speed when switched on Attempting to sprint when the character is too exhausted to sprint will now make the character run as fast as they can instead of walking and having to press the "Run" key separately. Fixed M16 still having its initial experimental values. No longer a death laser. MinDamage reduced to 0.8, MaxDamage reduced to 1.4. Greased back hair now requires hair gel. Frog legs and whole fish are now dangerous uncooked. Military lockers and crates now movable. They'll also contain loot. Unified spawn items and starter kit functions in SpawnItems.lua. Fixed drinking directly from river/puddles not making characters sick. Drinking tainted water now more merciful if character is already sick. Added ability to use sheet ropes to create log stacks Fixed players not becoming bored inside player-built rooms. Agoraphobic and Claustrophobic traits fixed to work inside player-built rooms. Added relevant tile properties (pick-up, rotate, water source etc) to: new farm dirt tile, washer-driers, dead farm plants, hay bales, red mobile tool cabinet, troughs, play castles, bird baths, sinks and more.
Spear charge fixes (MP and SP): charge only zombies in front of the player reset sprinting time when spear charge occurs
Added a volume automation for the hard of hearing trait in addition to the muffling we already had, additional -6db (needs some testing if this is okay) Added EmptyPan sound for "Empty Frying Pan" and 2 other recipes. The sound is a placeholder for now. Added values MeleeHitSurface for per-weapon door-hitting sounds. Added DoorSound=WoodShackDoor for new door sounds for wood-plank doors. Added StoveTimer sound. Added sounds played while constructing gravel-bag and sand-bag fences. Added sounds for turning media devices on/off and muting/unmuting. Added Dismantle sound for radios and televisions. Added generator repair, connect and refuel sounds. Added sounds for drinking and filling containers from water dispensers. Added new climb sound for high finces. Added bullet impact sounds. Added the violin melee hit/whoosh sounds
Minor volume tweak to zombie voices when they're very close, they were a bit too loud Added occlusion to vehicle engines, horn, sirens (needs some testing) Slight adjustment to the bass of the footstomp Play PourLiquidOnGround when emptying paint buckets and similar items. Fixed playing DrinkingFromTap or GetWaterFromTap when drinking from a river sometimes. Play the FallLight sound when tripping over a hedge/tree.
Added a button to the in-game map to remove all annotations and forget map knowledge. Hide the mini-map when the inventory and loot windows are visible when using a controller (so the mini-map doesn't overlap). Display controller button prompts in the in-game map. Play the MapOpen and MapClose sounds when viewing the in-game map.
Fixed the in-game map view not being centered on the player the first time it's displayed, when the mini-map is also used. Fixed moving map symbols with the mouse. The mini-map will be moved up a few pixels before hitting the Stable branch in order to not cover up the MP info.
Export of current dev map - including some new locations and improvement of general landscape Pylons and radio masts added to map Various map fixes
Added foraging tips system to investigate area window. Added some fixes to make the system work with controllers. Overlay radius now used instead of item radius for placing investigate arrow markers. Restructured trait/profession multipliers - now uses definitions. Added profession and trait category specialisations.
- Big bonuses to spot categories for professions.
- Small/medium bonuses to spot categories for traits. Added functions for modders to add trait/profession definitions. Added ammunition category to urban loot. Added medical category to urban loot. Added clothing items to urban loot. Added some more misc items/fruits/veggies. Added pinecones (only available from September to December). Added pinecones can be used as campfire fuel. Show spotting arrows immediately when the player notices something. Force-find now reveals an item nearby for the player instead of just moving it closer. New identifying items system - items can be identified if close enough or from afar with high skill. Zone display now reveals exact categories when reaching high enough level (identifyCategoryLevel). Set a minimum dark overlay value so the search radius is always visible even in bright daylight. Categories can be more or less common (or not available) during rain or snow. Items can be more or less common (or not available) at night or during the day. Items and categories can be more or less common (or not available) after it has rained. Items are moved to player inventory if a backpack goes over capacit - Yotherwise dropped onto the floor. Refactored, bugfixed and documented many functions. Fixed resetting itemTotal when fillZone is called. Fixed inverted light level values when indoors. Added foraging weather effect reduction for equipped umbrellas. Increased darkness/weather effect reduction cap. Resolved an issue with calculating foraging darkness/weather effect reduction. Fixed issue causing item markers to disappear when looking away. Added a chance to generate extra items on affinity sprites - more firewood in forests - more stones on roads. Tweaked and tidied bonus item generation and syncing. Added a flag to bonus icons for future management. Set affinity check to occur after all icons are loaded. Activate nearby zones inside radius. Allow multiple categories per affinity sprite. Show item ghost before spotting if in visible radius. Added bonus vision definitions for all professions. Place item marker arrows when inside item spotting radius if item is visible. Cloud darkness and fog level visibility increased on zone display. Added some variation to the zone display fog. Added zone display vision effectiveness tooltip. Updated search info tip. Skip checking icons outside loaded cell. Changed default itemDef value canBeOnTreeSquare to true. Added more search radius/trait/profession bonus info to Investigate Area tooltip. Added showing the poison skull on forage pins for mushrooms/berries if player has herbalist skill. More categories visible on Investigate Area window tooltip with high skill. Tidied up and documented ISSearchManager/ISBaseIcon. Tweaked forageSystem penalty calculations. Fixed icon arrows remaining on screen when sprinting. Added short sighted foraging debuff can be removed by wearing glasses/reading glasses. Added testFuncs to skill definitions. Fix rerolling zone icons while sprinting. Fix spotting icons while fast forwarding. Vision radius calculations refactored and tidied. Icon performance improvements. Fixed icons recreating with incorrect conditions. Reduced and capped stuttering caused by cell checks. Fixed overlay toggling in vehicles. Improved search radius transitions when toggling mode. Improved forage zone activation, icon moving, bonus icon generation. Fixed wild crop seed spawns. Fixed using the wrong broccoli type for foraging. Fixed issues in force find tracker. Skip sprite affinity checks on squares with trees or attached data. Fixed missing spaces in search window tooltips. Fixed missing item texture on pins for floor items. Fixed moved objects spawning bonus items. Removed performance impact for ISSearchManager, ISZoneDisplay, ISSearchWindow when UI not visible. Removed seasonal variances from medicinal plants Added WildPlants category for seasonal wild foods Updated ISSearchManager table resets to use table.wipe Updated radius and modifiers in ISZoneDisplay vision tooltip Tidied up some debug stuff in ISZoneDisplay Added foraging profession and trait specialisations for WildPlants
Balance:
Increased maximum possible spotting range further for specialised characters. Reduced base XP rewards for foraging. Tweaked icon density in zones. Insects, mushrooms, herbs are now much more common at night. Medicinal herbs are much easier to see. Increased medicinal herb yields. Herbs and mushrooms are more common in the rain and after it has rained. Added disabling search mode if a zombie is very close (about 1 square away). Reduced headwear vision penalties, added penalties for more types (not hats, never hats). Increased chance of items to be on affinity sprites (stones on stones, etc). Allow affinity icons to be moved again if they were not noticed before. Malus for item size adjusted to a curve to be less punishing. Rebalanced many item sizes with overrides for spotting (fruit trees, crops, etc). Reduced berries poison level by a lot - not likely to be fatal. Reduced mushroom toxicity range - still very risky to eat unidentified. Added additional food sickness penalty for consuming poison berries and mushrooms. Added a new increased minimum vision radius for well-lit squares. Increased variance of medicinal herb yields. Weather penalty calculation tweaked for snow cover. Weather penalty maximum increased. Overlay radius tweaked to use forageSystem min/max size values. Stones more likely to be found in cracks in the road + rates increased on roads. Removed skill requirements for some item categories. Tweaked sprite affinity and bonus icon chances. Tweaked sprite affinity/bonus icon chances. Foraged drainable items roll for a remaining amount. Increased zone icon density. Additional variation for zone density. Added more sprite affinities to trash, junk icons, and insects. Reduced chance of finding rotten wild foods. Increased chance of fresh wild foods with high skill. Profession and trait vision modifiers also affect the overlay maximum vision radius. Increased vision cap for extremely skilled and specialised characters. Decreased vision cap for non specialised characters. Ensure vision radius bonus always applies when aiming or sneaking. Rebalanced profession and trait darkness effect modifiers. Check darkness cap before placing item marker arrows. Removed override item size for some small items. Added more sprite affinities to categories. Dead animals much more likely to be stale or rotten. Aiming takes priority over crouching bonus in forageSystem. Bonus vision effects apply to maximum radius. Chance to find logs reduced. Rebalanced vision radius/view distance for spotting. Increased maximum hunger bonus for food items. Tweaked vision penalties for clothing. Increased base spotting speed and bonus spotting speed when aiming/sneaking. Reduced snow cover and cloud penalty. Umbrella rain penalty reduction increased and only applies to rain. Minor zone item count balance tweak. Added more sprite affinities for stones. Adjusted profession vision bonuses. Category chances tweaked to accommodate WildPlants. Debug: Added a new IsoMarker type for debugging icon vision radius. Added icon vision radius + category info debug options. Added debug option: "Show Icons Locations".
Splitscreen fixes:
Fixed split screen icon syncing. Fixed picking up forage icons with controller in split screen. Moved forage icon pickup option to the top of right click context menu. Increased range of back button wheel pickup option. Back button wheel forage options now use item textures. Added discard item option to back button wheel. Tidied up changes for split screen icon syncing. Fixed syncing of arrows/markers when an item is moved or removed. Fixed removal of icons noticed by co-op player. Added zone display split screen support. Sync forage item poison values in splitscreen co-op. Fixed a bug when co-op player simultaneously picks up items in ISForageAction
Added ISCarMechanicsOverlay.PartList[].vehicles tables to any parts that don't have them. VehiclePart.setInventoryItem() no longer calls setModelVisible(true|false) for all models, because this interferes with some mods that choose different models based on which item is installed for a part. Instead, a new method VehiclePart.setAllModelsVisible(true|false) was added that is called from these Lua functions:
Vehicles.Init.XXX
Vehicles.InstallComplete.XXX
Vehicles.UninstallComplete.XXX
Mods that define "init", "install.complete" and/or "uninstall.complete" Lua functions can now choose to hide or show whichever models they want.
Additionally, VehiclePart.repair() now calls the part's "init" Lua function (if it is defined) when creating a missing item.
This allows the "init" function to hide or show models.
The game will look for mod texture-pack files named Pack2x.floor.pack (correct) and then Pack.floor2x.pack (incorrect) if the first file doesn't exist. Added IsoGameCharacter.XP.setPerkBoost(Perk perk, int level). This is for mods that want to change an existing player's XP multiplier for a skill. Added IsHidden parameter for recipes and evolved recipes
- If true, this hides the recipe on the crafting menu
- Hidden recipes are still able to be crafted via the right click menu
- Evolved recipes are hidden unless a result item exists
- This allows adding additional ingredients via the crafting menu
Pressing and holding the left analogue stick displays a radial menu that allows toggling crouching, sitting on the ground, and auto-walking. A quick press of the left joystick button toggles crouch, the same as before. Pressing the controller A button when a text entry has the focus displays the on-screen keyboard.
- Left shoulder button changes focus between the text entry and keyboard.
- D-pad navigates in the text entry. Foraging / Search mode improved to work with controllers
Fixed a Lua error when trying to spawn a new character in game when the AllClothesUnlocked sandbox option or Character.CreateAllOutfits debug option is enabled. Fixed the "Aim Outline" option default being "None" instead of "Ranged Weapons". Fixed the volume controls not working in multiplayer. Fixed Home VHS tapes switching from blank to not-blank after reloading sometimes. Fixed some unique Home VHS tapes never being spawned. Now CDs and VHS tapes are randomized in ItemPickerJava. Fixed translation files from required mods having priority over the mod that required it. If mod B requires mod A, then mod B's translation files will be loaded first so they override the same translation in mod A, if present. Fixed sitting zombies facing random angles in multiplayer. Fixed an IllegalArgumentException in IsoChunk.SafeRead() when reading an empty map_X_Y.bin file. Fixed the mini-map displaying the game's map data in cells that have been overridden by mods. Fixed some curved-road zones. Fixed traffic jams on curved roads by implementing "traffjam / ParkingStall" and "rtrafficjam / ParkingStall" for polyline zones Fixed exercises not starting when a two-handed weapon attached to the back is equipped in both hands. Fixed a thread-synchronization bug with ZomboidFileSystem.getString() accessing RelativeMap. This led to walls not being cutaway due to failing to load the CircleStencil Shader. Fixed Character.Debug.PlaySoundWhenInvisible default being true when it should be false. Fixed a few cases where sounds from invisible players could be heard in multiplayer. Fixed bug in world dictionary when an item similarly named to a base item but with different module would be removed. This was due to scriptmanager.getModule defaulting to 'base' when the module was not found. Fixed scriptmanager.getModule testing for equals("Base") or startsWith("Base.") instead of startsWith("Base"). This would otherwise result in the same error happening still if one would name their module for example "BaseBuilding". Fixed item loading when trying to create an item with the same name in a different module. When a mod adds "MyMod.Apple" this a new item that exists alongside "Base.Apple", when MyMod is removed the "MyMod.Apple" bytes in the saves should be skipped. However due to ItemFactory.CreateItem calling the same scriptmanager functions that default to "Base" when no module found, it would try and instance "Base.Apple". Fixed bug in WorldDictionary ItemInfo where print debug would not print all lines. Fixed GameLoadingState doing GameClient stuff in single player. Fixed any exception that occurs when the "failed to create vehicles database" message is displayed not being printed. Fixed spawned fish in shops and stories unable to be filleted. Fixed getting extra materials when multiple players scrap an object. Fixed being unable to construct objects or floors through an open window. Fixed being unable to disassemble closed doors facing S and E. Fixed "take pills" anim playing only once when the action is queued. Fixed 'take pills' action being possible while running (it has no animation). Fixed the resize behavior of the "Select Spawn Location" ui. Fixed disallowed scrolling of map description in the "Select Spawn Location" ui using a controller. Fixed some forest and vegetation zones near curved streets. Fixed "ReceiveRemoveCorpse: incorrect square" messages on the client due to corpse rotting. These messages weren't errors. Fixed incorrect looping in RandomizedZoneStoryBase.cleanAreaForStory(). Fixed multithreading issues on the server with the vehicles database. Fixed radial menu for light sources only available for secondary item slot Fixed double-clicking a watch runs an action but doesn't equip it. Fixed adhesive bandages weighing too much. Fixed mechanics books not being in SkillBook category. Fixed missing Fishing.OnCreateFish function on server. Fixed default name of a profession preset not being the name of the profession (has a number if there is already a preset with that name) Fixed bowl of beans recipe not scaling to source can's hunger reduction. Fixed two-tile table stories possibly spawning on two different tables, possibly with a wall in between. Fixed trailers being detached on the client but attached on the server. Fixed explosive traps not damaging zombies in singleplayer. Fixed server soft-reset throwing errors. Fixed "bare hands" checks which used translated item names. Fixed lightbulbs breaking even if unpowered. Fixed inability to plumb sinks in existing buildings if the water is still on. Fixed zombies densities not affecting loot spawn in MP. This caused Sledgehammers and other items to be a lot rarer in MP than in SP. Fixed not being able to climb over tall fences when a vehicle is nearby. Fixed being able to get XP from VHS tapes again after relog. Fixed TVs showing test screen (only happens 14 days after apocalypse and onward). Fixed one TV screen not showing in the screen 'animation'. Fixed the first channel not being properly loaded when radio loads its savefile. Fixed, via disabling, zomboid radio debugger in mp client that was throwing errors due to stuff not being present on client Fixed bug that caused the temperature panel to display all values as zero. (the call to PZMath.clamp in the panels would randomly pick the int or float overload between diff game boots). Also added Thermoregulator node debugger panel. Fixed WAV sounds flickering between speakers when near the player's location. Fixed some problems with clothing losing condition due to holes. Fixed the client savefile not being deleted when the server savefile is soft-reset or recreated. Fixed playing DrinkingFromTap or GetWaterFromTap when drinking from a river sometimes. Fixed trap synchronization issues in multiplayer (including multiple explosion sounds). Fixed noise-trap sound continuing after the trap is picked up. Fixed farm-plant names not being translated in multiplayer. Fixed missing translation for "Spent Rounds" in firearm tooltips. Fixed Disassemble tooltips for movables showing the incorrect object name (and no icon) Fixed unlimited maximum title and text entry for journals, notebooks, paper Fixed impossible disassembly of tall fences south and west of player Fixed missing radioInteraction codes for perks Fixed bug in RadialProgressBar with texture offsets Fixed bug in ISSafetyUI where second part of the radial cooldown would display incorrectly. Fixed alarms being enabled in buildings the player spawns in (in MP). Fixed NullPointerException in DeadPlayerPacket.set(). Fixed ability to have more than three saved splitscreen players in multiplayer. Fixed issues managing saved splitscreen players in multiplayer. Fixed SafeHouseRemovalTime greater than 596 removing safehouses. Fixed player facing direction never getting set on the server. Fixed Survival Guide error showing the guide when isShowFirstTimeSneakTutorial() is true. Fixed the "Learned Recipe" text above the player's head when watching a VHS not being translated. Fixed EvolvedRecipe.java using DecimalFormat (which uses the default locale) and instead use NumberFormat.getInstance(Locale.US) to try and fix rare crafting exceptions. Fixed getting Fitness XP without exercising when starting exercises while aiming. Fixed being able to dismantle carpentry window frames and door frames before removing the window or door. Fixed Z location check in RecipeManager isNearItem Fixed playing sound from the waist of zombies that are on the ground and instead play from their head. Fixed incorrect plant names (and "Mystery Plant") being displayed in the farming-info window. Fixed not being able to dismantle Metal Floor. Fixed, via removal, leftover Multi-core option that had no effect anymore. Fixed double-jump animation climbing over fences when holding a two-handed weapon. This mostly occurred on Linux distributions.
Fixed Pacifist trait not reducing XP gains with LongBlade weapons. Fixed Soup bowls, Stew bowls and Pie Slices inheriting original hunger values. Fixed not being able to scroll the outfit panel with the mouse wheel in the character-creation ui (with all outfits enabled).
AND SEVERAL MORE FIXES
Full changelog here due to character limitation:
https://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/49401-4166-unstable-released/
[ 2022-02-22 17:41:06 CET ] [ Original post ]
MAKE SURE TO BACK-UP before continuing a save. This is an unstable ("I Will Back Up My Save) release and you can expect bugs. Server operators will find .zip files with their server backups, should they need to revert. 5 cycling incremental backupseach server run, and a special backup per version change. It can also be configured to backup periodically while the server is running, but you may expect a few seconds of lag if you do this. Accessible via the "unstable" Steam branch, server and client. Right-click PZ (or the Dedicated Server tool if you are hosting) in your Steam library, select "Properties" and navigate to the "Betas" tab. Then, select "unstable" from the dropdown menu.
MP CHANGES
NEW
BALANCE
NOISEWORKS
IN-GAME MAP
KNOX EVENT MAP
FORAGING / SEARCH SYSTEM
MODDING
CONTROLLER
FIXES
[ 2022-02-22 17:41:06 CET ] [ Original post ]
42 Techdoid
We have recently taken some time to get rid of a bunch of our longest standing issues with the games engine. Whilst this is definitely not a b41-style level of disruption, were digging deep inside our renderer and looking for ways to get rid of the quite severe problems that have been baked into our engine for a long time in terms of both capabilities and performance.
Of course, the biggest issue our engine struggles with daily is the extreme CPU and GPU heavy requirements of having a map composed of so many unique tiles, shaders and other stuff without the ability to use a z-buffer to let us render in an optimized way like most 3D games. Ironically the fact that its a simpler looking 2D game is what works against using a lot of the power of the GPU to render the map fast. This results in large FPS drops, particularly when zooming out due to the mind meltingly inefficient draw method that the ISO perspective forces on us. Weve had a few rather bold ideas on how to solve this, using the caching of chunks that have already been rendered, which we hope will vastly increase the FPS in B42. Its early days, but looks promising. This tech requires heavier use of the GPU memory, however, so it may be that this optimization will only be able to benefit cards with a few gigs of free VRAM. Well have to see which generations of GPUs will be best able to leverage it when its dev time is a little further down the line. Speaking of not being able to use a z-buffer to render things in an optimized way: in actual fact, weve also been working towards being able to use a z-buffer to render things in an optimized way.
This essentially frees us from having to slot the draws of zombies, vehicles or players in between the appropriate tile draws in back to front order. Well be able to simply draw all the characters and vehicles on-screen at the end, their pixels then discarded if they are deeper into the scene than an existing building objects pixel. This should massively optimize the rendering speed of zombies, and allow us to sort them by materials. It will free us to use cached chunks indefinitely, until the lighting or cutaways demand a change, rather than rendering all the tiles individually. We have had some surprising FPS results in 4k on max zoom,howeverwe also expect this will likely fall a lot in practice once the work is complete and everything is drawing. Please excuse any visual glitches at the moment! [previewyoutube=G6t5h0_Sfqc;full][/previewyoutube] Due to all this, in B42 it currently feels safe to assume that zooming out will have significantly lower performance penalty and that higher resolutions will become more feasible for at least mid-range GPUs, and possibly lower end GPUs too.
In the game, since our very earliest builds, weve been limited to 8 storey buildings. This was primarily because the height was global, and increasing this would incur a penalty to performance across the entire map even if that extra space was not used. The other issue was simply performance when drawing those extra floors. If were struggling to render the amount of tiles we already have, adding extra tall buildings would be a big mistake. Thirdly, theres something to be said about less being more in terms of gameplay. However, this hard limit of 8 has long been a thorn in our mappers sides, as well as for our mod community. Seeing as it looks like well be able to solve the performance issues discussed above, weve now added a variable chunk height system which will allow each chunk of the map to define its own max height. This means that in Build 42 its looking like a particular area could have floors up to 32 in height, should the mapper desire it.
Currently, due to certain tech limitations, we only have stairs that rise in north or west directions. This is annoying, and wed like to get rid of this limitation for numerous reasons. Weve done some mock-ups of how stairs would look in the other two directions, and think weve found a way to make it work. They look a little odd, however functionally being able to have stairs in any of the four directions would give mappers and ourselves much more freedom in building design.
Another limitation that has been very longstanding is the fact that negative map coords (expanding out the map in the negative X and Y directions) is not possible in PZ due primarily to some TIS naivety early on in development. For the maths-minded out there: casting a players x, y, z location to an int to work out what tile they are standing on will return the wrong value if any of those coordinates are a negative value. There were thousands of places where this occurred in the codebase, and they all needed changing from a static cast to a math.floor, so that they will work in negative dimensions. Making negative map coordinates possible means that we, or modders, will feasibly be able to build northwards and westwards, and opens up a huge extra area of potential map area to expand to. It likewise also puts other cool stuff (back) on the game dev table that well discuss at a later date.
We have also been updating our lighting system. In the current B41 we have an ambient light level thats inherent to every tile within the map though slightly reduced indoors. Light sources are only capable of lighting the room that they are in. Locking yourself in a cupboard with the door shut currently results in the same light level as youd get in the living room with open curtains. For B42 we are rejigging how lighting is calculated, to make a much more interesting and realistic light propagation system. Now being in a room with no windows, even in broad daylight, will leave you in the darkness. The evening sunset glow will encroach through the window and bathe your room in a red tint, creeping back toward the window and dimming as the sun goes down. Interiors of buildings will lighten and darken with the daylight based on how much exposure to the bounced light they will feasibly receive. Opening a door to a lit room will bathe the outside corridor in light, and so on. This is all still development in progress, and it maybe requires tweaking of light intensities, colours and fall-off ranges. Please also excuse any glitches you see, this is all still very much in the oven! [previewyoutube=9_0TiPQ-JQA;full][/previewyoutube]
[ 2022-02-03 19:22:47 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, heres a general update from TIS Towers on various things. We do hope this finds yall well. First off a quick heads-up on the forthcoming 41.66 patch. Its now content locked, and is now receiving required fixes reported by our internal testers. We will look to put it out into a new unstable beta branch as soon as we can. The full current changelist can be found here for those interested. Next up, a few details on our Build 42 work. As previously mentioned the core MP team will be sticking with Build 41 patches to improve life out on the servers for the immediate future, but work on the next big build has nevertheless now begun/continued in earnest. Already announced for Build 42 was a major expansion of late game crafting and a major focus on game balance details on which can be found here. There are a few other irons in the fire for this build too though. As ever, no ETAs on any of this. We are very much still in the early versions of this build, and indeed much of the late game crafting update is currently in the pen and paper planning stage. More on this in future blogs.
Engine Tech Improvements
We have recently taken some time to get rid of a bunch of our longest standing issues with the games engine. Whilst this is definitely not a b41-style level of disruption, were digging deep inside our renderer and looking for ways to get rid of the quite severe problems that have been baked into our engine for a long time in terms of both capabilities and performance.
Performance
Of course, the biggest issue our engine struggles with daily is the extreme CPU and GPU heavy requirements of having a map composed of so many unique tiles, shaders and other stuff without the ability to use a z-buffer to let us render in an optimized way like most 3D games. Ironically the fact that its a simpler looking 2D game is what works against using a lot of the power of the GPU to render the map fast. This results in large FPS drops, particularly when zooming out due to the mind meltingly inefficient draw method that the ISO perspective forces on us. Weve had a few rather bold ideas on how to solve this, using the caching of chunks that have already been rendered, which we hope will vastly increase the FPS in B42. Its early days, but looks promising. This tech requires heavier use of the GPU memory, however, so it may be that this optimization will only be able to benefit cards with a few gigs of free VRAM. Well have to see which generations of GPUs will be best able to leverage it when its dev time is a little further down the line. Speaking of not being able to use a z-buffer to render things in an optimized way: in actual fact, weve also been working towards being able to use a z-buffer to render things in an optimized way.
This essentially frees us from having to slot the draws of zombies, vehicles or players in between the appropriate tile draws in back to front order. Well be able to simply draw all the characters and vehicles on-screen at the end, their pixels then discarded if they are deeper into the scene than an existing building objects pixel. This should massively optimize the rendering speed of zombies, and allow us to sort them by materials. It will free us to use cached chunks indefinitely, until the lighting or cutaways demand a change, rather than rendering all the tiles individually. We have had some surprising FPS results in 4k on max zoom,howeverwe also expect this will likely fall a lot in practice once the work is complete and everything is drawing. Please excuse any visual glitches at the moment! [previewyoutube=G6t5h0_Sfqc;full][/previewyoutube] Due to all this, in B42 it currently feels safe to assume that zooming out will have significantly lower performance penalty and that higher resolutions will become more feasible for at least mid-range GPUs, and possibly lower end GPUs too.
Variable Chunk Heights
In the game, since our very earliest builds, weve been limited to 8 storey buildings. This was primarily because the height was global, and increasing this would incur a penalty to performance across the entire map even if that extra space was not used. The other issue was simply performance when drawing those extra floors. If were struggling to render the amount of tiles we already have, adding extra tall buildings would be a big mistake. Thirdly, theres something to be said about less being more in terms of gameplay. However, this hard limit of 8 has long been a thorn in our mappers sides, as well as for our mod community. Seeing as it looks like well be able to solve the performance issues discussed above, weve now added a variable chunk height system which will allow each chunk of the map to define its own max height. This means that in Build 42 its looking like a particular area could have floors up to 32 in height, should the mapper desire it.
Four way stairs
Currently, due to certain tech limitations, we only have stairs that rise in north or west directions. This is annoying, and wed like to get rid of this limitation for numerous reasons. Weve done some mock-ups of how stairs would look in the other two directions, and think weve found a way to make it work. They look a little odd, however functionally being able to have stairs in any of the four directions would give mappers and ourselves much more freedom in building design.
Map Coordinates
Another limitation that has been very longstanding is the fact that negative map coords (expanding out the map in the negative X and Y directions) is not possible in PZ due primarily to some TIS naivety early on in development. For the maths-minded out there: casting a players x, y, z location to an int to work out what tile they are standing on will return the wrong value if any of those coordinates are a negative value. There were thousands of places where this occurred in the codebase, and they all needed changing from a static cast to a math.floor, so that they will work in negative dimensions. Making negative map coordinates possible means that we, or modders, will feasibly be able to build northwards and westwards, and opens up a huge extra area of potential map area to expand to. It likewise also puts other cool stuff (back) on the game dev table that well discuss at a later date.
Light Propagation
We have also been updating our lighting system. In the current B41 we have an ambient light level thats inherent to every tile within the map though slightly reduced indoors. Light sources are only capable of lighting the room that they are in. Locking yourself in a cupboard with the door shut currently results in the same light level as youd get in the living room with open curtains. For B42 we are rejigging how lighting is calculated, to make a much more interesting and realistic light propagation system. Now being in a room with no windows, even in broad daylight, will leave you in the darkness. The evening sunset glow will encroach through the window and bathe your room in a red tint, creeping back toward the window and dimming as the sun goes down. Interiors of buildings will lighten and darken with the daylight based on how much exposure to the bounced light they will feasibly receive. Opening a door to a lit room will bathe the outside corridor in light, and so on. This is all still development in progress, and it maybe requires tweaking of light intensities, colours and fall-off ranges. Please also excuse any glitches you see, this is all still very much in the oven! [previewyoutube=9_0TiPQ-JQA;full][/previewyoutube]
OTHER BIZNESS
- The map team continue their awesomeness, with lots of map polish currently going into the current Knox Event map including electricity pylons and cool new locations like this.
- The Noiseworks gang continue with their improvements of the PZ soundscape, with their current mission being to provide background sounds that provide different ambiance for times when the electricity and water are on, for when they are off, and an audible change to signal the exact moment when the turn-off happens in-game.
- Currently awaiting integration are also 14 new music CDs, 14 movie VHS tapes, 20 new TV show tapes and 44 home recorded tapes too. You will be delighted to hear that these include several new sequels in the much-lauded Dog Goblin horror franchise. Our thanks to Brat Pen for these.
- The curator of the online PZ map project, Blindcoder, wants to let you know that hes on the case with updates and apologises for delays caused by Covid and irl fun/games. His blog here. Our thanks to him for all his amazing work also.
[ 2022-02-03 19:22:47 CET ] [ Original post ]
2022 and Beyond
[ 2022-01-06 12:20:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
Howdy survivors! Another crazy week for us, were still in a bit of a daze!
Just a few more days until the entire team are back together after the various international holiday periods have all come to an end, and were looking exceedingly forward to fixing up a few of the big issues that have come out in the wash since the MP launch. You can read more about them in last weeks blog here.
So the big question, now 41 is out there, and after the remaining MP issues have been fixed up, is what comes next?
Two Team Release Schedule
Going forward, now the behemoth that is Build 41 is increasingly looking to be in our rear-view mirror, we are going to structure the internal games development into two distinct teams (With General Arcade continuing in the meantime on improving MP, optimizing the server, increasing the player count and other MP related tech)
First, a little bit of a teaser!
[previewyoutube=oULByHbq5Tk;full][/previewyoutube]
(This is a fairly old internal video, created as a working proof-of-concept of various aspects of our NPC tech. Its also not necessarily canonically accurate anymore. It was built to echo our earliest tech demo, but this might not be the start point we take with narrative in future, even if the characters would still be familiar.)
Itll have been no surprise to anyone who read the interview in which Lemmy dropped some major Thursdoid spoilers that one of those teams is going to be focusing exclusively on NPC development from this point on. Well also be able to talk about it (not necessarily every Thursdoid, but certainly no longer in a vacuum), rather than work away in secret due to our only discuss whats coming next rule we instigated after a few instances of talking far too early about stuff.
Long ago we stated (informally on a forum post) our planned features for future builds, starting with hunting for build 42, and then numerous NPC builds for build 43 and onward.
However, many changed circumstances and much ponderings later, weve decided that this is not the best approach to take. First of all, its very clear that human NPCs have long been the most requested feature that is still outstanding, and the source of most of the frustration and bad feeling from those who consider the game to still be incomplete.
Not only this, but in slightly more selfish reasons, a big reason for not being comfortable with hunting and pets being first, is they are still NPCs and would necessarily leverage all the technology weve being working on for years at this point.
We have such amazing and peskily talented modders out there, we know fine well that as soon as we released this tech within their grasps, we would end up seeing extremely powerful NPC mods appearing, using our NPC tech heavily, before we had the pleasure of seeing this hard work paid off with our own NPCs.
It may be the initial build still contains hunting and wild animals, they ARE NPCs after all. It may be they drop into a subsequent build or later on in the unstable beta cycle, its not clear yet for reasons well discuss in a bit. But the next BIG thing will be NPCs and well have a dedicated team working toward this goal going forward.
However, NPCs will still, technically, be build 43. This is because well be running a second dev team exclusively on a quicker, less risky yet still super cool content patch before the NPC work is complete, and then ongoing alternately between the other NPC patches to keep the content train going.
Behold this fancy graphic we cooked up! Now that weve blown up a bit we need some fancy graphical charts in our Thursdoids!
Hopefully the chart shows that, in very real terms, NPCs will be coming out as quickly as they can, uninterrupted, and the other builds are there to help bridge the gap. No build will ever take as long as Build 41 did, it was a practical rewrite of large portions of the game, but non-the-less NPCs will take time to emerge, and we dont want to leave the community without new content in those waits.
Build 42
There is still a lot of polish and fix work to do on 41, primarily for the MP team but also with a side-salad of bug-fixing issues in both online and solo.
Beyond this, however, is a much smaller but still extremely cool update thatll drop before NPCs, that will release during the push toward an NPC release.
I say smaller only because no major functionality or new fundamental systems, and it will be more a balancing and content patch while NPC teams work is underway. However it will still be pretty beefy in terms of what it brings to the game.
It will serve several important purposes:
1) To balance a lot of the existing mechanics, particularly in relation to traits, professions, skills and other areas of the game that have been neglected or suffered some degradation during the years of development since they were introduced. Balancing traits and professions, medical system, and other stuff where it comes down to essentially tweaking numbers to make more builds viable or close up free points exploits in character creation. Loot balancing and anything else thats an easy balance but will help improve the game also fits in here.
2) To begin the expansion of the tech tree of the game significantly to provide a more rich end-game experience. While until NPCs exist, some of this may be slightly less impactful on single player (though were sure will still add a lot of potential), it will significantly improve the MP experience by servers being less pressured to wipe or have loot respawning, providing players and communities ability to create more items that at present can only be obtained through looting.
While we may not hit this spot in our first build, our ultimate goal is to provide significantly extra crafting potential to allow players to effectively create a post-apocalypse nu medieval community, to provide plausable alternatives to any of the lootable items in the game that would logically be plausable with the correct skills and resources so players dont feel pressured to restart the early game repeatedly to get long term fun out of the game. Want to be the person who makes clothes and sells them to a neighbouring settlement? Build brick walls and create something that resembles an actual house? Maybe even build a windmill? Who knows.
These are all examples of things we could do here, and may not all appear in Build 42, but hopefully our intended direction is clear. Ultimately to build up to the point that Alexandria / Hilltop / Kingdom style communities can form years after the apocalypse, giving more incentive to keep playing and building on existing worlds instead of intentionally replaying the early game because there is no real late game.
All this would be a time sink and require a group effort and wouldnt be compulsory for those who prefer to just die repeatedly in the early apocalypse days, but the hope is to allow for a much greater level of community building, and facilitate trade and potentially years of stories and rich history from within a single world, be it NPC populated or an MP server, spanning numerous player lives (so it can still be the story of how you died).
These professions and expanded tech trees would be heavily gated and require specialization, often in case of the more complex crafting paths requiring pre-apocalypse skills that while its possible, are extremely difficult to attain to high levels after the apocalypse without a character specced toward them. We long ago nerfed a metalworking system that was added to the game due to the implausibility of some random survivor crafting spoons and katanas in the apocalypse, however well be expanding this again to include better items available through sufficient mastery and enough plausibility with the character build.
Well increase the amount of recipes thatll be unlockable within the world through books, magazines or VHSs, and try and accurately model more advanced and multi-tier crafting professions to allow survivor communities to thrive and provide much more diverse activities for players who like to stay in the safehouses.
Finally, and vitally, well be introducing the concept of crafting surfaces to further restrict where some crafting recipes can be used. Some more complex recipes will require specific tables or equipment, some will just require a table or surface of any kind, while others can be carried out in your hands with no surface at all.
This will add an extra level to the crafting, as making a place suitable for crafting the more complex multi-stage recipes, and potentially upgrading your crafting station and equipment, would become a more fulfilling experience than standing in the field and being able to make a stir fry.
We have many and varied other things we want to inject into the game also were currently working on seated / reclining characters for example, and also want to expand on in-game events and tie them to the map. We also need to do some work to improve guns, and PvP, at some point. Its not clear when smaller features will start appearing, however, so will report on them in blogs as the year progresses.
Build 43
Worked on concurrently to the balancing and crafting update, as well as discussed and shown within our blogs going forward, will be the first version of NPCs. Were still deciding what should, could and would be present in the first NPC build. It could include autonomous NPCs that the player can group with, it could primarily include the reintroduction of the story mode, it could have NPC animals, or that could come later.
We really need to look at what we have, and whats feasible to deliver in a reasonable amount of time, as well as what we could release as a first build and not have people whove waited years for them to appear be disappointed. Theres a lot of plates to spin, decisions to make that require more brain power than weve had to spare during B41s development, so were going to take some more time to discuss what would make the most satisfying and manageable first build, and take a stock check of what we have.
Weve got a LOT of NPC code, lots of cool systems, from Rimworld style priority and jobs system, personality systems, procedural story event systems, combat systems, autonomous survival behaviours, advanced group behaviour systems, vehicle driving systems, and a whole bunch more. While nothing could be described as 100% complete, the vast majority of the hard work has been done, is functional and is extremely cool.
But B41 has taken a huge amount of our time and resources, and also taken some elements of the PZ workings in a different direction to things our NPCs were using, and so they need some time to be reintroduced to the most current build and made MP compatible. And when we do that, well be moving stuff over in stages to release, rather than try and get everything functional and release ready at once.
A good analogy is weve got two rooms, one full to the ceiling of extremely cool and complex circuit boards and wires that weve spent years making, one room is empty.
Trying to tidy and assemble everything in the first room will be a nightmare. So well start moving bits into a new room, setting them up, plugging them in together, and making something cool out of them to release. After release well continue bringing in more pieces and attaching them, and so on for perhaps 2 or 3 builds until the first room is empty and our vision of NPCs is complete. It doesnt mean thats all we have, far from it, just sorting that entire packed room out would take too long and we want to finally start pushing NPC content out as soon as possible.
We also have some big plans for a gun mechanics rework at some point, to provide a more solid gunplay experience that will make guns not only more interesting to use, require more a player skill element, but also make PVP encounters a lot more interesting for those who enjoy that kind of thing, as our PVP component is still one of the more lacking elements of our multiplayer experience. But for now we are not committing to where this will thread into the release schedule.
The process of moving stuff over will take some time, and so we may be quiet for a couple of Thursdoids until we start getting stuff moving in the current build. As soon as we are though, well be talking about the ongoing NPC development, alongside the concurrent crafting and balance patch, until they drop. Exciting times!
It shouldnt go unsaid, however, that if a big new feature is not ready then its not in our DNA to push it out of the door uncooked. Were confident that this will be a great year for PZ, and feel we can keep the content pipe flowing, but also wont be abandoning our accustomed position as the tortoise in the tortoise vs. hare race which appears to now be paying dividends for both game and community.
Much love,
TIS x
[ 2022-01-06 12:20:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 41 - Released!
A huge thanks everyone for the wonderful experience weve had since releasing multiplayer, seeing such a wave of positivity has been wild and made this long journey for this build more than worth it! Seeing the player numbers dwarf our previous record has been crazy:
Were over the moon over the success the multiplayer has seen and we vow to continue and expand on that. Were so proud of everyone on our team, we know we wouldnt be here today if we didnt have such dedicated devs working on all these features, often under intense external pressure, and the support team for helping us keep the sometimes chaotic wheels spinning. Every one of them is wonderful and deserving of all our thanks. Finally, a huge specific thank you to General Arcade, in particular Yuri and Andrei who have put such amazing work into bringing a quality to Zomboids multiplayer we simply would never have (and indeed, hadnt) achieved without them. Theyve put huge amounts of work into this, and were thankful to them for helping Zomboid multiplayer come to the vision we had for it. Thats all for this update. See you all after the new year where well talk about what comes next!
[ 2021-12-20 10:44:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
It felt like the day would never come, but were really happy and proud to announce that Build 41 has been released to stable! If youve been out of the loop on the beta, a good place to start would be our new trailer to celebrate the release and show those new to Zomboid whats in store for them: [previewyoutube=nPbsDmzZ3Oc;full][/previewyoutube] This build marks a huge step for us, the graphics, gameplay, audio and netcode being significantly remastered and radically improved, Build 41 feels more a sequel than a patch update. As well as a huge map update, new mechanics and systems, its by far our biggest update yet. Under normal circumstances, we may have done a little more polish and fixing before releasing to stable, but the truth is next to no one are playing Build 40 now, apart from those that didnt know of the beta branch. Its presence if anything has been damaging to Project Zomboids first impressions and we were only waiting for multiplayer to drop in a somewhat stable fashion to allow us to move on, as we feel strongly that Build 41 even with the remaining bugs and issues that need weeding out, casts a far superior first impression for new players. Build 40 will forever live on in a branch, access the beta branch legacy40 Classic Zomboid at any point to continue playing, or if your specs arent capable of running build 41 comfortably. So whats new in this build?
- Massive animation and character overhaul, more immersive animations and smoother gameplay and combat, highly customizable character that shows clothing and equipment in the world. Visibly ripped and damaged clothing. Visible Backpacks and Bags.
- In-game map system to allow the player to chart their exploration and find their way around the huge map.
- New animations and new movement systems. Sneaking, sprinting, jogging, racking, reloading, climbing, fence-jumping, collapsing and much much more.
- New multiplayer built from the ground up for smooth, immersive and low latency player and zombie movement.
- New combat, new weapons, new difficulty balance.
- New tutorial teaching you the very basics of the new movement and combat.
- New character creation many, many different new clothing options both on spawn and discoverable in the world as loot or on zombies.
- New city to explore, the gargantuan Louisville, as well as many improvements across the entire map, including new buildings, decoration, and curved roads for easier driving.
- New zombie behaviour: feasting on recent corpses, lolling against walls, falling over fences etc.
- Blood and dirt system that progressively bloodies bodies and clothing of survivors and zombies
- New injury system movement and combat visibly hampered when injured. Lacerations now possible, an injury state that lies between bites and scratches.
- Improved gunplay: green/red target outline while aiming, increased gun loot spawn.
- Randomized environmental storytelling elements. Death Scenes, zombies discovered in the situations in which people died. Prayer meetings, sports-viewing parties, survivor zeds wearing backpacks etc, vehicle crashes and blockades.
- Situational zombie type/clothing and inventories cop zeds in police station, firemen zeds in burnt buildings, Chef zeds in restaurant kitchens, bride and groom zeds at a wedding ceremony in church etc.
- Clothing protection: different clothing provides different levels of protection from zombie attacks.
- New Sims-style cutaway vision system.
- Vehicle handling improvements, resizing and appearance tweaks.
- Updated, remastered and expanded Kentucky-themed soundtrack.
- Complete soundscape overhaul All new sounds, building a more immersive and compelling sonic landscape.
- Items now have placeable 3D models in the world, for all your decorative needs.
- New Gameplay Styles Apocalypse: Stealth focus. Short lifespan. Combat best avoided and picked selectively. Survivor: Powerful combat. Longer Lifespan. A challenging playstyle based on PZs previous Survival mode of Build 40. Builder: Construction, Exploration, and Farming focus. A more relaxed experience.
- New Challenges Kingsmouth A separate challenge map, Kingsmouth puts you on a paradise island vacation resort. Studio Try to survive as the Knox Infection hits the dream factory. Some of these zombies are not like the others.
- Entirely new foraging system.
- New inventory slots belts and holsters now give quick equip slots. Weapons can be attached to the characters back.
- New thermal / body temperature system.
- New Tailoring system for clothing repairs.
- New Fitness / Exercise system.
- New emote system Hold Q to bring up the Radial Menu for Emotes.
- New water visuals including visible flow direction.
- New puddle system during heavy rain.
- New fog visuals.
- New levelling system.
- New VHS, and CDs system.
- Broken glass and related injuries.
- 3D Store Mannequins can be dressed however you like
- Working washing machines and driers
- Server-side saving: MP save system now in a server-side database. Offline SP-side, also means no more lost cars via irl power outages.
- New radial menu for reloading firearms.
- New game cursor
- New loot balance and loot balance system: houses and stores now have loot in the containers you would expect from real life and not in a jumble.
- Isometric aiming cursor that shows where youre aiming in iso space to aid in combat.
- A gigantic list of fixes and QoL improvements.
Thank you
A huge thanks everyone for the wonderful experience weve had since releasing multiplayer, seeing such a wave of positivity has been wild and made this long journey for this build more than worth it! Seeing the player numbers dwarf our previous record has been crazy:
Were over the moon over the success the multiplayer has seen and we vow to continue and expand on that. Were so proud of everyone on our team, we know we wouldnt be here today if we didnt have such dedicated devs working on all these features, often under intense external pressure, and the support team for helping us keep the sometimes chaotic wheels spinning. Every one of them is wonderful and deserving of all our thanks. Finally, a huge specific thank you to General Arcade, in particular Yuri and Andrei who have put such amazing work into bringing a quality to Zomboids multiplayer we simply would never have (and indeed, hadnt) achieved without them. Theyve put huge amounts of work into this, and were thankful to them for helping Zomboid multiplayer come to the vision we had for it. Thats all for this update. See you all after the new year where well talk about what comes next!
[ 2021-12-20 10:44:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 41 Multiplayer Beta Available Now!
Hello survivor! Heres a few notes of introduction for players new to the Knox Event. Build 41 is our playable beta of a complete overhaul of Project Zomboid: new animations, new combat, new soundscape designed by some of the folks who won awards for Alien: Isolation, new map function, vast new city added to the map. New everything, really. We have been working on it for two years, and very recently have reintroduced multiplayer which has proved extremely popular and may even be the reason that you are here reading this! It looks a little like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atI-tEpmS4g And heres some advice from Nurse about how to access and whats included: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCqRYjAepBk With Build 41.61, we've increased the supported player count to 32, already. This build is NOT currently the initial download Steam users are presented with we intend to give Build 41 its full release and move it into the mainline early next, year once we have fixed and polished remaining issues with the new MP.
Simply go to your Steam betas, and select the one called "b41multiplayer". Please be aware that this is a test build, and is still being actively patched, fixed and worked upon.
While many (many!) people are having a great time with Build 41 MP, there are still issues we need to fix and support issues that we need to address. Public servers are currently not recommended. Whitelisted and co-op servers are strongly advised for the best experience. The new update is very complex, and we are a very small team. So please be understanding while we update, fix and polish ready for the full launch next year. We would like to thank our amazing community for the help they have been giving to new players, and all the enthusiasm they have shown during this exciting time for Project Zomboid. We hope you all have fun! Have some Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!
[ 2021-12-16 16:03:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 41 and MP info
Hello survivor! Heres a few notes of introduction for players new to the Knox Event. Build 41 is our playable beta of a complete overhaul of Project Zomboid: new animations, new combat, new soundscape designed by some of the folks who won awards for Alien: Isolation, new map function, vast new city added to the map. New everything, really. We have been working on it for two years, and very recently have reintroduced multiplayer which has proved extremely popular and may even be the reason that you are here reading this! It looks a little like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atI-tEpmS4g And heres some advice from Nurse about how to access and whats included: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCqRYjAepBk With Build 41.61, we've increased the supported player count to 32, already. This build is NOT currently the initial download Steam users are presented with we intend to give Build 41 its full release and move it into the mainline early next, year once we have fixed and polished remaining issues with the new MP.
So how do you access the latest build?
Simply go to your Steam betas, and select the one called "b41multiplayer". Please be aware that this is a test build, and is still being actively patched, fixed and worked upon.
While many (many!) people are having a great time with Build 41 MP, there are still issues we need to fix and support issues that we need to address. Public servers are currently not recommended. Whitelisted and co-op servers are strongly advised for the best experience. The new update is very complex, and we are a very small team. So please be understanding while we update, fix and polish ready for the full launch next year. We would like to thank our amazing community for the help they have been giving to new players, and all the enthusiasm they have shown during this exciting time for Project Zomboid. We hope you all have fun! Have some Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!
[ 2021-12-16 16:03:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 41 IWBUMS Beta out
The IWBUMS beta is accessible to anyone who plays Project Zomboid. Right click Project Zomboid in your Steam library and hit Properties. Then, navigate to the betas tab and select the iwillbackupmysave branch from the dropdown menu.
Those who test IWBUMS beta builds must be aware that what theyre playing is a work in progress. IF YOU HAVE ANY PROBLEMS - MAKE SURE ALL MODS ARE DISABLED - then please try verifying the steam local cache within those same options. If this doesn't work, try a full uninstall and reinstall (while also deleting or renaming the installation folder as well as your user folder in C:\Users\YourUsername\Zomboid). Sometimes Steam updates can be buggy with big updates. The beta is put out for public consumption for player feedback and bug reports. Please direct gameplay feedbackto our forum beta release thread, and bugsto this section of our forums. For further details on what IWBUMS testing entails,please check here.
Build 41 is the most fundamental and wide-ranging update that Project Zomboid haseverhad. We intend it to be a stable foundation for us to build on for many years ahead. For this reason too,however, we anticipate a fairly long public beta while all the various issues presented to us by community testers are spotlit and remedied. Some key features, primarily MP, are initially disabled in the IWBUMS beta build and will be turned on during the testing process. Build 41 currently contains:
During the IWBUMS beta process for Build 41 the following features will be re-enabled and/or improved.
Due to the extent of engine and gameplay changes in Build 41, existing savegames will NOT be compatible. At the time of the full build release, for those wishing to continue playing on old saves, a Steam beta branch of the current Build 40 will be available and will continue to be available at all times. This will be known as PZ Classic, and will also allow people to continue to play with their favourite mods until such a time as they are updated. Click here for a sneak vision into the future beyond build 41!
[ 2019-10-16 15:47:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
The public I Will Back Up My Save beta for the long-awaited Build 41 is now open for testing by the Project Zomboid community.
HOW?
The IWBUMS beta is accessible to anyone who plays Project Zomboid. Right click Project Zomboid in your Steam library and hit Properties. Then, navigate to the betas tab and select the iwillbackupmysave branch from the dropdown menu.
Those who test IWBUMS beta builds must be aware that what theyre playing is a work in progress. IF YOU HAVE ANY PROBLEMS - MAKE SURE ALL MODS ARE DISABLED - then please try verifying the steam local cache within those same options. If this doesn't work, try a full uninstall and reinstall (while also deleting or renaming the installation folder as well as your user folder in C:\Users\YourUsername\Zomboid). Sometimes Steam updates can be buggy with big updates. The beta is put out for public consumption for player feedback and bug reports. Please direct gameplay feedbackto our forum beta release thread, and bugsto this section of our forums. For further details on what IWBUMS testing entails,please check here.
WHAT?
Build 41 is the most fundamental and wide-ranging update that Project Zomboid haseverhad. We intend it to be a stable foundation for us to build on for many years ahead. For this reason too,however, we anticipate a fairly long public beta while all the various issues presented to us by community testers are spotlit and remedied. Some key features, primarily MP, are initially disabled in the IWBUMS beta build and will be turned on during the testing process. Build 41 currently contains:
- New gameplay styles: Builder, Brawler and Survivor
- More deadly Survivor (Survival) gameplay balance player can be dragged down by horde and feasted upon etc.
- New survivor abilities: sitting, sneaking, sprinting, jogging, racking, reloading, climbing, fence-jumping, collapsing and much much more.
- New combat, new weapons, new difficulty balance.
- New character creation many, many different new clothing options both on spawn and discoverable in the world as loot or on zombies.
- New zombie behaviour: feasting on recent corpses, lolling against walls, falling over fences etc.
- Blood system that progressively bloodies bodies and clothing of survivors and zombies
- New injury system movement and combat visibly hampered when injured. Lacerations now possible, an injury state that lies between bites and scratches.
- Improved gunplay: green/red aiming outline, new guns, improved racking and reloading, increased gun loot spawn.
- Zombie Death Scenes zombies discovered in the situations in which people died. Prayer meetings, sports-viewing parties, survivor zeds wearing backpacks etc.
- Situational zombie type/clothing and inventories cop zeds in police station, firemen zeds in burnt buildings, Chef zeds in restaurant kitchens, bride and groom zeds at a wedding ceremony in church etc.
- Clothing protection: different clothing provides different levels of protection from zombie attacks.
- Visibly ripped and damaged clothing.
- New Sims-style cutaway vision system.
- Vehicle handling improvements, resizing and appearance tweaks.
- Updated, remastered and improved Kentucky-themed soundtrack. Original music still in rotation, and also accessible through game options.
- New SFX: weaponry, zombie moans etc.
- New water visuals including visible flow direction.
- New puddle system during heavy rain.
- Broken glass and related injuries.
- Garage doors may be opened / closed and shake when hit.
- New Challenge maps: Film Set and Kingsmouth Vacation Island
- 3D Store Mannequins can be dressed however you like
- Working washing machines and driers
- Server-side saving: MP save system now in a server-side database. Offline SP-side, also means no more lost cars via irl power outages.
- New game cursor
- New level-up sound, and tweaked levelling system.
- Faint isometric aiming cursor that shows where youre aiming in iso space.
- New loot balance and loot balance system: houses and stores now have loot in the containers you would expect from real life and not in a jumble.
- Two tiers of loot priority allowing for more realistic filler loot amidst the more valuable gameplay items.
- Many, many general fixes including remedies for: floating cars, farming issues, inaudible house alarms, erosion shrubs blocking vehicles, desensitized survivors being panicked by crawlers and much more.
- VISIBLE BACKPACKS!
WHAT NEXT?
During the IWBUMS beta process for Build 41 the following features will be re-enabled and/or improved.
- Multiplayer alongside significant MP Networking improvements
- Improved visual fidelity of survivor character and zombies
- Further optimization to improve performance on both low and high end systems.
- Sprinter Zeds
- Fire visuals
- Tutorial
- Zombie skin appearance/decay
- Ability to repair ripped clothing
WHAT ELSE?
Due to the extent of engine and gameplay changes in Build 41, existing savegames will NOT be compatible. At the time of the full build release, for those wishing to continue playing on old saves, a Steam beta branch of the current Build 40 will be available and will continue to be available at all times. This will be known as PZ Classic, and will also allow people to continue to play with their favourite mods until such a time as they are updated. Click here for a sneak vision into the future beyond build 41!
[ 2019-10-16 15:47:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Spiffos Round-Up #5
Given as were starting from a slightly blanker slate with Build 41 than we usually do, and combat by necessity is changing to match the improved visuals, these past few weeks we've been making some balance changes to the game. The primary goal of this is to bring Zomboid further into line with the fantasy of living in a zombie apocalypse and making the zed threat as real and as valid as those youd see in a Romero movie or The Walking Dead. So, for example, one of our intentions has been to make sure that combat adheres to the more classic zombie philosophy of threats coming not from the front, but from behind with zeds more likely to take a nice chunk out of your neck or shoulder. Heres a quick video with explanatory subtitles as to what were doing. (We think you'll also agree with us that music man Mister Beever has excelled himself with the new tune here too). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li5xZeImf9c You can read a more in-depth account of the balance changes here, but the general thrust of it is to make individual zombies relatively easy to takedown but crowds of two, three or more far more difficult. Likewise targeting the head of downed zombies will be encouraged, and due to feedback from the community on anims vids we've also upped movement and combat speeds a tad to try make things a little less sluggish.
Were currently doing a lot of work on walk speeds, run speeds and movement when youre injured, over-encumbered and such. You can see a video detailing our first iteration of this work below, although our regular weekly blog readers can likely expect a more detailed look at more recent stuff in coming weeks. https://youtu.be/qDSc9ySBS0o First off the video you see a scratch cause a light limp and a limping run. Burns will also have the same impact, alongside cuts a new injury type thats somewhere between our existing scratch and deep wound. After this: a deep wound that triggers heavy walk limps. You can still try to run, but it'll be slow on a par with the walk speed with a light limp. Finally in the vid: a fracture. This is currently a heavy limp, but it will forbid a run. This will also be the case if you have glass shards, bad burns or a leg bite.
We havent shown off many of the new weapons in a while, so heres a few. Please note this is a far from exhaustive list, there are more in this build and in builds to come. Also we've not yet balanced speeds and anims for all the weapons, and theres been a lot of balance since this vid was taken, so please don't take anything as final: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLnbOwVq9Xc This is the fifth Steam round-up of development news for Project Zomboid, but weekly Thursdoid blogs are posted both onour website and on the Steam discussion boards. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterrighthere!Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Thats all for now, keep tabs on our website for more every week!
[ 2019-06-04 13:43:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
How do everyone. Back again for update #5, heres the highlights of the last few weeks of Project Zomboid Build 41 development compiled from the Thursday blogs that appear at http://www.projectzomboid.com/blog/ and on the PZ Steam boards.
First off, a quick vid that shows the current state of the internal test build.
Were not going to tell you whats changed beyond the general polish weve been doing, but please make sure your sound/speakers are turned up.
https://youtu.be/FXjWIUW1g54
Second up, heres another video showing off some more gameplay but please make sure you make it to the thrilling/chilling dnouement to see some of the more recently tied-in animations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9OyAF-XgCM
Please note that, even though these vids are direct from gameplay and lookin pretty cool, we still have a lot of stuff we want/need to get in before we IWBUMS public beta testing.
There's body masking and rotational anim tech from Zac, Savegame improvements from Yuri, a fair amount of MP-poking to get it all operational, more optimization and a several other things besides.
This is all falling into place at the moment, but right now a playable beta isnt imminent and well only open it up when the time is right and when were at a point at which were able to deal with the flood of new external feedback. Right now theres nothing that we dont already know needs fixing/improving but as soon as its ready-enough, we will let folks in.
With that in mind, then, heres some other stuff thats being cooked up in Spiffos workshop. (And please note that all the following vids were done before the SFX work seen above!)
COMBAT RENOVATIONS
Given as were starting from a slightly blanker slate with Build 41 than we usually do, and combat by necessity is changing to match the improved visuals, these past few weeks we've been making some balance changes to the game. The primary goal of this is to bring Zomboid further into line with the fantasy of living in a zombie apocalypse and making the zed threat as real and as valid as those youd see in a Romero movie or The Walking Dead. So, for example, one of our intentions has been to make sure that combat adheres to the more classic zombie philosophy of threats coming not from the front, but from behind with zeds more likely to take a nice chunk out of your neck or shoulder. Heres a quick video with explanatory subtitles as to what were doing. (We think you'll also agree with us that music man Mister Beever has excelled himself with the new tune here too). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li5xZeImf9c You can read a more in-depth account of the balance changes here, but the general thrust of it is to make individual zombies relatively easy to takedown but crowds of two, three or more far more difficult. Likewise targeting the head of downed zombies will be encouraged, and due to feedback from the community on anims vids we've also upped movement and combat speeds a tad to try make things a little less sluggish.
LEGS THAT HURT
Were currently doing a lot of work on walk speeds, run speeds and movement when youre injured, over-encumbered and such. You can see a video detailing our first iteration of this work below, although our regular weekly blog readers can likely expect a more detailed look at more recent stuff in coming weeks. https://youtu.be/qDSc9ySBS0o First off the video you see a scratch cause a light limp and a limping run. Burns will also have the same impact, alongside cuts a new injury type thats somewhere between our existing scratch and deep wound. After this: a deep wound that triggers heavy walk limps. You can still try to run, but it'll be slow on a par with the walk speed with a light limp. Finally in the vid: a fracture. This is currently a heavy limp, but it will forbid a run. This will also be the case if you have glass shards, bad burns or a leg bite.
NEW WEAPONRY
We havent shown off many of the new weapons in a while, so heres a few. Please note this is a far from exhaustive list, there are more in this build and in builds to come. Also we've not yet balanced speeds and anims for all the weapons, and theres been a lot of balance since this vid was taken, so please don't take anything as final: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLnbOwVq9Xc This is the fifth Steam round-up of development news for Project Zomboid, but weekly Thursdoid blogs are posted both onour website and on the Steam discussion boards. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterrighthere!Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Thats all for now, keep tabs on our website for more every week!
[ 2019-06-04 13:43:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
Spiffos Round-Up #4
In Build 41 we will be adapting the lore slightly (hopefully forgivably) by making it so that the zed impulse to bite someone whos unturned isnt entirely removed after their death. Idle zeds will be slightly attracted to human corpses, and will crouch to feed meaning you can sneak by or attack without them noticing you as easily. This can be seen in the vid below: https://youtu.be/bC5LYYJPI8A Meanwhile, the same event can be added to our growing roster of interesting scenes we can spawn in random houses, which can be seen in the below screenshot which is also a good example of how neatly ChrisWs cutaway system will be improving the game. (Please also note that since this screenshot and video were taken weve added in more poses for feeding zombies so they wont all be doing the more human-like crouch, and some will be on their knees and pawing at the corpse.)
In the current build the discovery of survivor bodies can be quite crude, with bleach or alcohol bottles scattered around willy-nilly for example. With our new systems we can also quite easily add in bodies that tell a clearer and neater story. Even if its as simple, and tragic, as someone who died from self-inflicted gun wounds. [PLEASE NOTE THIS IMAGE IS WIP - POSES ETC WILL BE MORE VARIED AND IMPROVED]
[Traditional disclaimer: work in progress! Improved/sharper character models seen in previous blogs not yet in main test build!] Heres a quick vid that shows off the ability to pour out liquid from a container, the ability to sit on the ground to have a rest, and an idle that shows the survivors warming themselves in front of a heat source. Crikey, this game's quite dark isnt it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vllCqedCauw New animations tied into the new system include: applying bandages and taking pills. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgZwqkchCoc Also, digging graves and pouring contents from bottles out onto the ground. Allowing you to pour one out for your homies, if you so choose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66qBOvl8h0g
We will be releasing our new AnimZed dev tools to the community when we release this version (perhaps even when we are still in IWBUMS testing if the documentation is ready) and just wanted to touch on the sort of thing that could be done quite easily with them once theyre available. For example, a while ago Martin made us some skeleton models. These are primarily intended for use when exposing bone under character flesh when mortal body damage occurs. Likewise, bodies that have been feasted on may have exposed limb bones where the flesh has been picked clean and on top of that, there's always the opportunity for crawlers to be dragging skeletal bloody legs across the floor and for more damaged zeds to be appearing in Six Months Later and beyond. All thats still to come though, and as a quick mod experiment on his birthday (when he should have been having a day off) RJ decided to have a look what theyd look like if used in-game in their entirety. PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN EXAMPLE, AND NOT A REAL GAME FEATURE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waiu4dAFEOU The results are a bit rough still, but were sure youll agree: Boom, theres the beginnings of aHarryhausen or fantasy mod. Good times to come hopefully.
We had been waiting for the animations build to resize cars, due to the difference in size between our old and new character models. Yuri has now done some magic, and readjusted the physics so now the in-game vehicles look like this. Which, we reckon, is a nice improvement. https://youtu.be/l7_5qWYe_nE Now Yuri is tweaking his water effects, adjusting the intensity of their outlines and improving the banks of rivers, while also looking to improve the vehicle saving system so (very rare) events of car loss can be eradicated.
Something else that might be of worthy of mention, and a quick vid, are some examples of where the new animations system are highlighting in-between states that the game could previously get away with but now either look weird, or have resulted in a show-stopper bug. A good example of this is when a player either bumped into a zed when escaping through a window, or was very closely pursued by zeds when escaping this was not only resulting in visual weirdness in the anims build, but also was trapping the player in the window frame for all perpetuity. As such, after a consultation with Animator Martin, we can use this sort of situation for some cool new gameplay considerations. PLEASE NOTE: This is a WIP animation, and whatever anyone tells you the big saucepan is a bug thats already been fixed and wont be in the final build. (Were also working on more 'table against window' polish). https://youtu.be/1hfDXZbZCtU On top of this we will be improving this further perhaps with a zed grabbing and pulling you into the window instead of pushing you out. Anyway, those are the main headlines. If youd rather read em on a weekly basis, alongside the smaller details were ticking off and issues were addressing, then check the website or the Steam forum. Thanks all! This is the fourth monthly Steam round-up of development news for Project Zomboid, but weekly Thursdoid blogs are posted both onour website and on the Steam discussion boards. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterrighthere!Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Our thanks to our good friend Xeonyx for creating the header image using the internal anims build. Thats all for now, keep tabs on our website for more every week!
[ 2019-05-02 21:36:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, heres the highlights of the last few weeks of Project Zomboid development compiled from the Thursday blogs that appear at http://www.projectzomboid.com/blog/ and on the PZ Steam boards.
Heres a quick video that shows whereabouts we currently are with the internal anims build, with subtitles to highlight work still to be done which will also hopefully provide an accurate picture of what itll look and feel like to play.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3bLv8Hl_0Y
As you can see theres a lot of general smoothening of rough edges happening on the build at the moment, and likewise alongside our friends at TEA we still need to plug in work on rotational blending, MP hook-ups and the work on the zoom that led to the sharper-looking models we showed off in past weeks.
With that put up top then, lets have a look at some of the other stuff thats being introduced into the next PZ build.
BODIES EVERYWHERE
In Build 41 we will be adapting the lore slightly (hopefully forgivably) by making it so that the zed impulse to bite someone whos unturned isnt entirely removed after their death. Idle zeds will be slightly attracted to human corpses, and will crouch to feed meaning you can sneak by or attack without them noticing you as easily. This can be seen in the vid below: https://youtu.be/bC5LYYJPI8A Meanwhile, the same event can be added to our growing roster of interesting scenes we can spawn in random houses, which can be seen in the below screenshot which is also a good example of how neatly ChrisWs cutaway system will be improving the game. (Please also note that since this screenshot and video were taken weve added in more poses for feeding zombies so they wont all be doing the more human-like crouch, and some will be on their knees and pawing at the corpse.)
In the current build the discovery of survivor bodies can be quite crude, with bleach or alcohol bottles scattered around willy-nilly for example. With our new systems we can also quite easily add in bodies that tell a clearer and neater story. Even if its as simple, and tragic, as someone who died from self-inflicted gun wounds. [PLEASE NOTE THIS IMAGE IS WIP - POSES ETC WILL BE MORE VARIED AND IMPROVED]
OTHER NEWLY IMPLEMENTED ANIMATIONS
[Traditional disclaimer: work in progress! Improved/sharper character models seen in previous blogs not yet in main test build!] Heres a quick vid that shows off the ability to pour out liquid from a container, the ability to sit on the ground to have a rest, and an idle that shows the survivors warming themselves in front of a heat source. Crikey, this game's quite dark isnt it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vllCqedCauw New animations tied into the new system include: applying bandages and taking pills. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgZwqkchCoc Also, digging graves and pouring contents from bottles out onto the ground. Allowing you to pour one out for your homies, if you so choose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66qBOvl8h0g
MODDING POTENTIAL
We will be releasing our new AnimZed dev tools to the community when we release this version (perhaps even when we are still in IWBUMS testing if the documentation is ready) and just wanted to touch on the sort of thing that could be done quite easily with them once theyre available. For example, a while ago Martin made us some skeleton models. These are primarily intended for use when exposing bone under character flesh when mortal body damage occurs. Likewise, bodies that have been feasted on may have exposed limb bones where the flesh has been picked clean and on top of that, there's always the opportunity for crawlers to be dragging skeletal bloody legs across the floor and for more damaged zeds to be appearing in Six Months Later and beyond. All thats still to come though, and as a quick mod experiment on his birthday (when he should have been having a day off) RJ decided to have a look what theyd look like if used in-game in their entirety. PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN EXAMPLE, AND NOT A REAL GAME FEATURE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waiu4dAFEOU The results are a bit rough still, but were sure youll agree: Boom, theres the beginnings of aHarryhausen or fantasy mod. Good times to come hopefully.
SMALLER CARS
We had been waiting for the animations build to resize cars, due to the difference in size between our old and new character models. Yuri has now done some magic, and readjusted the physics so now the in-game vehicles look like this. Which, we reckon, is a nice improvement. https://youtu.be/l7_5qWYe_nE Now Yuri is tweaking his water effects, adjusting the intensity of their outlines and improving the banks of rivers, while also looking to improve the vehicle saving system so (very rare) events of car loss can be eradicated.
WINDOW HOPPING
Something else that might be of worthy of mention, and a quick vid, are some examples of where the new animations system are highlighting in-between states that the game could previously get away with but now either look weird, or have resulted in a show-stopper bug. A good example of this is when a player either bumped into a zed when escaping through a window, or was very closely pursued by zeds when escaping this was not only resulting in visual weirdness in the anims build, but also was trapping the player in the window frame for all perpetuity. As such, after a consultation with Animator Martin, we can use this sort of situation for some cool new gameplay considerations. PLEASE NOTE: This is a WIP animation, and whatever anyone tells you the big saucepan is a bug thats already been fixed and wont be in the final build. (Were also working on more 'table against window' polish). https://youtu.be/1hfDXZbZCtU On top of this we will be improving this further perhaps with a zed grabbing and pulling you into the window instead of pushing you out. Anyway, those are the main headlines. If youd rather read em on a weekly basis, alongside the smaller details were ticking off and issues were addressing, then check the website or the Steam forum. Thanks all! This is the fourth monthly Steam round-up of development news for Project Zomboid, but weekly Thursdoid blogs are posted both onour website and on the Steam discussion boards. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterrighthere!Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Our thanks to our good friend Xeonyx for creating the header image using the internal anims build. Thats all for now, keep tabs on our website for more every week!
[ 2019-05-02 21:36:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
Spiffos Round-Up #3
Zacs work on masking out different parts of clothing items has resulted in several extremely useful features. First, it now allows us to wear pieces of geometry clothing on top of other geometry clothing as opposed to being a texture drawn over the characters skin. This used to be impossible: the clothing worn underneath would always poke through the geometry of the clothing on top, especially when moving. So now we can layer clothing appropriately, and also spray blood on individual layers and garments instead of your survivors body as a whole. Our old solution was to to draw underclothing as textures directly on the character model, which unfortunately led to the side effect of them looking like body paint and lacking the bulk of real clothing. Now we can easily turn off areas of the clothing that are covered, so we are provided with many more options. https://youtu.be/0-DiI2trU7g This also allows us much more visual indications of damage and clothing wear and tear (quite literally). As well as putting a players newly scavenged/treasured Spiffo shirt at risk of damage, this will allow much more variety with zombies in particular. RJ has been adding code to implement this new system to further randomize zombies clothing conditions, and tie potential clothing damage into the various game systems for the player. https://youtu.be/Y_YEw1zRy7c
Our primary rule with Build 41 is that were updating animations to complement and add foundation to our existing gameplay, rather than get too excited and add in loads of new systems that could otherwise wait till a later version. A good example of this is something thats been in the game for a while, but have always been hidden slightly: our annotated survivor maps that show you the way to various hidden stashes. Now though, to create a bit of a breadcrumb trail for players to follow, we have introduced uniformed survivor zeds. They are the walking corpse of a survivor like yourself, who will not only carry some handy loot, but also potentially lead you to a place of interest. They will always be rare and spawned in a big crowd of zombies, but also appear bloodied and messed up and wear a neat backpack. One of our prototype Survivor Zeds looks a little like this: https://youtu.be/ukLzLSER28w
Over with General Arcade Yuri has been continuing his visual effect work and has fine-tuned his water so that waves and ripples arent as small. When it was windy in-game this was fairly uncomfortable on the eyes of our internal testers, so they now look like this. Right now hes also addressing something thats been an issue with cars since their introduction, but that we were waiting to address once the differently proportioned new character models were in-game. As such, say hello to the more sensibly-sized cars that Yuris currently updating the physics for:
Heres a quick run-down of other items of interest that have gone into the internal branch of Build 41 over the past month.
Hey all, heres the highlights of the last four weeks of Project Zomboid development compiled from the Thursday blogs that appear at http://www.projectzomboid.com/blog/ and on the PZ Steam boards.
First off here are a couple of gameplay videos. This first one is a demonstration of zoned zombie outfits which is essentially the system that ensures that firefighter zombies spawn in fire stations, chef zombies spawn in restaurant kitchens and the like. (Please note that there are a few individual animations in this vid we want to speed up, and in most cases already have done)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGdxNR-Rrng&feature=youtu.be
Next up, meanwhile, weve had some significant improvements and fixes made by Bitbaboon Mark to the core animation blending system in past weeks. Hes fixing a whole bunch of issues, snaps and glitches that have been vexxing us for a long time digging deep into the code, and doing a total rewire where necessary.
In prior Thursday vids we cut around these uglinesses as much as possible, but they still reared their heads. Snaps between character animations, jarring moves when turning to certain compass directions while strafing, and various other ugly things that we just couldnt account for were plaguing us but have now finally been fixed, leading to a far smoother animation blending system.
Zacs prepared a video demoing the new blending although please note hes running in debug, so this doesnt represent gameplay.
https://youtu.be/QMYGUWlVyMI
Speaking of, please note, that weve decided to put the completion of the high-res model rendering work described in the last Spiffo update on ice for little longer, since there were still numerous issues with it that meant it wasnt suitable to put into the main line and also it kept getting further broken by the flurry of additions and changes from the teams work described above.
We feel it would be best approached toward the end of Build 41 dev just before IWBUMS, at the point we could get extra resources on board to get it working right. As such all videos until then will use the traditional character resolution.
TORN CLOTHES AND BLOOD
Zacs work on masking out different parts of clothing items has resulted in several extremely useful features. First, it now allows us to wear pieces of geometry clothing on top of other geometry clothing as opposed to being a texture drawn over the characters skin. This used to be impossible: the clothing worn underneath would always poke through the geometry of the clothing on top, especially when moving. So now we can layer clothing appropriately, and also spray blood on individual layers and garments instead of your survivors body as a whole. Our old solution was to to draw underclothing as textures directly on the character model, which unfortunately led to the side effect of them looking like body paint and lacking the bulk of real clothing. Now we can easily turn off areas of the clothing that are covered, so we are provided with many more options. https://youtu.be/0-DiI2trU7g This also allows us much more visual indications of damage and clothing wear and tear (quite literally). As well as putting a players newly scavenged/treasured Spiffo shirt at risk of damage, this will allow much more variety with zombies in particular. RJ has been adding code to implement this new system to further randomize zombies clothing conditions, and tie potential clothing damage into the various game systems for the player. https://youtu.be/Y_YEw1zRy7c
SURVIVOR ZEDS
Our primary rule with Build 41 is that were updating animations to complement and add foundation to our existing gameplay, rather than get too excited and add in loads of new systems that could otherwise wait till a later version. A good example of this is something thats been in the game for a while, but have always been hidden slightly: our annotated survivor maps that show you the way to various hidden stashes. Now though, to create a bit of a breadcrumb trail for players to follow, we have introduced uniformed survivor zeds. They are the walking corpse of a survivor like yourself, who will not only carry some handy loot, but also potentially lead you to a place of interest. They will always be rare and spawned in a big crowd of zombies, but also appear bloodied and messed up and wear a neat backpack. One of our prototype Survivor Zeds looks a little like this: https://youtu.be/ukLzLSER28w
OTHER FUN STUFF
Over with General Arcade Yuri has been continuing his visual effect work and has fine-tuned his water so that waves and ripples arent as small. When it was windy in-game this was fairly uncomfortable on the eyes of our internal testers, so they now look like this. Right now hes also addressing something thats been an issue with cars since their introduction, but that we were waiting to address once the differently proportioned new character models were in-game. As such, say hello to the more sensibly-sized cars that Yuris currently updating the physics for:
GENERAL GAMEPLAY ADDITIONS
Heres a quick run-down of other items of interest that have gone into the internal branch of Build 41 over the past month.
- Extended idle animations. Depending on your character moodles, pain or other variable, youll sometimes see you character scratching an arm, shivering, checking his weapon, wipe his legs to check for blood etc.
- New timed action animations, alongside fixes for the current timed actions: digging graves with a shovel, looting on the ground or in shelves, cleaning blood etc.
- New outfits are also being added along with their own zone - Gigamart employee for example, and branded logo-ed shirts for various locations.
- New animation variants for the player defending against zombie bites. Three new variations of zombies thumping on objects.
- Weve gotten ChrisWs Sims-style wall cutaway system into the main line, but there are still a few issues to work out before its 100% operational.
- Garage doors can now be opened. huzzah. We will also be addressing the size of garages on the main map, and at the same time adding some more signage to the Exclusion Zone road network
- Support for characters to lower and raise hoods on hooded clothing, for example hoodies and certain coats, have been added alongside several new idle animations used when the character has injuries.
- Zach continues his great work adding more tools and features, this time to allow Martin and the other devs to quickly add and test new costume pieces through the AnimZed editor and preview them in game.
- We have added many clothing items such as a poncho, hoodies, scarfs, aprons and swimming outfits. RJ also now has hair and beard styles being associated with zone costumes (for e.g. so you dont tend to get military zombies or cops with hippy hairstyles and big beards).
Oh, and just today we found a way to make PZ feel a little more American.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow1qUukvjK4
This is the third monthly Steam round-up of development news for Project Zomboid, but weekly Thursdoid blogs are posted both onour website and on the Steam discussion boards. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterrighthere!Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Our thanks to our good friend Xeonyx for creating the header image using the internal anims build. Thats all for now, keep tabs on our website for more every week!
[ 2019-04-04 21:25:35 CET ] [ Original post ]
Spiffo's Roundup #2
First off, a general recently implemented animations video to whet your appetite along with some new Zach Beever musical goodness that will be coming in build 41. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj2NBd8kR6c
A key aspect of PZ mapping is zoning which we primarily use to mark up areas that are (for example) suitable for foraging and car spawns. Now however, with different clothing for zombies, we can flag which parts of the PZ map can spawn which particular zombie or which group of particular zombies. This, then, is how we can spawn only guards and orange jumpsuit-wearing prisoners in Rosewood prison.
Likewise, RJ has created a wedding spawn zone over one of the churches on the map which ensures that all zombies inside it, and outside for the selected area, have a very high chance of dressing in smart clothing, with a guaranteed bride, groom and church minister amongst them. This system will allow us to have many and varied different pockets of particular zeds police in police stations, lumberjacks at McCoy logging, military in military areas etc. Likewise, we will be examining the best methods to make sure that zeds in bathrobes or not wearing clothes are only found in homes and home bathrooms in particular. (It should be noted that aspects of this will also involve a very slight rewrite of PZ lore in terms of the outbreak, but we had intended to return to the radio/TV broadcasts soon in any case).
Weve been waiting for some important/complex work on rotational anim movements from TEA for a fair amount of the past few weeks but theres still been plenty of other areas for us to work in this time. A few examples of this includes knife attack animations, and tying survivors and zeds getting bloodied by attacks in general in-game. This has also involved us adding some additional combat skills, and in the process removing the skill point system. From Build 41 onwards skills will automatically level up when you gain the XP requirements, as we felt the manual skill point system never worked particularly well and would do so even less with many more skills.
RJ also adds a note on how running through crowds of zeds will now be a little more fraught with danger. One thing thats new and that people might be interested to see in action, is an effort to make sure players cant dash through hordes without getting slowed down. As seen in the video below, weve now added bumping against zeds. Colliding with one or two while youre running isnt dangerous, youll just get slowed down, but try running through a horde and youll stumble and fall leaving you temporarily exposed to the encroaching zeds. We might add in a few more different sorts of animations for nudges/pushes, but right now it looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQB4ewT412s
Next up, the issue of character and zed model visual fidelity. An area that was proving strange in terms of 41 development was that somewhere along the way some of the visual fidelity of characters had been lost and simultaneously, somehow, models looked far more buff/hunky than intended. Feet, also, seemed a little on the large side. After a bit of a dig, we finally located a bug in the exported model data that explained it. Due to this bug, the lighting of the characters was broken, which resulted in very washed out characters with little lighting shading which in turn removed definition that made muscles look bulkier. This has now been fixed and, after re-exporting all the clothing, has allowed us to achieve much better character model rendering and lighting than weve shown off previously during this recent leg of anim development. As ever, please keep in mind that well continue to balance/tweak to make sure characters fit their surrounds as well as possible as well as adjust the models themselves seeing as you can now see individual facial features much more clearly. These caveats notwithstanding, however, were pretty happy how theyre looking.
During this process we also focused on another prominent issue: that the character pixel resolution when zoomed in was extremely blocky and lacking in detail. Due to the ways that our initial zoom system handled things, characters were too harshly pixellated. This caused them to be extremely jaggied compared to what it was in the old days, when we were rendering characters to an off-screen sprite before placing them into the world. So over the past few weeks weve been doing some significant work on changing how the game handles the zoom, which in addition to fixing this issue should ultimately lead to slightly more optimized rendering of the game as well as providing the character models much more detail to play with.
The branch with this system on it isnt complete navigating indoors presents issues, mouse input hit-testing isnt fixed up yet, and were having issues with seams between tiles when zoomed out so its not quite ready for integration into the main test build. Heres a quick video of us running aimlessly around zombies under lights to show it off though. (Along with some new Zach Beever musical accompaniments!) https://youtu.be/cul1ykzHBJo
Zac and Mark from TEA have continued their work on the tech, ironing out the last few issues with the animation blending, as well as providing some extra cool tools to help us implement and debug the animations (as well as the modders once it releases!) https://youtu.be/ZspLm_D0JFM https://youtu.be/HJC5bUTltfI https://youtu.be/hy9wWeTkLQ4
[ 2019-03-07 18:18:26 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, heres the highlights of the last four weeks of Project Zomboid development compiled from the Thursday blogs that appear at projectzomboid.com and on the PZ Steam boards.
LATEST IMPLEMENTATION VID
First off, a general recently implemented animations video to whet your appetite along with some new Zach Beever musical goodness that will be coming in build 41. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj2NBd8kR6c
MAP ZONING FOR ZED OUTFITS
A key aspect of PZ mapping is zoning which we primarily use to mark up areas that are (for example) suitable for foraging and car spawns. Now however, with different clothing for zombies, we can flag which parts of the PZ map can spawn which particular zombie or which group of particular zombies. This, then, is how we can spawn only guards and orange jumpsuit-wearing prisoners in Rosewood prison.
Likewise, RJ has created a wedding spawn zone over one of the churches on the map which ensures that all zombies inside it, and outside for the selected area, have a very high chance of dressing in smart clothing, with a guaranteed bride, groom and church minister amongst them. This system will allow us to have many and varied different pockets of particular zeds police in police stations, lumberjacks at McCoy logging, military in military areas etc. Likewise, we will be examining the best methods to make sure that zeds in bathrobes or not wearing clothes are only found in homes and home bathrooms in particular. (It should be noted that aspects of this will also involve a very slight rewrite of PZ lore in terms of the outbreak, but we had intended to return to the radio/TV broadcasts soon in any case).
GAMEPLAY CHANGES
Weve been waiting for some important/complex work on rotational anim movements from TEA for a fair amount of the past few weeks but theres still been plenty of other areas for us to work in this time. A few examples of this includes knife attack animations, and tying survivors and zeds getting bloodied by attacks in general in-game. This has also involved us adding some additional combat skills, and in the process removing the skill point system. From Build 41 onwards skills will automatically level up when you gain the XP requirements, as we felt the manual skill point system never worked particularly well and would do so even less with many more skills.
ZED BUMPIN
RJ also adds a note on how running through crowds of zeds will now be a little more fraught with danger. One thing thats new and that people might be interested to see in action, is an effort to make sure players cant dash through hordes without getting slowed down. As seen in the video below, weve now added bumping against zeds. Colliding with one or two while youre running isnt dangerous, youll just get slowed down, but try running through a horde and youll stumble and fall leaving you temporarily exposed to the encroaching zeds. We might add in a few more different sorts of animations for nudges/pushes, but right now it looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQB4ewT412s
MODEL CLARITY
Next up, the issue of character and zed model visual fidelity. An area that was proving strange in terms of 41 development was that somewhere along the way some of the visual fidelity of characters had been lost and simultaneously, somehow, models looked far more buff/hunky than intended. Feet, also, seemed a little on the large side. After a bit of a dig, we finally located a bug in the exported model data that explained it. Due to this bug, the lighting of the characters was broken, which resulted in very washed out characters with little lighting shading which in turn removed definition that made muscles look bulkier. This has now been fixed and, after re-exporting all the clothing, has allowed us to achieve much better character model rendering and lighting than weve shown off previously during this recent leg of anim development. As ever, please keep in mind that well continue to balance/tweak to make sure characters fit their surrounds as well as possible as well as adjust the models themselves seeing as you can now see individual facial features much more clearly. These caveats notwithstanding, however, were pretty happy how theyre looking.
During this process we also focused on another prominent issue: that the character pixel resolution when zoomed in was extremely blocky and lacking in detail. Due to the ways that our initial zoom system handled things, characters were too harshly pixellated. This caused them to be extremely jaggied compared to what it was in the old days, when we were rendering characters to an off-screen sprite before placing them into the world. So over the past few weeks weve been doing some significant work on changing how the game handles the zoom, which in addition to fixing this issue should ultimately lead to slightly more optimized rendering of the game as well as providing the character models much more detail to play with.
The branch with this system on it isnt complete navigating indoors presents issues, mouse input hit-testing isnt fixed up yet, and were having issues with seams between tiles when zoomed out so its not quite ready for integration into the main test build. Heres a quick video of us running aimlessly around zombies under lights to show it off though. (Along with some new Zach Beever musical accompaniments!) https://youtu.be/cul1ykzHBJo
DEV AND MOD TOOL IMPROVEMENTS
Zac and Mark from TEA have continued their work on the tech, ironing out the last few issues with the animation blending, as well as providing some extra cool tools to help us implement and debug the animations (as well as the modders once it releases!) https://youtu.be/ZspLm_D0JFM https://youtu.be/HJC5bUTltfI https://youtu.be/hy9wWeTkLQ4
OTHER ITEMS OF NOTE
- Zac has been doing a whole bunch of optimization work, with fun example vids of his wares seen here with his zombie spawning, and here with multi-threaded rendering.
- RJ has implemented his previous work on looting improvements giving us more control over general clutter, and more realistically placed items in houses.
- Mash has begun creating icons for new clothing and weapons, Will had begun setting naming conventions for them.
- Connall and Turbo have continued to implement new timed actions.
- Yuri has finished adapting his water/puddles into Zacs revamped shader system, and is now experimenting with a particle system that will provide the bedrock for his fire improvements.
- The other Zac meanwhile, Young Zach, continues to deliver the new South-tinged PZ score that can be heard at playing over the initial video in this blog.
- Xeonyx is chasing/fixing map bugs in his now complete Kingsmouth Island challenge map.
[ 2019-03-07 18:18:26 CET ] [ Original post ]
Spiffos Roundup #1
ChrisW is back with us currently, and working on better internal visuals for buildings. Screenshots probably speak louder than words in this instance, so here we go:
Yuri has been putting the finishing touches on the puddle system, as well as tying it into the 40s climate stuff, and were super happy with how hes been able to add that visual spark to the water effects in the game. Heres a video of where hes up to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w5PAhh-pGE And here also is an earlier video, showing the more WIP shader effects appearing on roads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n_HxL0eh1E Our next plans for Yuris visual effects overhaul couldnt be more opposite, as we want him to give some visual love and attention to fire: one of our most ancient and jankiest looking systems. Were excited to see what he does with it, and at the same time as a visual boost, were planning on rebalancing the way fire works to make it behave more sensibly and better simulate its spread over different materials and tiles.
Stas from General Arcade has been going great guns with our public controller beta, and were now well into the bug fixing and polish stage. If you want to check out the latest version, number 14, details on how to join can be found here.
While the rest of the team works on Build 41, we currently have three people on map content. Mash is developing our take on Louisville, while RingoD is providing her with variations on our current housing models so that its suburbs dont feel too cookie-cutter. Heres a rare glimpse of a WIP urban location thats been prised from Mashs iron grip, shown with the understanding that the release will be a fair few builds into the future.
Seeing as the main map expansion is still so far away, however, we now also have the New Denver creator Xeonyx working on new locations that will come as a part of new challenges in the main game. Here, for example, is the main resort building on the fictional paradise island of Kingsmouth.
This is the first monthly Steam round-up of development news for Project Zomboid, but weekly Thursdoid blogs are posted both on our website and on the Steam discussion boards. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info.The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterright here!Our Discordis open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2019-02-07 19:04:04 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, heres a round-up of recent Zomboid dev. To start with a quick video compilation of stuff the team has been wiring up into our friends at TEAs animation systems.
https://youtu.be/HhM6eIrxNYA
Please note that there are still numerous bugs and issues as long as all our combined arms, and its hard to get a sustained video without issues and glitches popping up, so this vid is fairly carefully curated but it does give you an idea of the where we are. (Likewise, if you see something that looks wrong or glitchy, or think hmm, there should be more variation anims in that, then were probably already on it).
Essentially, TIS coders are currently implementing the game code-side, tying in the new animation system to all the game systems. RJ, for example, has been handling the combat system, tying up all the weapon swing, zombie reactions and various other related anims, and the system is getting close to the quality of the earlier videos of animations youve seen, though now tied 100% into the PZ combat, character and simulation systems.
Connall and Turbo, meanwhile, have been concentrating on non-combat related animations, such as reading, chopping wood, painting, eating, crafting, and the countless other in-game actions characters can do in-game that were previously performed like a stock-still robot with a progress bar.
EP has been doing his usual precision striking all across the code base, wiring up the character creation system, connecting model clothing to inventory items in the world, and fixing issues and integrating the codebase across the board.
In the mean-time TEA are optimizing and improving the AnimZed toolset with our requests the more we use it, and alongside general animation requests and polish Martin is experimenting with the gore potential of the system with visible guts hanging out of the front ofzombies and such.
Heres another vid from Zac from a two weeks ago: a walk through downtown West Point to test some of the latest optimization work, and the improved shaders that remove a lot of the bleached-out-ness from proceedings. At the moment Zac is also, still, looking into some further threading optimization as, bizarrely, better machines were having some stutters
https://youtu.be/Ge3IZlzOzRE
This past week weve also reimplemented zombies that spawn covered in blood (when the Version 41 is complete blood will gradually appear on most zeds during combat, however), which can be seen below alongside a few items ticked off the list from Connall and Turbos vast timed action spreadsheet.
Were also in the process of working out exactly which animations will be included in the first release, and what wont the Cover System; i.e. ducking behind walls and wall-hugging for example, is a confirmed not 41 at this point as we want to get the fundamentals right first. (edited)
SIMS-STYLE CUTAWAYS
ChrisW is back with us currently, and working on better internal visuals for buildings. Screenshots probably speak louder than words in this instance, so here we go:
GROUND WATER
Yuri has been putting the finishing touches on the puddle system, as well as tying it into the 40s climate stuff, and were super happy with how hes been able to add that visual spark to the water effects in the game. Heres a video of where hes up to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w5PAhh-pGE And here also is an earlier video, showing the more WIP shader effects appearing on roads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n_HxL0eh1E Our next plans for Yuris visual effects overhaul couldnt be more opposite, as we want him to give some visual love and attention to fire: one of our most ancient and jankiest looking systems. Were excited to see what he does with it, and at the same time as a visual boost, were planning on rebalancing the way fire works to make it behave more sensibly and better simulate its spread over different materials and tiles.
CONTROLLER BETA
Stas from General Arcade has been going great guns with our public controller beta, and were now well into the bug fixing and polish stage. If you want to check out the latest version, number 14, details on how to join can be found here.
MAP EXPANSION
While the rest of the team works on Build 41, we currently have three people on map content. Mash is developing our take on Louisville, while RingoD is providing her with variations on our current housing models so that its suburbs dont feel too cookie-cutter. Heres a rare glimpse of a WIP urban location thats been prised from Mashs iron grip, shown with the understanding that the release will be a fair few builds into the future.
Seeing as the main map expansion is still so far away, however, we now also have the New Denver creator Xeonyx working on new locations that will come as a part of new challenges in the main game. Here, for example, is the main resort building on the fictional paradise island of Kingsmouth.
This is the first monthly Steam round-up of development news for Project Zomboid, but weekly Thursdoid blogs are posted both on our website and on the Steam discussion boards. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info.The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterright here!Our Discordis open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2019-02-07 19:04:04 CET ] [ Original post ]
Zedsmoothening
Xeonyx, the creator of the much-lovedNew Denver / Slocan Lakemap, is now working on Challenge Maps for the main game. These, including the Film Studio map weve discussed previously, will most likely be a part of Build 41. His current mission is a fictional map called Kingsmouth a paradise island vacation resort in the Caribbean. The map will feature vast hotels, seaside locales, a military installation and much more but well go quiet on it for now while Jamie gets on with his work. Heres a quick screen from the map editor though.
Chris W continues his work on improving visuals within buildings aiming for more Sims-style cutaways and the removal of the circle stencil we currently use. Heres a quick before and after of the start of this work the second image showing walls in the foreground cutting away to skirting height with smooth transitions curving up to full height.
Wed like to direct your attention tothe new Hashima Island map by Woldren, a map based on an IRL location you might recognise as the place where James Bond shot a woman who had whiskey on her head in Skyfall. Its pretty damn cool.
Wed also like to direct your attention to the Redboid server, which had a season refresh/reboot/restart yesterday and is a grand place to start your PZ MP adventures if you havent done so yet. If you run a PZ server and would like a shout-out in a future blog, then please get in touch. And while youre at it -please use these values in Bitbaboon Steves recent networking optimization options, as they certainly seem to be helping those currently using em. ZombieUpdateMaxHighPriority=50 ZombieUpdateDelta=0.5 ZombieUpdateRadiusLowPriority=45.0 ZombieUpdateRadiusHighPriority=10.0 This weeks infested neighborhoodfrom Dark Oracle. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthereso you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info.The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ MailingListthat can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterright here!Our Discordis open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2019-01-10 17:58:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, quick run around the houses talking about whos on what this week.
In anims-land for Build 41 Zacs been looking at optimization, which well be coming back to pretty routinely from this point as we want to make sure everything is nice and smooth. Here hes sorted out some locks in the render thread, and from the Before and After you can see a marked improvement in quality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZ03VjhJr0
Hes also working on getting the shiny helmet / coats / leggings shader effect going for different clothing items, and also investigating with Mark as to why over the course of development with the animations systemweve lost some of the earthy coloursand harsher lighting that tended towards a slight over-saturation and bleached effect that doesnt quite make the new character models fit the scene.
Animator Martin, meanwhile, is looking at all the different locations weve got on the map (and those still to come) and creating new outfits to discover in their cupboards and lockers and likewise to find the local zeds dressed up in.
In other news:
Xeonyx, the creator of the much-lovedNew Denver / Slocan Lakemap, is now working on Challenge Maps for the main game. These, including the Film Studio map weve discussed previously, will most likely be a part of Build 41. His current mission is a fictional map called Kingsmouth a paradise island vacation resort in the Caribbean. The map will feature vast hotels, seaside locales, a military installation and much more but well go quiet on it for now while Jamie gets on with his work. Heres a quick screen from the map editor though.
Chris W continues his work on improving visuals within buildings aiming for more Sims-style cutaways and the removal of the circle stencil we currently use. Heres a quick before and after of the start of this work the second image showing walls in the foreground cutting away to skirting height with smooth transitions curving up to full height.
Meanwhile:
- Yuri is working on improvements to the way we render the ground surfaces, especially road textures that have been rained on, to complement his recent improvements to how water appears in-game. (This said, right now, hes shackling ahilarious car physics demonthats sprung up on an internal server.)
- Stasjust released an updated Controller Test betafor those helping out with our gamepad improvement scheme. If you are interested in getting a free PZ code for your troubles, thenjoin our band of testers.
- While BitbaboonMark does some TEA-side code repository movements and merging: RJ is doing some improvements to food crafting and prepping a (non-anims) forum test for his new loot table improvements, EP is doing some very exciting experimental work with a new player map system and Turbo is plotting his next move after the successful integration of his weather/shaders in Build 40. (Most likely picking up on his work on in-game devices, or maybe those seasonal sound effects we discussed before).
Community stuff:
Wed like to direct your attention tothe new Hashima Island map by Woldren, a map based on an IRL location you might recognise as the place where James Bond shot a woman who had whiskey on her head in Skyfall. Its pretty damn cool.
Wed also like to direct your attention to the Redboid server, which had a season refresh/reboot/restart yesterday and is a grand place to start your PZ MP adventures if you havent done so yet. If you run a PZ server and would like a shout-out in a future blog, then please get in touch. And while youre at it -please use these values in Bitbaboon Steves recent networking optimization options, as they certainly seem to be helping those currently using em. ZombieUpdateMaxHighPriority=50 ZombieUpdateDelta=0.5 ZombieUpdateRadiusLowPriority=45.0 ZombieUpdateRadiusHighPriority=10.0 This weeks infested neighborhoodfrom Dark Oracle. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthereso you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info.The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ MailingListthat can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterright here!Our Discordis open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2019-01-10 17:58:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
Spooky Santa
Grant and Zac have been finetuning the clothing and animation modules. Clothes are now shader-driven and individual Clothing items can have custom shaders for special fx. Animations now auto-reload when modified from the Editor, and Martin has also been hard at work adding new clothing outfits, and adding more variety to existing outfits. Heres a quick vid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZt_MOIM5TM Thats about it for today but Russian holidays mean that Yuri and Stas will continue their 41 work over the Western Xmas on current issues with upturned vehicles and the gamepad bindings screen, respectively, while theres plenty of other stuff bubbling under too. There will be a Thursdoid next week, but itll be a brief one featuring anything people have done over the holidays, and then back properly in the New Year. Have a great one if youre celebrating! This weeks Walking Dead-style not belonging herefrom non_curo. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info.The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ MailingListthat can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterright here!Our Discordis open for chat and hijinks too. Merry Xmas etc hohoho
[ 2018-12-20 21:26:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
[img]https://i.imgur.com/mO4Y6oq.jpg/img] Hello! Merry impending Chrimble. On Tuesday we ran a pretty successful Community Megatest using our new MP networking system that Bitbaboon Steve has concocted for us. Users generally reported a much smoother experience in overall play, and had a lot of fun with the storms, snow and admin-created blood moons. This said, we did see a few potential issues around mega-hordes and vehicles that we need to investigate deeper so didnt want to inflict our Megatest settings as default ones on players over the Xmas break until were sure theyre the right ones. To this end well be running more Community Megatests in the near future, with different system settings and some handy network debug tools that Steve is currently coding into the system. We have, however, also released it into the public build todayin Build 40.43for server owners to play around with and have already heard some positive feedback. In essence, and with a video deliberately set to explain it best, it looks a bit like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhm521K5gv8 In this video there are the two visible circles around the MP player, and then the mini-circles which appear around the zombies. Essentially: every time a circle appears around a zombie it means its getting a position update over the network from the server and then wired into your game. The clients zed placement signals are received and then the game knows where to show the zed. The essence of the system is that server operators can now adjust the circle of close dangerous zeds and the circle of distant no trouble zeds and the update times. This will cut down on the network traffic taken up by faraway zombies on your screen, and reduce strain on servers as a whole. [Please note that this vid is an example only and made to explain the system we havent judged what the best radius for these circles are yet and will be running a series of Community Megatests to help us judge what works best.] Sohere comes the science! In the vid the low priority (larger radius) dictates the zombies which are going to update on the update delta. So every x seconds they will get an update, and in the video you can see these as the pulses. [Its set purposefully long on the video to highlight it]. Meanwhile the high priority zombies get updated every server frame, and it will send out the closest Y zombies within the smaller circle around the player.
- ZombieUpdateHighPriorty is the radius around the player for sending the high priority zombies.
- ZombieUpdateMaxHighPriority is a cap on the number of high detail ones to send, and it will send the closest zombies to the player up to this limit.
- ZombieUpdateRadiusLowPriority is the maximum radius to send the lower frequency updates to at 45 this is essentially the entire screen at 1440p fully zoomed out.
- ZombieUpdateDelta is the time between sending these lower frequency larger blobs of zombies
Grant and Zac have been finetuning the clothing and animation modules. Clothes are now shader-driven and individual Clothing items can have custom shaders for special fx. Animations now auto-reload when modified from the Editor, and Martin has also been hard at work adding new clothing outfits, and adding more variety to existing outfits. Heres a quick vid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZt_MOIM5TM Thats about it for today but Russian holidays mean that Yuri and Stas will continue their 41 work over the Western Xmas on current issues with upturned vehicles and the gamepad bindings screen, respectively, while theres plenty of other stuff bubbling under too. There will be a Thursdoid next week, but itll be a brief one featuring anything people have done over the holidays, and then back properly in the New Year. Have a great one if youre celebrating! This weeks Walking Dead-style not belonging herefrom non_curo. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info.The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ MailingListthat can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterright here!Our Discordis open for chat and hijinks too. Merry Xmas etc hohoho
[ 2018-12-20 21:26:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
ZedLocation
Today we released our final (sort of, read below for more on that) patch for Build 40. Full patchnotes can be foundhere, but this covers stuff like:
While the rest of the team move into the animations build and version 41, were leaving optimization specialist Bitbaboon Steve investigating what easy-win MP networking improvements we could potentially still patch into 40. The first of his discoveries, the removal large number of empty and unnecessary data packets being sent over the server, has been released in 40.40 and should be a mild salve for current lag issues but his investigations also came up with an idea we thought itd be wise to test out with a forthcoming IWBUMS beta and Community Megatest. Essentially, Steve has been working on some server configurable optimizations for zombies in multiplayer. Since vehicles, performance in multiplayer servers has seen added strain (particularly in handling zombie hordes) and were hoping this might improve matters. In essence, were about to release a test version in which there are several configurable options to allow server owners to fine-tune how much zombie data is sent to their players. There will now be two player client zombie awareness circles: the first a smaller radius that defines at what tile-range zombie positions are sent to clients with a high precision in every frame, and then a second larger radius in which the zombie location information can be sent to clients less frequently. Server owners will also be able to play with how much time there is between the low frequency updates. On low population co-op servers these values can be set pretty liberally, so the players are getting all zombies in the visible area smoothly. But on high population servers that experience lag issues, server operators can sacrifice the smoothness of zombie movement in the distance (or even cap zombie visibility completely over a certain distance) in order to VASTLY reduce the amount of internet traffic they produce when lots of players are involved. We think this will sharply decrease the amount of work the server needs to do and should lead to a much better player experience with a little bit of visual compromise toward the edge of the screen. Distant zombies might pause a bit or appear to teleport slightly between updates, but these movements are also something wed hope to blend better (and make far less noticeable) with the added functionalities of the animations build. Server operators can decide on their own level of compromise too. This work is pretty much done, and as such we will add it into the IWBUMS beta as soon as its clear theres nothing from 40.40 that needs hot-fixing. Please keep your eyes on the forum if you want to participate in a special Yuletide Megatest.
This week in TEA-land Grant has improved things dev/modder-side with live texture reload, through upgrading the Filewatcher mechanism. It now watches the media folder instead of polling individual files, and is much more efficient. Upon a texture filechange, the game now reloads it live and in-place. This should make iteration times on textures much easier and faster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXtz_Owm_V8 Zac, meanwhile, has fixed up AnimZed for Animator Martin to the extent that he can now get a lot more variation on different individual outfits. Take these cops for example:
Martin has also been creating a better range of skin tones for player characters, to allow for better customisation should people desire it.
Todays warehouse hordefrom Frank. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info.The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZWikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterright here!OurDiscordis open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-12-13 16:55:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Howdy almost-yuletide survivor.
PATCH 40.40 RELEASED
Today we released our final (sort of, read below for more on that) patch for Build 40. Full patchnotes can be foundhere, but this covers stuff like:
- Improved darker nights, and less washed out night-time interiors. Car headlights and flashlights will be more of a necessity now. Sandbox settings also updated, so you can adapt it to a brightness you desire.
- Improved appearance of weather effects when in a building.
- Moon calculations re-added to game to govern night brightness.
- Extended disassemble ability to many more items,including: fridges, ovens, more chairs, washing machines, lockers, fitness equipment, metal barrels and some missing shelves.
- Some balanced player actions related to injuries, sleeping, window-breaking and bandages in a saucepan.
- Fixed whisper problems in the new chatbox, stair teleports, rain rather than snow in Winter is Coming, community translation font issues, plumbed sinks not working in MP and various other issues.
40 MP NETWORK STUFF
While the rest of the team move into the animations build and version 41, were leaving optimization specialist Bitbaboon Steve investigating what easy-win MP networking improvements we could potentially still patch into 40. The first of his discoveries, the removal large number of empty and unnecessary data packets being sent over the server, has been released in 40.40 and should be a mild salve for current lag issues but his investigations also came up with an idea we thought itd be wise to test out with a forthcoming IWBUMS beta and Community Megatest. Essentially, Steve has been working on some server configurable optimizations for zombies in multiplayer. Since vehicles, performance in multiplayer servers has seen added strain (particularly in handling zombie hordes) and were hoping this might improve matters. In essence, were about to release a test version in which there are several configurable options to allow server owners to fine-tune how much zombie data is sent to their players. There will now be two player client zombie awareness circles: the first a smaller radius that defines at what tile-range zombie positions are sent to clients with a high precision in every frame, and then a second larger radius in which the zombie location information can be sent to clients less frequently. Server owners will also be able to play with how much time there is between the low frequency updates. On low population co-op servers these values can be set pretty liberally, so the players are getting all zombies in the visible area smoothly. But on high population servers that experience lag issues, server operators can sacrifice the smoothness of zombie movement in the distance (or even cap zombie visibility completely over a certain distance) in order to VASTLY reduce the amount of internet traffic they produce when lots of players are involved. We think this will sharply decrease the amount of work the server needs to do and should lead to a much better player experience with a little bit of visual compromise toward the edge of the screen. Distant zombies might pause a bit or appear to teleport slightly between updates, but these movements are also something wed hope to blend better (and make far less noticeable) with the added functionalities of the animations build. Server operators can decide on their own level of compromise too. This work is pretty much done, and as such we will add it into the IWBUMS beta as soon as its clear theres nothing from 40.40 that needs hot-fixing. Please keep your eyes on the forum if you want to participate in a special Yuletide Megatest.
41 ANIMS
This week in TEA-land Grant has improved things dev/modder-side with live texture reload, through upgrading the Filewatcher mechanism. It now watches the media folder instead of polling individual files, and is much more efficient. Upon a texture filechange, the game now reloads it live and in-place. This should make iteration times on textures much easier and faster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXtz_Owm_V8 Zac, meanwhile, has fixed up AnimZed for Animator Martin to the extent that he can now get a lot more variation on different individual outfits. Take these cops for example:
Martin has also been creating a better range of skin tones for player characters, to allow for better customisation should people desire it.
OTHER STUFF
- Stas has just updated theGamepad Test beta with a lot of fixes, for our lovely select bunch of gamepad testers. If you fancy helping out with this part of PZ work, and earn yourself a free code,then enquire within.
- RJ has been tinkering with in-game loot, and has occasionally been popping into the PZ Discord to look for willing testers. The overall plan is to have more information in the game code in terms of whats a desirable item, and whats junk so we can then fill containers with a lot more realistic junk items even on higher difficulty levels. Hes also experimenting with having more specific containers in homes for more specific items (all the cutlery in one drawer, male clothes in one wardrobe, female in another etc) but the jury is currently out on whether it actually detracts from the looting gameplay.
- ChrisWs work on in-building Sims-style cutaways and the abolition of the dithered circle view stencil continues. As seen here both with, and without.
Todays warehouse hordefrom Frank. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info.The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZWikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterright here!OurDiscordis open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-12-13 16:55:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Nightzedding
Weve currently got the final Build 40 patch in a public IWBUMS beta, and since last week have released40.37and40.38into it. This includes Turbos new night shaders and more colourful/useful interior lights, flashlights and headlights as we felt that Build 40 had moved away from what we wanted in this respect. You can see the video of this from a previous Thursdoidhere. So far IWBUMS testers have reacted really positively the new nights, which is heartening to see. Weve had quite a few comments like Night-time looks like the old PZ nights and flashlights finally have a function, this is amazing! and similar, which is exactly what we were hoping for. IWBUMS beta 40.39 was due for release today ready for the public patch, but Stas is still hitting a chatbox whisper bug with a code hammer. It will also add in, upon arrival, a fix for players getting wet in some player constructions and add back in the system we have that governs on how dark nights are depending on how bright the moon is. Turbo has also added the dither circle stencil to the weathermask system (the ring of visibility around the player) when it comes to being inside buildings, which really improves the look of it all. Heres a video of itwithout, and heres a video of itwith.
Work continues with the AnimZed tool, clothing, layering, spawned zed outfits and similar. Theres still loads of stuff to do under the hood for 41, but were now in a position to hopefully provide more visual updates in blogs each week. This first video touches on what we discussed last week the ability to layer clothing in whatever order we/you please for added player/zombie variety. This allows for full length clothing items like dresses, different sorts of shoes, the ability to wear an apron under a jacket, different underwear etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mfKRC1c258 This week Zac has also added a zombie spawn test function that creates zeds wearing different outfits from our assigned collection or all dress the same. This is so we have a convenient way of testing all the different randomized and non-randomized clothing items at once. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD-2fUw69Mg Finally for this section, here are some of the dev-defined Career Zed outfits that the systems easily conjuring up for Martin.
Yuri this week has continued working on the code for calculating the direction of water movement that we discussed last week meaning that the game now knows where water should be still and where it should flow. Hes also fixed some model issues he was having with the anims build, and improved the way banks look. As weve said before, it might look too realistic in some aspects of it but the different quality options give us room to play here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRl2Z1wlC1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZLwe8OHAwU
Chris W is back with us and back in the code, picking up where he left off with improving the way that building interiors are displayed to the extent that one day our aforementioned friend the dithered visibility circle stencil will no longer be a requirement. Im replacing the old method of stencilling out walls that obscure the interiors he explains. The new method will cut the walls down to ankle height, so you can still see where they should be. The system uses shaders to combine multiple texture samplers, while the old method used multiple passes. When its finished, itll include curved transitions between the full walls and the cutaway walls. You can see my first work on this in the screen below, but theres still a lot to change and fix.
[ 2018-12-06 22:05:47 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, Thursday greetings.
40 PATCHING
Weve currently got the final Build 40 patch in a public IWBUMS beta, and since last week have released40.37and40.38into it. This includes Turbos new night shaders and more colourful/useful interior lights, flashlights and headlights as we felt that Build 40 had moved away from what we wanted in this respect. You can see the video of this from a previous Thursdoidhere. So far IWBUMS testers have reacted really positively the new nights, which is heartening to see. Weve had quite a few comments like Night-time looks like the old PZ nights and flashlights finally have a function, this is amazing! and similar, which is exactly what we were hoping for. IWBUMS beta 40.39 was due for release today ready for the public patch, but Stas is still hitting a chatbox whisper bug with a code hammer. It will also add in, upon arrival, a fix for players getting wet in some player constructions and add back in the system we have that governs on how dark nights are depending on how bright the moon is. Turbo has also added the dither circle stencil to the weathermask system (the ring of visibility around the player) when it comes to being inside buildings, which really improves the look of it all. Heres a video of itwithout, and heres a video of itwith.
41 ANIMS AND MODELS
Work continues with the AnimZed tool, clothing, layering, spawned zed outfits and similar. Theres still loads of stuff to do under the hood for 41, but were now in a position to hopefully provide more visual updates in blogs each week. This first video touches on what we discussed last week the ability to layer clothing in whatever order we/you please for added player/zombie variety. This allows for full length clothing items like dresses, different sorts of shoes, the ability to wear an apron under a jacket, different underwear etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mfKRC1c258 This week Zac has also added a zombie spawn test function that creates zeds wearing different outfits from our assigned collection or all dress the same. This is so we have a convenient way of testing all the different randomized and non-randomized clothing items at once. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD-2fUw69Mg Finally for this section, here are some of the dev-defined Career Zed outfits that the systems easily conjuring up for Martin.
WATERZED
Yuri this week has continued working on the code for calculating the direction of water movement that we discussed last week meaning that the game now knows where water should be still and where it should flow. Hes also fixed some model issues he was having with the anims build, and improved the way banks look. As weve said before, it might look too realistic in some aspects of it but the different quality options give us room to play here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRl2Z1wlC1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZLwe8OHAwU
SIMS-STYLE CUTAWAYS
Chris W is back with us and back in the code, picking up where he left off with improving the way that building interiors are displayed to the extent that one day our aforementioned friend the dithered visibility circle stencil will no longer be a requirement. Im replacing the old method of stencilling out walls that obscure the interiors he explains. The new method will cut the walls down to ankle height, so you can still see where they should be. The system uses shaders to combine multiple texture samplers, while the old method used multiple passes. When its finished, itll include curved transitions between the full walls and the cutaway walls. You can see my first work on this in the screen below, but theres still a lot to change and fix.
OTHER STUFF
- Stas continues his work on the ControllerTest Build, with a fixes version released to testerstoday. If you would like to join in the test beta and earn yourself a free PZ code,enquire within.
- Bitbaboon Steve is back with us and investigating ways to optimize MP.
- RJ is looking into ways to allow us better control over our loot spawn system and difficulty levels, given the many new items that future builds will bring.
- Mash continues with her work/marathon in the creation of our take on Louisville, and is currently creating the crumbier/seedier end of town.
[ 2018-12-06 22:05:47 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Darkness
Weve just patched Build 40, which is now up to version 40.36. Primary improvements youll notice are:
One of the biggest problems with Build 40 on release was that the new time of day, and time of year, shaders didnt play very nicely with the lighting system. Flashlights, internal lighting and vehicle headlights all suddenly look very washed out. Players who venture out in the dark werent having as much fun as usual. As such, Turbo has been working on an improvement that we want to get into the current public version before he moves fully into Build 41. Vids of this can be seen below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m64s12l00yY We hope you agree that it looks far, far better and more than a little scarier to boot. In the above videos the ambient values have been changed along with the colours during dark periods (night/storms) Turbo explains. This fixes the headlights, flashlights etc and makes darkness look better in general. Also seen below is some improved and indoor lighting during dark times. In the initial Build 40 release my shader overlay coloring messed it all up so now the shader coloring is disabled when youre indoors. This did come with the problem that when youre looking outside you wouldnt see darkness or weather effects, however, so Im now using the mask cut-out I created for rain to overlay an external colored texture too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27jT7cTmbV0 Before we patch I will probably adjust storms a bit too though, as currently they lose a bit too much of their storm tint. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP_WnlsiM9I
Were transitioning the PZ coders over to the work that TEA have done on animations for Build 41, but in the mean-time guys like Zac and Grant are continuing to improve tools and, in the case of Grant, do some optimization of the anims codebase. Im doing a lot of work on the new clothing tech at the moment explains Zac. Using AnimZed wearable bags like backpacks are now visible on the character, and characters can equip custom clothing meshes on top of the base rig. This allows outfits such as baggy jeans, coats, dresses, hoodies, jump-suits, and so on and parts of the base mesh can be now be masked out to prevent clipping and/or overdraw. When this gets to the modders then itd be fairly simple to even do something like replace a characters hand with a pirates hook or something. Its all customized for each clothing item, using the paper-doll UI inside the new ClothingItem Editor. Theres also random tints for more variety in the clothing too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F1Yqi9dTOA (please note: on the spot turning animations are not in the build yet but will be before release!)
Regular Thursdoiders will know that Yuri is currently working on the improved appearance of water for Build 41. Below youll find what it looks like currently, but heres a note on what to look out for:
Were currently running a beta for the work that Stas has recently been doing on gamepad controller improvements, and folk have been contributing some absolutelybrilliantfeedback. If you enjoy playing PZ with a pad want to join in, and earn yourself aFREE PZ CODE, then simply visit this thread, install the controllers beta, play for a few hours and answer the ten questions weve provided. This morningwe released a new versionof the Controllers build using your feedback, and Stas has quashed many of the bugs that were irking people. So now is a great time to join in. Please note that currently only PC players can run the build, and also that the joypad back-end system, configuration and bindings have been completely rewritten from the ground up. In the process some aspects of the controls and default bindings have been changed in the rewriting process if you have any issues with the default bindings and behaviours of the controls wed like to hear about it.
A quick shout out for Xeonyx, the creator of the wonderful map mod New Denver which has recently been renamed as Slocan Lake. Jamie is now making Challenge maps for the main game, the first of which will likely appear in Build 41 at this point, but wanted to bring his most famous mod creation up to date. The new version of Slocan Lake now has vehicle spawns and lootable maps, and no longer covers up areas of the vanilla zomboid map. You can find ithere.
With the additions of the towns of Silverton and Rosebery, explains Xeonyx, I felt it necessary to change the name of the map mod to Slocan Lake BC to better reflect the region the map takes place in, and not just the first town that was completed. Players can now choose to start in one of the three towns as opposed to just New Denver, and with vehicles being added it makes for easier travel between places. Ive also added forage zones to let players to gather supplies, even when theyre kilometers deep in the bush. Traveling players will find the map no longer covers parts of the vanilla map (Farmlands, Rosewood Prison etc) and has been pushed South. So if you find a road going South off the highwayhere, this will take you to New Denver. Ive also added lootable maps to the mod, so you have maps of Silverton, New Denver, Rosebery, Full Region Map and Golf Course Cards out there to find. I also added in the real world street names on the town maps for players wanting to better navigate, and clearly to underline how the map mod is a 1:1 scale recreation of the real life region where I live.
This weeks pile-upfrom Maris. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info.The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterright here!Our Discordis open for chat and hijinks too. Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving to all our American survivors!
[ 2018-11-22 20:38:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey everyone, lots to get through today soooo
PUBLIC BUILD 40 PATCHED
Weve just patched Build 40, which is now up to version 40.36. Primary improvements youll notice are:
- Local text chat now audible/legible from a distance, and no longer obscured.
- Weather period frequency throughout the whole year increased, and more heavy weather.
- Car alarms now attract zeds again.
- Chat now logged on server (format will be improved later)
- Less getting wet in inappropriate places
NEXT 40 PATCH: BETTER NIGHTS
One of the biggest problems with Build 40 on release was that the new time of day, and time of year, shaders didnt play very nicely with the lighting system. Flashlights, internal lighting and vehicle headlights all suddenly look very washed out. Players who venture out in the dark werent having as much fun as usual. As such, Turbo has been working on an improvement that we want to get into the current public version before he moves fully into Build 41. Vids of this can be seen below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m64s12l00yY We hope you agree that it looks far, far better and more than a little scarier to boot. In the above videos the ambient values have been changed along with the colours during dark periods (night/storms) Turbo explains. This fixes the headlights, flashlights etc and makes darkness look better in general. Also seen below is some improved and indoor lighting during dark times. In the initial Build 40 release my shader overlay coloring messed it all up so now the shader coloring is disabled when youre indoors. This did come with the problem that when youre looking outside you wouldnt see darkness or weather effects, however, so Im now using the mask cut-out I created for rain to overlay an external colored texture too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27jT7cTmbV0 Before we patch I will probably adjust storms a bit too though, as currently they lose a bit too much of their storm tint. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP_WnlsiM9I
BUILD 41
Were transitioning the PZ coders over to the work that TEA have done on animations for Build 41, but in the mean-time guys like Zac and Grant are continuing to improve tools and, in the case of Grant, do some optimization of the anims codebase. Im doing a lot of work on the new clothing tech at the moment explains Zac. Using AnimZed wearable bags like backpacks are now visible on the character, and characters can equip custom clothing meshes on top of the base rig. This allows outfits such as baggy jeans, coats, dresses, hoodies, jump-suits, and so on and parts of the base mesh can be now be masked out to prevent clipping and/or overdraw. When this gets to the modders then itd be fairly simple to even do something like replace a characters hand with a pirates hook or something. Its all customized for each clothing item, using the paper-doll UI inside the new ClothingItem Editor. Theres also random tints for more variety in the clothing too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F1Yqi9dTOA (please note: on the spot turning animations are not in the build yet but will be before release!)
WATER STUFF
Regular Thursdoiders will know that Yuri is currently working on the improved appearance of water for Build 41. Below youll find what it looks like currently, but heres a note on what to look out for:
- A ripple effect has been added to the water, that will let players to see the direction and speed of the wind added to the game in Build 40 on the waters surface.
- The water shader now accepts data for flow direction and speed for each tile in the map, so rivers are now more realistic. In the video you can see how the water flows more slowly near the bank, and also how the flow of water smoothly changes its direction along the river.
- Three water visual quality options have been added. There is now a high and low quality option for both dynamic water and static water. Low quality dynamic water puts a very small load on the GPU, so it should be okay on most PCs.
PUBLIC CONTROLLER BUILD TEST
Were currently running a beta for the work that Stas has recently been doing on gamepad controller improvements, and folk have been contributing some absolutelybrilliantfeedback. If you enjoy playing PZ with a pad want to join in, and earn yourself aFREE PZ CODE, then simply visit this thread, install the controllers beta, play for a few hours and answer the ten questions weve provided. This morningwe released a new versionof the Controllers build using your feedback, and Stas has quashed many of the bugs that were irking people. So now is a great time to join in. Please note that currently only PC players can run the build, and also that the joypad back-end system, configuration and bindings have been completely rewritten from the ground up. In the process some aspects of the controls and default bindings have been changed in the rewriting process if you have any issues with the default bindings and behaviours of the controls wed like to hear about it.
NEW DENVER UPDATED NOW SLOCAN LAKE
A quick shout out for Xeonyx, the creator of the wonderful map mod New Denver which has recently been renamed as Slocan Lake. Jamie is now making Challenge maps for the main game, the first of which will likely appear in Build 41 at this point, but wanted to bring his most famous mod creation up to date. The new version of Slocan Lake now has vehicle spawns and lootable maps, and no longer covers up areas of the vanilla zomboid map. You can find ithere.
With the additions of the towns of Silverton and Rosebery, explains Xeonyx, I felt it necessary to change the name of the map mod to Slocan Lake BC to better reflect the region the map takes place in, and not just the first town that was completed. Players can now choose to start in one of the three towns as opposed to just New Denver, and with vehicles being added it makes for easier travel between places. Ive also added forage zones to let players to gather supplies, even when theyre kilometers deep in the bush. Traveling players will find the map no longer covers parts of the vanilla map (Farmlands, Rosewood Prison etc) and has been pushed South. So if you find a road going South off the highwayhere, this will take you to New Denver. Ive also added lootable maps to the mod, so you have maps of Silverton, New Denver, Rosebery, Full Region Map and Golf Course Cards out there to find. I also added in the real world street names on the town maps for players wanting to better navigate, and clearly to underline how the map mod is a 1:1 scale recreation of the real life region where I live.
This weeks pile-upfrom Maris. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info.The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterright here!Our Discordis open for chat and hijinks too. Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving to all our American survivors!
[ 2018-11-22 20:38:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
Crepe Expectations
[ 2018-11-09 09:50:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
We released Build 40last Tuesday, and gave it a first hotfixon Thursday. We currently havethe next patch in a public IWBUMS beta channel and if you dont mind then wed love you to jump over there and see how it plays. Primary fixes/changes include:
- More frequent changes in weather systems as the weeks tick by, and a little more extreme weather. We were concerned that people werent seeing enough of the new weather events, particularly rain, and so things should be more variable with this patch. We would still love to hear feedback on the current builds weather too, and if youd like to let us know then the relevant thread can be foundhere.
- Some restored/improved chat functionality, and admin commands.
- Sandbox options for snow on the ground, and rain/fog fx intensity.
- Fixes to player wetness: you wont get soaked inside tents anymore, and likewise driving with a smashed windshield will get you wet.
- Fixes with crate-stacking, car horn/alarm radius, MP door and tree shake, construction issues, vehicle reflections and various other stuff.
[ 2018-11-09 09:50:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 40 Released!
[ 2018-10-30 14:31:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
To both of you out there who arent playing Red Dead Redemption 2 right now, we have a treat! Build 40 has been officially released!
Build 40 contains a simulated weather and climate system recreating true-to-life weather patterns through 365 days of the year following a virtual warm and cold front system.
Once this version is out and fully patched, then the team will moving into the animation codebase currently being prepped by our friends at T.E.A. for Build 41.
As far as Build 40 goes, the following video gives you a brief taster of what to expect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UmCQZNf5hU
New stuff that can be seen in the above video includes:
- Storms that pass over the Zomboid map.
- Different levels of fog and mist, that will often clear during the day.
- Simulated wind speeds that can be seen in the moving foliage around you, and in how precipitation falls. Trees sway, and move when crashed into or hordes pass through them.
- New shaders and post-processing effects to give a better feeling of different times of day, and for different seasons and times of year.
- Improved rain effects, with more realistic ground impact.
- Improved snow and snow effects.
- Improved player character temperature system, moodles and inventory clothing types to help you fight against the more extreme temperatures. (Stuff the game now tracks seen here][/*)
- New Chatbox. Primary features include separate chat streams (safehouse, local, global, etc), customizable chat and more intuitive usage and commands. Its hopefully a lot more convenient now.
- Reflective windows on vehicles and skybox generation. This takes into account: the time of day, the Global illumination color, fog, cloudiness, precipitation intensity, wind direction, wind speed and the temperature of the ambient air / cloud level.
- Added shake sprite effects for hits on doors, chops on trees and zeds/players walking through vegetation.
- System to convert objects placed by mappers so they can be used as functional game objects. This covers items like barricades, campfires, rain barrels, traps, composters, crops etc.
- MP Admin Items list UI that can be used to quickly search through, and spawn, items.
- New MP host Sandbox options that can be enabled, where possible, in-game without a restart.
- New C++ version of ZombiePopulationManager. This system is what governs the placement and movement of zombies when theyre not directly on your screen, and this updated version should be an optimization for SP and MP hopefully helping out lower spec machines and busy servers.
- New weather-based challenges: A Storm is Coming, and The Descending Fog. Improved Winter is Coming challenge.
- Also: Car battery charger now available. Driving drunk is no longer recommended. MP players can now be damaged by cars. Clearer weight gain and loss. Revamped PZ sound system. Loads of optimizations, MP and Admin improvements, map fixes, improved UI readability, a fair bit of balance and 300+ general fixes.
[ 2018-10-30 14:31:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
Sway of Things
Build 40 is for all intents of purposes done now, with one addition that might need a few fixes that well explain the reasoning behind below. On Tuesday we releasedVersion 40.26to the IWBUMS public beta. As we forecastlast week, this contained:
Were pretty happy with the fog, mist, storms, improved snow and other general additions of Build 40 but something we werent 100% satisfied with was getting an indication of wind speed and direction across to the player. There just werent any indicators on-screen, and we werent making the most of a lot of the work on the simulated climate and weather systems. It was something of a blemish on an otherwise really cool feature. And so Turbo scurried off to his experimentation chamber and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO-RkLWUF_Q This is now playable on the IWBUMS beta, but will need some balance and feedback from testers as to how strong the effect should be at different wind speeds. We also, clearly, need to know if anyone notices any change in performance. Right now, trees sway slightly in low wind and in storms, especially, at night theyre a bunch more atmospheric. (Well also be adding in better wind, and other, SFX in Build 40 patches.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq3WR8bq2hY Through building this system into the game, Turbo has also unlocked some helpful visual niceties that the game has needed for a long time. They will also be of huge benefit to our players who are hard of hearing. In this build, this includes:
Work continues with the TEAs preparation for the entire team moving onto animations once 40 is final and patched, a lot of it under the bonnet kinda stuff. A big improvement to the animation system and tools is the ability to clone animation states and override aspects of them without needing to completely duplicate the state logic that drives it. An example of this would be for handling (quite literally) weapons while walking, strafing or attacking. We can now define the core states for handling walking, strafing, sneaking, attacking without a weapon equipped, and then creating other states using that as a template that say hold a one handed weapon, or a gun, and substitute animations while still retaining all the logic tying together and blending the animations with the gameplay. Functionality such as this will speed up Animator Martins job of implementing all these states into PZ, and cut down the replication of work from the coders once were all inside the system.
This weekssunday servicefrom KurtZ. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info.The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterright here!Our Discordis open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-10-18 21:22:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, heres whats happening.
BUILD 40
Build 40 is for all intents of purposes done now, with one addition that might need a few fixes that well explain the reasoning behind below. On Tuesday we releasedVersion 40.26to the IWBUMS public beta. As we forecastlast week, this contained:
- New, rare, inventory clothing types to better insulate players.
- Thunderclaps when players are banned on a server. (Optional)
- Better admin control over weather effects
- Fixed map bugs. Fixed missing vehicle skids sounds in MP. Fixed broken MP car locks. Fixed container bugs. Lots of other fixed bugs.
SHAKE IT
Were pretty happy with the fog, mist, storms, improved snow and other general additions of Build 40 but something we werent 100% satisfied with was getting an indication of wind speed and direction across to the player. There just werent any indicators on-screen, and we werent making the most of a lot of the work on the simulated climate and weather systems. It was something of a blemish on an otherwise really cool feature. And so Turbo scurried off to his experimentation chamber and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO-RkLWUF_Q This is now playable on the IWBUMS beta, but will need some balance and feedback from testers as to how strong the effect should be at different wind speeds. We also, clearly, need to know if anyone notices any change in performance. Right now, trees sway slightly in low wind and in storms, especially, at night theyre a bunch more atmospheric. (Well also be adding in better wind, and other, SFX in Build 40 patches.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq3WR8bq2hY Through building this system into the game, Turbo has also unlocked some helpful visual niceties that the game has needed for a long time. They will also be of huge benefit to our players who are hard of hearing. In this build, this includes:
- Doors shaking when zombies hit them
- Locked doors shaking when the player tries to open them
- Trees shaking slightly when the player is chopping them down.
- Trees rustling when the player, or zeds, walk through them
- Trees shaking after car collisions
BUILD 41
Work continues with the TEAs preparation for the entire team moving onto animations once 40 is final and patched, a lot of it under the bonnet kinda stuff. A big improvement to the animation system and tools is the ability to clone animation states and override aspects of them without needing to completely duplicate the state logic that drives it. An example of this would be for handling (quite literally) weapons while walking, strafing or attacking. We can now define the core states for handling walking, strafing, sneaking, attacking without a weapon equipped, and then creating other states using that as a template that say hold a one handed weapon, or a gun, and substitute animations while still retaining all the logic tying together and blending the animations with the gameplay. Functionality such as this will speed up Animator Martins job of implementing all these states into PZ, and cut down the replication of work from the coders once were all inside the system.
OTHER STUFF
- Wed like to welcome ChrisW back to our bank of coders, who will be picking up where he left off with theSims stylecutaways wed like to make internal building navigationa bit slicker.
- As mentioned last week RJ is now working with Xeonyx, creator of New Denver, to help debug his new Hollywood Studio map and come up with an Official PZ Challenge system for it for when its added to the main game. Heres another screenie from it.
This weekssunday servicefrom KurtZ. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kepthere so you dont have to plough through endless dev blogs for info.The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterright here!Our Discordis open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-10-18 21:22:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Zombie, it’s cold outside
We will be holding an IWBUMS Community Megatest tonight to see how many major irritations remain, and to gather info on the login issues that hampered the last Megatest – should the same problem arise. If you would like to join in then keep an eye on the TIS forums. Free PZ codes for participants will be available (usual conditions apply) but please note that this isn’t a stress test so the required player number on the server might be limited.
It’s been a busy week for TEA preparing for the code merge of the animation build into the mainline development branch as soon as build 40 goes final. They have completed the vast majority of the tasks required for the handoff, at which point they will continue to work on bits of extra technology to make the main animation build development go smoother, and end up with better results, while the rest of the team beavers away converting the main branch’s character states to use their new fancy state system. TEA have implemented all the character control and combat features that were present in the early animation build, but with the new elegant and fast to implement data driven state logic that will act as example for the rest of the team to use as a basis, as well as being a much more robust and bug free base than what existed before, so we’re hoping that while it certainly won’t be a quick task, with the entire team pushing toward it we’re hoping progress will be swift, and we can finally start showing more exciting videos on the Thursdoids with the confidence that they are finally around the corner. Animations represent a huge amount of work as well as a linchpin for the rest of the major features to be implemented into the game. Each build after and including animations (intermediary quick builds aside) on our roadmap to 1.0 and filling in those missing features everyone has been waiting for (yes, those). It’s going to be an exciting 2019! After the hand off, TEA will be looking at some extra tech, such as animation retargetting, which will not only mean a much easier time for modders to implement their own animations and models by allowing animations to be adapted to slightly differing skeletons, but will also save poor Martin many many hours of reexporting hundreds of animations whenever we decide to add a bone to the skeleton (looking at you, backpacks!). In addition, they are going to look into finally getting the proper rotation blending working nicely, which has been a thorn in our side since day 1, and would if nailed allow for better turning and much more immersive turning animations. Though obviously it’s key that we retain the nice responsive character movement, so we’ll need to experiment with how to allow for animated turning without the character feeling sluggish to control. This week’s snow scene from Taquitosito. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-10-04 21:34:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
As mentioned in recent weeks, we’re now on clean-up duties before the release of Build 40 – which will then be patched with whatever’s necessary, before the animation branch being worked on by the guys over at TEA is fully merged into the main dev codebase for work on Build 41.
Last week, on IWBUMS beta 40.21, we put in the reflective windows skybox to better show season/day/night (and in prep for a future build’s reflective water), and also included Turbo’s more natural-looking snow, which can also be seen in the featured image above.
In the mean-time we’ve had several other test builds backstage, and are now putting out beta version 40.25. The full changelist can be found here, but the headlines are below.
- Weather patterns are now more random, generally shorter, less intense in terms of screen darkness and have more periods of clear sky.
- Cloud patterns seen on the ground have been updated, and have new textures – night has been improved.
- Ground snow accumulation has been improved and updated, also working better when snow is turned on with admin/debug tools.
- Weather periods can now also be fully modded, including a designated ‘modded’ stage which can be freely modified.
- Insulation properties of different clothing now more clearly shown in the UI.
- Spawns have been added for McCoy Logging and Fossoil vehicles, which weren’t appearing – alongside improved car spawns at gas stations in general.
- Fixed: various chatbox and admin issues, a longstanding MP issue in which loot was respawning way too soon, the weird tile visual effect with some zombie corpses, crowds of zombies launching cars like bottle rockets (!) and players sometimes being trapped in their car (and zombies getting confused) by Yuri’s invisible anti-clip forcefield.
Megatest
We will be holding an IWBUMS Community Megatest tonight to see how many major irritations remain, and to gather info on the login issues that hampered the last Megatest – should the same problem arise. If you would like to join in then keep an eye on the TIS forums. Free PZ codes for participants will be available (usual conditions apply) but please note that this isn’t a stress test so the required player number on the server might be limited.
Anims
It’s been a busy week for TEA preparing for the code merge of the animation build into the mainline development branch as soon as build 40 goes final. They have completed the vast majority of the tasks required for the handoff, at which point they will continue to work on bits of extra technology to make the main animation build development go smoother, and end up with better results, while the rest of the team beavers away converting the main branch’s character states to use their new fancy state system. TEA have implemented all the character control and combat features that were present in the early animation build, but with the new elegant and fast to implement data driven state logic that will act as example for the rest of the team to use as a basis, as well as being a much more robust and bug free base than what existed before, so we’re hoping that while it certainly won’t be a quick task, with the entire team pushing toward it we’re hoping progress will be swift, and we can finally start showing more exciting videos on the Thursdoids with the confidence that they are finally around the corner. Animations represent a huge amount of work as well as a linchpin for the rest of the major features to be implemented into the game. Each build after and including animations (intermediary quick builds aside) on our roadmap to 1.0 and filling in those missing features everyone has been waiting for (yes, those). It’s going to be an exciting 2019! After the hand off, TEA will be looking at some extra tech, such as animation retargetting, which will not only mean a much easier time for modders to implement their own animations and models by allowing animations to be adapted to slightly differing skeletons, but will also save poor Martin many many hours of reexporting hundreds of animations whenever we decide to add a bone to the skeleton (looking at you, backpacks!). In addition, they are going to look into finally getting the proper rotation blending working nicely, which has been a thorn in our side since day 1, and would if nailed allow for better turning and much more immersive turning animations. Though obviously it’s key that we retain the nice responsive character movement, so we’ll need to experiment with how to allow for animated turning without the character feeling sluggish to control. This week’s snow scene from Taquitosito. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-10-04 21:34:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
Men with Ven
With the final touches being made to build 40, we’re now at the point of making a decision on what to do for the next build. The issue with huge features like our new animation and clothing system, and everything that comes with it, living on another code branch is you tend to have to play catch-up a lot. The developers on the base game add or fix things on the non-animation branch, those changes need merging in – and due to the vast differences in the underlying code due to the animations this tends to add in extra work for the four guys over at TEA working on the new systems. There comes a point you’ve just got to go all in and commit, or you’ll be playing catch-up forever. So (even though we have a few non-anim things ready to roll for Build 41 – like improved MP admin and gamepad functionality) as soon as build 40 is live and patched, we will be making the leap and merging in both the work we originally did, and all the extra animation tech that’s been worked on by TEA into the main development branch This will mean that every developer at Indie Stone, including the chaps at TEA and at General Arcade, will all be working directly on the same version, and the focus of the entire team will be shifted onto making sure the entire game functions with the new animation system. There is still a lot to do, there’s a lot of game there and things like cars and multiplayer will need some work to get functional, but this move will commit us and the next non-hotfix and non-patch build after 40 goes live will be the animations build. It also means that blog updates about it all (once the dust has settled from the big switch-over) will hopefully become a bit clearer and less dry and technical. As well as, say, this week’s news that ‘Zac has made improvements to the BlendField renderer to help visualise how the anims blend together’ we can increasingly show how the PZ gameplay we all know and love/hate is coming together with the new visuals etc. Which will hopefully prove less frustrating. Before this happens, though, TEA need to bed down a few things and prepare some documentation –and we need to get Build 40 out of the door and patched. So….
We just released version 40.17 to the IWBUMS beta, patchnotes for which are available here. We’re pretty much done with Build 40 at this point, but do need to smuggle in some more temperature balance and seasonal SFX. We’re going to do a new internal test build for 40.18 tomorrow with some required fixes for admin commands and the chatbox, with the intention of then releasing it to IWBUMS early next week so we can have one final Community Megatest to shake out any remaining cobwebs. There will, as always, be free PZ codes for people who help out – and due to the additions to the game mentioned below it should be a lot of fun. Please keep an eye on the forums for details.
[ 2018-09-20 18:08:33 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, here’s a quick run-down on where we’re at with Build 40 and beyond.
BUILD 41+
With the final touches being made to build 40, we’re now at the point of making a decision on what to do for the next build. The issue with huge features like our new animation and clothing system, and everything that comes with it, living on another code branch is you tend to have to play catch-up a lot. The developers on the base game add or fix things on the non-animation branch, those changes need merging in – and due to the vast differences in the underlying code due to the animations this tends to add in extra work for the four guys over at TEA working on the new systems. There comes a point you’ve just got to go all in and commit, or you’ll be playing catch-up forever. So (even though we have a few non-anim things ready to roll for Build 41 – like improved MP admin and gamepad functionality) as soon as build 40 is live and patched, we will be making the leap and merging in both the work we originally did, and all the extra animation tech that’s been worked on by TEA into the main development branch This will mean that every developer at Indie Stone, including the chaps at TEA and at General Arcade, will all be working directly on the same version, and the focus of the entire team will be shifted onto making sure the entire game functions with the new animation system. There is still a lot to do, there’s a lot of game there and things like cars and multiplayer will need some work to get functional, but this move will commit us and the next non-hotfix and non-patch build after 40 goes live will be the animations build. It also means that blog updates about it all (once the dust has settled from the big switch-over) will hopefully become a bit clearer and less dry and technical. As well as, say, this week’s news that ‘Zac has made improvements to the BlendField renderer to help visualise how the anims blend together’ we can increasingly show how the PZ gameplay we all know and love/hate is coming together with the new visuals etc. Which will hopefully prove less frustrating. Before this happens, though, TEA need to bed down a few things and prepare some documentation –and we need to get Build 40 out of the door and patched. So….
PUBLIC IWBUMS BETA 40.17 RELEASED
We just released version 40.17 to the IWBUMS beta, patchnotes for which are available here. We’re pretty much done with Build 40 at this point, but do need to smuggle in some more temperature balance and seasonal SFX. We’re going to do a new internal test build for 40.18 tomorrow with some required fixes for admin commands and the chatbox, with the intention of then releasing it to IWBUMS early next week so we can have one final Community Megatest to shake out any remaining cobwebs. There will, as always, be free PZ codes for people who help out – and due to the additions to the game mentioned below it should be a lot of fun. Please keep an eye on the forums for details.
- Turbo has added climate and weather MP admin panels that should make for some really interesting roleplay and gameplay opportunities on PZ servers. Storms, snow and fog can be triggered at will to cover the entirety of the map – as well as overall climate values can be now be ticked to override what the game has conjured itself depending on what time of year it is. Server admins can also play around with how night appears, whether the game appears in monochrome etc We’re hoping that it’ll be a lot of fun.
- Rain and snow now look like they hit the ground, which makes for a huge visual improvement. Rain then disappears, and snow fades out. Likewise, Turbo has also fixed how precipitation wasn’t clearly visible when zoomed in.
- There’s also a bunch of fixes including: issues with various in-game tiles, gun sounds not being heard far enough away in multiplayer, two bugs that spawned a random zombie in a barricaded bathroom and the ability to learning from the TV and radio when asleep. Full list here!
[ 2018-09-20 18:08:33 CET ] [ Original post ]
Beeverdoid
We’ve just released IWBUMS beta 40.14, which is another release that’s primarily fix and polish – our current aim for the devs working on this build being to make lots of quality of life corrections and adjustments while Turbo finishes his weather/climate work and the version can get a full public release. You can see the patch notes here. To this end this version fixes missing raindrops, absent MP storms and other climate errors – while EP has also figured out the annoying sound volume and delayed sound issues, which should now be eradicated. The telepathic ‘terminator’ zeds trailing after players in MP that several of our IWBUMS testers have reported have also been stripped of their powers. EP has also made improvements to alleviate longstanding woes with zombies appearing in your vision cone all-too-late in large buildings like the Mall, and Yuri has made fuel caps more accessible through his vehicle anti-clipping force-field. EP has also been through all the various vehicle features and made them operate as you’d expect when the car battery is dead or uninstalled, also having them still operational until the car is powered down when the battery is removed and the engine is going. Another minor, but irritating and ancient, bug he’s figured out is the frozen food that’s been spawning in freezers long after the final power outage. Please be aware that SpiffoSpace remains open for IWBUMS testing. This server, based in France, has no password and can be found by anyone running the beta (access details here). Once we’ve added in some admin power over weather (admin-triggered storm/snow/fog etc) we will be coordinating a Community Megatest on here.
Due for internal testing over the weekend and early next week, Turbo has redone the way the IWBUMS beta currently has changes in temperature, and resistance to hot and cold, impact on the player. Although it works okay-ish currently, the edges were too rough – and deaths were often broken/cheap. His revamped system focuses on how resistance to the elements is calculated – and the way it takes hunger, thirst, worn clothing, wetness and exercise all into account should be a marked improvement. The temperature ‘safe zone’ range will be wider too, and the system takes ‘real time’ minutes into account rather than ‘game time’ – so fast forward peril is decreased, alongside being dead by dawn next to the embers of a camp fire. The next version will also improve weather visuals to better distinguish rain from snow, and add in temperature conversions – so our Kentucky setting gets its proper and correct Fahrenheit readings, rather than horrid old European centigrade.
While the four guys over at T.E.A. continue to work on our new animations system, we thought it might be worthwhile mentioning the fifth horseman of that build: our music composer Zach Beever. Since animations are such a fundamental evolution of the game, we want a whole bunch of new music to bring players along emotionally with the new visuals. Zach’s been working with us for months now, preparing a whole host of new tracks, many including familiar themes and motifs from old favourites. Rather than drip them in one by one, and to give him time to work on them as a collective whole, we felt their impact would be far greater if they all went in together. To this end, behind the scenes, Zach has now completed 19 new music tracks, with more to come – and a part of one of the latest can be heard below. https://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/zacpreview.mp3?_=1 For thoughts on his direction and inspiration for the music, we thought we’d ask the man himself. “When I began work on the soundtrack some years ago, part of the overall vision was to incorporate instruments that were totally removed from the Kentucky setting. The thinking was to mirror the massive shift in the world—that whole zombie thing—with an equally big change in the (expected) music. What could have possibly been played by the banjo and fiddle, for example, went to the tar and duduk.” “Recently, though, the team brought up a player’s suggestion to reexamine this and tie in aspects of the local music. This took some thought and a good bit of experimentation, as I didn’t want to upset the identity we had created for Zomboid.” “The result is a new set of tracks that, I believe, expand on the old ones faithfully—the mood is still there, but now we’ve got American-style sounds mixing with the more middle-eastern sounding ones. When everything’s heard together, I hope the occasional appearance of these instruments (and their distinct playing styles) hints at the past world.”
Behind the scenes there’s currently a lot of conversation about revamps of existing systems (farming, last week’s thoughts on polishing the power outage etc) but something else we’re discussing are ‘survival-style’ skill and recipe-based enhancements to vehicles. To which end, we thought we’d float this image of our potential direction with this in front of the community – to gauge opinion and gather some feedback. Please note that this is NOT a final representation – it requires a full art pass, not to mention a lot of coding work that will likely come from General Arcade’s Yuri for a future build. It does, however, show how a modular model system could work – and we’d like your thoughts on it.
It’s currently the Annual Penisham Celebration on our forums. Feel free to join in, but be aware that Penisham will only be available for another five days. This week’s patriotism from GodImtrash . A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. And did you ever wonder how the Knox Event played out in the UK, well wonder no more…
[ 2018-09-06 19:39:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, Thursday greetings.
IWBUMS BETA 40.14 RELEASED
We’ve just released IWBUMS beta 40.14, which is another release that’s primarily fix and polish – our current aim for the devs working on this build being to make lots of quality of life corrections and adjustments while Turbo finishes his weather/climate work and the version can get a full public release. You can see the patch notes here. To this end this version fixes missing raindrops, absent MP storms and other climate errors – while EP has also figured out the annoying sound volume and delayed sound issues, which should now be eradicated. The telepathic ‘terminator’ zeds trailing after players in MP that several of our IWBUMS testers have reported have also been stripped of their powers. EP has also made improvements to alleviate longstanding woes with zombies appearing in your vision cone all-too-late in large buildings like the Mall, and Yuri has made fuel caps more accessible through his vehicle anti-clipping force-field. EP has also been through all the various vehicle features and made them operate as you’d expect when the car battery is dead or uninstalled, also having them still operational until the car is powered down when the battery is removed and the engine is going. Another minor, but irritating and ancient, bug he’s figured out is the frozen food that’s been spawning in freezers long after the final power outage. Please be aware that SpiffoSpace remains open for IWBUMS testing. This server, based in France, has no password and can be found by anyone running the beta (access details here). Once we’ve added in some admin power over weather (admin-triggered storm/snow/fog etc) we will be coordinating a Community Megatest on here.
IWBUMS NEXT
Due for internal testing over the weekend and early next week, Turbo has redone the way the IWBUMS beta currently has changes in temperature, and resistance to hot and cold, impact on the player. Although it works okay-ish currently, the edges were too rough – and deaths were often broken/cheap. His revamped system focuses on how resistance to the elements is calculated – and the way it takes hunger, thirst, worn clothing, wetness and exercise all into account should be a marked improvement. The temperature ‘safe zone’ range will be wider too, and the system takes ‘real time’ minutes into account rather than ‘game time’ – so fast forward peril is decreased, alongside being dead by dawn next to the embers of a camp fire. The next version will also improve weather visuals to better distinguish rain from snow, and add in temperature conversions – so our Kentucky setting gets its proper and correct Fahrenheit readings, rather than horrid old European centigrade.
MUSIC MAN ZACH
While the four guys over at T.E.A. continue to work on our new animations system, we thought it might be worthwhile mentioning the fifth horseman of that build: our music composer Zach Beever. Since animations are such a fundamental evolution of the game, we want a whole bunch of new music to bring players along emotionally with the new visuals. Zach’s been working with us for months now, preparing a whole host of new tracks, many including familiar themes and motifs from old favourites. Rather than drip them in one by one, and to give him time to work on them as a collective whole, we felt their impact would be far greater if they all went in together. To this end, behind the scenes, Zach has now completed 19 new music tracks, with more to come – and a part of one of the latest can be heard below. https://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/zacpreview.mp3?_=1 For thoughts on his direction and inspiration for the music, we thought we’d ask the man himself. “When I began work on the soundtrack some years ago, part of the overall vision was to incorporate instruments that were totally removed from the Kentucky setting. The thinking was to mirror the massive shift in the world—that whole zombie thing—with an equally big change in the (expected) music. What could have possibly been played by the banjo and fiddle, for example, went to the tar and duduk.” “Recently, though, the team brought up a player’s suggestion to reexamine this and tie in aspects of the local music. This took some thought and a good bit of experimentation, as I didn’t want to upset the identity we had created for Zomboid.” “The result is a new set of tracks that, I believe, expand on the old ones faithfully—the mood is still there, but now we’ve got American-style sounds mixing with the more middle-eastern sounding ones. When everything’s heard together, I hope the occasional appearance of these instruments (and their distinct playing styles) hints at the past world.”
VEHICLE ENHANCEMENTS
Behind the scenes there’s currently a lot of conversation about revamps of existing systems (farming, last week’s thoughts on polishing the power outage etc) but something else we’re discussing are ‘survival-style’ skill and recipe-based enhancements to vehicles. To which end, we thought we’d float this image of our potential direction with this in front of the community – to gauge opinion and gather some feedback. Please note that this is NOT a final representation – it requires a full art pass, not to mention a lot of coding work that will likely come from General Arcade’s Yuri for a future build. It does, however, show how a modular model system could work – and we’d like your thoughts on it.
PENISHAM FESTIVAL
It’s currently the Annual Penisham Celebration on our forums. Feel free to join in, but be aware that Penisham will only be available for another five days. This week’s patriotism from GodImtrash . A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. And did you ever wonder how the Knox Event played out in the UK, well wonder no more…
[ 2018-09-06 19:39:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 40 IWBUMS
(For full changelist, and to provide feedback, please visit this thread on the forums. There are many, many other fixes and balance improvements.)
[ 2018-08-23 15:57:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, we have just moved Build 40 into the wider IWBUMS public beta – which contains Turbo’s weather and climate system (proper seasons, new shaders, fog, mist, storms that move over the map etc), vehicle improvements and an awful lot of gameplay tweaks, balance and bug fixes.
A brief ‘highlights’ changelist can be found below, while the full changelist can be found here. Please leave feedback in the thread, and bug reports here. Details on how to join the public IWBUMS beta can be found here.
Some quick housekeeping notes on this build:
- There *might* be an annoyance with players still getting wet and feeling temperature effects in vehicles, though this will be patched pretty soon if so. Likewise, – the general impact of temperature on players will be balanced over the course of the IWBUMS beta.
- This version has various aspects of car integration converted into Lua so that modding full cars, not just changing skins, is now a lot more viable for modders. Yuri has written detailed guidelines which RingoD has posted up here, and we’ve also included a new script to help you convert textures into PZ’s required form.
- A lot of engine work and general vehicle improvements have carried on into this build, but still require substantial testing on servers – not to mention a lot of improvements and fixes we’ve been making to MP Admin in general. Feedback on MP, and especially people connecting to distant servers, would be much appreciated. We will be bringing our own public SpiffoSpace IWBUMS test servers online next week.
40.9 CHANGELIST HIGHLIGHTS
(For full changelist, and to provide feedback, please visit this thread on the forums. There are many, many other fixes and balance improvements.)
- Full weather and climate simulation system recreating true-to-life weather patterns through 365 days of the year. Morning fog, thunderstorms created by virtual weather fronts that move over the map, improved rainfall visuals, visible snowfall and improved rendering to better evoke the time of year, and the time of day. New SFX. New player character temperature system.
- New MP Chatbox. Primary features include separate chat streams (safehouse, local, global, etc), customizable chat and more intuitive usage and commands. It’s hopefully a lot more convenient now.
- New ‘A Storm is Coming’ and ‘The Mist Descends’ scenarios
- New system to convert objects placed by mappers so they can be used as functional game objects. This covers items like barricades, campfires, rain barrels, traps, composters, crops etc.
- Winter is Coming game mode now works with new climate system. Seasons still impact on this mode – ‘Summer’ highest temperature is 0 degrees centigrade, and winters may drop to -30. After 3 full days a powerful weather period is generated, that will always feature a blizzard.
- New MP Admin UI additions including an Items list viewer in the admin panel that can be used to quickly search through, and spawn, items. Also includes the functionality to change in-game settings on the server that don’t require a restart, and clear ways to change admin powers within the UI so hosts can remain admins and play along without advantages.
- Improved car handling. New driving traits. New car-battery charger item that’s placed on the ground and interacted with using a context menu. Drunk moodle now has an impact on driver steering input. Players can now be harmed when hit by a car.
- Car wrecks can now be dismantled with propane torch and a welding mask. Gathered metal material will depend on your metalwork skill.
- Many UI changes to handle different font sizes. Added context-menu font-size option. Re-exported the map to improve zombie density in some farmland and rural areas.
- Changed First Week and One Week Later and adjusted settings to make sure that new players aren’t given too easy a ride. Removed Initial Infection.
- Added Display option to disable the new roof-hiding feature for low-spec users. Updated menu screen with vertical rather than horizontal options – due to problems with taskbar in latest Windows Updates.
- Added chevrons on character screen next to the weight to indicate if weight is increasing or decreasing.
- New isoRegions system to detect an enclosed area – player-made or dev-created – to keep weather effects on the outside.
- New functionalities for the PZ sound system. Formerly modders couldn’t override sounds in PZ FMOD soundbanks, so when players find certain sounds are too loud or annoying (heartbeat, zombie alert, flies, level up noise etc) it was hard to raise/lower them independently. Details about all the game sounds now go into media/scripts/sounds.txt. A new in-game UI allows users change the volume of any sound they feel is too oppressive.
[ 2018-08-23 15:57:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Zombies in Bloom
[ 2018-08-16 22:24:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
We’ve just updated the public weather build beta to version 40.7, which will probably be the last one before we widen it out to the more heavily subscribed IWBUMS public beta channel. (Steam beta password is ‘weathertestbranch’ for those wanting to check it out.) Primary new features in this include:
- Turbo has hooked the Winter is Coming game mode to the new climate system. After three full days of preparation time a powerful weather period is generated, that will always feature a blizzard. The mode will still follow seasons, of a sort, with the mode’s ‘Summer’ having a high temperature of 0 degrees centigrade, and the ‘Winter’ dropping to -30. A time-lapse of the initial Blizzard in Winter is Coming can be seen below.
- Placeholder moodles have been added to show the ‘heating up’ and ‘cooling down’ of player temperature, but this will likely change to being shown on the player health screen. We don’t want this aspect of the game to become too distracting and micro-managey, and don’t feel that an over-population of the moodles is entirely the way to go. [In the meantime, however, they are quite useful for tracking impact of the WIP system. This build hopefully nerfs some of the more extreme impacts of temperature too.]
- RJ has coded a new MP Admin UI to help server owners quickly search through, and spawn, items. It looks a bit like this.
- Stas has continued to update his new chat system – and this version has a bunch of bugs fixed that have arisen in testing, alongside a much neater fade-in and fade-out for the input field.
- New car stuff: When dismantling a car wreck metal items are now spawned on the ground instead of player’s inventory. The player can also now sleep in a car that has its engine running, and Turbo has also played around with the visibility cone when driving through more intense weather effects.
- General Arcade’s Yuri has also exposed various elements of the vehicle code to modders, essentially rewriting stuff like LoadVehicleModel and vehicle spawn governance, in lua. This will aid modders who want to add in new/individual cars to operate alongside the existing ones of the vanilla game. He has also written a guide for this, which will go onto the forum in the coming week.
[ 2018-08-16 22:24:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
Thurs…weather…shaders….chat!
We’ve just updated the weather branch. The main addition is the first version of our overhauled multiplayer chat system developed by Stas at General Arcade. The new chat is a bit fancier and more functional and more in line of what you’d expect on an MMO or similar types of games. You can activate the window to chat by pressing T or Enter. Let us know how you get on with it and if there are any problems Various fixes include reintroducing the low lighting mode, and an option for disabling the new building hiding system, which will provide better performance on low end machines (more on this subject in a moment), removed the weird sound echoes, various Linux compatibility / java fixes, fixed multiplayer zombie attacking / defending issues, and many more. We’ll try to get you a complete change-list soon. Work continues apace with animations, nothing flashy to show or talk about, but many fixes have been made to the tool and Martin the animator now has access to regular builds to help integrating all the anims. Steve at BitBaboon nears completion of the new build system overhaul, which will vastly improve our internal organisation of builds, and should allow us quicker testing and releasing of builds. With this we’re making wider changes to the team organisation to help us deal with the bigger team size and the various irons we have in fires.
We’ve had a small number of people reporting that cars are invisible on their low end machines. This is due to the fact that the way the vehicles are rendered require shaders to overlay damage and other effects, so cards that are unable to use shaders, as with the 3D characters which use GPU skinning, will not be able to render the vehicles. We’ve fought for many years to keep our minimum specs where they are, wanting to keep our potato running Zomboiders in the game for as long as possible. However, as the years progress, the numbers dwindle as more people upgrade, and at this point we’re talking about an extreme minority of PCs, bottom end Intel laptops any of them close to or over a decade old, at least in terms of technology, and constituting less than 1% of all our customers – It’s gotten to the point where retaining compatibility with machines mostly over a decade old is starting to hamper development in several ways. 1) For example to add support for vehicles for this minority of machines, including testing and bug-fixing would take a substantial amount of development time, which at this stage could be spent working on the features, optimisations and improvements the vast majority of our customers would benefit from and that would take us toward the fabled 1.0. 2) There are a whole host of avenues for optimisation that we’ve for a long time written off because they would end up raising the minimum spec by requiring shaders to work and would be too fundamental to switch off. Since the game and simulation have become massively complex at this point, optimisation is becoming ever more important. Vehicles at one stage ran so badly on top end machines that we simply had to spend significant time doing extreme and very disruptive optimisation work, and the game still doesn’t run adequately in built up areas on machines that should on the face of it be able to handle it. However the available routes for optimisation are becoming extremely sparse–there’s only so much blood you can wring out of a stone and we’ve shaved practically every millisecond we can from the game’s frame time, so we really need new directions to be able to explore to keep the game running well particularly when features such as Louisville, the new animations (which will bring performance benefits and pressures, and it’s unclear what the net result will be) and of course the NPCs go into the game. The way the rendering system works with the lighting, shading and isometric perspective is hugely costly and it’s difficult to see how it can possibly be improved having no guaranteed access to literally any of the rendering advancements developed in the past 13 years. Having guaranteed shader support will open up many optimisation opportunities in the future, our rendering being far and away the biggest bottleneck, and there comes a point where it becomes unfair to the huge majority of our customer-base not to exploit these. While it’s frustrating the game not running well on an old laptop, it’s certainly much worse for it not to run well on a top of the range gaming PC and that’s something we have more responsibility to fix and avoid in future. So while we understand this decision will upset a few of you (though it’s a decision we hope you appreciate we did not take lightly, and resisted as long as humanly possible to give as many the opportunity to upgrade as possible), we hope that the few affected by this understand why we’ve come to this decision. In the meantime, build 38 will always be available via the Steam betas, and there are many affordable old laptops with GPUs that have the requisite shader support, so hopefully we’ll see you back in the new builds before long. This week’s tense disagreement from QwencGames. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-08-02 16:22:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
Welcome to this week’s Thursdoid! (Last week's Thursdoid can be found here) We’re a bit light on the team this week as a few of us (including, as you can probably guess, the developer in charge of Thursdoid punnage) are having a well deserved holiday after the exhausting and mega stressful vehicle push for so many months finally came to an end, and like buses several of those holidays coincidentally happened to come at once, but still a few things to report.
Weather Build Update
We’ve just updated the weather branch. The main addition is the first version of our overhauled multiplayer chat system developed by Stas at General Arcade. The new chat is a bit fancier and more functional and more in line of what you’d expect on an MMO or similar types of games. You can activate the window to chat by pressing T or Enter. Let us know how you get on with it and if there are any problems Various fixes include reintroducing the low lighting mode, and an option for disabling the new building hiding system, which will provide better performance on low end machines (more on this subject in a moment), removed the weird sound echoes, various Linux compatibility / java fixes, fixed multiplayer zombie attacking / defending issues, and many more. We’ll try to get you a complete change-list soon. Work continues apace with animations, nothing flashy to show or talk about, but many fixes have been made to the tool and Martin the animator now has access to regular builds to help integrating all the anims. Steve at BitBaboon nears completion of the new build system overhaul, which will vastly improve our internal organisation of builds, and should allow us quicker testing and releasing of builds. With this we’re making wider changes to the team organisation to help us deal with the bigger team size and the various irons we have in fires.
Shaders & Compatibility
We’ve had a small number of people reporting that cars are invisible on their low end machines. This is due to the fact that the way the vehicles are rendered require shaders to overlay damage and other effects, so cards that are unable to use shaders, as with the 3D characters which use GPU skinning, will not be able to render the vehicles. We’ve fought for many years to keep our minimum specs where they are, wanting to keep our potato running Zomboiders in the game for as long as possible. However, as the years progress, the numbers dwindle as more people upgrade, and at this point we’re talking about an extreme minority of PCs, bottom end Intel laptops any of them close to or over a decade old, at least in terms of technology, and constituting less than 1% of all our customers – It’s gotten to the point where retaining compatibility with machines mostly over a decade old is starting to hamper development in several ways. 1) For example to add support for vehicles for this minority of machines, including testing and bug-fixing would take a substantial amount of development time, which at this stage could be spent working on the features, optimisations and improvements the vast majority of our customers would benefit from and that would take us toward the fabled 1.0. 2) There are a whole host of avenues for optimisation that we’ve for a long time written off because they would end up raising the minimum spec by requiring shaders to work and would be too fundamental to switch off. Since the game and simulation have become massively complex at this point, optimisation is becoming ever more important. Vehicles at one stage ran so badly on top end machines that we simply had to spend significant time doing extreme and very disruptive optimisation work, and the game still doesn’t run adequately in built up areas on machines that should on the face of it be able to handle it. However the available routes for optimisation are becoming extremely sparse–there’s only so much blood you can wring out of a stone and we’ve shaved practically every millisecond we can from the game’s frame time, so we really need new directions to be able to explore to keep the game running well particularly when features such as Louisville, the new animations (which will bring performance benefits and pressures, and it’s unclear what the net result will be) and of course the NPCs go into the game. The way the rendering system works with the lighting, shading and isometric perspective is hugely costly and it’s difficult to see how it can possibly be improved having no guaranteed access to literally any of the rendering advancements developed in the past 13 years. Having guaranteed shader support will open up many optimisation opportunities in the future, our rendering being far and away the biggest bottleneck, and there comes a point where it becomes unfair to the huge majority of our customer-base not to exploit these. While it’s frustrating the game not running well on an old laptop, it’s certainly much worse for it not to run well on a top of the range gaming PC and that’s something we have more responsibility to fix and avoid in future. So while we understand this decision will upset a few of you (though it’s a decision we hope you appreciate we did not take lightly, and resisted as long as humanly possible to give as many the opportunity to upgrade as possible), we hope that the few affected by this understand why we’ve come to this decision. In the meantime, build 38 will always be available via the Steam betas, and there are many affordable old laptops with GPUs that have the requisite shader support, so hopefully we’ll see you back in the new builds before long. This week’s tense disagreement from QwencGames. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-08-02 16:22:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
Too Hot For TV
Recently we’ve had a sharp uptick of streamers playing our game, and have been paying close attention to Klean’s awesome Blacksite server (Long live Trader City) which has managed to amass 100 concurrent players on a couple of occasions–which while we were impressed it functioned at all, did start to fall down under the load. We’re hoping we can use our observations to improve the multiplayer syncing and server performance. One thing we’ve observed repeatedly in recent times is that it appears certain players seem to suffer worse with getting delayed or missing packets leading to much more extreme lag to other players. This doesn’t seem to be tied to ping, so we’re looking to investigate the lower level networking code to see if a problem could reside there that would cause some players to be starved of packets on busier servers – we’re currently looking to organize a large non-Steam multiplayer test with which to test if the Steam communication layer may be causing any additional interferance, after which we’ll hopefully be closer to nailing down these issues. We’ll post on the forums about such a test when it has been organized. We’re also noticing some oddities with sound pop up here and there, seeing people not hearing other player’s guns, and a few reports of inaccurate ranges for different sounds, so feedback on this would be much appreciated!
On the weather front, the test build in the weather branch has also had an update to the weather overhaul – the big focus of this build is to improve the game’s simulation of player body temperature, to more accurately model how a player will get hot or cold within the environment, with internal body temperature interacting with the character’s surrounding with various modifiers based on the character’s situation, dress and health. Extra elements are simulated such as sickness lowering resistance to cold, wind and rain reducing the player’s body temperature, as well as adding hyperthermia and hypothermia into the mix. We’re aware we may have to provide more ways for the player to handle extreme heat or cold, such as more varied clothing – some of this will clearly need to wait until the animation build, so we’ll decide in a future test build whether we need to disable or reduce the more extreme temperature effects until these features or added. If people are giving the new temperature system a try out, you can pull up some debug information to track the player’s body modifiers. This will hopefully show the depth of these systems!
Full details on the weather build can be found here, with instructions on how the new body temperature system works.
Yuri’s been improving the look of the vehicles, adding environment maps to make cars look much less matte and have the reflective shine one would expect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH_kxAocCO0 We’ll probably have a lot of fun tying the reflective values into how clean a car is, and providing another weirdly in-depth mechanic to the vehicle system in Zomboid in future! Today’s somber goodbyes are from Rzeznik. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-07-19 20:56:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey everyone! This week on Thursdoid:
We’ve just released a new test build into the weather branch, which contains many improvements to the new weather system, and in addition contains a whole slew of fixes and additions. However, we’ve had a few issues confined to only a couple of testers and think a couple of bugs have slipped into the mix that we’re having trouble tracking down or replicating reliably, and we’d love to get some wider testing done to try and figure out if this is a widespread issue or not, so multiplayer feedback would be much appreciated! Details on the build can be found here, we’ll look to get you a complete change-list in the next day or so but this is a combination of various branches so general feedback on any issues would be very appreciated!
Multiplayer optimisation
Recently we’ve had a sharp uptick of streamers playing our game, and have been paying close attention to Klean’s awesome Blacksite server (Long live Trader City) which has managed to amass 100 concurrent players on a couple of occasions–which while we were impressed it functioned at all, did start to fall down under the load. We’re hoping we can use our observations to improve the multiplayer syncing and server performance. One thing we’ve observed repeatedly in recent times is that it appears certain players seem to suffer worse with getting delayed or missing packets leading to much more extreme lag to other players. This doesn’t seem to be tied to ping, so we’re looking to investigate the lower level networking code to see if a problem could reside there that would cause some players to be starved of packets on busier servers – we’re currently looking to organize a large non-Steam multiplayer test with which to test if the Steam communication layer may be causing any additional interferance, after which we’ll hopefully be closer to nailing down these issues. We’ll post on the forums about such a test when it has been organized. We’re also noticing some oddities with sound pop up here and there, seeing people not hearing other player’s guns, and a few reports of inaccurate ranges for different sounds, so feedback on this would be much appreciated!
Thermal Expansion
On the weather front, the test build in the weather branch has also had an update to the weather overhaul – the big focus of this build is to improve the game’s simulation of player body temperature, to more accurately model how a player will get hot or cold within the environment, with internal body temperature interacting with the character’s surrounding with various modifiers based on the character’s situation, dress and health. Extra elements are simulated such as sickness lowering resistance to cold, wind and rain reducing the player’s body temperature, as well as adding hyperthermia and hypothermia into the mix. We’re aware we may have to provide more ways for the player to handle extreme heat or cold, such as more varied clothing – some of this will clearly need to wait until the animation build, so we’ll decide in a future test build whether we need to disable or reduce the more extreme temperature effects until these features or added. If people are giving the new temperature system a try out, you can pull up some debug information to track the player’s body modifiers. This will hopefully show the depth of these systems!
Full details on the weather build can be found here, with instructions on how the new body temperature system works.
Shiny!
Yuri’s been improving the look of the vehicles, adding environment maps to make cars look much less matte and have the reflective shine one would expect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH_kxAocCO0 We’ll probably have a lot of fun tying the reflective values into how clean a car is, and providing another weirdly in-depth mechanic to the vehicle system in Zomboid in future! Today’s somber goodbyes are from Rzeznik. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-07-19 20:56:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Snow DaZe
As flagged on the PZ website last week, we currently have a public test version of Turbo’s new weather, climate, storms and fog system available for players to try out. You can find full details on how to access this in the forum thread. Initial player reports have been really positive – with people reporting that they’re feeling a greater sense of seasonal change and are feeling nicely hemmed in (and are having more difficulty driving) in heavy fog. The primary piece of feedback we probably need at this point is whether players feel some of the new time of day and season shaders are too intense or washed out – you can find details of the debug tools that’d be useful if you wanted to quickly check a variety out in the link above. Turbo has also just released an updated version of the test weather beta, which features a multiplayer component of his IsoRegions system – this should allow the information about enclosed player-built spaces across an MP network so fog/precipitation can only be shown in outdoor areas. Please note that this will break current saves on this test build. Turbo will now start to address some of the great feedback he’s received this past week in terms of bugs and suggestions, such as the occasional foggy starting houses and black lines that are visible on some zoom levels.
In amongst the bigger headline features like weather and MP chat improvements currently in the mix, there a variety of smaller features and fixes also on the boil to benefit players, modders and admins. In-game fonts have been made bolder to help with legibility, car wrecks can now be dismantled with a propane torch and welding mask and we’re also tightening the difficulty levels of our more noob-friendly scenarios – as we can’t help but feel that some of our players are getting too easy a ride at first. Also fresh from the coding furnace, meanwhile, is EasyPickins’ in-game Sandbox Options Editor for server admins. This will allow admins to change in-game settings that don’t require a full restart, and should make managing a server for you and your friends a little more forgiving experience.
This week Zac has built a ‘Paper doll’ interface into the AnimZed dev/modding tool, as seen below this replaces a big list of numbers and toggles – letting you/us design zombie and survivor outfits for in-game use and testing in a far more user-friendly and efficient way. He’s also got 2D blends working in the tool, but still needs to work out the best way to visualize them in AnimZed.
A lot of what T.E.A. are currently doing is improving the system, and adding flexibility, by making large chunks of it data-driven and greatly simplifying (and modularising) the player code. It’s complicated stuff that’ll make devving and modding easier, and should put the game and community in a good shape for many years to come. This has been Grant’s primary work with the ‘state machine’ recently, while Bitbaboon Mark (although we should probably call him T.E.A. Mark at this point) working out the best ways to transition the T.E.A. workflow over into the core PZ team. Our thanks to Mad Dan for his snow pic, and indeed just for being Mad Dan. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-07-05 19:13:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Happy Thursday all. Work continues on two fronts: the stuff that was developed concurrently with the vehicles build that we intend to get out into an IWBUMS beta as soon as we can, and the stuff that the five guys over at T.E.A. continue to improve our new animations system with in terms of more flexible/data-driven code and an improved AnimZed animation tool to match. Let’s go round the houses then and see what’s new.
WEATHER TEST BUILD
As flagged on the PZ website last week, we currently have a public test version of Turbo’s new weather, climate, storms and fog system available for players to try out. You can find full details on how to access this in the forum thread. Initial player reports have been really positive – with people reporting that they’re feeling a greater sense of seasonal change and are feeling nicely hemmed in (and are having more difficulty driving) in heavy fog. The primary piece of feedback we probably need at this point is whether players feel some of the new time of day and season shaders are too intense or washed out – you can find details of the debug tools that’d be useful if you wanted to quickly check a variety out in the link above. Turbo has also just released an updated version of the test weather beta, which features a multiplayer component of his IsoRegions system – this should allow the information about enclosed player-built spaces across an MP network so fog/precipitation can only be shown in outdoor areas. Please note that this will break current saves on this test build. Turbo will now start to address some of the great feedback he’s received this past week in terms of bugs and suggestions, such as the occasional foggy starting houses and black lines that are visible on some zoom levels.
NEXT IWBUMS
In amongst the bigger headline features like weather and MP chat improvements currently in the mix, there a variety of smaller features and fixes also on the boil to benefit players, modders and admins. In-game fonts have been made bolder to help with legibility, car wrecks can now be dismantled with a propane torch and welding mask and we’re also tightening the difficulty levels of our more noob-friendly scenarios – as we can’t help but feel that some of our players are getting too easy a ride at first. Also fresh from the coding furnace, meanwhile, is EasyPickins’ in-game Sandbox Options Editor for server admins. This will allow admins to change in-game settings that don’t require a full restart, and should make managing a server for you and your friends a little more forgiving experience.
T.E.A. WORK
This week Zac has built a ‘Paper doll’ interface into the AnimZed dev/modding tool, as seen below this replaces a big list of numbers and toggles – letting you/us design zombie and survivor outfits for in-game use and testing in a far more user-friendly and efficient way. He’s also got 2D blends working in the tool, but still needs to work out the best way to visualize them in AnimZed.
A lot of what T.E.A. are currently doing is improving the system, and adding flexibility, by making large chunks of it data-driven and greatly simplifying (and modularising) the player code. It’s complicated stuff that’ll make devving and modding easier, and should put the game and community in a good shape for many years to come. This has been Grant’s primary work with the ‘state machine’ recently, while Bitbaboon Mark (although we should probably call him T.E.A. Mark at this point) working out the best ways to transition the T.E.A. workflow over into the core PZ team. Our thanks to Mad Dan for his snow pic, and indeed just for being Mad Dan. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-07-05 19:13:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Zedlights
[ 2018-06-22 11:42:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
We released the Build 39 vehicles patch this time last week – release notes for which can be found here.
This seems to have remedied the most pressing issues with Build 39 and
(given that we also don’t want to add any major changes to the pot
without enough testing) further tweaks and improvements will go into
Build 40.
All of Build 40’s bigger features are already complete, if untested,
so we’re hoping to get it into IWBUMS public beta testing within the
next few weeks and for it to be a fairly quickfire version. As such a
lot of work in the coming week involves bringing work done while we were
polishing the release candidate for Build 39 into the main 40 build –
stirring each ingredient in one after the other.
First off Yuri from General Arcade has done a lot of work on MP
networking, vehicle clipping, floating cars, headlights, vehicle shadows
and zombie reaction speeds – and then Stas’ new chatbox will also
finally get its time in the sun. Finally Turbo’s work on the new climate
system, improved rain/snow/fog and general ‘greater sense of season’
work will also be added to the mix.
As we’ve discussed in previous dev blogs, Turbo’s final hurdle was
finding ways to make the new precipitation and fog visible through
windows – initially in pre-made buildings, and then with the trickier
proposition of player-made structures. Telling the game not to conjure
up internal fog in a constructed base was a big issue.
As such, this week he has been finishing a system that can accurately
detect player-made rooms and regions on each height layer – now the PZ
engine can properly detect if an area is enclosed by walls, windows,
door frames and fences. The system also checks whether said area is
roofed, and then mask a feature like fog from that and all connected
rooms. It practice it looks a little bit like this…
https://youtu.be/c_n5J2BbtIo
Having this functionality in the game will also make it far, far
easier to prevent the occasional ‘zombie in my base!’ bugs that have
been known to creep back into the game – and also be very handy for
other independent zoning systems for farming improvements etc.
While the above features are being added to Build 40 other team
members are blitzing through our internal task system – verifying
reported bugs, fixing up legacy issues and generally sorting out
long-term kinks in the game that have sat in the system unaddressed for
too long. The advent of the new animations system, and the dev
changeover to it, will bring a lot of new work and issues so the more of
these 300-ish minor tasks we can strike from the record the cleaner our
plate will be.
This sort of stuff deals with missing loot spawns, errant nutrition
values, trait issues, places you can’t sleep but should be able to and
other general irritations. In addition, meanwhile, we’re adding stuff to
improve vehicles – like the ability to use metalwork skills to
dismantle car wrecks and retrieve construction materials, and making it
very unwise to drive your car while drunk.
Once we’ve cleared out these tasks we can also add in some more community suggestions,
start to polish some of our more elderly game systems and also do some
planned work on our current loot system to give us more power on what
spawns where and by how much – which is also a requirement to get the
best out of the new animation/models system as we’ll certain zombies
spawning in certain locations, with certain loot around then.
The work on the animations system, and the AnimZed tool itself,
continues with our friends at T.E.A. It’s relatively dry dev work this
week, but all necessary stuff. Zac has been going through AnimZed
changes following the feedback of our animator Martin last week, and
will continue to supply new versions for him to check out. Grant has
been working on the Game state hook-up, and compiling guidelines for
coders and modders to follow with T.E.A.’s data-driven approach to
animation integration. Mark has been investigating load/rendering issues
with backpacks, and Gar is adding new masks/test textures for
texture-based pants/tops which are coming in the editor.
Thanks so much for all your continuing feedback and bug reports on
Build 39 everyone. It’s been great having so many new and returning
players, and hopefully we’ve got some good stuff in the pipeline for all
concerned parties.
This week’s night cruise from Cocoa. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here –
so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for
info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct
your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-06-22 11:42:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
On the Move
We’ve been running an IWBUMS patching some of the more serious issues – but due to the expanded number of people currently playing MP we don’t want to mix it into the fairly stable release build without giving it its due testing. As such, if you fancy grabbing some free PZ codes for participation, then keep your eyes on the forum over the next few days / week and we will likely be running some impromptu community IWBUMS megatests for those on the beta channel. UPDATE: In addition we have just updated 39.67.2. In amongst many and varied other things, currently in the patch we have:
We’ve got a few complete, and almost complete, things that were a bit logjammed while we polished vehicles that we’re hoping to drop into testing over the coming weeks, mainly the new MP chatbox and Turbo’s ‘virtual climate’ weather and seasons upgrade. In the past week Turbo’s worked out ways to show fog/precipitation from inside buildings, but our larger and taller buildings (mall, prison etc) need some extra thought, as do outside balconies – although this does look pleasingly Exorcist-y even with the visual bug. Here’s a quick video of the fog system as nature intended it though… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeXrnBCTzyU Meanwhile, over with our friends at T.E.A. the animation build push continues. One aspect of this is that Zac, who is working on the new dev and modding tool AnimZed, has built a nifty clothing and outfit editor into it – from which both ourselves and modders will be able to easily hook up new models and textures to items, and create new looks for zeds and survivors alike. If you didn’t see some of these looks in our vid the other week you can check it out here. The updated tool within AnimZed looks a bit like this currently, although the bottom of the left hand column did raise some eyebrows… This tool work is probably going to be followed up with another utility that shows in-game items vs the visual items. At the moment we/TEA/modders have to check an item’s name, then lookup how it appears in-game separately and it would be very handy to have it done in an automated fashion. Elsewhere Gareth has been tweaking/polishing shaders for body masks, and Bitbaboon Mark has been blending, simplifying and ironing out kinks so that our animator Martin can jump in and get used to the new suite of tools available to him and polish up his work in-game. So hopefully we’ll have a bit more to show/discuss next week. Thanks so much for all your continuing feedback and bug reports on the vehicles everyone. Please keep it coming! This week’s station wagon from Julio. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-06-07 17:48:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
Evening all! Last week’s vehicles release felt like it went well. The release version was fairly stable, people are enjoying having transport in the game and we’ve seen a huge boost in player numbers – which has in-turn revealed plenty of bugs for us to squash over the next few weeks in patches. Many thanks for all your reports, and please keep them coming!
There are clearly a lot of people returning to the game and wanting to get their friends involved on co-op, so we’ve also decided to put the game on sale from tomorrow for a few days with 40% off. (If people find this helpful we’ll probably do so again whenever bigger features get into the main game.)
VEHICLES FIRST PATCH
We’ve been running an IWBUMS patching some of the more serious issues – but due to the expanded number of people currently playing MP we don’t want to mix it into the fairly stable release build without giving it its due testing. As such, if you fancy grabbing some free PZ codes for participation, then keep your eyes on the forum over the next few days / week and we will likely be running some impromptu community IWBUMS megatests for those on the beta channel. UPDATE: In addition we have just updated 39.67.2. In amongst many and varied other things, currently in the patch we have:
- A fix for the disabled VOIP bug, double doors imbued with physics and fixes to zombie positions on the client.
- Fixes for players riding shotgun in MP being teleported to elsewhere on the map by preventing drivers from entering areas of the map that haven’t been loaded in their passengers’ game.
- An increased the spawn rate of mechanic tools in car trunks, lowered player panic when inside vehicles and increased knockback when you’re ramming zeds.
- A new Car Battery Charger item. This can be used to charge your car battery if you have electricity around you (generator included).
BEYOND VEHICLES
We’ve got a few complete, and almost complete, things that were a bit logjammed while we polished vehicles that we’re hoping to drop into testing over the coming weeks, mainly the new MP chatbox and Turbo’s ‘virtual climate’ weather and seasons upgrade. In the past week Turbo’s worked out ways to show fog/precipitation from inside buildings, but our larger and taller buildings (mall, prison etc) need some extra thought, as do outside balconies – although this does look pleasingly Exorcist-y even with the visual bug. Here’s a quick video of the fog system as nature intended it though… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeXrnBCTzyU Meanwhile, over with our friends at T.E.A. the animation build push continues. One aspect of this is that Zac, who is working on the new dev and modding tool AnimZed, has built a nifty clothing and outfit editor into it – from which both ourselves and modders will be able to easily hook up new models and textures to items, and create new looks for zeds and survivors alike. If you didn’t see some of these looks in our vid the other week you can check it out here. The updated tool within AnimZed looks a bit like this currently, although the bottom of the left hand column did raise some eyebrows… This tool work is probably going to be followed up with another utility that shows in-game items vs the visual items. At the moment we/TEA/modders have to check an item’s name, then lookup how it appears in-game separately and it would be very handy to have it done in an automated fashion. Elsewhere Gareth has been tweaking/polishing shaders for body masks, and Bitbaboon Mark has been blending, simplifying and ironing out kinks so that our animator Martin can jump in and get used to the new suite of tools available to him and polish up his work in-game. So hopefully we’ll have a bit more to show/discuss next week. Thanks so much for all your continuing feedback and bug reports on the vehicles everyone. Please keep it coming! This week’s station wagon from Julio. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-06-07 17:48:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 39: Vehicles released!
[ 2018-05-31 13:04:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Survivors of the Knox Event can now drive vehicles and explore every nook and cranny of the vast Project Zomboid map.
Vehicles are enhanced with real physics, and come with all the expected sundries such as a UI dashboard, headlights, expanded inventory space, car horns, air conditioning and car radios – and the capacity for breakdowns, part replacement and collision damage.
Mark_exe has been kind enough to record a short video to explain ’em. Please consider going and subbing to his channel if you don’t already!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8Js_oVLD14
Nine different vehicle models are available – not including variants on these such as branded vans or emergency vehicles. The PZ garage runs the gamut from family cars to police sedans, to Spiffo restaurant vans.
Vehicles can be found outside homes and in parking lots – while keys can be found in nearby homes, in the vehicle itself or on the floor. Hotwiring is also a skill option.
Players can replace spare parts, tyres, suspension, brakes and more – all of which can be damaged by situations such as overuse, off-road driving and collisions.
Vehicles must be topped up with gas, have charged batteries and each variety of vehicle has its own set of replacement parts for players to add to their chosen transport.
To accompany vehicles a Mechanic profession and skill have also been added to the game – allowing for increased chances of successful part installation, and trickier repairs.
PLEASE NOTE:
Due to the massive engine and gameplay changes required for vehicles, game saves from the previous build 38.30 are NOT compatible. If you want to continue your game a Steam beta channel for the previous Build 38.30 has been provided.
PLEASE ALSO NOTE:
While we’ve taken a lot of effort to get this build as bug free as possible, due to these huge changes to the PZ engine we can anticipate many bug reports, and also the potential of operational issues on computer set-ups that weren’t part of our IWBUMS beta process. Please report any issues here, and thank you for patience.
OTHER BUILD FEATURES:
- The PZ map has been expanded – filling in the countryside between Riverside and Rosewood with farmsteads, camp sites and various nooks and crannies to explore in your cars, vans and ambulances. The official PZ online map has been updated to reflect this.
- A lot of optimization has been done under the hood to make way for vehicles: general map streaming performance, garbage collection improvements, UI framerate changes, rendering of non-visible internal tiles to provide smoother play around tall buildings etc.
- Many, many other improvements to game systems including: player-crafted double-doors and gates, new sandbox options, map improvements, MP and co-op tweaks, external generators, loot and XP balance, UI improvements, better gamepad controls and much much more.
[ 2018-05-31 13:04:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Death Cab for Zombie
We’re hopeful that today’s public IWBUMS release (39.64) will be the last before the full vehicles release. It contains:
As regular readers will know, our Technical Director friend Bitbaboon Mark now has his own company called TEA – and he and his cohorts Zac, Chris, Gar and Schnitz are working on getting the new anims and models ready for the PZ codebase to switch over to them. This week from a technical standpoint they’ve been sorting meshes/textures and data that’s loaded from .X files and have hooked up character masks and ‘items’ to create individual characters from with everything hooked up correctly. The intention is to have the character config inside the dev/modding tool AnimZed – so people can quickly add and update meshes and put them onto characters to validate alongside the animations themselves. In fact Zac has a ‘random’ create for characters all running from AnimZed, and it looks a little bit like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhhjHrPQ0sg Music credit: MrEldfuel from free sounds. Please note: there’s clearly lots of different outfits and items on-show in this video – initial anims build releases will not contain everything seen above, especially if it involves combat markedly different to what’s already in-game. This is purely to show what AnimZed can do now, and the way that anim stances now change based on the weapon being held – which is all data-driven now. (Please also note: Spiffo’s Restaurant mascot outfits are supposed to look a bit… threadbare).
Turbo is working on his remedy for the new snow/fog/storms system – in that it’s all fine and dandy having a climate system with morning fog and real-time storms forming and passing overhead, but not helpful when (as it currently is in-game) you can’t look out of the window to see what the weather’s doing. As such he has been exploring the possibility of using screen masking to allow for the player’s building to not be included in the rendering of rain, fog or other atmospheric effects. This will mean they will be visible to the character through windows, instead of being turned off across the screen when a player enters the house. Please note this is just a proof of concept and not fully implemented into the game yet.
Meanwhile Stas continues his gamepad set-up improvements, Zach continues with his additions to the PZ soundtrack and Mash continues to build some of the larger new building locations to place within the expansion out to Louisville.
Twas the night before GDPR, when all through the house – not a creature was stirring, not even an updated privacy policy. This week’s fare from ㊣ $ℏìᶄ ㊣ . A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-05-24 20:47:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
Evening all, we do hope y’all are well.
IWBUMS BUILD 39.64
We’re hopeful that today’s public IWBUMS release (39.64) will be the last before the full vehicles release. It contains:
- A few physics and vehicular position fixes that will hopefully help those playing on co-op and dedicated servers.
- Improvements to loot kept on car seats, tweaks to the item disassembly system, and the removed item transfer progress bar being restored by public demand.
- Fixes to faulty item spawn rates (especially skill books) in MP, sheet rope levitation, aspects of zombie pathfinding, missing collision on various objects and various bugs squashed when transferring items between containers. And many other fixes besides.
ANIMS
As regular readers will know, our Technical Director friend Bitbaboon Mark now has his own company called TEA – and he and his cohorts Zac, Chris, Gar and Schnitz are working on getting the new anims and models ready for the PZ codebase to switch over to them. This week from a technical standpoint they’ve been sorting meshes/textures and data that’s loaded from .X files and have hooked up character masks and ‘items’ to create individual characters from with everything hooked up correctly. The intention is to have the character config inside the dev/modding tool AnimZed – so people can quickly add and update meshes and put them onto characters to validate alongside the animations themselves. In fact Zac has a ‘random’ create for characters all running from AnimZed, and it looks a little bit like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhhjHrPQ0sg Music credit: MrEldfuel from free sounds. Please note: there’s clearly lots of different outfits and items on-show in this video – initial anims build releases will not contain everything seen above, especially if it involves combat markedly different to what’s already in-game. This is purely to show what AnimZed can do now, and the way that anim stances now change based on the weapon being held – which is all data-driven now. (Please also note: Spiffo’s Restaurant mascot outfits are supposed to look a bit… threadbare).
WEATHER AND CLIMATE SYSTEM
Turbo is working on his remedy for the new snow/fog/storms system – in that it’s all fine and dandy having a climate system with morning fog and real-time storms forming and passing overhead, but not helpful when (as it currently is in-game) you can’t look out of the window to see what the weather’s doing. As such he has been exploring the possibility of using screen masking to allow for the player’s building to not be included in the rendering of rain, fog or other atmospheric effects. This will mean they will be visible to the character through windows, instead of being turned off across the screen when a player enters the house. Please note this is just a proof of concept and not fully implemented into the game yet.
Meanwhile Stas continues his gamepad set-up improvements, Zach continues with his additions to the PZ soundtrack and Mash continues to build some of the larger new building locations to place within the expansion out to Louisville.
PRIVACY POLICY FUN
Twas the night before GDPR, when all through the house – not a creature was stirring, not even an updated privacy policy. This week’s fare from ㊣ $ℏìᶄ ㊣ . A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-05-24 20:47:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
Monkey Bizness
Last week we announced that we’d teamed up with a gang of renegade coders called The Eccentric Ape – ably led by our current anims-focussed Technical Director whizz (Bitbaboon) Mark. This past week has seen them getting up to speed with PZ, and right now they’re getting their hands dirty in the codebase. The plan is for them to do a big push on the animation system, and overall intention is that we’ll be working alongside them on many of our big features going forward.
So, for the next little while TEA’s Grant is fixing up remaining issues with layer/node and blending code, and then adding in the common state conditions that animations will ‘trigger’ – stuff like collision being on/off for combat and swings. Snitz, meanwhile, is setting to work on movement, idle and swing states to remove anything still hard coded and tie them instead to the new in-game variables. Finally, Zac and Gaz are working on AnimZed, making it more user friendly, filtering and sorting the anims into the first set of released animations and focussing on it from the end user perspective. By the time this push is complete the system should be in a state where Animator Martin, and ultimately modders, can dive in and start layering new anims for the remaining states with very little required coder intervention.
Turbo’s big challenge at the moment with the new precipitation and fog that go hand in hand with his simulated climate system is how to handle it when you look out of windows – in the current game rain isn’t visible outside, and this bug will become much clearer with better rain and fog effects. Particles currently get drawn after the world has been drawn, and the weather is drawn over this final image – so we need a solution for this so you can check the weather outside your safehouse without walking out into it. We anticipate that looking out of a window when hearing the noise of, for an example, an approaching thunderstorm (thunderclaps at the correct timing, taking into account to your distance away on the map from lightning and the centre of the storm) will be a much more common occurrence with this new system – likewise with checking out the fog. As such it’s something we need to fix up before release. While he puzzles this all out alongside our other coders, Turbs is also creating a new sound bank for ambient sounds to signal seasonal change. He’s currently got a supply of forest zone sounds, insect noise, rain effects for both indoors and outdoors, extra SFX for heavy weather, birdsong and indoor/outdoor wind effects. He intends to have it so that, for example, on a hot summer afternoon with little to no wind you can hear the crickets chirping – and for birds to become silent when heavy weather hits. It’s intended to be soft background noise, but if implemented well should really improve your sense of the time of year – and the current weather state created by the simulated climate system. After a meeting with the PZ art brigade Turbo is also going to add some more direction to his ‘clouds overhead’ effect, as currently they look a little too smoke-like.
Bitbaboon Steve is finishing off our updated internal build system, while Connall is investigating ways to help our community translators keep up to date with translation strings that are updated from build to build. Mash continues with Louisville, while RingoD is building a wider roster of house and apartment buildings that she can drop into residential areas when she moves into the suburbs. When they return from Russian Victory Day vacations General Arcade’s Yuri is working on MP network physics, and Stas continues his work to improve gamepad and mouse settings/bindings. ChrisW is also back with us and will work on giving final polish to his existing rooftop occlusion system when it comes to player-built structures, before returning to his work on Sims-style interior cutaways in houses. Due to a necessary forum upgrade we’re also having to decommission our current Bug Tracker, which is annoying but has to be done unfortunately. We’ve harvested all the longstanding issues that were present in it, so if you see any of your reports disappearing – please don’t worry as they have a new home in our internal system. We’ll work on getting a decent replacement in the weeks ahead. This week’s 911 call out from Ghost. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. The BOIT would like to apologise to Mark for calling T.E.A. ‘The Educated Ape’ last week instead of ‘Eccentric’, although that would also have been a good name for his new company.
[ 2018-05-10 21:57:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Build 39 Vehicles build (playable in public IWBUMS beta) is essentially ready to go, but we need to be sure that a couple of issues have been solved by today’s release of Build 39.57: one that saw crowds of zombies pinging vehicles off roads in MP, and another on some dedicated servers that had zeds attracted to a vehicle’s previous position that we also think was to do with the physics interpolation. [So please let us know if you encounter either!]
39.57 also improves the way vehicles are arranged in parking stalls by adding directional pointers to the mix, addresses issues with watch alarms, adds extra options to help you tailor/toggle world degradation (erosion) in the game and some tweaks to help modders with the change to the vehicles build. Amidst a lot of under the hood stuff to keep stuff ticking over. EDIT: A complete changelist will appear here in the next day or so, but due to last minute issue with the latest code we’ve released a build that was already in testing and thus we’ll have to recompile the changelist to suit.
In the mean-time let’s go round the houses and find out what other PZ types are up to:
ANIMS
Last week we announced that we’d teamed up with a gang of renegade coders called The Eccentric Ape – ably led by our current anims-focussed Technical Director whizz (Bitbaboon) Mark. This past week has seen them getting up to speed with PZ, and right now they’re getting their hands dirty in the codebase. The plan is for them to do a big push on the animation system, and overall intention is that we’ll be working alongside them on many of our big features going forward.
So, for the next little while TEA’s Grant is fixing up remaining issues with layer/node and blending code, and then adding in the common state conditions that animations will ‘trigger’ – stuff like collision being on/off for combat and swings. Snitz, meanwhile, is setting to work on movement, idle and swing states to remove anything still hard coded and tie them instead to the new in-game variables. Finally, Zac and Gaz are working on AnimZed, making it more user friendly, filtering and sorting the anims into the first set of released animations and focussing on it from the end user perspective. By the time this push is complete the system should be in a state where Animator Martin, and ultimately modders, can dive in and start layering new anims for the remaining states with very little required coder intervention.
WEATHER
Turbo’s big challenge at the moment with the new precipitation and fog that go hand in hand with his simulated climate system is how to handle it when you look out of windows – in the current game rain isn’t visible outside, and this bug will become much clearer with better rain and fog effects. Particles currently get drawn after the world has been drawn, and the weather is drawn over this final image – so we need a solution for this so you can check the weather outside your safehouse without walking out into it. We anticipate that looking out of a window when hearing the noise of, for an example, an approaching thunderstorm (thunderclaps at the correct timing, taking into account to your distance away on the map from lightning and the centre of the storm) will be a much more common occurrence with this new system – likewise with checking out the fog. As such it’s something we need to fix up before release. While he puzzles this all out alongside our other coders, Turbs is also creating a new sound bank for ambient sounds to signal seasonal change. He’s currently got a supply of forest zone sounds, insect noise, rain effects for both indoors and outdoors, extra SFX for heavy weather, birdsong and indoor/outdoor wind effects. He intends to have it so that, for example, on a hot summer afternoon with little to no wind you can hear the crickets chirping – and for birds to become silent when heavy weather hits. It’s intended to be soft background noise, but if implemented well should really improve your sense of the time of year – and the current weather state created by the simulated climate system. After a meeting with the PZ art brigade Turbo is also going to add some more direction to his ‘clouds overhead’ effect, as currently they look a little too smoke-like.
OTHER STUFF
Bitbaboon Steve is finishing off our updated internal build system, while Connall is investigating ways to help our community translators keep up to date with translation strings that are updated from build to build. Mash continues with Louisville, while RingoD is building a wider roster of house and apartment buildings that she can drop into residential areas when she moves into the suburbs. When they return from Russian Victory Day vacations General Arcade’s Yuri is working on MP network physics, and Stas continues his work to improve gamepad and mouse settings/bindings. ChrisW is also back with us and will work on giving final polish to his existing rooftop occlusion system when it comes to player-built structures, before returning to his work on Sims-style interior cutaways in houses. Due to a necessary forum upgrade we’re also having to decommission our current Bug Tracker, which is annoying but has to be done unfortunately. We’ve harvested all the longstanding issues that were present in it, so if you see any of your reports disappearing – please don’t worry as they have a new home in our internal system. We’ll work on getting a decent replacement in the weeks ahead. This week’s 911 call out from Ghost. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. The BOIT would like to apologise to Mark for calling T.E.A. ‘The Educated Ape’ last week instead of ‘Eccentric’, although that would also have been a good name for his new company.
[ 2018-05-10 21:57:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
Blends n’ Shades
As stated last week, we’re in the final IWBUMS beta build(s) before we get vehicles out to public. This week we discovered an annoying map streaming hitch in MP (previously slightly obscured, but made more visible by last week’s improvements to chunk loading) so have this week been ironing it out – which hopefully means that today’s public IWBUMS beta play more smoothly. It has been released today as a part of Public IWBUMS Beta 39.52. Also included in Build 39.52 are improvements to vehicle collisions with zeds. In essence there’s now a far higher chance of turning zombies into crawlers, and your speed is now tied to the amount of damage you do – and whether you’ll be rewarded with a blood splat. Vehicles now also bump slightly when driving over corpses and, while there is a ‘boost’ bug associated with this that we need to deal with – illness on the team has meant we couldn’t fix this in time for the release today, but hopefully you can forgive the occasional car-catapult. Elsewhere loot in cars has been brought in line with what you’d expect from the loot in nearby houses, fixes have been made to zed pathfinding, XP from broadcasts has been increased, the mass of car wrecks has been reduced and outdoor generator use has been enabled in all game modes by default. Full changelist here.
As regulars will know, we have Mark from Bitbaboon working on our new animation system – and he’s using his knowledge from his lengthy experience as a Technical Director in the world of AAA game publishing to make the implementation of new animations (for both the PZ modding community, and PZ developers) as modular and intuitive as possible. The primary dev and modding tool that facilitates this is called AnimZed, and this week Mark thought it would be fun to give you a video tour around some of its functions – while he continues to prepare AnimZed, and the PZ codebase, for the point post-vehicles at which we can all jump in. There’s just one quick item of note: in the video when animation stances change in AnimZed they suddenly flick to their new position – this is because in demonstrating the tool the ‘blend time’ was left at 0 seconds meaning instant switch between one pose and another. In the game they would clearly be blended so they look smooth and natural. (Oh, and our apologies for the robo-voice in the vid, but Mark thought it better than his own gruff Brummie accent.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UfoY-trxJQ This vid gets quite technical, but hopefully explores and explains the breadth and scope of what we’re aiming for a little better than dry boring text.
Turbo’s weather system – a realistic representation of temperature, weather patterns, precipitation, fog, snow and ice melt has been taken for a few spins backstage in the recent week to spotlight the key areas that need fixing/improvement before it can be integrated into public test builds. Tester feedback has been pretty positive, outlining especially that you can really feel the passage of the time of day a lot better now – and people also seem to like the way that a storm will gradually roll over a map in a way that it would in real life. [Slight warning for headphone users] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLg4pLyrrWQ We are also treating this as a way of killing two birds with one stone, as up till now there are areas of the game where visibility has been a problem due to our current shaders – and as such Turbo has been experimenting with many and various time of day and seasonal settings. His side mission being to get the right balance so PZ’s visuals don’t become over-saturated, and on the other side making sure the winter months aren’t *too* drab and dreary. Please note that the following are super WIP – some are a little too garish still, but do look quite good at the correct time of day.
For now however Turbo is concentrating on the system’s bugs – like the way, for example that fog disappears completely when you enter a building, making the area around the house visible.
Elsewhere in PZ-land Stas is getting to grips with our improved gamepad functionality and set-up options, while long term Louisville construction continues, and Bitbaboon Steve is on hand to go deeper into the optimization of our MP game. In terms of the Build 39 vehicles release then Blindcoder is also currently working on the update to the official online PZ map that’ll reveal/spoil every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse that’s new in the upcoming release. This week’s trailer park massacre from Sergeant Giacomo. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-04-26 19:07:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Evening all. Some good vehicles stuff today as they approach their public release, and info from the animation coalface.
BUILD 39 IWBUMS BETA
As stated last week, we’re in the final IWBUMS beta build(s) before we get vehicles out to public. This week we discovered an annoying map streaming hitch in MP (previously slightly obscured, but made more visible by last week’s improvements to chunk loading) so have this week been ironing it out – which hopefully means that today’s public IWBUMS beta play more smoothly. It has been released today as a part of Public IWBUMS Beta 39.52. Also included in Build 39.52 are improvements to vehicle collisions with zeds. In essence there’s now a far higher chance of turning zombies into crawlers, and your speed is now tied to the amount of damage you do – and whether you’ll be rewarded with a blood splat. Vehicles now also bump slightly when driving over corpses and, while there is a ‘boost’ bug associated with this that we need to deal with – illness on the team has meant we couldn’t fix this in time for the release today, but hopefully you can forgive the occasional car-catapult. Elsewhere loot in cars has been brought in line with what you’d expect from the loot in nearby houses, fixes have been made to zed pathfinding, XP from broadcasts has been increased, the mass of car wrecks has been reduced and outdoor generator use has been enabled in all game modes by default. Full changelist here.
ANIMATIONS
As regulars will know, we have Mark from Bitbaboon working on our new animation system – and he’s using his knowledge from his lengthy experience as a Technical Director in the world of AAA game publishing to make the implementation of new animations (for both the PZ modding community, and PZ developers) as modular and intuitive as possible. The primary dev and modding tool that facilitates this is called AnimZed, and this week Mark thought it would be fun to give you a video tour around some of its functions – while he continues to prepare AnimZed, and the PZ codebase, for the point post-vehicles at which we can all jump in. There’s just one quick item of note: in the video when animation stances change in AnimZed they suddenly flick to their new position – this is because in demonstrating the tool the ‘blend time’ was left at 0 seconds meaning instant switch between one pose and another. In the game they would clearly be blended so they look smooth and natural. (Oh, and our apologies for the robo-voice in the vid, but Mark thought it better than his own gruff Brummie accent.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UfoY-trxJQ This vid gets quite technical, but hopefully explores and explains the breadth and scope of what we’re aiming for a little better than dry boring text.
WEATHER
Turbo’s weather system – a realistic representation of temperature, weather patterns, precipitation, fog, snow and ice melt has been taken for a few spins backstage in the recent week to spotlight the key areas that need fixing/improvement before it can be integrated into public test builds. Tester feedback has been pretty positive, outlining especially that you can really feel the passage of the time of day a lot better now – and people also seem to like the way that a storm will gradually roll over a map in a way that it would in real life. [Slight warning for headphone users] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLg4pLyrrWQ We are also treating this as a way of killing two birds with one stone, as up till now there are areas of the game where visibility has been a problem due to our current shaders – and as such Turbo has been experimenting with many and various time of day and seasonal settings. His side mission being to get the right balance so PZ’s visuals don’t become over-saturated, and on the other side making sure the winter months aren’t *too* drab and dreary. Please note that the following are super WIP – some are a little too garish still, but do look quite good at the correct time of day.
For now however Turbo is concentrating on the system’s bugs – like the way, for example that fog disappears completely when you enter a building, making the area around the house visible.
OTHER STUFF
Elsewhere in PZ-land Stas is getting to grips with our improved gamepad functionality and set-up options, while long term Louisville construction continues, and Bitbaboon Steve is on hand to go deeper into the optimization of our MP game. In terms of the Build 39 vehicles release then Blindcoder is also currently working on the update to the official online PZ map that’ll reveal/spoil every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse that’s new in the upcoming release. This week’s trailer park massacre from Sergeant Giacomo. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2018-04-26 19:07:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Vehicle IWBUMS
This week’s ignored rest stop from Wei. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too
[ 2018-04-05 17:12:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
[img]https://i.imgur.com/MTsU8Pi.jpg/img] Hey everyone – today we’re retiring our Steam vehicles beta branch and moving it into our traditional ‘I Will Back Up My Save’ beta slot as Build 39. If you’ve been holding off from trying out our trucks, vans and cars as you were waiting for them to feel stable and (almost/increasingly) non-buggy then we’d politely ask you to consider entering the fray today. We need an extra burst of community testers for the final patches before launch. We need to know:
- What’s unclear about the way we’ve implemented Vehicles and the Mechanics skill
- How the game runs on your machine. [And if there are any issues we will 100% need to know what sort of computer it is, alongside your tech specs]
- How vehicles are changing the way you play – both in the early and late game. And, of course, whether or not you’re having fun.
- Any bugs and weirdness that stick out like a sore thumb.
This week’s ignored rest stop from Wei. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too
[ 2018-04-05 17:12:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hellgate: Muldraugh
We’ve just updated the Public Vehicle Beta to version 40, the details of which can be found here . It’s quite a long changelist as it’s two weeks of tweaks and bug fixes, but the headlines run as follows.
For next week’s build (which we intend to be moved into the traditional IWBUMS beta slot as long as public testing of Build 40 doesn’t throw up any clangers) in amongst many/varied other improvements and fixes, General Arcade’s Yuri has been working on a neat little system that will decrease the irritating occasions upon which the player character is super-imposed on the car it’s standing behind – essentially creating shifting ‘bounding boxes’ around vehicles that are separate from the physics one. Also for next week’s version Uncle Bitbaboon Steve has done some work improving network connectivity in the fight against lag, and will be with us again tomorrow to implement the final sounds for normal and small cars. Steve’s colleague Mark, meanwhile, has been plugging away at the animation system we intend to switch dev over to once Vehicles are out of the door – most of his work last week comprising of bringing it all up to date with the considerable amount of core engine adjustments brought about in our recent optimization push. General Arcade’s Stas, meanwhile, has provided a first iteration of his new MP chat update to check out, and is now doing the same ‘bringing up to date with optimizations’ task with our forthcoming lwgl3 upgrade. Elsewhere Turbo has been working on the new weather system we hope to get into a post-vehicles build – details of which can be found here. He’s been on a lot of ‘under the hood’ aspects this week, but has also improved how general periods of weather work – setting them up so they can be easily changed and transition a lot better. His intent is so that periods of showers, heavy rainfall and thunder clouds generate in a more variable way, and don’t always have the same expected pattern. Now that the new wilderness/farmland map expansion is out and players are finding cool stuff like the kiddie summer camp Mash is officially moving entirely onto a bigger, and much more urban, setting with our fictionalised version of Louisville – an area that won’t be as big as the real thing, but will still be really big (and plenty big enough) in existing PZ terms. The broad layout is done (redesigned from what we’ve shown as hints previously) which was no mean feat in itself – and now begins the process of hand-crafting all the buildings and adding details. We’ve got a stash of interesting and previously unseen pre-made buildings to slot in though, and RingoD will be stepping in to help out with residential areas, but even with this it’ll be a long, long task to complete, and as such we won’t be talking about it much about it again until it nears completion. This week’s featured rooftop party from Bromo BR. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Finally, those open to a spot of YouTube zombie parkour might be interested in a movie version Indiegogo. Cheers all!
[ 2018-03-29 21:04:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
Happy Thursday all, and a Maundy one too – if you’re partial to that sort of thing.
CURRENT VEHICLES BETA
We’ve just updated the Public Vehicle Beta to version 40, the details of which can be found here . It’s quite a long changelist as it’s two weeks of tweaks and bug fixes, but the headlines run as follows.
- We’ve made quite a few changes to speed up zombies when they respond to sound. This will hopefully reduce the amount of lag from zombies when they’re lured by car/siren noise, and indeed in general when a horde is on the move. The change under the bonnet is that sounds are heard on the game’s chunk system, so will there will be less iteration and tests made by each individual zed. We’ve also slightly lowered the frequency of long range car sound triggers to further ease this, without making too much of a dent on zombie attraction.
- Currently in Six Months Later it’s too hard to find a working car as batteries have generally died. As such we’ve now changed this to spawn some fully charged batteries, no matter your chosen difficulty or the time since the outbreak, to simulate a more recent use. We’ve also nerfed the impact of world age on the battery remaining delta to help with this.
- Since the introduction of vehicles it’s been an issue getting them into player-made bases. As such, RJ and Mash have conjured up a variety of gates to make your entrances/exits a little more dignified.
- Loot discovered in vehicles has been bugging out for a while now – so in Build 40 this has been fixed up and there should be a lot more varied in-car discoveries. We’ve also added a lot more varied ‘general crap’ in vehicles, and likewise a few extra ‘owner profession’ loot spawns – like construction worker, taxi driver, painter and decorator etc.
- After our recent bout of optimizations we’ve added a menu option to let people choose their own preferred framerate levels for UI vs. general game FPS, and upped the default UI setting too. We’ll use user feedback from this to determine the best default value in future versions.
- A big problem in MP has been that passengers got cruelly dumped by the roadside while the driver sped off ahead, and vehicles could get a bit ‘blinky’ too – an issue compounded by lag. General Arcade’s Yuri has been on the case and this should be improved. There’s still a slight issue with the passenger-view of the vehicle jumping around a bit, but on the whole it’s a lot more playable – and Yuri is looking to get it fixed up for next week’s version.
- There may be a few issues with cars visibly juddering at top speed and occasionally on gear changes in multiplayer. We’re looking into these issues and will resolve as soon as possible.
BUILDS BEYOND
For next week’s build (which we intend to be moved into the traditional IWBUMS beta slot as long as public testing of Build 40 doesn’t throw up any clangers) in amongst many/varied other improvements and fixes, General Arcade’s Yuri has been working on a neat little system that will decrease the irritating occasions upon which the player character is super-imposed on the car it’s standing behind – essentially creating shifting ‘bounding boxes’ around vehicles that are separate from the physics one. Also for next week’s version Uncle Bitbaboon Steve has done some work improving network connectivity in the fight against lag, and will be with us again tomorrow to implement the final sounds for normal and small cars. Steve’s colleague Mark, meanwhile, has been plugging away at the animation system we intend to switch dev over to once Vehicles are out of the door – most of his work last week comprising of bringing it all up to date with the considerable amount of core engine adjustments brought about in our recent optimization push. General Arcade’s Stas, meanwhile, has provided a first iteration of his new MP chat update to check out, and is now doing the same ‘bringing up to date with optimizations’ task with our forthcoming lwgl3 upgrade. Elsewhere Turbo has been working on the new weather system we hope to get into a post-vehicles build – details of which can be found here. He’s been on a lot of ‘under the hood’ aspects this week, but has also improved how general periods of weather work – setting them up so they can be easily changed and transition a lot better. His intent is so that periods of showers, heavy rainfall and thunder clouds generate in a more variable way, and don’t always have the same expected pattern. Now that the new wilderness/farmland map expansion is out and players are finding cool stuff like the kiddie summer camp Mash is officially moving entirely onto a bigger, and much more urban, setting with our fictionalised version of Louisville – an area that won’t be as big as the real thing, but will still be really big (and plenty big enough) in existing PZ terms. The broad layout is done (redesigned from what we’ve shown as hints previously) which was no mean feat in itself – and now begins the process of hand-crafting all the buildings and adding details. We’ve got a stash of interesting and previously unseen pre-made buildings to slot in though, and RingoD will be stepping in to help out with residential areas, but even with this it’ll be a long, long task to complete, and as such we won’t be talking about it much about it again until it nears completion. This week’s featured rooftop party from Bromo BR. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Finally, those open to a spot of YouTube zombie parkour might be interested in a movie version Indiegogo. Cheers all!
[ 2018-03-29 21:04:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
Storms and Studies
We were about to release the build today, as a potential IWBUMs version, and in testing last minute have noticed a serious crash issue in MP that needs resolving first, so we’ll look to fix that then release — if not tomorrow, then early next week. A few highlights for what will be coming:
Since this has been a rather teeny Thursdoid, we thought we’d share a few nice videos showing some of the new weather systems Turbo has been working on, with new shader effects (along with legacy versions for those without shader support) Hope you enjoy! Stormy car ride https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kelQMB62qUI New shader driven fog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJqxS7FK17c Super rare night vision goggle prototype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzgdPDbbUZs New shader ambiences https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6futPu-g13I
Erstwhile investigators ShylokVakarian and his proclaimed ‘Queen of Loot’ ChatNoir have been running a rather impressive study on loot that appears in player’s starting houses, with some interesting revelations on which spawning towns have the best loot, down to the likelihood of running into good bag or a fabled Spiffo doll in your spawn house. It’s very interesting and useful statistics you should totally check out to help you plan your survival. Thanks to ShylokVakarian for his study, it’s really great that people are willing to dig this deep into the game we’ve created, and we massively look forward to his other studies in future! That’s all for this week, apologies its a bit short and version-less, we’ll look to get something out to you ASAP. This week’s image is from BecquerL. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Oh, and check out the findings of the latest great loot survey from ShylokVakarian. Fanks!
[ 2018-03-22 17:31:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello all, welcome to this week’s Thursdoid. A slightly short one, as usual Thursdoider Batsphinx is currently waving the Zomboid flag high at the GDC in that there America, for the betterment of all Zomboids – devs and players alike. Normal Thursdoid blogging will resume next week!
A few things to cover non-the-less.
VEHICLE BUILD 41
We were about to release the build today, as a potential IWBUMs version, and in testing last minute have noticed a serious crash issue in MP that needs resolving first, so we’ll look to fix that then release — if not tomorrow, then early next week. A few highlights for what will be coming:
- Since we had a few complaints about the slower UI update speed, we’ve added a menu option to allow people to choose their own level of sacrifice of game FPS for UI framerate, and in addition have raised the default UI framerate a bit. (We’ll see what option most people like to try and determine a good default value in the future. Of course ultimately we’d like to get the UI further optimized, but sadly since it’s written in lua for modding purposes its inherently a bit slower to process than most game uis so we’ll do what we can.)
- Zombie horde optimizations – there is still more to do, but in particular we’ve made significant optimizations to zombies responding to sound, and the way sounds are transmitted across the map, to make handling huge hordes better. Additionally there has been done work on the pathfinding that should make things run better when you’re amongst hordes of the dead. You’ll likely still see FPS drops until we manage to further optimize but you should notice a noticeable improvement, especially when you’re in a vehicle.
WEATHER UPDATE
Since this has been a rather teeny Thursdoid, we thought we’d share a few nice videos showing some of the new weather systems Turbo has been working on, with new shader effects (along with legacy versions for those without shader support) Hope you enjoy! Stormy car ride https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kelQMB62qUI New shader driven fog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJqxS7FK17c Super rare night vision goggle prototype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzgdPDbbUZs New shader ambiences https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6futPu-g13I
THE LOOT DETECTIVES
Erstwhile investigators ShylokVakarian and his proclaimed ‘Queen of Loot’ ChatNoir have been running a rather impressive study on loot that appears in player’s starting houses, with some interesting revelations on which spawning towns have the best loot, down to the likelihood of running into good bag or a fabled Spiffo doll in your spawn house. It’s very interesting and useful statistics you should totally check out to help you plan your survival. Thanks to ShylokVakarian for his study, it’s really great that people are willing to dig this deep into the game we’ve created, and we massively look forward to his other studies in future! That’s all for this week, apologies its a bit short and version-less, we’ll look to get something out to you ASAP. This week’s image is from BecquerL. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Oh, and check out the findings of the latest great loot survey from ShylokVakarian. Fanks!
[ 2018-03-22 17:31:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
Climate Change
We have just released public vehicles build 39. It’s another fairly weighty changelist, but the highlight of it is that the many, varied and major FPS optimizations we discussed last weekhave arrived. We’d love to hear about any changes you notice in performance. Likewise, however, we will need to hear of any bugs this has introduced. We’ve eradicated most of the gremlins backstage (like checkerboard lighting updates, flickering UIs windows, invisible ground objects etc) but there may well be other curiosities that our in-house testers haven’t found. Please let us know in the build release thread. Something we are aware of is that in this version there’s more work to do with the UI. We’ve made significant optimizations by sacrificing UI FPS for the sake of the FPS of the overall game, which is clearly of a greater priority. On top of this, some of the windows may appear more transparent than usual. We’ll look to improve smoothness and responsiveness in future builds, but we hope any additional bugs or annoyances will pale compared to the significant FPS improvements. Elsewhere in the vehicles beta, meanwhile:
While the majority of the team work on the vehicles build – Stas (chat upgrade), Mark (animations) and Turbo (fog, snow and new climate/weather system) continue to work away in the background. Turbo tends to sit away from the main team (his speciality being over-arching systems that we can tie into the main game like his existing seasonal changes and radio systems) and he’s currently working on an improved dynamic weather system that he hopes will make his existing seasons feel more real, and give a greater sense of day-to-day variety. This will also mean that different weather effects will move over the map in real-time. Here, for example, is a debug thunderstorm moving over the south of the current map – between March Ridge and West Point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETaYRyFJbnE This all generated by a system of simulated cold and warm fronts of varying strengths. An in-game change from Warm to Cold, for example, will result in a day with rain in the morning getting heavier as the day goes on, with the possibility of a tropical storm in summer, or a blizzard in winter. The intensity of the rain, and thunder, meanwhile is all dependent on the simulated front strength.
When mixed in with the new fog that’ll see misty mornings slowly clearing in the sunshine this should give a far greater feeling of variety as each day passes. What’s more, as a part of this weather upgrade Turbo is also looking at improving our current use of shaders to increase the feeling of seasonal change in PZ – giving it a subtle yet tangible feeling of it being either a warm and vibrant day of summer, or a pale and hazy day in winter. Alongside this Turbo intends to improve the SFX to reflect seasonal change better too – removing birdsong from winter, introducing snow crunch etc. When this ready, in the world beyond vehicles, we will also need to rebalance our farming system too in terms of the change in daily/seasonal rainfall – itself a fairly old system that could do with some TLC. This week’s bannister-less deathtrap from актёрище. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Oh, and check out the findings of the latest great loot survey from ShylokVakarian. Fanks!
[ 2018-03-15 17:16:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
Evenin’ all. Here’s the latest from the Knox Event.
CURRENT VEHICLES BETA
We have just released public vehicles build 39. It’s another fairly weighty changelist, but the highlight of it is that the many, varied and major FPS optimizations we discussed last weekhave arrived. We’d love to hear about any changes you notice in performance. Likewise, however, we will need to hear of any bugs this has introduced. We’ve eradicated most of the gremlins backstage (like checkerboard lighting updates, flickering UIs windows, invisible ground objects etc) but there may well be other curiosities that our in-house testers haven’t found. Please let us know in the build release thread. Something we are aware of is that in this version there’s more work to do with the UI. We’ve made significant optimizations by sacrificing UI FPS for the sake of the FPS of the overall game, which is clearly of a greater priority. On top of this, some of the windows may appear more transparent than usual. We’ll look to improve smoothness and responsiveness in future builds, but we hope any additional bugs or annoyances will pale compared to the significant FPS improvements. Elsewhere in the vehicles beta, meanwhile:
- In preparation for the full release of the vehicles we’ve also added some tutorial windows that appear when new players first boot the game up. If there are any salient details we’ve missed here then please let us know! We’ve also made it so that vehicles are automatically enabled in all games, unless deselected in Sandbox options.
- For MP we have raised the speed limit we previously imposed when map loading was far more of an issue. The default is now an in-game 80mph, although this can now also be played around with in your Server Options.
- Car spawn zones have been added to the small settlement south of Riverside. Various unclear aspects of in-game text and UI icons have been improved. Car damage at low speeds has been nerfed. Radio transmission ranges have been increased to cater for the extended map.
- In terms of fixed bugs, there are a few, but the biggest irritations hopefully salved include: miniature MP vehicle sizes gone, reversed textures and backwards writing on some vehicles fixed and the much-reported self-duplicating cars on servers addressed. Likewise various background memory leaks and the like have been knocked out of the build, and your FPS no longer holds as much sway over your steering.
BUILDS BEYOND VEHICLES
While the majority of the team work on the vehicles build – Stas (chat upgrade), Mark (animations) and Turbo (fog, snow and new climate/weather system) continue to work away in the background. Turbo tends to sit away from the main team (his speciality being over-arching systems that we can tie into the main game like his existing seasonal changes and radio systems) and he’s currently working on an improved dynamic weather system that he hopes will make his existing seasons feel more real, and give a greater sense of day-to-day variety. This will also mean that different weather effects will move over the map in real-time. Here, for example, is a debug thunderstorm moving over the south of the current map – between March Ridge and West Point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETaYRyFJbnE This all generated by a system of simulated cold and warm fronts of varying strengths. An in-game change from Warm to Cold, for example, will result in a day with rain in the morning getting heavier as the day goes on, with the possibility of a tropical storm in summer, or a blizzard in winter. The intensity of the rain, and thunder, meanwhile is all dependent on the simulated front strength.
When mixed in with the new fog that’ll see misty mornings slowly clearing in the sunshine this should give a far greater feeling of variety as each day passes. What’s more, as a part of this weather upgrade Turbo is also looking at improving our current use of shaders to increase the feeling of seasonal change in PZ – giving it a subtle yet tangible feeling of it being either a warm and vibrant day of summer, or a pale and hazy day in winter. Alongside this Turbo intends to improve the SFX to reflect seasonal change better too – removing birdsong from winter, introducing snow crunch etc. When this ready, in the world beyond vehicles, we will also need to rebalance our farming system too in terms of the change in daily/seasonal rainfall – itself a fairly old system that could do with some TLC. This week’s bannister-less deathtrap from актёрище. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Oh, and check out the findings of the latest great loot survey from ShylokVakarian. Fanks!
[ 2018-03-15 17:16:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
Performance Enhancements
Today we released public vehicles build 38, which is a general fix/polish update while the more structural optimization work detailed below has been running in parallel. You can find the changelist here. Items of note include an improvement to vehicles clipping over characters and over each other – although to eradicate this completely will require structural work on a depth buffer, and more importantly the rewritten 3D model system that’s a part of future animation builds. This said, this build should at least see a marked improvement.
Other bugs fixed that’ve proved an irritation to testers include far more satisfying zed/vehicle collisions in MP, key loss lessening, a limitation on the threat of invisible trees and the removal of in-car 3D sound to make the sounds less disorientating.
Despite a lot of work and improvement over recent builds, for a little while we hadn’t been satisfied with the performance in our vehicles beta. It was workable, and clear that testers are having a lot of fun with it, but not something we felt was good enough. As such over the past couple of weeks we’ve been working on what we feel are rather special and significant optimizations – basically going through every area of the game code and shaving off every millisecond we could, and the results have been quite profound. On our internal test PCs (fairly good set-ups) it’s now possible to obtain a solid 60fps when zoomed out at almost every point in the map, save for the mall and downtown West Point – which regardless are themselves a lot more playable now. The following video is shot in 1920×1080 and shows the improved performance we’re seeing on standard settings. Note the FPS read out in the top left. We thought about editing together pieces from different tests, however felt that cutting between them may look like sneaky editing, so have opted to use 5 minutes of uninterrupted recorded footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ9W5gpuErM This video is recorded in 3800×1600 and shows the sort of performance you could expect on much higher resolutions. Hopefully not that much different from 4k framerates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJLHXqNmuk4 Additionally, as you may be able to tell from the videos, we have also added support for uncapping the FPS into the game options, now the FPS has improved significantly to make use of it. Hopefully this will make those with high refresh-rate monitors happy. Internally we have hit 300+ fps when zoomed in in low density areas of the map with FPS uncapped, which is pretty nice and silky on a 144hz G-Sync monitor! We had hoped this optimization build would have been ready to release today, but when doing such deep and all-encompassing optimization that touches on many areas of the game, there are always new unintended side effects and new bugs introduced from changing the code to make it faster. Aspects of the UI suddenly become unhinged by the frame-rate, lighting refreshes go wonky etc. As such we decided to release the existing changelist of Vehicles Beta 38 and leave this until next week, when there’s a few less gremlins in the system. We hope this will then be the candidate for moving vehicles into our established IWBUMS beta as we step up plans for animations etc.
As mentioned previously, alongside the animation systems that Bitbaboon Mark is prepping, we have a few other new systems to drop into testing once vehicles are out of the way. The first is Stas’ new chat window and functions for MP, and the second, meanwhile, is the new snog/fog that will come hand-in-hand with a general improvement/deepening of how weather works in-game. This all comes from Turbo, once a modder and now a valued contributor to PZ, who generally sits aside from the main team cooking up crazy/intricate concoctions that can then be passed on into the main game. We should have a full time-lapse next week, although existing fog vids live here, but for now you can see how it all works on Turbo’s debugger. Right now we only have a single daily temperature, precipitation values etc, but now an extra layer on top of the existing climate system will have more varied weather/temperature change throughout the day – and also more realistic weather systems over multiple days. So a quick example, here you can see a foggy day – in which the sunlight is a white line. Here you can see the light blue fog line building up in the morning, just before the sun rises, after which the sun has rises and the in-game fog starts to fade away.
Meanwhile over longer periods, rather than it feeling rather random, precipitation will be clustered so you can have lots of days without rain and then a longer period of days with a lot of rain/snow.
As you can see from the following picture, the climate modelling goes much deeper than that though, tying temperature, wind, and other factors together into a pretty deep system worthy of Project Zomboid:
This week’s zed race from JoeScore. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!
[ 2018-03-08 18:04:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
Ello’ Zomboids and Zombettes. Some cool stuff to talk about this week!
CURRENT VEHICLES BETA
Today we released public vehicles build 38, which is a general fix/polish update while the more structural optimization work detailed below has been running in parallel. You can find the changelist here. Items of note include an improvement to vehicles clipping over characters and over each other – although to eradicate this completely will require structural work on a depth buffer, and more importantly the rewritten 3D model system that’s a part of future animation builds. This said, this build should at least see a marked improvement.
Other bugs fixed that’ve proved an irritation to testers include far more satisfying zed/vehicle collisions in MP, key loss lessening, a limitation on the threat of invisible trees and the removal of in-car 3D sound to make the sounds less disorientating.
NEXT VEHICLES BUILD
Despite a lot of work and improvement over recent builds, for a little while we hadn’t been satisfied with the performance in our vehicles beta. It was workable, and clear that testers are having a lot of fun with it, but not something we felt was good enough. As such over the past couple of weeks we’ve been working on what we feel are rather special and significant optimizations – basically going through every area of the game code and shaving off every millisecond we could, and the results have been quite profound. On our internal test PCs (fairly good set-ups) it’s now possible to obtain a solid 60fps when zoomed out at almost every point in the map, save for the mall and downtown West Point – which regardless are themselves a lot more playable now. The following video is shot in 1920×1080 and shows the improved performance we’re seeing on standard settings. Note the FPS read out in the top left. We thought about editing together pieces from different tests, however felt that cutting between them may look like sneaky editing, so have opted to use 5 minutes of uninterrupted recorded footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ9W5gpuErM This video is recorded in 3800×1600 and shows the sort of performance you could expect on much higher resolutions. Hopefully not that much different from 4k framerates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJLHXqNmuk4 Additionally, as you may be able to tell from the videos, we have also added support for uncapping the FPS into the game options, now the FPS has improved significantly to make use of it. Hopefully this will make those with high refresh-rate monitors happy. Internally we have hit 300+ fps when zoomed in in low density areas of the map with FPS uncapped, which is pretty nice and silky on a 144hz G-Sync monitor! We had hoped this optimization build would have been ready to release today, but when doing such deep and all-encompassing optimization that touches on many areas of the game, there are always new unintended side effects and new bugs introduced from changing the code to make it faster. Aspects of the UI suddenly become unhinged by the frame-rate, lighting refreshes go wonky etc. As such we decided to release the existing changelist of Vehicles Beta 38 and leave this until next week, when there’s a few less gremlins in the system. We hope this will then be the candidate for moving vehicles into our established IWBUMS beta as we step up plans for animations etc.
BUILDS BEYOND VEHICLES
As mentioned previously, alongside the animation systems that Bitbaboon Mark is prepping, we have a few other new systems to drop into testing once vehicles are out of the way. The first is Stas’ new chat window and functions for MP, and the second, meanwhile, is the new snog/fog that will come hand-in-hand with a general improvement/deepening of how weather works in-game. This all comes from Turbo, once a modder and now a valued contributor to PZ, who generally sits aside from the main team cooking up crazy/intricate concoctions that can then be passed on into the main game. We should have a full time-lapse next week, although existing fog vids live here, but for now you can see how it all works on Turbo’s debugger. Right now we only have a single daily temperature, precipitation values etc, but now an extra layer on top of the existing climate system will have more varied weather/temperature change throughout the day – and also more realistic weather systems over multiple days. So a quick example, here you can see a foggy day – in which the sunlight is a white line. Here you can see the light blue fog line building up in the morning, just before the sun rises, after which the sun has rises and the in-game fog starts to fade away.
Meanwhile over longer periods, rather than it feeling rather random, precipitation will be clustered so you can have lots of days without rain and then a longer period of days with a lot of rain/snow.
As you can see from the following picture, the climate modelling goes much deeper than that though, tying temperature, wind, and other factors together into a pretty deep system worthy of Project Zomboid:
This week’s zed race from JoeScore. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!
[ 2018-03-08 18:04:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
SirenZ
We’ve just released Vehicles Build 37 – and it’s got quite a long changelist given as a case of the judders held back last Thursday’s release. You can see the full version details, and find details on how to join the beta, in this thread. Vehicles are easily the biggest technology upgrade that PZ has had since its inception – and Build 37 builds on work already complete by including the MP lag work we mentioned last week directed by our Technical Director friend BitBaboon Steve, but now also has had a lot of improvements to our map/chunk streaming both online and off, and a big change in how our game handle’s Java’s jolt-inducing ‘garbage collection’. To this end aspects of it remain fairly experimental, in that they work nicely behind closed doors but require wider testing – which is where you guys and your bug/performance/gameplay reports come in. We’ve also made some changes to how the frame compensation is handled, and have fixed issues with the framerate smoothing which resulted in time slowing down during gameplay, which led to occasional uneven gameplay and treacley movement in a few recent builds. Instead the game may occasionally hitch for a frame, whereas before it might drag the framerate and game speed down for a second or more. This far more mild hitch is something we can tackle later on, in general the smoothness of gameplay should more than make up for it. Beyond this other highlights of the build follow, some which we mentioned last week – others have been added to the version as the week goes on.
We have the majority of the team working on finalising vehicles at the moment (specifically RJ, Yuri and EP) but in the background there’s clearly Bitbaboon Mark prepping anims for the team to switch over onto once the vehicles dust settles, alongside various other members of the team working on the framework of future map content. Two other features currently in the oven for a build beyond vehicles, meanwhile are GA Stas working on his chat window – and Turbo’s revamped fog/snow weather progression that we hope to have new timelapse vids/details on next week. This week’s endangered police vehicle from [TOD]malex97145. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. In other news check out the new RP Season over on New Dawn. Fanks!
[ 2018-03-01 22:22:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all. Here’s the current goings-on over in Zomboid Towers.
CURRENT VEHICLES BETA:
We’ve just released Vehicles Build 37 – and it’s got quite a long changelist given as a case of the judders held back last Thursday’s release. You can see the full version details, and find details on how to join the beta, in this thread. Vehicles are easily the biggest technology upgrade that PZ has had since its inception – and Build 37 builds on work already complete by including the MP lag work we mentioned last week directed by our Technical Director friend BitBaboon Steve, but now also has had a lot of improvements to our map/chunk streaming both online and off, and a big change in how our game handle’s Java’s jolt-inducing ‘garbage collection’. To this end aspects of it remain fairly experimental, in that they work nicely behind closed doors but require wider testing – which is where you guys and your bug/performance/gameplay reports come in. We’ve also made some changes to how the frame compensation is handled, and have fixed issues with the framerate smoothing which resulted in time slowing down during gameplay, which led to occasional uneven gameplay and treacley movement in a few recent builds. Instead the game may occasionally hitch for a frame, whereas before it might drag the framerate and game speed down for a second or more. This far more mild hitch is something we can tackle later on, in general the smoothness of gameplay should more than make up for it. Beyond this other highlights of the build follow, some which we mentioned last week – others have been added to the version as the week goes on.
- Mash’s map expansion that fills in many of the gaps between our major towns and zombie troublespots – which will hopefully allow for vehicle exploration and more out-of-town hideaways and safehouses. Here’s that map showing the general areas you’ll be able to find new stuff.]
- Item and bag loss bug tracked down and patched, that will come as a welcome relief to our testers. This comes alongside a multitude of fixes to the various vehicle parts, errors in the UI screens for the various new vehicles, issues that arose when a co-op friend was in your vehicle and switching seats or trying to sound the horn and bugs that arose when zeds attack your car.
- For testing and MP admin purposes – an admin can now spawn keys, gas and repair cars. [In a quick side community requested side-project Tim also allowed for day length in sandbox to allow all hours up to 24.]
- New switch-seat keybind (Z) to allow you to move around inside the car easier (and choose which door to exit from if there’s a horde pawing at your wing mirror), a ‘V’ keybind to hide/show the radial menu and other interface improvements/fixes.
- Increased spawn chances for tire pumps, barbed wire, sandbags and milk. XP tweaks for the Mechanic Skill. Nerfed tire pressure impact on speed. Fixed up interactions when you’re looting piles of crates – which previously could be a pita – and some player-requested improvements to the composting system. Lots of other tweaks and fixes,
FUTURE VERSIONS
We have the majority of the team working on finalising vehicles at the moment (specifically RJ, Yuri and EP) but in the background there’s clearly Bitbaboon Mark prepping anims for the team to switch over onto once the vehicles dust settles, alongside various other members of the team working on the framework of future map content. Two other features currently in the oven for a build beyond vehicles, meanwhile are GA Stas working on his chat window – and Turbo’s revamped fog/snow weather progression that we hope to have new timelapse vids/details on next week. This week’s endangered police vehicle from [TOD]malex97145. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. In other news check out the new RP Season over on New Dawn. Fanks!
[ 2018-03-01 22:22:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hunt for the Wilderdoid
[ 2018-02-22 21:41:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all. Here’s the news on what’s happening with current/forthcoming builds from Zomboid HQ.
We’ve got public Vehicles beta 37 just about ready to drop – it includes:
- Work that stems from our friendly Technical Director favourite uncle Bitbaboon Steve on our netcode – intended to address MP lag via the discovery of elements of vehicle data clogging up the pipes, and the way that server saves work. We’ve also put some extra work into being more strict with what the game considers as physics objects, which should cut down on memory and processing. (Internally we’re seeing some higher FPS read-outs from built up areas like West Point, and we’d be very interested to hear if this is replicated on beta tester set-ups come release).
- New map areas filling in countryside, farms and smaller settlements between West Point and Riverside, and March Ridge and Rosewood . This includes new town zones and foraging zones, especially around Riverside – alongside missing map elements in that town, and general decoration map-wide. A few secret areas will be hiding in amongst it all too.
- In terms of gameplay – tire pressure’s impact on speed has been nerfed significantly, while we’ve also polished the Mechanic UI to give clearer indications of success/failure via visuals and SFX. A fair amount of irritation caused by dual keybindings (on foot vs. in vehicle key functions) will also be cleared up.
- Connall, fresh from zoning the new map, is now coming back to the ‘Small But Important’ Community Request thread – while elsewhere the general bug blitz continues when it comes to vehicle textures, item transfer speeds, crawlers damaging vehicles and zombies attacking the relevant part of the car where you’re visible to them (or were last visible to them) as opposed to banging on the driver door. The annoying issue of occasional item loss has also been tracked down and, hopefully, consigned to oblivion.
- New vehicle SFX for vans and higher performance vehicles are part of the new build. Although, with this said, these still aren’t perfect – so we have found someone who works at a friend’s game studio who’s created a procedural engine sound system – which means we can obtain custom engine loops for different car types to feed into Bitbaboon Steve’s new code. This means that we no longer have to dredge internet sound banks, or consider making actual vehicle recordings ourselves – and likewise will make the process easier when adding new vehicles, and hopefully noisier industrial/military vehicles, later on down the line.
[ 2018-02-22 21:41:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Pump it up
[ 2018-02-08 22:03:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
Greetings all. We released public beta Vehicle Build 35 last Friday, the top-line of which was the introduction of two new cars – the jeep-esque Dash Ranger and the more luxurious Mercia Lang 400. Build 35 also introduced better vehicle variety/colour spawns, better interaction with the new car overlays on the Mechanic skill UI, better gamepad control and lots of balance/polish. If you want to help out with MP testing then the Spiffospace server is a good place to hang out.
Vehicle build 35.3 also introduced Bitbaboon Steve’s new engine/exhaust sound system, which means that driving around is now far less of an irritant on the ears. Please note, however, that currently the truck engine noises are placed on all vehicles.
Now we have the engine noise system in-game it’s easy to get new variants in-game, but sourcing the relevant sounds to feed into it is a little trickier – not least due to our isometric perspective (away from the internal noises of the engine itself) and the fact that we feature ‘normal’ cars rather than the performance vehicles that are in so many other games. We have a few irons in the fire with this, however, and should have more fitting sounds for standard cars in the next few builds.
Here’s a quick video of what’s ‘latest’ in the build right now – alongside the tire pump that’ll be going into Build 36. [The new car’s hood/bonnet might still be a little pinched, we will likely improve on this.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbvD3H-9gQ4
Something else that came up after the release of Build 35 was the decision to hold back a lot of our work on the item sync optimization until a later version – as it was clear that the gremlins it was going to keep on throwing up were now in danger of delaying a public Vehicles release. As such this has been reverted to the system we have in the current public build, which came at the cost of the reintroduction of several MP sync bugs – half of which have now been hotfixed, with more to follow when we release Vehicles beta 36 in the coming days.
Vehicles beta 36 will largely comprise of polish and bug fixes destined to make our community testers life a little better – with issues addressing safehouses, damaged vehicle textures, Muffler degradation, aforementioned residual sync oddities, odd night-time lighting on vehicles and various other stuff.
Under the hood, meanwhile, it also comes with a networking optimization that should help on chunk-loading when you’re driving at speed – that of compressing info on identical items are now compressed to a single item. So, especially on a modded server, your connection will take less of a beating when it’s being informed of the thousands of lovingly stored nails in containers up ahead. It should hopefully speed things up, and also make for less sync bugs appearing in general. Connall, meanwhile, will hopefully have finished zoning the new parts of Mash’s map for the build next week.
In team news, meanwhile, the PZ workforce (when taking into account our friends at General Arcade currently working on vehicles and new chat functions, and the guys at BitBaboon working on optimization and the new animation system) has doubled in the past year – and it was clear that we needed a few more production people backstage to suit this.
As such we’d like to welcome Sasha to the team – who’ll be working with Jake as a fresh layer of production and QA before our beta builds go live, and helping to filter out show-stoppers before they’re dropped onto our community testers. We’d also like to give a hearty ‘hello’ to General Arcade’s Konstantin to the ‘open task’ sheet – who will be working with Stas and Yuri in terms of QA on their various aspects of Zomboid work.
This week’s house of praise from ssjr66888. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!
[ 2018-02-08 22:03:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
Test Track
We just released Vehicle Build 34 – a build primarily comprised of a multitude of fixes and general tidy-up work around the issues bug-harvested from the public Spiffospace test server. The test server itself has been updated, so if you fancy helping us chase down some bugs then please do join in. There will still be some irregularities on there so be prepared (though testers seem to be having a lot of fun) but overall we’ve pruned back a lot of annoyances in this new build that should bring remaining big issues into a sharper focus. Also a part of 34 is the updated Mechanics UI visualisation provided by Mash – which should bring a bit more clarity to what’s wrong with your car, or if you don’t have a high enough Mechanics skill then at least show you which area the problem can be found in. There’s one for each primary vehicle class – and seen below are the van and station wagon.
On top of the Vehicles 34 big heap of fixes, we also released 33.4 last Friday. This gave server admins more powers when it comes to organising regular loot respawns, improved the range of car conditions you’ll find on the streets of our towns and also boosted spawn rates for certain hard-to-find loot reported by the community. Another longstanding issue with vehicles are that the motor sounds have needed a great deal of improvement – we blogged about our first foray into this a while back, but after that it became clear that Bitbaboon Steve’s longstanding experience in this field could create a far better template and system code-side for when additional vehicles are brought on-board and require sound balance. This system is now in place, and this video shows an initial mix of an idle car, a slow-moving car and a fast-moving car. This isn’t final, however, as we feel it needs more deep exhaust noises instead of the primary engine sound to make it feel more realistic and less abrasive to listen to for long periods. This will also suit the isometric viewpoint of the game and fit the game’s setting a little better – and likewise we know the car crash noise needs some love. It’s good enough to show y’all though, as it shows the rudiments of the underlying system are working pretty well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GDhwsNEk08 Meanwhile this build’s map expansion (filling in the gaps inside the primary ‘road loop’ around our major settlements for cars to venture into and search for rural safehouses) is now complete in the editor – and now handed over to Connall for the zoning of town areas, foraging areas etc. It will be added into the vehicle build once Connall has finished this dark zone magic.
Bitbaboon Mark continues to work through the sorts of bugs shown in the video from last week– primarily the one from the end of the vid in which states now initialise much more reliably but then get stuck and don’t progress – unless hit with a baseball bat of course. Other main ‘future build’ work in the pipeline is General Arcade’s Stas who has spent the past month or so bringing our MP chat functions into order, and is now working on an all-singing and all-dancing new communications window. You can see Stas’ latest video of this here – with the word of warning that clearly the visuals are due some polish as we go along. The levels of chat this allows will be customisable depending on the way you like to play (local rather than direct messaging on RP servers etc) but the (highly work in progress!) video should give an idea of where we’re going in terms of window scaling, local chat, whispers, global chat and the like – with Stas’ future work covering PZ-specific gameplay aspects like safehouse, radio and faction chat. This week’s road horde from 84th Locklear. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!
[ 2018-01-25 17:25:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
How do everyone. Hope this finds you well and non-fevered.
VEHICLES BETA
We just released Vehicle Build 34 – a build primarily comprised of a multitude of fixes and general tidy-up work around the issues bug-harvested from the public Spiffospace test server. The test server itself has been updated, so if you fancy helping us chase down some bugs then please do join in. There will still be some irregularities on there so be prepared (though testers seem to be having a lot of fun) but overall we’ve pruned back a lot of annoyances in this new build that should bring remaining big issues into a sharper focus. Also a part of 34 is the updated Mechanics UI visualisation provided by Mash – which should bring a bit more clarity to what’s wrong with your car, or if you don’t have a high enough Mechanics skill then at least show you which area the problem can be found in. There’s one for each primary vehicle class – and seen below are the van and station wagon.
On top of the Vehicles 34 big heap of fixes, we also released 33.4 last Friday. This gave server admins more powers when it comes to organising regular loot respawns, improved the range of car conditions you’ll find on the streets of our towns and also boosted spawn rates for certain hard-to-find loot reported by the community. Another longstanding issue with vehicles are that the motor sounds have needed a great deal of improvement – we blogged about our first foray into this a while back, but after that it became clear that Bitbaboon Steve’s longstanding experience in this field could create a far better template and system code-side for when additional vehicles are brought on-board and require sound balance. This system is now in place, and this video shows an initial mix of an idle car, a slow-moving car and a fast-moving car. This isn’t final, however, as we feel it needs more deep exhaust noises instead of the primary engine sound to make it feel more realistic and less abrasive to listen to for long periods. This will also suit the isometric viewpoint of the game and fit the game’s setting a little better – and likewise we know the car crash noise needs some love. It’s good enough to show y’all though, as it shows the rudiments of the underlying system are working pretty well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GDhwsNEk08 Meanwhile this build’s map expansion (filling in the gaps inside the primary ‘road loop’ around our major settlements for cars to venture into and search for rural safehouses) is now complete in the editor – and now handed over to Connall for the zoning of town areas, foraging areas etc. It will be added into the vehicle build once Connall has finished this dark zone magic.
FUTURE BUILDS
Bitbaboon Mark continues to work through the sorts of bugs shown in the video from last week– primarily the one from the end of the vid in which states now initialise much more reliably but then get stuck and don’t progress – unless hit with a baseball bat of course. Other main ‘future build’ work in the pipeline is General Arcade’s Stas who has spent the past month or so bringing our MP chat functions into order, and is now working on an all-singing and all-dancing new communications window. You can see Stas’ latest video of this here – with the word of warning that clearly the visuals are due some polish as we go along. The levels of chat this allows will be customisable depending on the way you like to play (local rather than direct messaging on RP servers etc) but the (highly work in progress!) video should give an idea of where we’re going in terms of window scaling, local chat, whispers, global chat and the like – with Stas’ future work covering PZ-specific gameplay aspects like safehouse, radio and faction chat. This week’s road horde from 84th Locklear. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!
[ 2018-01-25 17:25:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
Maul Rats
[ 2018-01-18 21:03:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Happy Thursday one and all.
VEHICLES BUILD
Getting the Spiffospace Test Server up last week has proved really fruitful in terms of both showing us what’s not readily explicable to players about vehicles in the gameplay, and in terms of revealing the MP-related issues that vehicles dev is now turning a little more towards. If you want to help us out with the community bug hunt you can find the server in-game, and report findings here.
Overall vehicles seem to bring a fresh dynamic to the MP experience (should people choose to enable them) as you’re not stuck trying to find your friends on foot, or dependent on lucking out with a choice bag. It’s now a race for a working car to find the rare items and get out of town.
In terms of the community bug harvest, meanwhile, Spiffospace has revealed a seg fault in our PZBullet physics, and let us address most of the item sync issues. There’s still a bunch of stuff to fix up, and some lag to address, but Yuri and RJ’s work towards general server stability in Vehicle Builds 32 and 33 has certainly improved things over the week gone by.
Other issues addressed in these builds include XP changes (with more to come), physics collisions at highest speeds not registering, the erosion system’s saplings no longer causing damage, fire crashes fixed and the spammy game console getting a clear-out.
We’ve also just released 33.1, that sees Connall fiddling around with elements of loot spawn to boost appearances of some items in-game (antibiotics, canning apparatus etc), and RJ introducing some new RNG to give more reliable probability calculations and the like while crafting or dabbling in the Mechanics skill.
Aspects of the vehicles build also being worked on right now (omitting improved fog/snow as irl stuff might knock that into the next version, we’ll see) include:
- Mash is finishing off her countryside map additions and ‘map gap filling’ work. These will generally be found south of Rosewood, the current wildlands between Rosewood and Riverside, along the banks of the Ohio river East and West of Riverside – and a smidge of land close to West Point. This should be handed over to Connall for zoning quite soon, at which point she can turn her attention to the different Mechanics Skill car overlay images for the various different car types we have.
- As discussed last week Bitbaboon Steve has taken over on the new vehicle sounds due to his wealth of experience. When he’s done he’ll be looking into potential memory leaks and garbage collection issues that have been reported on the forums, and on the Spiffospace server.
- Meanwhile: EP continues with his zombie navmesh experiments in terms of zed pathfinding and following that’s intended to reduce performance snarl-ups in high density undead areas.
[ 2018-01-18 21:03:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Spiffospaced
We’ve reached a point at which we need a place for MP vehicles testers to hang out, drive cars, bash zombies and report bugs. With that in mind, then, the Spiffospace server has been revived – and is accessible from the vehicles beta server list. Please post feedback in the server thread, and bugs in the tracker. There will almost certainly be crashes and lag issues that we’ll need to sort over the coming weeks, so some patience is required, but initial testers are reporting that they’re having a lot of fun. We’ll keep the server up and running as long as possible, and avoid resets as much as we can, and a little further down the line this is the server that’ll be used for Community Megatests too. We’re currently on Vehicles Build 31.2 and 31.3 will follow tomorrow – loot sync issues have improved in these builds, but Yuri has also just committed a fix for loot that could be lost/duplicated when two players were in the same inventory space at the same time. (We’ll be resetting the Spiffospace server once this released, with some player-requested new time settings etc too.) In terms of the vehicles build itself RJ is now back and working on bugs and XP balance, while resident artist Mash is working on a more final version of the Mechanics Skill vehicle UI overlay. Another issue we’re dealing with is coming up with a way to prevent players locking their own vehicle keys in the trunk – which, while providing some hilarious anecdotes from testers, probably isn’t the optimum situation.
Our optimization guru Bitbaboon Steve recently revealed that he has a bunch of experience in working with vehicle noises over the years. He’s done sound work on vehicles for big games by folks like Atari, Ubisoft and Disney so it seemed wise to pass the audio baton over to him. The current car sounds have been crappy for too long in the vehicles beta, and this should get them done well and efficiently. “Right now I’m adding support to the audio code to allow me to pitch shift samples” explained Steve when we nudged him. “This will mean that we can take four steady samples from the vehicle idling through to it going fast – and then let me set the volume / pitch so there’s a seamless blend through the whole RPM range.”
“This will then be hooked up directly to the vehicle simulation to provide a basic vehicle sound. Once it’s complete I’ll add an additional on/off ‘load’ so the vehicles sound different when accelerating and stressing the engine when compared to players easing off the accelerator. After this I’ll then find different sound sets to use for the different varieties of car – sports, truck etc.”
Our goal is to have anims in a state that’s ready for us to jump straight into once vehicles are wrapped. Right now, in the unified anims build that’ll be used as a base for the releases beyond vehicles, Bitbaboon Mark has fixed up mesh rendering with new system – so we can now see anim models alongside vehicles and judge how they size up against each other. [Screenshot taken before the wheels bug had been worked out though!]
Next up he’s adding some extra anim debug info that’ll let him display anim state info about each character in the world – which will help Animator Martin and himself track down exactly when the system bugs out / gets stuck. AnimZed, the tool that will allow us/modders to edit anim states live to the game is doing its job fine but still needs some functionality issues ironed out – after which the sanity/data pass that we mentioned in previous blogs can get going.
Performance in the vehicles build is currently pretty okay, apart from when the wider sound radius of moving vehicles attracts the attention of a whole bunch of zeds – which then knocks into FPS repercussions. To address this, then, EP is experimenting with the implementation of a C++ navigation mesh to find paths to replace the Java version we currently have – which will both remove some memory from the heap, and also dispense with the ‘thinking time’ of zombies who’ve lost their way far more quickly than our current set-up.
[ 2018-01-11 21:21:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Ello all. Hope you’re well.
Vehicles Spiffospace Test Server
We’ve reached a point at which we need a place for MP vehicles testers to hang out, drive cars, bash zombies and report bugs. With that in mind, then, the Spiffospace server has been revived – and is accessible from the vehicles beta server list. Please post feedback in the server thread, and bugs in the tracker. There will almost certainly be crashes and lag issues that we’ll need to sort over the coming weeks, so some patience is required, but initial testers are reporting that they’re having a lot of fun. We’ll keep the server up and running as long as possible, and avoid resets as much as we can, and a little further down the line this is the server that’ll be used for Community Megatests too. We’re currently on Vehicles Build 31.2 and 31.3 will follow tomorrow – loot sync issues have improved in these builds, but Yuri has also just committed a fix for loot that could be lost/duplicated when two players were in the same inventory space at the same time. (We’ll be resetting the Spiffospace server once this released, with some player-requested new time settings etc too.) In terms of the vehicles build itself RJ is now back and working on bugs and XP balance, while resident artist Mash is working on a more final version of the Mechanics Skill vehicle UI overlay. Another issue we’re dealing with is coming up with a way to prevent players locking their own vehicle keys in the trunk – which, while providing some hilarious anecdotes from testers, probably isn’t the optimum situation.
Vehicle SFX
Our optimization guru Bitbaboon Steve recently revealed that he has a bunch of experience in working with vehicle noises over the years. He’s done sound work on vehicles for big games by folks like Atari, Ubisoft and Disney so it seemed wise to pass the audio baton over to him. The current car sounds have been crappy for too long in the vehicles beta, and this should get them done well and efficiently. “Right now I’m adding support to the audio code to allow me to pitch shift samples” explained Steve when we nudged him. “This will mean that we can take four steady samples from the vehicle idling through to it going fast – and then let me set the volume / pitch so there’s a seamless blend through the whole RPM range.”
“This will then be hooked up directly to the vehicle simulation to provide a basic vehicle sound. Once it’s complete I’ll add an additional on/off ‘load’ so the vehicles sound different when accelerating and stressing the engine when compared to players easing off the accelerator. After this I’ll then find different sound sets to use for the different varieties of car – sports, truck etc.”
Anims
Our goal is to have anims in a state that’s ready for us to jump straight into once vehicles are wrapped. Right now, in the unified anims build that’ll be used as a base for the releases beyond vehicles, Bitbaboon Mark has fixed up mesh rendering with new system – so we can now see anim models alongside vehicles and judge how they size up against each other. [Screenshot taken before the wheels bug had been worked out though!]
Next up he’s adding some extra anim debug info that’ll let him display anim state info about each character in the world – which will help Animator Martin and himself track down exactly when the system bugs out / gets stuck. AnimZed, the tool that will allow us/modders to edit anim states live to the game is doing its job fine but still needs some functionality issues ironed out – after which the sanity/data pass that we mentioned in previous blogs can get going.
Zed pathfinding
Performance in the vehicles build is currently pretty okay, apart from when the wider sound radius of moving vehicles attracts the attention of a whole bunch of zeds – which then knocks into FPS repercussions. To address this, then, EP is experimenting with the implementation of a C++ navigation mesh to find paths to replace the Java version we currently have – which will both remove some memory from the heap, and also dispense with the ‘thinking time’ of zombies who’ve lost their way far more quickly than our current set-up.
Other stuff
- Zomboid won’t have Steam achievements for a while yet, and so PZ modding hero Nolan has stepped in to provide for all those who love the sweet caress of a cheevo notification. Check it out, and make suggestions, here.
- RingoD has written a guide for map-makers with some simple steps as to how to update maps to handle the roof occlusion system.
- Our fair RingoD has also provided some guidelines for mappers who want to add car spawn zones to maps in preparation for the release of the vehicles build which can be found here.
[ 2018-01-11 21:21:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Back in Bleak
[ 2018-01-04 20:26:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, cogs and gears are back whirring after the Christmas and New Year break – so we thought we’d do a quick round-robin of the primary work being done at the moment for the Vehicles build, and the next public builds that follow it.
- In terms of the vehicles build itself we just released a fix for the roof-rendering bug that had crept back into recent versions, and also some work from Yuri that will hopefully improve some of the MP sync issues that still remain. We intend to release Vehicles 32 next week, which will primarily focus on balance and bugs – while Yuri is also looking at the sound issues in MP, trees losing collision at high speeds etc. (Once it’s clear that the more glaring MP issues have been knocked out the build then we’ll also be shifting the test build into the traditional IWBUMS beta slot.)
- Something that we haven’t mentioned previously is that since he finished his jwjgl3 work (stability/operational improvements due for integration after vehicles are out) we’ve had Stas from General Arcade working on an improved MP chat window. The basic aim will be to give players a more familiar, intuitive and functional chat experience that’s expected from modern games and… looks a lot nicer, and doesn’t get into trouble when it snows. We intend to have optional tabs that are defined through Server Admin options for radios, safehouse, faction etc. and are also building on the existing (unreleased) General Arcade work on Discord implementation. It won’t be part of the vehicles build, but can be expected in the next one or two builds beyond it. Our thanks to Rathlord and EG for their help with the research and planning doc on this.
- Mash continues to work on fleshing out the map – and making the farmland, river banks and country tracks in the ‘loop’ north from Rosewood and up to Riverside, then over to West Point and back down round through Muldraugh feel more real and lived-in. If we encourage players outside of towns with the vehicles, then we’d like those exploring the spaces between our major hubs to find a little less scrubland on their travels.
- Bitbaboon Steve is back to do some more optimization work alongside us this week, while his colleague Mark down under is fixing up kinks in the unified animation build so that everything is in working order when the wider team’s primary focus turns away from vehicles. His immediate task is the one from the vid we showed in the blog before Christmas – that of a math issue from the model import changes that’s made cars invisible. He has a unified math wrapper to put around the whole shebang now, after which the focus will turn to getting the AnimZed tools to Animator Martin and the wider team and then checking through all the data to make sure it looks right when played out in-game. All the while he’ll also be taking note of performance issues as/when they appear and the best way for the game to handle them.
- Also as mentioned before Christmas: optimization of zombie cognition, path finding and path following will be our next focus as we seek to reduce the impact of the widened net of zombie attraction that our noisy/speedy vehicles now provide. With this in mind, at the same time as Yuri considering a new ‘walkaroundbuilding’ state mentioned before Xmas, EasyPickins is also experimenting with a new general pathfinding library that uses a navigation mesh to find paths that could save on memory and optimize the current set-up significantly.
- In more general news that doesn’t befit an entire bullet point on its own: Turbo is working towards getting his fog/snow into an upcoming vehicles build, Connall is working on a way to allow modders to easily add settings for their mods in the Options menu and ChrisW is looking into visual issues on tiles where players are building/destroying stuff.
[ 2018-01-04 20:26:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Slay Bells Ringing
[ 2017-12-21 17:06:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
Merry Christmas survivors, joy to the world and all that business. With opening sentence festiveness over then, let’s see where we’re at with a few things.
VEHICLES BUILD 31
Vehicles Build 31 is out now, and is primarily one of bug-fixing – with corrections, balancing and optimizations being the primary focus as work towards pushing vehicles toward stability and their public release.
We’ve still got some work to do with remaining MP sync issues, which Yuri is currently addressing, and there’s an annoying rooftop rendering regression bug to address still – but general issues covered in this latest public test build include: disappearing skill books, lock syncs, giganto cars on 1x tiles, everlasting street lights and various issues related to vehicle loot.
In Build 30 zombies were also given the ability to set off house alarms when swarming a house and breaking windows – but we’ve turned this off until we’ve looked ‘zombie awareness’ optimization in the new year. People did seem to be enjoying the added chaos to the first few hours of the game, however, so it’s been made available as a sandbox option.
ZED OPTIMIZATION
The combination of BitBaboon Steve’s map streaming smoothening and ChrisW’s work with the non-rendering unseen tiles has resulted in a far more playable games when it comes to the vehicle build – with the biggest strain on performance now being the zombies themselves.
In towns and densely populated scenarios the combination of players covering large distances more quickly and their vehicles having wide radius of zombie attraction means that more zombies are being stirred up than ever before.
Yuri, then, has been investigating the best ways to optimize their heightened enervation – to give us some wiggle room when it comes to difficulty and zed population without sacrificing FPS. He’s even done some graphs like this or that seen below:
Right now zombies will ‘walk towards’ sounds they hear in a straight line, until they hit a fence, wall or building. At this point they enter a more costly ‘PathFindState’ that will direct them towards the player, which in all honesty isn’t very zombie-like in any case. As the above graph shows, with hundreds of zombies responding to car sounds at long range this is causing major lag in areas like West Point.
To improve this over Christmas Yuri will be creating a ‘WalkAroundBuildingState’ which will be used for any zombies outside of close range of the player (off-screen to a SP player). This will be a simplified version of the traditional zed pathfinding that funnels them along a building’s wall in a direction that brings them closest to the player, going back into ‘walk toward’ when they have circled the building.
As such zombies will be able to navigate past buildings without dragging processor power, while still displaying suitable dumb zombie behaviours to MP onlookers, or the player themselves if they are watching a horde following a distraction or a house alarm.
ANIMS
As of the public release of the vehicles build we’ll have the full animation system lying dormant in the released code, waiting to be turned on bit-by-bit in the test versions that follow.
Right now it’s all behaving better than expected – but has a sweep of bug-fixes required that’ve either appeared during the grand unification process and the introduction of Bitbaboon Mark’s tool-based ‘AnimZed’ editing and implementation.
As you can see in this vid, for example, for some reason vehicles (despite being drivable and tinkerable) aren’t visible – and elsewhere the player character turns into a squiggly nightmare when climbing through windows, and can often snap a full 360 which looks decidedly strange.
Once these kinks are ironed out Mark will be moving onto optimizing these processes (the focus has been on getting stuff working, with the tightening of loose nuts and bolts to come later) while Martin can concentrate on improving visuals – and maybe have a model for a trouser-wearing male that doesn’t look quite so… tight-fit and 1980s.
A full sanity data pass of the entire data set will also be required soon, so Mark will no doubt be calling on his Technical Director management skill-set to get a full export/validate system going with Martin to get it done quickly and easily.
Today’s supermarket sweep from persol. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-12-21 17:06:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
Zombies in the Stream
[ 2017-12-15 09:18:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all. Current PZ thinking is to get final features into Build 39 (current Vehicles beta) as soon as we can – then concentrate on bug fixing, polish and further optimization in the new year. Outstanding features include injuries to player in car crashes, a few more Mechanics components/repairs, better SFX and Turbo’s new fog/snow effects seen below. There are a few threads popping up now detailing how cars are changing people’s play-styles and mixing in some new fun elements, so it would appear that we are on the right track.
VEHICLES BETA
Vehicles Test Build 30 has been released – and its full patch notes can be found here. The biggest change in this is probably the addition of BitBaboon Steve’s optimization to map streaming – which removes locks between game threads when it comes to chunk loading. This should make for a smoother ride for our testers.
This said, there’s still work to do – our internal build was running with a better FPS in West Point so we need to do a smidge of digging today, while Steve needs to figure out a few remaining locks. After which the next optimization improvement will likely be in the zombies themselves. Zed attention is currently called in to cars over a wide radius which (while difficulty still needs balancing) still has too big an impact on performance in high population scenarios than we’d like.
Elsewhere, Vehicles 30 also introduces WIP collision detection for road furniture, and damaged sprites from Mash to accompany them. This work isn’t complete, and we’d like any weird behaviour reported. Mail boxes, stop signs, garbage bins etc will now appear as damaged when hit at the correct speed.
In terms of other new content (generally Thursdoided last week) there’s a bunch of new stuff for the Mechanic skill – from which we’d like to get some more feedback if possible. There are now Mechanic skill books, a lug wrench for removing tires, Mufflers to impact on vehicle noise and an update to the key system that gives the key-bearing driver an icon above their head when close to the vehicle. Likewise keys are now visible in the ignition, and to more clearly demark which car they belong to are coloured the same as the car’s paint job.
Annoying bugs fixed include railings now rendering properly, shoved zeds no longer being drawn behind walls, furniture being rotate-able again and walls no longer obscuring the player on staircases. In general game-wide fixes, meanwhile, trapping has now been fixed – alongside a bunch of longstanding recipe and crafting oddities.
FOGGY BIZNESS
Turbo reports that his fog and snow effects are almost ready for integration into the vehicles beta and proffers this car-starring video as proof.
https://youtu.be/PpFkEuSnJuc
ANIMS
In terms of Animation work, as we haven’t mentioned it in a while, Bitbaboon Mark currently has the existing anims working with a skinned mesh renderer – which as we’ve mentioned before means that dev-side we can toggle between the two and make progress without breaking anything. This also means that as we bind in the rest of the new anim code, Mark’s Animzed dev/modding tool and start to optimize to cope in densely populated areas then we’ll be able to be a lot more visible in terms of progress.
As ever, we understand the frustration that all this remains out of reach while the rest of the team beaver away on vehicles – but we have the right people doing the right stuff backstage. Likewise we have an ever-growing catalogue of models to flesh out the game world from Martin when general work moves on from vehicles and into the builds beyond.
MODDERING
Connall, alongside being king of the small suggestions thread, is now the overseer of The Modder’s Wishlist – requests from the modding community for documentation and small tweaks to game code that will make their lives easier. The first part of this mission, meanwhile, has been in curating this reference list of lua events. Connall is also regularly available in the modding channel on Discord should anyone need pointing in the right direction for anything.
Today’s hail of bullets from John. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. ShylokVakarian’s Great Loot Search remains open, meanwhile, and oh man: how good is this Wild West map starting to look?
[ 2017-12-15 09:18:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Muffled Scream
[ 2017-12-08 07:06:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
Howdy survivors.
We’re approaching a point at which the Vehicles build (details on how to play here) is feeling increasingly fully-formed. On Monday we released Vehicles 29, which most importantly brought back some FPS lost to towns and around tall buildings – as well as getting our Mac/Linux players back into testing.
Aspects of the build we’d like player feedback on, meanwhile, are the latest updates to where car keys spawn – and also how vehicles will now drift to a halt when the accelerator isn’t down, rather than it acting like an active brake.
We also gave the dashboard’s heater a dual-purpose with air-conditioning – meaning that your character can find relief from the elements in both summer and winter months. Rules on sleep consistent with the rest of the game were also added to the mix – meaning that taking a nap in a car is just as dependent on pain and panic levels as anywhere else.
In non-vehicle affairs, meanwhile, Vehicles 29 also added darkening to levels below player’s z height to help sense of depth between levels – saving many of our future construction enthusiast survivors from smashed-up limbs.
NEXT UP
We have Bitbaboon Steve’s map streaming optimizations running backstage, and they appear to be mixing in fairly nicely with ChrisW’s rendering improvements. We’ll give them a bit more of a test, and then they’ll likely be released alongside the stuff that EP, Connall, RJ and Yuri are beavering away on the upcoming Vehicle Build 30.
Most likely due for release early next week, 30 will introduce new materials for those with Mechanic attributes: Mechanic skill books, different types of muffler to let you tinker with engine noise, new tools like lug wrenches that are required when you remove tires etc.
We’re also doing our best to clear up confusion over car keys – who can get into what, and which car key starts up which car. As such if a player is near a car that they have the key for then from 30 onwards then a key icon will appear above their head – while keys both in inventories and in said icon will be colour coded to the colour of the vehicle itself.
Keys inserted into the ignition will also now be visible on the dashboard – alongside a fancy new temperature gauge to show you whether you need to be wearing your big coat. Here’s a quick vid that covers much of the above.
https://youtu.be/VTtjBRUf8WA
Future vehicle builds (at this point likely to be released as IWBUMS betas rather than in the current Vehicles beta slot) will also include Turbo’s work on mist, fog and snow [latest vid found here], as well as a map update that will fill in many of the more empty slices of countryside between our major towns with fields, tracks and farms that should complement vehicle exploration quite nicely.
Yuri’s current task, meanwhile, is the physics collision work that needs adding to the system so that RJ can implement Artist Mash’s smashed up mailboxes, garbage cans and road signs.
Also due for more immediate release in Build 30, meanwhile, are some fixes to longstanding tidy-up issues like the see-through MP chat window conflicting with snow (and, now, the upcoming fog), weirdness with syncing door locks in MP and pants that never get dirty.
Connall, meanwhile, has also coded in the ability for modders to support 1x and 2x tiles in their mods. Previously, modders would have to choose whether to support 1x or 2x but not both – so hopefully this will be of help.
Finally we’d also like to flag ShylokVakarian’s latest scientific study of PZ and loot house halls. Enquire within for details.
Today’s rooftop skirmish from Savv. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-12-08 07:06:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
Something in the Air
[ 2017-11-23 16:02:40 CET ] [ Original post ]
How do all. Happy Thanksgiving to our American survivors, and indeed to those of us who choose to give thanks at alternate times of year.
38 Patch Bizness
First off, just a quick note to say that in the past week we’ve updated Build 38 with a couple of extra patches, as there were still a few MP bumps and issues that were niggling at us. Details for both can be found behind the links: 38.29 and 38.30. Highlights include generator fixes, outdoor lighting oddities and hopefully some stuff helpful for servers. We’ve had a few hiccups with Mac builds the last few days, which should be resolved now and hopefully GOG builds will be updated with these today.
Vehicles Build 27 (aka 39.27)
We released Build 27 of the Vehicles alpha today (access details here), and it contains a few performance improving aspects – although, as detailed below, the bigger-hit work on this is still to be integrated.
Elsewhere the build contains a few other system tweaks. First off there are updates to the naming, spawning and operation of car keys – and also the addition of the game having your character walk to the relevant part of the car when installing/removing. It also syncs up lots of aspects of the Mechanic and vehicles system between co-op and MP players – from engine temperature, to tire inflation. The full changelist can be found here.
Next up we’ll be adding in crafting/repairing level requirements for the Mechanic Skill, alongside dripfeeding in the optimizations we’ve been brewing with ChrisW, Steve et al. More on which below.
Optimization fun
Regular viewers will know that we have not one but two mega-experts helping out with the game these days – both established Technical Directors within the world of gaming. Mark is tasked with getting animations in order for the builds beyond 39, while Steve is addressing optimization for vehicles.
This past Friday, with the help of copious tea and loud metal, he made some huge strides in improving our map streaming – which will pay dividends once integrated into Build 39. There’s still a fair amount of work to be done: playing coder ‘whack-a-mole’ with issues that crop up due to the changes, and trying to eliminate nasty locks between the code’s loader thread and the main thread. With that balancing act still to come, then, the improvements let him run the game so it ran like this:
https://youtu.be/clZrKB7FfVk
We can’t guarantee this level of perfection when it comes to the main game, especially at the highest resolutions, but it does seem that we’re making good progress towards nullifying stutters and pauses – as well as allowing for speedier/smoother vehicle movement around the map.
Weather upgrade
With vehicles, meanwhile, come required vehicle hazards. As such, returning from a spell on the sidelines, Turbo is back and bringing a few additions to his existing weather system.
We’ve always needed stronger indications of seasonal change, and likewise new weather effects. Although we’ve always had snow appear on the ground – we’ve never actually shown it fall.
https://youtu.be/oKT8LZ9t3mg
Likewise, we’ve always wanted players to wake up to mists and fogs that’ll dissipate as the day goes on – that’ll hopefully add an extra level of fear to your daily chores exploration on the days it descends.
youtu.be/p4LkjPi2dBM
In the video it is at its more extreme levels, however we can also add more subtle mists and fogs to add additional ambiences to the game.
We’ve always been quite rigorous when it comes to having weather authentic to the area that the PZ map covers (in 1993, which is close to our start year, Muld had 11 days of fog) and currently there’s an internal debate as to how much poetic license we can take with this to bolster gameplay. In any eventuality we intend to add a dose of it to the vehicles build in the near future, and it may also make for engaging new Challenge modes in times to come.
Today’s featured image from Biker. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Ooh, and could PZ user maps make the leap to la belle France?
[ 2017-11-23 16:02:40 CET ] [ Original post ]
Dashdoid
We just released a huge patch for the public build – bringing Build 38 up to 38.28. This not only marks the entrance of our new internal automated build process, but is also an extensive clear-out of nagging issues that have crept into the game in recent times. You can find the full changelist here. Much of it is necessary ‘tidy up’ work – but you might also notice improvements with alarms and clocks, fixed stash map issues, a volume option for fly buzz, that annoying ‘add spice’ recipe bug gone, corpses no longer remaining highlighted and the sad end of the ‘infinite ice cream bug’. There’s a lot more than that though, so check out the patch notes if you’re a PZ regular. Many thanks to Tim for all his hard work on this.
This morning we booted Vehicle Build 26 out onto our public vehicles beta (details on how to access found here). There are two primary aspects of this version – the first being some general optimization improvement. Following on from this, most likely in the next build, we will also have ChrisW’s work on increasing FPS (quite dramatically, when compared to current versions) when in towns and around tall buildings – and likely some java garbage collection optimization too that’ll further limit occasional stuttering. The other main addition, meanwhile, is a more authentic and aesthetic dashboard constructed by RJ and our artist Mash. Up until now the vehicle read-outs have looked like this:
https://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/old-dash-300x48.jpg And with Vehicles Build 26 they now live in a dashboard that looks like this:
https://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/dash-solo-300x76.png We’ve also done this to fit in with the general ‘the player sees what the character’ sees mantra of PZ – so if there’s a general issue with the engine you’ll see it through a dashboard warning light, just as you would in real life. You’ll only be able to truly get to grips with it however, and analyse the issue, if you have the necessary Mechanic skills. Here’s a general vid showing how it all works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzpGqFN4kac Elsewhere Yuri is doing a large-ish chunk of work on how we synchronise objects over the PZ map, which will also hopefully provide some performance benefits for vehicles, and we also have Bitbaboon Steve on-hand to hopefully chase down the map streaming optimization/fix we mentioned last week. The plan is, once the newly patched Build 38 is clearly stable, to officially make our vehicles beta known as Build 39 and move it into our traditional ‘unstable version’ IWBUMS position. Amidst all the general vehicles work we also anticipate some new rural map areas to be added to this, the (boring but essential) lwjgl3 java upgrade currently being implemented by Stas from General Arcade and many/varied gameplay nips and tucks from Connall the curator of the community suggestion list. Beyond that Martin, Bitbaboon Mark and others continue to work on stuff for Build 40+: our larger workforce these days allowing for a far greater degree of rolling development.
We love so many of the mods and maps created for Project Zomboid, but the moving story behind New Denver and its creator XeonyX (told here) has always made the New Denver mapstand out for us – just as much as its size and authenticity to a real world location. As such, we’re super-pleased to direct you towards its latest (and final) big town expansion – that of Silverton which lies to the south of New Denver itself. Thank you very much Jamie, and we do hope that you’re doing well.
https://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/silverton.png This week’s imperilled survivor from FACAG@MES on your Steam service. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-11-16 16:39:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Ello survivor. Come in, take a seat.
Public Build 38.28
We just released a huge patch for the public build – bringing Build 38 up to 38.28. This not only marks the entrance of our new internal automated build process, but is also an extensive clear-out of nagging issues that have crept into the game in recent times. You can find the full changelist here. Much of it is necessary ‘tidy up’ work – but you might also notice improvements with alarms and clocks, fixed stash map issues, a volume option for fly buzz, that annoying ‘add spice’ recipe bug gone, corpses no longer remaining highlighted and the sad end of the ‘infinite ice cream bug’. There’s a lot more than that though, so check out the patch notes if you’re a PZ regular. Many thanks to Tim for all his hard work on this.
Vehicle Test Build 26
This morning we booted Vehicle Build 26 out onto our public vehicles beta (details on how to access found here). There are two primary aspects of this version – the first being some general optimization improvement. Following on from this, most likely in the next build, we will also have ChrisW’s work on increasing FPS (quite dramatically, when compared to current versions) when in towns and around tall buildings – and likely some java garbage collection optimization too that’ll further limit occasional stuttering. The other main addition, meanwhile, is a more authentic and aesthetic dashboard constructed by RJ and our artist Mash. Up until now the vehicle read-outs have looked like this:
https://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/old-dash-300x48.jpg And with Vehicles Build 26 they now live in a dashboard that looks like this:
https://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/dash-solo-300x76.png We’ve also done this to fit in with the general ‘the player sees what the character’ sees mantra of PZ – so if there’s a general issue with the engine you’ll see it through a dashboard warning light, just as you would in real life. You’ll only be able to truly get to grips with it however, and analyse the issue, if you have the necessary Mechanic skills. Here’s a general vid showing how it all works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzpGqFN4kac Elsewhere Yuri is doing a large-ish chunk of work on how we synchronise objects over the PZ map, which will also hopefully provide some performance benefits for vehicles, and we also have Bitbaboon Steve on-hand to hopefully chase down the map streaming optimization/fix we mentioned last week. The plan is, once the newly patched Build 38 is clearly stable, to officially make our vehicles beta known as Build 39 and move it into our traditional ‘unstable version’ IWBUMS position. Amidst all the general vehicles work we also anticipate some new rural map areas to be added to this, the (boring but essential) lwjgl3 java upgrade currently being implemented by Stas from General Arcade and many/varied gameplay nips and tucks from Connall the curator of the community suggestion list. Beyond that Martin, Bitbaboon Mark and others continue to work on stuff for Build 40+: our larger workforce these days allowing for a far greater degree of rolling development.
New New Denver
We love so many of the mods and maps created for Project Zomboid, but the moving story behind New Denver and its creator XeonyX (told here) has always made the New Denver mapstand out for us – just as much as its size and authenticity to a real world location. As such, we’re super-pleased to direct you towards its latest (and final) big town expansion – that of Silverton which lies to the south of New Denver itself. Thank you very much Jamie, and we do hope that you’re doing well.
https://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/silverton.png This week’s imperilled survivor from FACAG@MES on your Steam service. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-11-16 16:39:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Rules of Attraction
[ 2017-11-09 21:34:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Vehicle Build 25 (aka 39.25) got a release yesterday. Added in Build 25 were the new Mechanic profession and related traits, random highway wreck collisions, Mechanic XP gains through car tinkering and a lot of general optimization in terms of UI, net code and traffic congestion spawns. Today RJ also released a hotfix to reduce zed attraction to car noise, tie engine sound to RPM rather than speed and remove collisions with small items.
It’s all shaping up quite nicely in terms of the general handling/feel of what we want – but also highlights that we need to get back on top of the performance and garbage collection issues that have crept back in over recent builds. So, next up, Yuri will be optimizing the java garbage collection to address the stutter that some people are reporting – while resident artist Mash is also hard at work creating ‘damaged’ sprites for some aspects of road furniture for the next coder task.
Right now static object collisions are improved in that you can’t drive through solid street furniture – which perhaps makes sense for street lights and concrete walls, but less so for household mail boxes and traffic cones. As such we’ve gone through the various things that players are likely to collide with while driving – and working out what should remain impervious, what should look damaged but remain impassable after a collision (as below with the unhappy post boxes) and what should be smashed/crushed when hit at speed (as below with the even more unhappy household mail boxes).
In this way driving will feel that little bit more realistic, and an extra feeling of lasting change to the map will also be added to your survival run.
Meanwhile, Mission: Optimization continues. As discussed last week ChrisW is playing around with what PZ draws – hiding all squares behind solid walls from the game’s rendering system, and thereby freeing up your processor. Our chosen FPS hot spot was the four level flats in March Ridge which pre-optimization was coming in at 26 fps on ChrisW’s system, but is now coming in at 41 fps on an internal test build– which is a significant improvement.
Next on the list for Chris, then, is in optimizing the code so that it also brings benefits to general play – ensuring that the new background calculations themselves don’t clog up any performance gains. Bitbaboon Steve, meanwhile, continues to spotlight other areas for improvement.
In other technical areas of the game, meanwhile, we’re happy to have beckoned General Arcade’s Stas back into the fold – who will initially be finishing off our java upgrade from lwjgl2 to lwjgl3. This will open up a bunch of necessary day-to-day improvements for the game – better support for different resolutions, dpi awareness, neater alt-tabbing and general smoother operation.
Finally, last night’s Community Megatest for the IWBUMS Build 38 patch had to be put back a bit due to various serverside issues we’re still trying to get to the bottom of. Keep an eye out on the forums for more information on when the test will be once we’ve gotten to the bottom of it. We’ll be handing out PZ Steam codes for family and friends to some of the people who help out, so please do pop along. Thanks!
Today’s featured image from Jodidosciervos of Steam parish. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Ooh and check out Texas956’s AWESOME TileZed buildings!
[ 2017-11-09 21:34:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Vlad the Imbiber
RJ and Yuri have been hard at work on Vehicles Build 25 – much of which has involved scrubbing up and polishing features added over the past few iterations. So you can expect optimization, UI improvements and general groundwork for the final ‘top down diagram’ vehicle UI screen – while Yuri is currently cracking down on a rogue memory leak and various aspects of non-syncing on MP servers. Also in Vehicles Build 39.25 will come the end of drive-through streetlights and road furniture… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20Y6blvqeDc We’ve also added in the ‘random spawn’ car/wreck collisions on the Exclusion Zone’s roads to accompany the ‘lore’ wreck congestion , some new wreck models and map fixes – and have balanced a lot of aspects of the new Mechanic skills/profession and related car parts. We anticipate starting work on a better ‘dashboard’ UI once vehicles build 25 is out.
One of the biggest issues with the current Vehicles build is that driving through built-up areas results in performance hiccups – the game is being forced to draw too many tiles, too quickly. Currently, however, PZ draws *everything* – even when the player character can’t see it. Stuff on higher floors, stuff in buildings you have no line of sight into and everywhere with doors and windows shut – it’s all being conjured up needlessly and chewing up unnecessary processor power. Enter stage left, then, our good friend Chris Wood. “I’m culling squares inside the levels of buildings that are covered by the floors and walls so we don’t draw them”, he explains. “This is being done very simply, using building bounding rectangles that can hide about 20% of the scene in busy areas with lots of buildings, and thereby reducing what’s rendered by 20%. This does, however, leave window interiors looking a bit strange – as in these screenshots ”
“My current task is to make this work more intelligently: by hiding all squares behind solid walls and floors by projecting back onto them. This will hopefully draw even less, as it won’t draw anything when a square is totally hidden – including the ground behind buildings. It won’t have the same visual artefacts and it’ll hide more squares.” “The idea is that by the time I’ll have finished it will all look identical to the current public build – but behind the scenes it’ll be drawing a lot fewer tiles which will make a huge difference to performance since tile drawing is the biggest bottleneck in the game.” On top of this we’re talking to General Arcade about picking up the reins on our LWJGL upgrade, which will also have optimization benefits, and have best friend genius BitBaboon Steve prodding a vehicles memory issue that will hopefully help out people with slower systems. So, all in all, performance improvement should be on the way.
Everything seems in place for a public release of the Build 38 megapatch that we’ve been building up over the last few weeks, but we want to be sure it’s run through enough of your machines – and specifically on online servers – before release. As such we’ll be running a Community Megatest in the coming days on a fresh server, and as ever there’ll be free PZ codes for a bunch of the people who turn up to help out. We’ve just released IWBUMS 38.26 which is the build the server will be running on. Details on how to access the IWBUMS public beta can be found here, and info on the event itself will appear on the TIS forum over the next few days. This week’s well-kept safehouse from RyuVladimir over on Steam. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-11-02 21:38:55 CET ] [ Original post ]
Thursday: it’s back. Back from the dead. Back with the zeds.
VEHICLES
RJ and Yuri have been hard at work on Vehicles Build 25 – much of which has involved scrubbing up and polishing features added over the past few iterations. So you can expect optimization, UI improvements and general groundwork for the final ‘top down diagram’ vehicle UI screen – while Yuri is currently cracking down on a rogue memory leak and various aspects of non-syncing on MP servers. Also in Vehicles Build 39.25 will come the end of drive-through streetlights and road furniture… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20Y6blvqeDc We’ve also added in the ‘random spawn’ car/wreck collisions on the Exclusion Zone’s roads to accompany the ‘lore’ wreck congestion , some new wreck models and map fixes – and have balanced a lot of aspects of the new Mechanic skills/profession and related car parts. We anticipate starting work on a better ‘dashboard’ UI once vehicles build 25 is out.
OPTIMIZATION
One of the biggest issues with the current Vehicles build is that driving through built-up areas results in performance hiccups – the game is being forced to draw too many tiles, too quickly. Currently, however, PZ draws *everything* – even when the player character can’t see it. Stuff on higher floors, stuff in buildings you have no line of sight into and everywhere with doors and windows shut – it’s all being conjured up needlessly and chewing up unnecessary processor power. Enter stage left, then, our good friend Chris Wood. “I’m culling squares inside the levels of buildings that are covered by the floors and walls so we don’t draw them”, he explains. “This is being done very simply, using building bounding rectangles that can hide about 20% of the scene in busy areas with lots of buildings, and thereby reducing what’s rendered by 20%. This does, however, leave window interiors looking a bit strange – as in these screenshots ”
“My current task is to make this work more intelligently: by hiding all squares behind solid walls and floors by projecting back onto them. This will hopefully draw even less, as it won’t draw anything when a square is totally hidden – including the ground behind buildings. It won’t have the same visual artefacts and it’ll hide more squares.” “The idea is that by the time I’ll have finished it will all look identical to the current public build – but behind the scenes it’ll be drawing a lot fewer tiles which will make a huge difference to performance since tile drawing is the biggest bottleneck in the game.” On top of this we’re talking to General Arcade about picking up the reins on our LWJGL upgrade, which will also have optimization benefits, and have best friend genius BitBaboon Steve prodding a vehicles memory issue that will hopefully help out people with slower systems. So, all in all, performance improvement should be on the way.
COMMUNITY MEGATEST
Everything seems in place for a public release of the Build 38 megapatch that we’ve been building up over the last few weeks, but we want to be sure it’s run through enough of your machines – and specifically on online servers – before release. As such we’ll be running a Community Megatest in the coming days on a fresh server, and as ever there’ll be free PZ codes for a bunch of the people who turn up to help out. We’ve just released IWBUMS 38.26 which is the build the server will be running on. Details on how to access the IWBUMS public beta can be found here, and info on the event itself will appear on the TIS forum over the next few days. This week’s well-kept safehouse from RyuVladimir over on Steam. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-11-02 21:38:55 CET ] [ Original post ]
Pitch Battle
[ 2017-10-20 04:23:04 CET ] [ Original post ]
Today we’re dropping a Build 38 patch (38.24) into testing that’s full to the brim of fixes that follows on from Monday’s 38.23. Our current course is to pack as much in there as possible and make sure it’s all working correctly so we can minimise disruption to MP servers upon public release.
Vehicle Build 24 is planned for release tomorrow. As well as fixing up some load errors this adds in differing engine volume stats for each vehicle (actual sounds to follow), adds in missing parking zones for the vehicle-free parts of the map (Rosewood, March Ridge, Dixie etc) and introduces the canonical in-game brands for vehicle type.
Build 24 will also be reintegrating the car wrecks we had in earlier vehicle builds with a better zonal spawning system. The plan is that we’ll have certain ‘lore’ traffic build ups on the edges of the map where survivors suffering from the first wave of the infection tried to get out of the Exclusion Zone prior to their zombification – which in terms of gameplay will also help us flag where the edge of the map will be when you’re out motoring. Elsewhere, meanwhile, there’ll be smaller pile-ups and abandoned cars that’ll spawn differently for each new game you play.
There’ll also be improved vehicle placement spawn (rich homesteads will have nicer cars), better terms for the different car parts you can tinker with if you play as a Mechanic and hopefully a fix for the several players who were experiencing an irl game crash after in-game one.
Build 24 will also introduce suspension and a tangible differences in vehicle control when you go off-road – dependent on the sort of car you drive, and the suspension condition hidden within it. You can see this in the following video, though as ever please be aware that this is its first iteration and we’re aware that the low condition suspension in the second half of the clip looks like it’s out of an old rap video and needs toning down:
https://youtu.be/IsKY8VE-ssM
In terms of the next vehicles build Yuri is currently integrating Mash’s damage textures into the game – which will add variety, and also visual clues into a vehicle’s general condition. Here’s a few vids showing how they’re currently looking on the mean streets of Muldraugh. Please note, however, that Project Zomboid cars will not be chameleons – and the colour changing is just an example of the governing code we’ve got going.
https://youtu.be/qlOw8KPROeo
https://youtu.be/al6mGoryxcI
Finally here’s a quick vid showing aspects of all of the above, couple with some improved ‘line of sight’ mechanics that fit in better with the way PZ works – although we’ll be wanting feedback as to how much testers get on with it. Again, the vehicle spawn-rate here is from a debug mode.
https://youtu.be/iUhbQkvhFbk
Once 38 is fully patched (and we’ve also finished current tasks to make the dedicated server build work with our fancy new internal automated build processes) then we’ll be promoting the Vehicles build up the beta branches and into our accustomed IWBUMS beta slot as Build 39.
It’s been said before, but just so everyone’s on the same page – in the background to all this Bitbaboon Mark has the new animation code working with the vehicle branch on a toggle, so it can soon be present in a deactivated state throughout the rest of vehicle development.
This will ensure that we can start ‘turning on’ the various anims features so it all gets integrated as soon and as well as possible for the builds that follow vehicles. This will also make development of different concurrent builds backstage a lot easier in the mean-time, as well as maintaining test branches when they become needed.
This week’s zombie hooligans from Ziron360. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-10-20 04:23:04 CET ] [ Original post ]
Max Damage
WIP Stuff A new Vehicle Mechanics UI can now be accessed. Right click a vehicle and select “[WIP] Mechanics” or when directly inside the vehicle with the vehicle menu (“V” key). The system should operate much like the existing player health panel.
[ 2017-10-14 01:33:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
We’ve just released Vehicles Build 22 into the vehicles Steam beta (details for accessing found here), details of which can be found below.
We are also currently working on a final patch for our public version 38 of the main build (much of which is also in the new vehicles build) which we’ll release once we’re sure everything is operating and stable. At this point we’ll also release on GOG, as we’ll know save games will be safe.
Blindcoder, Zomboid friend and champion to all, has also updated the official PZ map with Riverside, the Knox Heights Country Club and its surrounding roads and wilderness.
So if you want to check it out, and maybe find some new places to explore and hold out, you’ll find it right here. Also, if you have any new favourite places to call home in the new map then why not share your location in this thread?
Vehicles Build 22
First off, due to the sheer amount of stuff in Vehicles Build 22 there is a chance that existing Vehicles build saves will break. We’d encourage you to start a new game, but if you have a longstanding character then we have also provided the previous Vehicles Build 21 on a separate Steam beta branch so you can continue your game without issues. It can be accessed through the beta tab and is called ‘previousvehicle’.
Please note that the new Vehicles Build 22 release is more WIP than others that we’ve released, as we need player feedback during its construction. Please be patient if you discover unexpected irritation.
Full patch notes and release thread here. Please note that amidst the bug fixes is, hopefully, a remedy for non-synced car loot and associated co-op issues.
New Stuff
- New cars models including a Taxi and an SUV – and extra versions of small and modern cars. Or at least ‘modern’ for 1993.
- Horn and Siren system. Check the vehicle menu while inside the car. Press “V” (vehicle menu key) or right click on a vehicle to add or siphon gas. Cars can be refuelled at gas stations.
- Keys are now needed to open trunk.
- The game now spawns cars coloured by game code rather than textures – adding variety.
- The Normal Car model can now have damage textures. When we have tested them out in-game we will create them for all vehicles.
WIP Stuff A new Vehicle Mechanics UI can now be accessed. Right click a vehicle and select “[WIP] Mechanics” or when directly inside the vehicle with the vehicle menu (“V” key). The system should operate much like the existing player health panel.
- Select vehicle parts to see information about them.
- Right click a part to see if it can be removed or installed.
- Parts can be repaired from your inventory although not everything can be fixed.
- Different car parts like tires, gas tanks, trunk and brake systems.
- Low condition brakes will reduce your brake force.
- Low condition gas tanks can leak fuel.
- A car trunk that’s been crumpled in a collision will have reduced capacity and may drop items stored in it onto the ground when in motion.
- Car parts and vehicles themselves are categorised as ‘standard’, ‘heavy-duty’ and ‘sports’. Only matching car parts can be used in relevant vehicles. [This may change in later builds should player have high skills, be prepared to lose condition with a car part in an inappropriate vehicle etc]
- New Sandbox options: CarDamageOnImpact: Governs how much damage a vehicle will take after collisions. CarGeneralCondition: Governs what condition cars can have on spawn – whether very low or very high.
[ 2017-10-14 01:33:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
Grave Harvest
What with Build 38 released publicly, there hasn’t been a vehicles beta release since Build 21– but there’s enough brewing to mean that the upcoming Build 22 will be a good one – as mentioned last week there’s sirens on emergency vehicles, zeds that thump cars rather than lie down next to them, more varied car models, fixed MP sync work, some optimizations etc. On top of this there’s also a lot of finessing of Build 38’s new ‘window peek’ and ‘visible rooftop’ systems from ChrisW and slight map tweaks waiting to be dropped in (that’ll require testing rather than being hurled into 38 itself) to eradicate the (pretty occasional) view-blockers that you might have come across on PZ maps. Also whirring along the production line, meanwhile, are:
Our initial vehicle damage system, currently being worked on by Yuri, will use textures to indicate damage rather than start mangling the car models themselves. To this end Yuri will create a map of damage zones on each vehicle – and work alongside Mash and Martin to create textures to show light damage and heavy damage. The following is a Yuri’s initial example of what it’ll look like in-game – but please be aware that it hasn’t been through the art department just yet (Also ignore the debug lines).
This system will also add to the visual variety of the cars you find scattered around the map, as well as give better indicators of the quality of cars that you’ll discover. Indeed, another aspect of this work will be to create textures that look dirtier/rustier to give a fairer indication of a vehicles’s age and quality. Yuri is also, meanwhile, going to implement a system that determines a car’s colour through software rather than the texture itself – which will again add to the visual variety of the family cars, farm trucks and very occasional sports cars that spawn on the map.
And now a word from RJ about how the mechanic system and UI have been developing since we discussed it all last week. Oh, and a new video too! “The Mechanic stuff is progressing well. Right now, you can uninstall almost everything on a vehicle, and certain parts have to be removed first before you get at others – so getting to brakes will need you to remove the tire first. All parts have their own weight too, so if you’ve got the right skill level and tools then you can potentially sacrifice a seat to reduce your car’s weight, go a bit faster and consume less fuel.” “I’m working on it so that those with the required skills can adapt their vehicle to the survival style they want: a fast car, a loot car (high container capacity, and also quieter) or even a more robust car that can withstand more zombie collisions.” “I’m also working with Yuri to ensure that conditions also impact the vehicle gameplay/physics: a bad condition gas tank could leak fuel, a car that’s been rear-ended might not have as much trunk capacity, poor condition brakes will increase stopping times etc. Likewise dangerous driving at full speed with the worst condition suspension and poor steering might not end well..” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgkgWqIWOfU
Patches for Build 38 continue with various coders behind the scenes being corralled into areas of 38 that had a rougher ‘bugs’ landing that we’d have liked – and that both ourselves and the community are used to. We mentioned this, and what we’re doing to improve it all for future builds, over on the forums. The TLDR of it is that, to avoid complications arising from maintaining two test builds at once like 38 and vehicles, which has been a big factor in the problems in this release, in future when we have long standing features in development we’ll merge them into the main codebase as soon as possible, with some kind of switch to disable them until they’re ready. This is, in fact, already due to be the case when animations roll around. [Although for those thinking ‘Whoop! Hackable animation system!’ we’ll also leave out the data files until they are ready too.] This should mean that having two separate public test branches, for example a public animation test, with far less fuss. The other issue we faced with Build 38 was the simple fact that in the past six months the team has grown a hell of a lot – and our existing processes need to be improved to cater for it. As such we’ve been working with the help of our friends at BitBaboon to research and implement a robust and fancy new build system. It’s still in the latter stages of setting up, and it’s boring ‘backroom stuff’ for a [strike]Mondoid[/strike] Thursdoid so apologies for that, but we’ll have automatic compiling from the code repositories, as well as automatic construction of builds, along with automatic testing, old save file testing and the like, as well as automatic uploading to a steam branch. This should not only cut down on the potential for build breaking save bugs and the like, but also allow the versions to be updated by any developer on the game, as well as facilitate instant updates for our testers, and stuff like auto mailer sending mails to anyone who has broken the code. With all this in place we should have a much easier job during build 39, finishing off the vehicles and what lies in the far beyond. This week’s unhealthy vegetables from Narzul over on Steam. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-10-06 00:25:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
The fourth day of the week returns with a vengeance. Welcome back to Thursdoid.
Build 39 – Vehicles
What with Build 38 released publicly, there hasn’t been a vehicles beta release since Build 21– but there’s enough brewing to mean that the upcoming Build 22 will be a good one – as mentioned last week there’s sirens on emergency vehicles, zeds that thump cars rather than lie down next to them, more varied car models, fixed MP sync work, some optimizations etc. On top of this there’s also a lot of finessing of Build 38’s new ‘window peek’ and ‘visible rooftop’ systems from ChrisW and slight map tweaks waiting to be dropped in (that’ll require testing rather than being hurled into 38 itself) to eradicate the (pretty occasional) view-blockers that you might have come across on PZ maps. Also whirring along the production line, meanwhile, are:
Vehicle Damage
Our initial vehicle damage system, currently being worked on by Yuri, will use textures to indicate damage rather than start mangling the car models themselves. To this end Yuri will create a map of damage zones on each vehicle – and work alongside Mash and Martin to create textures to show light damage and heavy damage. The following is a Yuri’s initial example of what it’ll look like in-game – but please be aware that it hasn’t been through the art department just yet (Also ignore the debug lines).
This system will also add to the visual variety of the cars you find scattered around the map, as well as give better indicators of the quality of cars that you’ll discover. Indeed, another aspect of this work will be to create textures that look dirtier/rustier to give a fairer indication of a vehicles’s age and quality. Yuri is also, meanwhile, going to implement a system that determines a car’s colour through software rather than the texture itself – which will again add to the visual variety of the family cars, farm trucks and very occasional sports cars that spawn on the map.
Mechanic Profession/UI
And now a word from RJ about how the mechanic system and UI have been developing since we discussed it all last week. Oh, and a new video too! “The Mechanic stuff is progressing well. Right now, you can uninstall almost everything on a vehicle, and certain parts have to be removed first before you get at others – so getting to brakes will need you to remove the tire first. All parts have their own weight too, so if you’ve got the right skill level and tools then you can potentially sacrifice a seat to reduce your car’s weight, go a bit faster and consume less fuel.” “I’m working on it so that those with the required skills can adapt their vehicle to the survival style they want: a fast car, a loot car (high container capacity, and also quieter) or even a more robust car that can withstand more zombie collisions.” “I’m also working with Yuri to ensure that conditions also impact the vehicle gameplay/physics: a bad condition gas tank could leak fuel, a car that’s been rear-ended might not have as much trunk capacity, poor condition brakes will increase stopping times etc. Likewise dangerous driving at full speed with the worst condition suspension and poor steering might not end well..” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgkgWqIWOfU
Build 38
Patches for Build 38 continue with various coders behind the scenes being corralled into areas of 38 that had a rougher ‘bugs’ landing that we’d have liked – and that both ourselves and the community are used to. We mentioned this, and what we’re doing to improve it all for future builds, over on the forums. The TLDR of it is that, to avoid complications arising from maintaining two test builds at once like 38 and vehicles, which has been a big factor in the problems in this release, in future when we have long standing features in development we’ll merge them into the main codebase as soon as possible, with some kind of switch to disable them until they’re ready. This is, in fact, already due to be the case when animations roll around. [Although for those thinking ‘Whoop! Hackable animation system!’ we’ll also leave out the data files until they are ready too.] This should mean that having two separate public test branches, for example a public animation test, with far less fuss. The other issue we faced with Build 38 was the simple fact that in the past six months the team has grown a hell of a lot – and our existing processes need to be improved to cater for it. As such we’ve been working with the help of our friends at BitBaboon to research and implement a robust and fancy new build system. It’s still in the latter stages of setting up, and it’s boring ‘backroom stuff’ for a [strike]Mondoid[/strike] Thursdoid so apologies for that, but we’ll have automatic compiling from the code repositories, as well as automatic construction of builds, along with automatic testing, old save file testing and the like, as well as automatic uploading to a steam branch. This should not only cut down on the potential for build breaking save bugs and the like, but also allow the versions to be updated by any developer on the game, as well as facilitate instant updates for our testers, and stuff like auto mailer sending mails to anyone who has broken the code. With all this in place we should have a much easier job during build 39, finishing off the vehicles and what lies in the far beyond. This week’s unhealthy vegetables from Narzul over on Steam. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-10-06 00:25:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
New Model
We released Build 38 last Friday and people have been getting their first tastes of Riverside, the new worldview features and much else beside. (Release notes here). As you would probably expect, a lot of this week has involved collating and fixing up the various issues that arose when 38 was revealed to the wider public audience. To this end we’ve released 38.16, 38.17, 38.18 and 38.19 in the interim to patch things up. Most critical issues have now been resolved, but there are still MP issues that we still need to get to the bottom of (generators faltering when players log out, magically unlocking doors etc) amongst other gremlins that need battering (zombie-proof windows, misplaced radio sounds, some Linux-y stuff). As such we anticipate 38.20 tomorrow, and likely some follow-ups and a GOG release next week. Blindcoder is also in the process of updating the official PZ Map with Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club – it takes a very long time to process the map into an image, however, so it too will hopefully be surfacing at some point next week.
Elsewhere work continues on our next build – which will be the first release of the vehicles initially constructed by EasyPickins, and now being knocked into shape by General Arcade’s Yuri and our own RJ. We released Vehicles Build 21 last week, and discussed much of its keys/hotwire/loot content in the Thursdoid. Vehicles Build 22, meanwhile, will be released once the bug-chasing on the main public build slows down a bit. Vehicles 22 will introduce ‘Zombie thump’ when zeds flock round a car, meaning that they will act in the same way that they currently do around building windows and doors – as opposed to their current habit of falling over next to the car and taking damage themselves. It should also sync up motor activity for different players in co-op, as well as hopefully put an end to lost trunk loot. After various calls for more vehicle variety, meanwhile, the build will also feature a new modern car, an SUV, a two door smaller car and a taxi that Martin has created, and Mash has textured up. Many of these can be seen in the following video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwO0fOsSil4 From another community request, emergency vehicles will also now have sirens and flashing lights alongside as a part of their UI – which will clearly be something of an attractant for zed-kind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SkmlXkLKL8 Finally, shown here in full WIP mode, are the beginnings of how the Mechanic Skill and Car Repair will work. Clearly there’ll be less references to ‘rubber bands’, the car diagram will be improved and only max-level characters will be able to see percentages in this way – but as you can see it’s much like how the current Health panel works. [As you can probably tell, this still needs a fair amount of work and won’t be a part of the next Vehicle Build.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyZuCYcp7lk A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-09-28 15:27:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Thursdoids continue. They will not be stopped.
Build 38 Released
We released Build 38 last Friday and people have been getting their first tastes of Riverside, the new worldview features and much else beside. (Release notes here). As you would probably expect, a lot of this week has involved collating and fixing up the various issues that arose when 38 was revealed to the wider public audience. To this end we’ve released 38.16, 38.17, 38.18 and 38.19 in the interim to patch things up. Most critical issues have now been resolved, but there are still MP issues that we still need to get to the bottom of (generators faltering when players log out, magically unlocking doors etc) amongst other gremlins that need battering (zombie-proof windows, misplaced radio sounds, some Linux-y stuff). As such we anticipate 38.20 tomorrow, and likely some follow-ups and a GOG release next week. Blindcoder is also in the process of updating the official PZ Map with Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club – it takes a very long time to process the map into an image, however, so it too will hopefully be surfacing at some point next week.
Build 39 (Vehicles)
Elsewhere work continues on our next build – which will be the first release of the vehicles initially constructed by EasyPickins, and now being knocked into shape by General Arcade’s Yuri and our own RJ. We released Vehicles Build 21 last week, and discussed much of its keys/hotwire/loot content in the Thursdoid. Vehicles Build 22, meanwhile, will be released once the bug-chasing on the main public build slows down a bit. Vehicles 22 will introduce ‘Zombie thump’ when zeds flock round a car, meaning that they will act in the same way that they currently do around building windows and doors – as opposed to their current habit of falling over next to the car and taking damage themselves. It should also sync up motor activity for different players in co-op, as well as hopefully put an end to lost trunk loot. After various calls for more vehicle variety, meanwhile, the build will also feature a new modern car, an SUV, a two door smaller car and a taxi that Martin has created, and Mash has textured up. Many of these can be seen in the following video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwO0fOsSil4 From another community request, emergency vehicles will also now have sirens and flashing lights alongside as a part of their UI – which will clearly be something of an attractant for zed-kind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SkmlXkLKL8 Finally, shown here in full WIP mode, are the beginnings of how the Mechanic Skill and Car Repair will work. Clearly there’ll be less references to ‘rubber bands’, the car diagram will be improved and only max-level characters will be able to see percentages in this way – but as you can see it’s much like how the current Health panel works. [As you can probably tell, this still needs a fair amount of work and won’t be a part of the next Vehicle Build.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyZuCYcp7lk A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-09-28 15:27:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 38 Changelog
[ 2017-09-22 07:42:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
[New]
- New map area added! The town of Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club are now ripe and ready for exploration. It can be found west of West Point. [Foraging zones etc still need to be added, but survival can commence!]
- Added an easy way for modders to add columns to their scrolling lists.
- [MP] Added an UI for admin to manage player's inventory.
- [MP] When a server save will occur all client will be unable to perform anything (paused, server option).
- [MP] Got rid of TransactionID while it's bugged & it made server saving longer.
- [MP] Optimization to limit the amount of zombie placement and zombie movement data that’s shared between players. Released in preparation for the Wednesday community megatest.
- First Aid kits now spawn with sterilized bandages, rather than regular bandages.
- Can now sterilize cloth bandages in a boiling pot of water.
- Mattress can now be made using a suture needle as well as a regular needle.
- You can now add spices as first item in pasta/rice (eg. marinara).
- Can use CTRL + A to select all items in a container.
- Command console in Debug now autosuggests functions and shows return types.
- Command console version now accurately reflects the current version of the game.
- Items used for fuel in campfires can now be used for fuel in BBQs.
- Sheet of paper can now be written on.
- Updated credits.
- Large piles of rotten corpses will make you feel ill and sad if you stay close to them for extended periods.
- You can now dig graves with a shovel. (Ability to bury multiple bodies in the same grave will come in 38.2)
- If you're carrying a corpse, you can bury it in an empty grave.
- Added new sub menu in carpentry "Misc".
- In "Misc" you'll find a wooden cross, acairn and a wooden memorial picket to go alongside the graves you dig.
- Changes in clothing:
- Clothing can now become dirty over extended periods, dependant on your activities.
- Fighting zombies will make your clothing bloody.
- If you're wearing dirty or bloody clothing over an open wound then chances of infection (normal infection, not zombie) will increase.
- Clothing now also has durability, every time you get hit you'll lose a little.
- Some clothing is more resistant than others.
- Added new sandbox options:
- Generator Spawn: Increase/decrease the chance of electrical generators spawning on the map.
- Generator Fuel Consumption: Impacts how much fuel is consumed by generators. A generator that needs no fuel should be set to 0.0. (Replaces GeneratorFuelConsumed server option)
- Randomized House Chance: Increase/decrease probability of discovering randomized safe house on the map: either burnt out, containing loot stashes, dead survivor bodies etc.
- Annotated Map Chance: Impacts on how often a looted map will have annotations marked on it by a deceased survivor.
- Zombie Construction Damage: Governs whether or not zombies can destroy player constructions and defences.
- Free Trait Points: Adds free points during character creation.
- Player-built Construction Strength: Gives player-built constructions extra hit points so they are more resistant to zombie damage.
- Day/Night Active Zombies: Governs whether zombies are more active during the day, or whether they act more nocturnally. Inactive zombies will be slower, and tend not to give chase.
- Nocturnal Darkness: Governs how dark it gets at night. Don't forget your flashlight
- Injury Severity: Increase and decrease the impact that injuries have on your body, and their healing time.
- Bone Fracture: Enable or disable broken limbs when survivors receive injuries from impacts, zombie damage and falls.
- Time Before Corpse Removal: Number of in-game hours before zombie corpses are automatically removed from the map. (Replaces former HoursForCorpseRemoval server option).
- Decaying Corpse Health Impact: Governs impact that nearby decaying bodies has on the player's health and emotions
- Clothing Degradation: Governs how quickly clothing degrades, becomes dirty and bloodied. (Can be disabled.)
- Added random selection on zombie's: Strength, Toughness and Cognition.
- Fire spread (previously No Fire spread on server): allow or not spreading fire.
- TV and Radio programmes now have an impact on the character's moodles. If watching an instructional show then an XP multiplier is received.
- [MP] Added a "Level Up" button on the player stats UI to quickly level up a perk without using global point.
-
Changed how custom maps are loaded:
- After selecting your mod, you now arrive on the "select spawn location" screen and no more "select map" screen to avoid confusion.
- Every map mods enabled is now loaded, including their spawnpoints.
- It means you don't need to code your own multiple maps mod to load more than one.
- Added a mod order UI, use it if you have conflicts (copy a cell over existing one) in your modded map!
- Changes on world view:
- Building levels above the player are ONLY hidden for the "current building".
- "Current building" defined as the building you're inside OR if you're outside, the building blocking our view of the player character OR a building whose window you're look through.
- To peek through a window stand adjacent and face it.
- Building levels are also hidden when the nearest visible zombie is behind a building. So if your character looks behind the back wall of a building and there's a zombie there the building's floors will be hidden just as they would if you walked behind the building.
- Building exterior walls are no longer stencilled to transparent when you're outside unless they are actually blocking the view of your character.
[Balance]
- Increase player's constructions hit points.
- Removed starting year sandbox option.
- Increased a tad the nutrition values of fishes & berries.
- Sleeping outside in rain will wake players up, unless they are in a tent or under a player made structure with roof.
[Bug Fix]
- Fixed zombie memory "none" sandbox option not working.
- Fixed a bug with season making moon not afecting ambient lights at night.
- Fixed water pouring bug.
- Fixed lampost still active when electricity was down.
- Fixed being able to build thing inside player's safehouse.
- Fixed being able to climb through windows into a player's safehouse.
- Fixed bodies corpses zone sometimes overlapping.
- Fixed bodies corpse zone not being properly synced in multiplayer.
- Fixed bugs on the new riverside map.
- Fixed lot of UI non-working with a gamepad.
- Large amount of smaller items will now correctly fill up container space available.
- Book Reading is now interrupted when player aims a weapon.
- Fixed Characters losing fraction of xp on save.
- Added missing "spawn point" options in the server settings GUI.
- Added missing world filler.
- Fixed possible bug with alarm being reset.
- Fixed Rare bug with the craftingUI.
- Fixed Mod order button being missplaced.
- Fixed Bug with the getLightFoodMod() calculation.
- Fixed Evolved recipe drinks not being able to be drunk when an item could be added to it (the coffee bug).
- Fixed Crafting issue with Hot Cuppa.
[Optimization]
- Optimized Garbage Collection
- Added WorldReuserThread
- LightingJNI optimized
- Fixed surge in memory usage of 2-300 MB that can stall the game
- Optimized map loading
- Fixed: Voice Manager being enabled in SP. [Should give slight improvement in FPS, especially on slower systems]
[ 2017-09-22 07:42:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
Thursdoid Rising
We realise the 38 release has been built-up a fair amount, it’s been on the brink for so long while we mop up this bug and that – but on the approach to release on Monday we realised that some aspects of the build’s optimizations hadn’t been properly integrated in recent 38 builds, and as such as a whole the ‘release candidate’ hadn’t received sufficient public testing. There’s a lot of changes under the hood in Build 38, and the last thing we want is for an unironed version to go out and disrupt people’s ongoing games. It’s all in place now, however. As such, if you’re an IWBUMS tester or fancy being one for the day, please jump into the latest beta – let us know how it runs for you, and we’ll press ‘go’ when we see enough green lights.
As mentioned in a previous Mondoid, we now have various people working on Build 39 (the vehicles build) so have a ‘gameplay’ coder and Bitbaboon Steve doing general optimizations – all alongside Yuri’s existing ‘nuts and bolts’ engine and physics work. As such, Vehicles Build 21 has been released with a bunch of stuff intended to gel our vehicles ever tighter to PZ gameplay. This includes:
A few threads have popped up on the forum saying that we could do with a bit more variety in vehicle models to make things look a little bit more realistic – and as such Martin has been modelling up some different variants on existing car models, as well as creating a few new ones, for Mash to paint up some textures for. These won’t appear in Build 39, most likely, but will pop up in the relevant areas in the versions that follow
A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-09-21 21:43:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
And so begins a bold new era of… Thursday.
Build 38
We realise the 38 release has been built-up a fair amount, it’s been on the brink for so long while we mop up this bug and that – but on the approach to release on Monday we realised that some aspects of the build’s optimizations hadn’t been properly integrated in recent 38 builds, and as such as a whole the ‘release candidate’ hadn’t received sufficient public testing. There’s a lot of changes under the hood in Build 38, and the last thing we want is for an unironed version to go out and disrupt people’s ongoing games. It’s all in place now, however. As such, if you’re an IWBUMS tester or fancy being one for the day, please jump into the latest beta – let us know how it runs for you, and we’ll press ‘go’ when we see enough green lights.
Build 39 (aka Vehicle Test Build 21)
As mentioned in a previous Mondoid, we now have various people working on Build 39 (the vehicles build) so have a ‘gameplay’ coder and Bitbaboon Steve doing general optimizations – all alongside Yuri’s existing ‘nuts and bolts’ engine and physics work. As such, Vehicles Build 21 has been released with a bunch of stuff intended to gel our vehicles ever tighter to PZ gameplay. This includes:
- Simulated gear shifts are now based on your engine rpm, the number of gears your car has and the max speed. Previously it would just work on the speeds you hit.
- You’re now slowed and have less traction if you’re driving off-road. [In future builds constant off-road driving will also reduce a vehicle’s condition.]
- Car keys are now a more important aspect of the game. They are mandatory when it comes to starting an engine or turning on headlights, and have a (small) chance of spawning already in the ignition or in the glove box. A ‘car locked’ sound is also heard, rather than the characters say ‘locked’ out loud like a weirdo would.
- If you have Level 2 Electrical Skill then you can Hotwire a vehicle if you can get inside. Better and more modern cars are trickier to hotwire, and a failed attempt will result in damaging the ignition.
- In larger vehicles like vans and emergency vehicles you can fit more characters inside in MP – and rear seats can also be used as containers now.
- Vehicles are no longer empty of ‘life detritus’. They now have loot tables that reflect their past owners. Every day vehicles might have bags of rotting groceries inside, uneaten candies and old magazines. Meanwhile there’s a small chance that a pick-up might have a fisherman’s equipment, while a pick-up could have been a carpenter’s work vehicle – and as such have a trunk full of items that reflect his work.
- General changes: gas consumption now dependent on what gear you’re in, and more forgiving. Reduced chances of stalling. Balanced vehicle storage capacities. Vehicles audible from a greater range. Can no longer drive through double doors. (Sorry
)
Moar vehicles
A few threads have popped up on the forum saying that we could do with a bit more variety in vehicle models to make things look a little bit more realistic – and as such Martin has been modelling up some different variants on existing car models, as well as creating a few new ones, for Mash to paint up some textures for. These won’t appear in Build 39, most likely, but will pop up in the relevant areas in the versions that follow
A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-09-21 21:43:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
Behold the Thursdoid
[ 2017-09-18 20:46:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone. A little bit of a short Mondoid this week. In fact the last one ever. But don’t worry, we’re still keeping up with the weekly updates.
It’s the end of an era. This Mondoid is just an announcement to say that from this point the traditional Mondoid blog will be moving to Thursday – henceforth to be known as ‘Thursdoid’.
There are several reasons for this. We know some people look forward to Mondoids to combat the back to work/school Monday blues, but as our team has grown quite dramatically over the past year, it has become more and more clear how inconvenient Monday updates are, how much harder it is to coordinate the week’s work after a weekend, and how they are ultimately of detriment to the game, player-base and developers. From the game’s side, it means we’ve had an entire weekend just prior to the most important day of the week, where it may have been more difficult to get hold of people, or work has been at its lightest. From the developers side, many of the contractors we’ve taken into the fold have families, and its a bit crappy of us to impose our historic looming Mondoid pressure onto them.
We feel that moving to Thursdays will be better for everyone, as we’ll have had several working days of preparation and week day communication to make sure the Thursdoids are on point, versions have had sufficient time in the incubators during the week, and yet we’ll still have Friday to fix up any problems that crop up before the weekend starts (that’s not to say the workaholic elements within will not continue to poke at the game during the weekend as we always have). It’s also closer to the weekend, so when versions emerge, players have less time to wait to have dedicated time to enjoy them.
Also we ran out of Monday puns a long time ago.
We had hoped to sweeten this final Mondoid with a public release of build 38, but in the last hours discovered a few issues we really need to address. As such we will warm up for a full release as soon as we can this week, and we’ll see you on Thursday!
[ 2017-09-18 20:46:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
Gas 2 Go
Build 38 is fully baked, but requires two roof-rendering fixes to player-made bases from ChrisW who’s beavering away at them as we speak. We didn’t want to wreck the views of solo savegame and server player bases with a public release, and will be patching in further tweaks to the system (improved peeking, fairer window/zed visibility at NW corners etc) after release. In the mean-time there’ll be a new public IWBUMS beta release tomorrow with other general/necessary pre-launch bug fixes from RJ and Connall.
With the current vehicles beta soon to transform into Build 39 this week we’ve had extra hands descend upon it. Yuri will continue to oversee physics issues, car shadows, visible damage and general vehicles performance – meanwhile Steve will be providing optimization support game-wide, and now RJ is in amongst it working on gameplay aspects like realistic vehicle spawning, the Mechanic skill, gas used during journeys and the like. [In the meanwhile Turbo will continue to work on his devices code, work will begin on the next big map update and Bitbaboon Mark will continue to work with the PZ team with the new animations for integration into the build(s) that follow.] In terms of Build 39 RJ has begun this work with Vehicle build 19 (directions on how to access here) in which he transferred aspects of Yuri’s work into the overall PZ zoning system, added Mash’s latest textures for burnt-out cars, balanced attributes of particular cars, restarted work on car keys and added various Sandbox options to let players tailor their vehicular PZ experience a little better. Build 19 also introduced some of Yuri’s fixes to vehicles in co-op and MP, so that will hopefully make for a smoother ride online – with less disappearing cars and loot. Over to RJ for a brief word on his automobile work: “Up until Vehicles Build 19 properties like engine condition, maximum speed and how much gas a car had were purely dependent on where the vehicle spawned. So at the moment I’m giving each car some individuality, although spawn area still matters as a vehicle spawning in a beautiful neighbourhood won’t have the same condition as something found in a trailer park.” “Also now in the vehicles build the amount of gas consumed by a car is no longer static – previously you lost a set amount per-tick, but now it depends on various things: stuff like the total mass of the car and your loot, engine quality and the speeds you’re travelling at. So gas usage will really depend on how you use the car.” “I’ve also made sure that when driving on non-tarmac surfaces cars will be slowed – and ultimately damaged if you’re driving over bumpy wilderness.” “In terms of car spawning zones – that should now be improved, although spawn numbers will likely still need balance. Not every zone is done but where I’ve done work then cars should be appearing in more accurate places, burnt out cars should be appearing in junk yards and trailer parks, and ‘special’ vehicles like the Spiffo’s truck should be parked outside the Spiffo’s restaurant. Still to come is work that’ll make the way that they’re parked look a bit more ‘natural’.” “Until Build 38 is released and I need to get back onto bug fixes I’m also working on engine power, car keys and locked cars, and balancing general vehicle stats. We’re also finalizing the ‘Mechanic’ skill design doc, and should be getting the sign off from the rest of the team this week.”
Optimization is currently vital as the vehicle build is careering towards a wider audience. As such Bitbaboon Steve’s opti-mission continues – chalking up two more FPS salves that we’ll test out in the Vehicles Build (Build 39) towards the end of the week, and also spotlighting something funky deep in the PZ engine rendering system that’ll require further investigation. To aid him in his quest we’re investigating an update from lwjgl2 to lwjgl3 – which is no simple task, but has been on the ‘must do’ tasklist for a fair while. We’re at a point with it that should help Steve a fair amount when he dives deep into the rendering code, but when it reaches its full fruition then this will hopefully make for general better running of PZ, remedied display issues and general headache easing.
[ 2017-09-11 22:37:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hola gang. Here’s the latest slice of Monday.
BUILD 38
Build 38 is fully baked, but requires two roof-rendering fixes to player-made bases from ChrisW who’s beavering away at them as we speak. We didn’t want to wreck the views of solo savegame and server player bases with a public release, and will be patching in further tweaks to the system (improved peeking, fairer window/zed visibility at NW corners etc) after release. In the mean-time there’ll be a new public IWBUMS beta release tomorrow with other general/necessary pre-launch bug fixes from RJ and Connall.
VEHICLES
With the current vehicles beta soon to transform into Build 39 this week we’ve had extra hands descend upon it. Yuri will continue to oversee physics issues, car shadows, visible damage and general vehicles performance – meanwhile Steve will be providing optimization support game-wide, and now RJ is in amongst it working on gameplay aspects like realistic vehicle spawning, the Mechanic skill, gas used during journeys and the like. [In the meanwhile Turbo will continue to work on his devices code, work will begin on the next big map update and Bitbaboon Mark will continue to work with the PZ team with the new animations for integration into the build(s) that follow.] In terms of Build 39 RJ has begun this work with Vehicle build 19 (directions on how to access here) in which he transferred aspects of Yuri’s work into the overall PZ zoning system, added Mash’s latest textures for burnt-out cars, balanced attributes of particular cars, restarted work on car keys and added various Sandbox options to let players tailor their vehicular PZ experience a little better. Build 19 also introduced some of Yuri’s fixes to vehicles in co-op and MP, so that will hopefully make for a smoother ride online – with less disappearing cars and loot. Over to RJ for a brief word on his automobile work: “Up until Vehicles Build 19 properties like engine condition, maximum speed and how much gas a car had were purely dependent on where the vehicle spawned. So at the moment I’m giving each car some individuality, although spawn area still matters as a vehicle spawning in a beautiful neighbourhood won’t have the same condition as something found in a trailer park.” “Also now in the vehicles build the amount of gas consumed by a car is no longer static – previously you lost a set amount per-tick, but now it depends on various things: stuff like the total mass of the car and your loot, engine quality and the speeds you’re travelling at. So gas usage will really depend on how you use the car.” “I’ve also made sure that when driving on non-tarmac surfaces cars will be slowed – and ultimately damaged if you’re driving over bumpy wilderness.” “In terms of car spawning zones – that should now be improved, although spawn numbers will likely still need balance. Not every zone is done but where I’ve done work then cars should be appearing in more accurate places, burnt out cars should be appearing in junk yards and trailer parks, and ‘special’ vehicles like the Spiffo’s truck should be parked outside the Spiffo’s restaurant. Still to come is work that’ll make the way that they’re parked look a bit more ‘natural’.” “Until Build 38 is released and I need to get back onto bug fixes I’m also working on engine power, car keys and locked cars, and balancing general vehicle stats. We’re also finalizing the ‘Mechanic’ skill design doc, and should be getting the sign off from the rest of the team this week.”
OPTI-MISSION
Optimization is currently vital as the vehicle build is careering towards a wider audience. As such Bitbaboon Steve’s opti-mission continues – chalking up two more FPS salves that we’ll test out in the Vehicles Build (Build 39) towards the end of the week, and also spotlighting something funky deep in the PZ engine rendering system that’ll require further investigation. To aid him in his quest we’re investigating an update from lwjgl2 to lwjgl3 – which is no simple task, but has been on the ‘must do’ tasklist for a fair while. We’re at a point with it that should help Steve a fair amount when he dives deep into the rendering code, but when it reaches its full fruition then this will hopefully make for general better running of PZ, remedied display issues and general headache easing.
OTHER STUFF
- Connall’s work on the ‘small things that make a big difference’ suggestion list continues, with the integration of imperial measurements (pounds, miles, Fahrenheit etc) to make our American audience feel a little less like… they’re in a European zombie apocalypse.
- We’ve stolen Nasko, our community manager, away from his actual real world workplace for a month or two to work on revamping the PZ Wiki – so it’s more accessible and better structured for community efforts. If anyone has any thoughts, or maybe even would like to help him on his quest when details need to flood the system, then please give him a shout.
[ 2017-09-11 22:37:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
Over where?
The public Build 38 release is feeling increasingly imminent – although there are still a few fixes to the new roof rendering and player view system that are still in the oven. Today we released IWBUMS public beta 38.11 that focuses on transferred optimizations from the vehicles build – so improved garbage collection, optimized lighting, memory leaks plugged and improved map loading. There’s also a VoiceManager fix gone in, spotted by BitBaboon Steve and remedied by General Arcade, that should provide an FPS improvement in SP – especially on lower spec systems. So if you see/feel/sense any improvements then please let us know. The build also does various soon-to-launch jobs like updating community translations, alongside several of Connall’s Community Suggested tweaks: first aid kits now spawning with sterilized bandages, suture needles being able to be used for sewing like regular needles and the ability to sterilize bandages in boiling water. He’s also made aspects of tea preparation and drinking less frightful through the addition of a new recipe. Full changelist here.
This week Yuri is moving onto commonly reported MP issues in the public vehicles beta in preparation for the wider testing audience when Build 39 goes into IWBUMS. As such stuff like vehicles disappearing on exit, precious loot removing itself from the boot (trunk if you’re American) and similar will all come beneath his steely glare. He’s also, finally hopefully, zapped the ‘trapped in walking animation’ bug that’s been vexing our car testers for several builds now – with a fix due in Vehicle Build 19. Vehicle Build 18, meanwhile, came out last Friday – and came with the much requested addition of making sure that the number of players that can fit inside each car model is accurate to the number of seats, and hopefully a fix to the strange lights on/off syncing issue that MP players have been reported. It also came with actual visible headlights appearing on vehicles (rather than just having the beams) and red brake lights to boot. It brings a surprising amount to the vehicles when it’s all seen in-game, as you can hopefully see in this video. [Although Yuri’s coding music is a little… mellow (?) for our taste.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uAOvTz-DUk We’ve also updated the Vehicles Build with the latest IWBUMS, so testers can explore the new town of Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club in relative leisure – as seen below.
Once Build 38 releases the current plans are for Build 39 to be a relatively quickfire release, essentially getting the existing experimental vehicles out to the public in as bug-free a state as possible – albeit on the current selection toggle. We anticipate improving on their current zoning/spawning alongside aspects of their optimization, but the meat of their maintenance will come in the following build. We’re currently firming up the design docs – but the current plan is for vehicle damage, repair and car wreck player injuries to be a focus in Build 40, and then to turn to player-crafted improvements and realistic ‘apocalypse survival’ modifications in later versions. As we’ve mentioned before, maintaining your cars will work in much the same way as our current medical system – covering stuff like dead batteries, burst tires and the more common engine issues as well as structural damage. Don’t expect My Summer Car levels of vehicular knowledge requirements [although we certainly hope the modding crowd will think towards this] but do expect the Mechanic profession to be a fun/useful one to have. Elsewhere Turbo is making good progress with his Devices overhaul (this week reworking radios so it’s easier to find and tune into different player wavelengths), Bitbaboon Mark is fixing up the new skinned renderer in the now integrated model loader in the anims build and his colleague Steve is marking up various targets for optimization to ensure that vehicles run as swimmingly as possible when they’re released. Oh, and Mash is adding more detail to the wilderness areas around Riverside for those who venture into the back of beyond. Today’s featured massacre from C.P. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless Mondoids for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-09-04 19:20:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Ello, ello, ello – here’s some of the latest.
BUILD 38
The public Build 38 release is feeling increasingly imminent – although there are still a few fixes to the new roof rendering and player view system that are still in the oven. Today we released IWBUMS public beta 38.11 that focuses on transferred optimizations from the vehicles build – so improved garbage collection, optimized lighting, memory leaks plugged and improved map loading. There’s also a VoiceManager fix gone in, spotted by BitBaboon Steve and remedied by General Arcade, that should provide an FPS improvement in SP – especially on lower spec systems. So if you see/feel/sense any improvements then please let us know. The build also does various soon-to-launch jobs like updating community translations, alongside several of Connall’s Community Suggested tweaks: first aid kits now spawning with sterilized bandages, suture needles being able to be used for sewing like regular needles and the ability to sterilize bandages in boiling water. He’s also made aspects of tea preparation and drinking less frightful through the addition of a new recipe. Full changelist here.
VEHICLES
This week Yuri is moving onto commonly reported MP issues in the public vehicles beta in preparation for the wider testing audience when Build 39 goes into IWBUMS. As such stuff like vehicles disappearing on exit, precious loot removing itself from the boot (trunk if you’re American) and similar will all come beneath his steely glare. He’s also, finally hopefully, zapped the ‘trapped in walking animation’ bug that’s been vexing our car testers for several builds now – with a fix due in Vehicle Build 19. Vehicle Build 18, meanwhile, came out last Friday – and came with the much requested addition of making sure that the number of players that can fit inside each car model is accurate to the number of seats, and hopefully a fix to the strange lights on/off syncing issue that MP players have been reported. It also came with actual visible headlights appearing on vehicles (rather than just having the beams) and red brake lights to boot. It brings a surprising amount to the vehicles when it’s all seen in-game, as you can hopefully see in this video. [Although Yuri’s coding music is a little… mellow (?) for our taste.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uAOvTz-DUk We’ve also updated the Vehicles Build with the latest IWBUMS, so testers can explore the new town of Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club in relative leisure – as seen below.
39+ PLANS
Once Build 38 releases the current plans are for Build 39 to be a relatively quickfire release, essentially getting the existing experimental vehicles out to the public in as bug-free a state as possible – albeit on the current selection toggle. We anticipate improving on their current zoning/spawning alongside aspects of their optimization, but the meat of their maintenance will come in the following build. We’re currently firming up the design docs – but the current plan is for vehicle damage, repair and car wreck player injuries to be a focus in Build 40, and then to turn to player-crafted improvements and realistic ‘apocalypse survival’ modifications in later versions. As we’ve mentioned before, maintaining your cars will work in much the same way as our current medical system – covering stuff like dead batteries, burst tires and the more common engine issues as well as structural damage. Don’t expect My Summer Car levels of vehicular knowledge requirements [although we certainly hope the modding crowd will think towards this] but do expect the Mechanic profession to be a fun/useful one to have. Elsewhere Turbo is making good progress with his Devices overhaul (this week reworking radios so it’s easier to find and tune into different player wavelengths), Bitbaboon Mark is fixing up the new skinned renderer in the now integrated model loader in the anims build and his colleague Steve is marking up various targets for optimization to ensure that vehicles run as swimmingly as possible when they’re released. Oh, and Mash is adding more detail to the wilderness areas around Riverside for those who venture into the back of beyond. Today’s featured massacre from C.P. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless Mondoids for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-09-04 19:20:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Riversiders
The town of Riverside and the countryside around it was added to the IWBUMS public beta Build 38 last Thursday in 38.8, and we’re getting plenty of positive reports from the testers exploring its separated rich/poor districts, the Scenic Grove trailer park, the stone angels of its graveyards and the delights of the Knox Heights Country Club.
We’ve also added a lootable map, and have been adding foraging zoning etc to it since release. Here’s a section of it, but there’s plenty more besides.
We’ll be adding the map to the vehicles build imminently, tomorrow hopefully, which will probably help you in your exploration as it’s been constructed to favour drivers a little more than previous map expansions. Initial reports suggest people are digging the different building styles, and there’s still some more to come from Mash in terms of extra buildings and detail. It sounds like zombie numbers need to be topped up a little, though, so if the Country Club tennis courts feel like they need a bit more action then please let us know.
Last Wednesday we ran the IWBUMS Megatest II to try out Bitbaboon Steve’s new effort in the War Against Zombie Lag – and we’re very pleased to report a resounding success. We opened up the server toward the end of the test and had 141 people playing off/on over the hour, and 87 at its peak – and the usual peril of ghosting zombies, unfair bites and general combat sludginess was hugely improved. Even better, things didn’t seem to degrade the more players got online. If this summary from Svarog is anything to go by, life for our MP players should be vastly improved when 38 is released: “I’ve gotta say that it’s incredible how much better it is when it comes to zombies. There is almost no lag, combat is much, much more pleasant. I can even use knives as weapons. Awesome job.” Our thanks to Steve for his eagle eyes and code skills – and also for his ongoing work as there’s still room for improvement. During the test he set up various headache testcases with groups of helpful players, and there’s still plenty of areas he feels he can ratchet MP performance tighter, before moving on to general PZ optimization to aid and abet both vehicles and the animation system that his colleague Mark is helping out with. Hurrah then!
Current focus is to tidy up Build 38 and get it out of the door – with IWBUMS 38.9 fairly imminent with Riverside forage zoning, new spawnpoints, Yuri’s recent gamepad work and some work on legacy bugs from Connall. (Incidentally Connall is now taking ownership of much of the ‘Small but Important Suggestions thread‘ so if there’s any minor thing that you think could make life that little bit more fun or realistic in the game then feel free to holler at him there. From 38.9 if you’re sleeping outside then rain will wake you up, for instance.) Yuri, meanwhile, continues his work on the public vehicles test – and is currently adding brake lights, and a change in appearance of the physical headlights to accompany the light beams we already have in the game. He’ll most likely be turning to co-op issues later in the week, while we’ll also be internally testing his engine optimizations when they’re integrated into Build 38 so that we can pave the way for the release of the first iteration of vehicles in Build 39. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless Mondoids for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-08-28 20:08:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Ello’ all, and happy Bank Holiday for UK-ers and beyond.
RIVERSIDE RELEASE
The town of Riverside and the countryside around it was added to the IWBUMS public beta Build 38 last Thursday in 38.8, and we’re getting plenty of positive reports from the testers exploring its separated rich/poor districts, the Scenic Grove trailer park, the stone angels of its graveyards and the delights of the Knox Heights Country Club.
We’ve also added a lootable map, and have been adding foraging zoning etc to it since release. Here’s a section of it, but there’s plenty more besides.
We’ll be adding the map to the vehicles build imminently, tomorrow hopefully, which will probably help you in your exploration as it’s been constructed to favour drivers a little more than previous map expansions. Initial reports suggest people are digging the different building styles, and there’s still some more to come from Mash in terms of extra buildings and detail. It sounds like zombie numbers need to be topped up a little, though, so if the Country Club tennis courts feel like they need a bit more action then please let us know.
MEGATEST RESULTS
Last Wednesday we ran the IWBUMS Megatest II to try out Bitbaboon Steve’s new effort in the War Against Zombie Lag – and we’re very pleased to report a resounding success. We opened up the server toward the end of the test and had 141 people playing off/on over the hour, and 87 at its peak – and the usual peril of ghosting zombies, unfair bites and general combat sludginess was hugely improved. Even better, things didn’t seem to degrade the more players got online. If this summary from Svarog is anything to go by, life for our MP players should be vastly improved when 38 is released: “I’ve gotta say that it’s incredible how much better it is when it comes to zombies. There is almost no lag, combat is much, much more pleasant. I can even use knives as weapons. Awesome job.” Our thanks to Steve for his eagle eyes and code skills – and also for his ongoing work as there’s still room for improvement. During the test he set up various headache testcases with groups of helpful players, and there’s still plenty of areas he feels he can ratchet MP performance tighter, before moving on to general PZ optimization to aid and abet both vehicles and the animation system that his colleague Mark is helping out with. Hurrah then!
NEXT
Current focus is to tidy up Build 38 and get it out of the door – with IWBUMS 38.9 fairly imminent with Riverside forage zoning, new spawnpoints, Yuri’s recent gamepad work and some work on legacy bugs from Connall. (Incidentally Connall is now taking ownership of much of the ‘Small but Important Suggestions thread‘ so if there’s any minor thing that you think could make life that little bit more fun or realistic in the game then feel free to holler at him there. From 38.9 if you’re sleeping outside then rain will wake you up, for instance.) Yuri, meanwhile, continues his work on the public vehicles test – and is currently adding brake lights, and a change in appearance of the physical headlights to accompany the light beams we already have in the game. He’ll most likely be turning to co-op issues later in the week, while we’ll also be internally testing his engine optimizations when they’re integrated into Build 38 so that we can pave the way for the release of the first iteration of vehicles in Build 39. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless Mondoids for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-08-28 20:08:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Optimal Transmission
We released a new build of the Vehicles test branch today, in preparation for it becoming Build 39 once Build 38 gets a full release. Vehicle Build 15 fixes bugs with car wrecks spawning in the air and gently floating down, and also goes through and corrects the vehicle shadows and collision boxes of all our car models – meaning that flipped cars can no longer be walked through. Yuri also finished off his gamepad integration work, adding gamepad control to our lootable map interface, which he will be transferring to Build 38 alongside the rest of his controller work. The original plan was to release our new map expansion featuring the town of Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club into the vehicles build, but as the week has gone by it’s seemed increasingly daft to sit on something that’s finished for longer than is necessary. As such we’re currently working on the zombie spawn maps and player spawn points necessary for it to be released earlier with Build 38. Our intention is to get this out, alongside rooftop rendering and general RJ fixes, in time for a Community MP Megatest we’ll be holding on Wednesday evening. This is as a result of the…
We currently have two technical director chaps working on Zomboid. There’s Mark who’s setting up animations and currently getting a character skinned renderer active on a toggle (so we can turn on the new anims on the dev-side one-by-one as we go), and Steve who we’ve initially tasked with optimizing MP connectivity. Steve’s primary aim is to remove zombie lag (teleporting zeds, unfair bites and general server strain) and this past Friday he might have made a bit of a breakthrough – which has now been coded and is due to be released into our IWBUMS public beta for testing tomorrow. Essentially Steve discovered a way to optimize zombie transmission – limiting the amount of zombie placement and zombie movement data that’s shared between players, while still keeping the online gameplay rolling. This, combined with Stas from General Arcade’s ‘server save pause’ that’s already part of Build 38, could hopefully provide a massive improvement for all our MP players and server owners when released. Through the power of maths we can tell it’s likely to be a nifty optimization, but we can’t tell how nifty it will be without putting it to the test… and so…
This Wednesday 23rd August at 8pm BST (GMT+1) we will be opening up a server that’s running the current IWBUMS build, and we’d politely ask those interested in helping out to attend. Full details in this thread. As with our previous Build 38 Megatest, participants will all receive a free Project Zomboid code to give to a friend/enemy/close family relation. All we need is for you to be running around on the server for an hour or so, and it’ll probably be quite a fun escapade. The only difference between this time and the last Megatest is that, to properly emulate a normal live PZ server, we will be capping the number of participants at 50. When the test is over, however, we will open the server a little wider. This does mean, however, that there will only be 50 Steam codes up for grabs.
Massive props to SoulFilcher for recreating this little scene in LEGO. Terrifying indeed.
Today’s featured image from SAS 6007. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless Mondoids for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-08-21 22:35:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Plenty on at the moment, and a new Community Megatest with free PZ codes up for grabs coming up on Wednesdoid…
NEW BUILDS
We released a new build of the Vehicles test branch today, in preparation for it becoming Build 39 once Build 38 gets a full release. Vehicle Build 15 fixes bugs with car wrecks spawning in the air and gently floating down, and also goes through and corrects the vehicle shadows and collision boxes of all our car models – meaning that flipped cars can no longer be walked through. Yuri also finished off his gamepad integration work, adding gamepad control to our lootable map interface, which he will be transferring to Build 38 alongside the rest of his controller work. The original plan was to release our new map expansion featuring the town of Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club into the vehicles build, but as the week has gone by it’s seemed increasingly daft to sit on something that’s finished for longer than is necessary. As such we’re currently working on the zombie spawn maps and player spawn points necessary for it to be released earlier with Build 38. Our intention is to get this out, alongside rooftop rendering and general RJ fixes, in time for a Community MP Megatest we’ll be holding on Wednesday evening. This is as a result of the…
WAR ON ZOMBIE LAG
We currently have two technical director chaps working on Zomboid. There’s Mark who’s setting up animations and currently getting a character skinned renderer active on a toggle (so we can turn on the new anims on the dev-side one-by-one as we go), and Steve who we’ve initially tasked with optimizing MP connectivity. Steve’s primary aim is to remove zombie lag (teleporting zeds, unfair bites and general server strain) and this past Friday he might have made a bit of a breakthrough – which has now been coded and is due to be released into our IWBUMS public beta for testing tomorrow. Essentially Steve discovered a way to optimize zombie transmission – limiting the amount of zombie placement and zombie movement data that’s shared between players, while still keeping the online gameplay rolling. This, combined with Stas from General Arcade’s ‘server save pause’ that’s already part of Build 38, could hopefully provide a massive improvement for all our MP players and server owners when released. Through the power of maths we can tell it’s likely to be a nifty optimization, but we can’t tell how nifty it will be without putting it to the test… and so…
SERVER COMMUNITY MEGATEST II
This Wednesday 23rd August at 8pm BST (GMT+1) we will be opening up a server that’s running the current IWBUMS build, and we’d politely ask those interested in helping out to attend. Full details in this thread. As with our previous Build 38 Megatest, participants will all receive a free Project Zomboid code to give to a friend/enemy/close family relation. All we need is for you to be running around on the server for an hour or so, and it’ll probably be quite a fun escapade. The only difference between this time and the last Megatest is that, to properly emulate a normal live PZ server, we will be capping the number of participants at 50. When the test is over, however, we will open the server a little wider. This does mean, however, that there will only be 50 Steam codes up for grabs.
AND FINALLY
Massive props to SoulFilcher for recreating this little scene in LEGO. Terrifying indeed.
Today’s featured image from SAS 6007. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless Mondoids for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-08-21 22:35:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Project CarZ
We’re fixing up and polish Build 38 for release, and want it to be as clean as possible so we can drop the vehicles build straight into IWBUMS beta testing afterwards as Build 39 – with the new map expansion that includes the new town of Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club. This includes ironing the final kinks out of ChrisW’s rooftop rendering and peeking changes – as right now in the beta we’ve still got a few irritations like occasional see-through roof slants, canopies around the edges of buildings that never disappear and wonky player-built second floors. It’s ‘tidy up’ work more than anything, but we want it all to be as seamless as we can make it once it hits public. As such, while this is done and in the build-up to release, we’ll continue to fix and polish RJ’s existing 38 work with graves, sandbox options and other stuff – alongside turning as much of the Bug Tracker from red to green as possible. Yuri meanwhile, he of Vehicles Build fame, is going to transfer as many of his branch’s optimizations as we can into the IWBUMS version – so they’re not stuck in a holding pattern. He’ll also transfer his current work on improving gamepad controls and making sure that screens like in-game maps, foraging and sandbox game creation can all be navigated without a keyboard.
As regular readers will know we’ve now got Mark and Steve from Bitbaboon, both established Technical Directors from the land of AAA, bedded down with the team to help with animations (Mark) and MP/general optimization (Steve). Steve’s first task is to optimize MP connectivity – and so we’ve set him up with a build so he can get some detailed stats back on bandwidth, cpu and memory for servers, and track what happens when latency rises. While he does so he’s also marking targets for when his role turns to more general FPS optimization. Mark, meanwhile, is approaching the point at which the new animation system is merged into the main game code, but on a (development side debug) toggle. This means that it will always be integrated into the PZ build, allowing our coders to flick its various visual/gameplay switches ‘on’ as we go and start releasing test versions – keeping it in date with the main game
We released Vehicle Test Build 16 on Friday, which was something of a ‘wider IWBUMS testing’ preparation build as it put vehicles on a toggle accessed from the Game Select screen. It also corrected and darkened shadow positioning as well as, hopefully, prevented unrealistic car-climbing and bouncing on zombie corpses. Next up Yuri will be integrating Mash’s redone burnt car models, an example of which is below, before moving onto a spot of optimization. This said, in amongst it all, there are a few other aspects we’d like to see integrated before/during the 39 IWBUMS: specifically clearer headlights, red brakelights, car horns, sirens and accurate numbers of seats for each car model. We’ll see how much we can fit in, basically.
If you fancy holding out somewhere new and different than can we also suggest you check out the wide range of awesome maps that Woldren has created? Over the River, especially, is pretty awesome – as it creates a huge bridge over from West Point, with its own docked ship nearby, and a range of interesting locations for you to explore on the opposite bank. Definitely one to check out.
Something we’ll need to be adding to the main game in build 39+ are player-built gates that’ll allow vehicles inside. In the meantime the lovely Mister Nolan has you covered with his new Log Wall Gate mod. Vid here. Today’s featured image from Boop. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless Mondoids for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-08-14 18:39:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
[Notice: Last Weeks Mondoid can be found here]
https://projectzomboid.com/blog/2017/08/skull-face/
Current focus is getting 38 out of the door, while putting roots down for the initial vehicles release in Build 39 and beyond. And so…
BUILD 38
We’re fixing up and polish Build 38 for release, and want it to be as clean as possible so we can drop the vehicles build straight into IWBUMS beta testing afterwards as Build 39 – with the new map expansion that includes the new town of Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club. This includes ironing the final kinks out of ChrisW’s rooftop rendering and peeking changes – as right now in the beta we’ve still got a few irritations like occasional see-through roof slants, canopies around the edges of buildings that never disappear and wonky player-built second floors. It’s ‘tidy up’ work more than anything, but we want it all to be as seamless as we can make it once it hits public. As such, while this is done and in the build-up to release, we’ll continue to fix and polish RJ’s existing 38 work with graves, sandbox options and other stuff – alongside turning as much of the Bug Tracker from red to green as possible. Yuri meanwhile, he of Vehicles Build fame, is going to transfer as many of his branch’s optimizations as we can into the IWBUMS version – so they’re not stuck in a holding pattern. He’ll also transfer his current work on improving gamepad controls and making sure that screens like in-game maps, foraging and sandbox game creation can all be navigated without a keyboard.
BITBABOON GANG
As regular readers will know we’ve now got Mark and Steve from Bitbaboon, both established Technical Directors from the land of AAA, bedded down with the team to help with animations (Mark) and MP/general optimization (Steve). Steve’s first task is to optimize MP connectivity – and so we’ve set him up with a build so he can get some detailed stats back on bandwidth, cpu and memory for servers, and track what happens when latency rises. While he does so he’s also marking targets for when his role turns to more general FPS optimization. Mark, meanwhile, is approaching the point at which the new animation system is merged into the main game code, but on a (development side debug) toggle. This means that it will always be integrated into the PZ build, allowing our coders to flick its various visual/gameplay switches ‘on’ as we go and start releasing test versions – keeping it in date with the main game
VEHICLES
We released Vehicle Test Build 16 on Friday, which was something of a ‘wider IWBUMS testing’ preparation build as it put vehicles on a toggle accessed from the Game Select screen. It also corrected and darkened shadow positioning as well as, hopefully, prevented unrealistic car-climbing and bouncing on zombie corpses. Next up Yuri will be integrating Mash’s redone burnt car models, an example of which is below, before moving onto a spot of optimization. This said, in amongst it all, there are a few other aspects we’d like to see integrated before/during the 39 IWBUMS: specifically clearer headlights, red brakelights, car horns, sirens and accurate numbers of seats for each car model. We’ll see how much we can fit in, basically.
WOLDREN MAPS
If you fancy holding out somewhere new and different than can we also suggest you check out the wide range of awesome maps that Woldren has created? Over the River, especially, is pretty awesome – as it creates a huge bridge over from West Point, with its own docked ship nearby, and a range of interesting locations for you to explore on the opposite bank. Definitely one to check out.
NOLAN GATES
Something we’ll need to be adding to the main game in build 39+ are player-built gates that’ll allow vehicles inside. In the meantime the lovely Mister Nolan has you covered with his new Log Wall Gate mod. Vid here. Today’s featured image from Boop. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless Mondoids for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-08-14 18:39:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Rise of the Baboon
[ 2017-07-31 19:05:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
In ‘general beta updates’ news we’re continuing to chase bugs in both our IWBUMS public beta and the public vehicles beta. The IWBUMS beta needs to be polished and bug-crunched until it’s ready for release, and the vehicles beta needs to be fixed up until the cars are in a good enough state to be released as an ‘experimental vehicle’ toggle in the Build 39 IWBUMS beta very shortly afterward – alongside the new map extension.
We’ll be releasing a new IWBUMS version once Chris W has finished off his rooftops/building rendering fixes (primarily the issues surrounding player-built constructions) later this week, while a new vehicles build will probably appear beforehand – which will make cars climbing on top of other cars and burnt-out wrecks impossible and make cars ‘jump’ less when striking zeds.
Vehicle Build 15 also came out last Thursday which, among other bugs, improved fluidity should cars come to a stop and need to start moving again.
Work has also continued to improve the sounds that vehicles make and, while still a work in progress, we hope that you agree that they are far improved on what we had last week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6xNH1JHDs
As you may know from previous Mondoids, we now have Mark Rowley working alongside us to integrate the long-awaited animations system we’ve constructed – which will in turn open the door to all manner of improvement and features that’ve been cooking backstage. Now his work is becoming a part of our internal animations build we thought it high time to drop the curtain on him, and have a Mondoid chat.
Before we begin it’s probably also worth mentioning that Mark’s colleague at Bitbaboon, Steve, will also be joining us for a little while each week to help out with MP issues – primarily looking at a fix for zombie lag and its resultant unfair injuries. [General Arcade’s Stas was initially being set on this, but was called away elsewhere and will hopefully return to PZ a little further down the line].
Hello Mark! First off, can you give a bit of background about who you are and the sort of stuff you’ve worked on previously?
Well I taught myself how to program way back on the C64, then progressed onto the Amiga and the demo/cracking scene. Then later on I studied electronics and decided to get a ‘real job’. I worked in fire detection, weights and measures and almost made a career at the Ministry of Defence before I was lucky enough to get offered a position at my first games company… that was 17 years ago and I haven’t looked back since.
Since then I have worked at many companies all over the world, on many titles. In terms of animation systems specifically I’ve worked on multiple games engines, but the largest would be the Assassins Creed Engine, Don King’s Prizefighter for Take2, procedural animations for Prince of Persia while at Ubisoft and then London 2012 Official Olympics game at SEGA.
There have been many others in between though. A good data-driven animation system can really allow content creators to bring a game to life. There’s a video of my GDC talk that covered animation issues and the Olympics game here, if anyone’s interested.
Where’ve you encountered PZ before and what brought you into its orbit?
PZ has always been a game I have enjoyed and followed, so when I heard they were looking for some help, I jumped at the chance. I know Lemmy from long ago, during our mutual time at Reflections on Driv3r, and I have heard a lot about Will from colleagues at SEGA. It’s a very small industry!
While we had crossed paths a couple of years ago during my time at SEGA, it’s only been recently that I have been in a position to help out.
Just to get everyone up to speed – where was the new animation system when you joined us, and what have you added/improved in the past month or so?
It’s pretty impressive, lots of features and efficient, so my focus has been to make it easier to maintain and extend, and get it delivered to the players.
Over my career I have found the enormous value in data driven systems, and we have now implemented the foundation systems into PZ to allow data driven animation and character states that should mean its robust, easy to extend and more importantly easy to maintain.
You’re currently merging your work in, so what’s next? What plans have you and the team concocted?
The animation system is being merged system by system, and then we will hook each of them up. Each character ‘state’ will be implemented and updated to use the animation system as much as possible so in the future it becomes really easy to extend.
My work is also a drive to reduce code and eliminate bugs before they happen. As an example, let’s take ‘climbing over an object’ which in the initial anims build required code to pick a new animation for each and every type of object. This meant that whenever we wanted to add a new type of object and a new climb animation it would mean diving into the code and manually hooking up all the data.
Now we’re driving this logic through the animation system with much simpler queries to the player’s state and world which makes the change through pure data, and to help manage it we have a nice simple editor to go with the changes called AnimZed.
As a PZ player, during your work with the animation system so far and having access to Martin’s model and movement databanks, what aspects of the new animation system have you spotted that you reckon will bring cool stuff to the game? Will it be worth the (lengthy) (very lengthy) wait?
Firstly it will just be the way animation seems much smoother, but over time as we evolve the systems we can start to add more depth and subtlety. We have also looked at extracting the velocity and motion of character from the Animation data, so changing the pace can be controlled by Martin a lot more precisely.
Couple this extracted motion with the ability to blend between states of animation, and we will start to see more than just simple switches in animation. Imagine instead of walking and then suddenly limping when you get an injury, seeing that limp get progressively worse and really slowing you down the worse it gets… which will be even more fun when you’re slowing down those Z’s and watching them limp mindlessly after you.
It’s pretty evident that the wait has been a really long one, but I think it will be worth it when players start to see much more depth to the way things move, but also for the developers with the ability it creates to add more dynamic content – adding greater variations of players and zombie movement without the massive amounts of work it would previously involve.
It’s also making it much easier to bring other things, like animals, to the world without writing lots of complex code. I know the whole team is looking forward to unleashing this guy on the world.
This week we’ve also been getting your colleague Steve wired up to the PZ coding mainframe. I’m sure we’ll talk to him at a later date blog-wise, but in the meantime would you mind introducing him and the sort of work he’ll be doing?
Sure, I have worked with Steve for over 10 years now at various studios around the world, and around 4 years ago we started our own company specializing in helping out other studios and developers with their projects. I won’t steal his thunder, but Steve is one of the most thorough and skilled engineers I have ever worked with … for us both to working on PZ is awesome.
I believe he’s going to be looking at a backlog of network features and fixes, but we’ll let him explain his plans himself later.
Thanks Mark! We genuinely love you.
Today’s featured image from Jim. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless Mondoids for info. The Block of Non-Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-07-31 19:05:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
Thank you George Romero
[ 2017-07-18 04:15:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
It should go without saying that without George Romero there would be no Project Zomboid. In fact, the entire face of video-gaming would have been very different without his vision. Since its genesis PZ has been about trying to recreate the feeling of Romero’s movies, and there’s no doubt that alongside legions of other video-games, books and movies we owe the man a great debt.
We were greatly saddened to hear of his death at the age of 77, and our thoughts are with his family and friends. The legacy he leaves behind is a brilliant and astonishing one.
VEHICLES
As mentioned last week the public vehicles build is going to keep on getting updates until the point it’s ready to have its stream crossed with an IWBUMS beta – so we can get an ‘experimental vehicles’ option into the main beta channel, get its optimizations into the main game and make tester life easier.
Tomorrow Yuri will be updating the public build with a few cool changes. Firstly while playing around with sound implementation we realised that the noise of gear shifts was fairly vital, but also that the behaviour of the cars themselves didn’t leave much room for this – and the inclusion of actual player-controlled gear shifts seemed a little too hardcore.
To give a feeling of gears then, to accompany the sounds we have brewing in an FMOD studio, Yuri has changed the way vehicles accelerate. Top speeds are now on a curve: acceleration slows in the last 25% of your potential full speed. This will likely need further tweaking, so feedback is welcome, but should allow us to space out RPM increase in sounds and implement the gear shift noises. It will also, hopefully, make high speed driving more rewarding.
To accompany this Yuri has also added a speedometer (kmh) and engine gauge (revs) to the UI – although it should be noted that the visuals and read-outs for these are placeholder, and we’ll be converting to mph with an options toggle in due course. Yuri has also fixed a few bugs, so the people of Muldraugh have now stopped occasionally parking their cars on top of other cars.
IWBUMS BETA
RJ released Build 38.5 into the IWBUMS public beta with a rewrite of his ‘zombie corpse build-up’ code that tracks decaying bodies in a much more localized area than previously. Feedback appreciated as we can certainly tweak this system further.
We should be also be getting some ChrisW fixes to the new ‘rooftop exteriors’ engine code later this week – making players beneath supported roofs and overhangs look less broken – before moving onto player-built structure issues and any other issues the system raises in general gameplay.
OTHER STUFF
- Mark R will be doing a big check-in of his anims code rewire and layers system (explained here) this week, bringing it all together and providing a new and improved base from which to get ‘em out to you. In the mean-time Martin the animator and model guy has been working on more military clothing, military vehicle wrecks and other stuff so we’re ready when the time comes.
- Mash’s map work continues, and will likely land in Build 39. It’s a spread out area that should be fun to explore with vehicles. There’s a bit of it that looks like this:
- Our composer Zach Beever is back (and graduated! Congrats Zach!) and will be experimenting with layered music that can be heard during play actively fits what’s happening on-screen – build-ups during lulls of non-zombies, more intense during confrontations etc. It’s all quite experimental currently, but its fab to have Zach back in the saddle.
[ 2017-07-18 04:15:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hazmatters
We just pushed a new version of the public vehicles beta (access details here) in which the headline improvement is probably the improved zombie collision. Formerly piling headlong into zombies without acceleration seemed to have more impact on zeds, so hopefully things will feel a little more realistic now. Likewise collisions with car wrecks would previously slide along like ice hockey pucks, and they now should hopefully feel as if they have more weight and presence in the world. Yuri has also cleared a bunch of bugs from our plate that our awesome testers have been reporting – including fire errors, persistent engine noise, radial menu problems and the somewhat dangerous ability to read a book while driving. Our general plan with vehicles will likely be to merge them into the next round of IWBUMS testing as an optional ‘experimental’ sandbox feature (unless the existing one stays in testing for more than a couple of weeks). The thought is that this will allow us to get the vehicle branch’s many engine optimizations into the main game, widen player feedback and also remove the irritation of constant swapping between test builds for our merry band of community bug reporters.
As a part of this we’re also now looking into integrating proper sounds for vehicles that reflect their type and condition, and while we’re back in the FMOD studio we’re also taking the opportunity to polish a few other areas of the PZ soundscape. We’re looking at stuff like different footstep noises on grass, concrete, snow, wood, from a higher floor etc and also more varied seasonal sounds. Right now we have a lot of birdsong in winter, for example, which could be easily removed and replaced to give a better feeling of seasonal change.
Feedback on the more visible upper storeys and window peeking that are currently part of the IWBUMS public beta seems pretty positive – but there are two primary issues that need to be ironed out before we can release. The first are visibility issues with porches, overhangs and buildings like garage forecourts with supported roofs – as is shown here by Captain Dringo. The best way to sort this is to have the data marked up so that canopies and porches and similar structures can be hidden cleanly – to which end Mash has been marking up impacted locations on the map. This week ChrisW will be adding the code fix and remedying cases where small overhangs are attached to buildings. This procedure will give us an effective way to hide anything that blocks the view. Currently the system never hides the player or the nearest zombie, but we also need to expand this to other survivors for MP. Likewise to finalise his fixes Chris will be making sure that player built structures and additions respond to the same rules as the game’s pre-existing buildings.
It’s been off the boil for a while, but Turbo is back on his upgrade to how in-game devices operate and is chasing down bugs and networking issues in a newly operational build. This is an under-the-bonnet feature, but it’ll allows us to make the use of radios, TVs, VHS, computers, military equipment etc a lot more engaging – and will also open the door to a lot of modding. Turbo’s modular system essentially standardises the code that runs the various different in-game gadgets, and will have repercussions (whether from us or from the community) on how easy it is to introduce/improve a wide variety of in-game and in-building systems. The sort of stuff that’ll now be far easier to create, either officially or from modders, would be: recording/playback of messages, device deconstruction and upgrading, player-created electric wiring and waterpipe systems in safehouses, security systems places like Rosewood Prison and banks, various items of discovered military equipment etc.
First off: everyone keep an eye on what Rekkie’s up to in this thread – as we certainly will be. In terms of ‘us’ stuff though well we’ll have another IWBUMS public beta update later this week from RJ, while Mash’s map work on the next main game area continues. In the long wait for animations, meanwhile, Martin’s still churning out new clothing and models backstage so we’re sitting on something of a stockpile back here while Mark does his stuff. We’ve refrained from showing much during the lengthy delay, but this one that popped into our inboxes this morning made us do a ‘squee’ as it really nails the 90s ‘Outbreak’ movie vibe that we generally go for. And also we don’t give Martin enough love for what he’s doing so well for us behind the scenes.
This week’s engaging water closet from Hootie. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless Mondoids for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-07-10 20:30:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
Ello, here’s the latest on matters both zomb and oid.
VEHICLES
We just pushed a new version of the public vehicles beta (access details here) in which the headline improvement is probably the improved zombie collision. Formerly piling headlong into zombies without acceleration seemed to have more impact on zeds, so hopefully things will feel a little more realistic now. Likewise collisions with car wrecks would previously slide along like ice hockey pucks, and they now should hopefully feel as if they have more weight and presence in the world. Yuri has also cleared a bunch of bugs from our plate that our awesome testers have been reporting – including fire errors, persistent engine noise, radial menu problems and the somewhat dangerous ability to read a book while driving. Our general plan with vehicles will likely be to merge them into the next round of IWBUMS testing as an optional ‘experimental’ sandbox feature (unless the existing one stays in testing for more than a couple of weeks). The thought is that this will allow us to get the vehicle branch’s many engine optimizations into the main game, widen player feedback and also remove the irritation of constant swapping between test builds for our merry band of community bug reporters.
NOISES
As a part of this we’re also now looking into integrating proper sounds for vehicles that reflect their type and condition, and while we’re back in the FMOD studio we’re also taking the opportunity to polish a few other areas of the PZ soundscape. We’re looking at stuff like different footstep noises on grass, concrete, snow, wood, from a higher floor etc and also more varied seasonal sounds. Right now we have a lot of birdsong in winter, for example, which could be easily removed and replaced to give a better feeling of seasonal change.
CHRISW ENGINE WORK
Feedback on the more visible upper storeys and window peeking that are currently part of the IWBUMS public beta seems pretty positive – but there are two primary issues that need to be ironed out before we can release. The first are visibility issues with porches, overhangs and buildings like garage forecourts with supported roofs – as is shown here by Captain Dringo. The best way to sort this is to have the data marked up so that canopies and porches and similar structures can be hidden cleanly – to which end Mash has been marking up impacted locations on the map. This week ChrisW will be adding the code fix and remedying cases where small overhangs are attached to buildings. This procedure will give us an effective way to hide anything that blocks the view. Currently the system never hides the player or the nearest zombie, but we also need to expand this to other survivors for MP. Likewise to finalise his fixes Chris will be making sure that player built structures and additions respond to the same rules as the game’s pre-existing buildings.
TURBO DEVICES
It’s been off the boil for a while, but Turbo is back on his upgrade to how in-game devices operate and is chasing down bugs and networking issues in a newly operational build. This is an under-the-bonnet feature, but it’ll allows us to make the use of radios, TVs, VHS, computers, military equipment etc a lot more engaging – and will also open the door to a lot of modding. Turbo’s modular system essentially standardises the code that runs the various different in-game gadgets, and will have repercussions (whether from us or from the community) on how easy it is to introduce/improve a wide variety of in-game and in-building systems. The sort of stuff that’ll now be far easier to create, either officially or from modders, would be: recording/playback of messages, device deconstruction and upgrading, player-created electric wiring and waterpipe systems in safehouses, security systems places like Rosewood Prison and banks, various items of discovered military equipment etc.
OTHER STUFF
First off: everyone keep an eye on what Rekkie’s up to in this thread – as we certainly will be. In terms of ‘us’ stuff though well we’ll have another IWBUMS public beta update later this week from RJ, while Mash’s map work on the next main game area continues. In the long wait for animations, meanwhile, Martin’s still churning out new clothing and models backstage so we’re sitting on something of a stockpile back here while Mark does his stuff. We’ve refrained from showing much during the lengthy delay, but this one that popped into our inboxes this morning made us do a ‘squee’ as it really nails the 90s ‘Outbreak’ movie vibe that we generally go for. And also we don’t give Martin enough love for what he’s doing so well for us behind the scenes.
This week’s engaging water closet from Hootie. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless Mondoids for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-07-10 20:30:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
Saving Public Zomboid
Vehicle and main game optimisations continue apace, we had an extremely fruitful public test event we held last week, thanks to EnigmaGrey and a lot of awesome people who took the time to help us brute force the system, we managed to get over a hundred people to join, and gathered some valuable telemetry that will allow us to optimise the game further. In addition we were able to put Stas’ new saving system to the test. In short, the saving has been optimised heavily, to cut down on server save times and in addition to pause the game on clients to avoid the players getting themselves into lethal situations amongst paused and laggy zombies. We’re confident the multiplayer experience will be much better once this is merged into the main codebase. Whether this will be in the IWBUMS, or only in the vehicle build will depend on how things go.
Work on animations continues to tick away nicely. Mark has implemented an awesome layers system that should attack the remaining animation work in various ways. Layers basically add another dimension to the animation state system implemented by us mere mortals, and allows on the one hand much more genericised states, allowing us to add ‘sub states’ that will make it much easier to allow us to tie the animation system into the existing game logic in areas it still needs doing so. An example would be say in injuries, a character will not only have a ‘walk’ state, but also that walk state will contain all the logic for ‘walking with a limp’ or ‘walking with a crutch’ or ‘walking with a vengeance’ or whatever kind of walking we might have or implement later, further allow us to blend granularity between these sub states. This, while still not 100% complete, will cut down on the amount of code required for such things dramatically, and allow us to slip the system in to hug existing code much easier, while at the same time essentially giving us thousands of ‘half way house’ animations between actual animations we create (character is walking with 20% limp in left leg) etc to give the game an even more dynamic and animation rich feel.
Chris continues his work on making the isometric game world look oh so more pretty, ironing out the remaining bugs on the ‘single building cutaway’ system, while we talk about the new cutaway system that will render the interiors of the houses much more pleasant and navigable, and finally do away with the transparent blob effect we currently have in the game. Mash has started work on the necessary cutaway tiles and things are steaming along.
[ 2017-07-03 10:32:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
We’re really struggling with those puns at this point. Hello all and welcome to this week’s Mondoid. Due to some unforeseen absences this may be a brief one, but still a few newslets to convey.
Vehicles and optimisation
Vehicle and main game optimisations continue apace, we had an extremely fruitful public test event we held last week, thanks to EnigmaGrey and a lot of awesome people who took the time to help us brute force the system, we managed to get over a hundred people to join, and gathered some valuable telemetry that will allow us to optimise the game further. In addition we were able to put Stas’ new saving system to the test. In short, the saving has been optimised heavily, to cut down on server save times and in addition to pause the game on clients to avoid the players getting themselves into lethal situations amongst paused and laggy zombies. We’re confident the multiplayer experience will be much better once this is merged into the main codebase. Whether this will be in the IWBUMS, or only in the vehicle build will depend on how things go.
Animations
Work on animations continues to tick away nicely. Mark has implemented an awesome layers system that should attack the remaining animation work in various ways. Layers basically add another dimension to the animation state system implemented by us mere mortals, and allows on the one hand much more genericised states, allowing us to add ‘sub states’ that will make it much easier to allow us to tie the animation system into the existing game logic in areas it still needs doing so. An example would be say in injuries, a character will not only have a ‘walk’ state, but also that walk state will contain all the logic for ‘walking with a limp’ or ‘walking with a crutch’ or ‘walking with a vengeance’ or whatever kind of walking we might have or implement later, further allow us to blend granularity between these sub states. This, while still not 100% complete, will cut down on the amount of code required for such things dramatically, and allow us to slip the system in to hug existing code much easier, while at the same time essentially giving us thousands of ‘half way house’ animations between actual animations we create (character is walking with 20% limp in left leg) etc to give the game an even more dynamic and animation rich feel.
Zomboid Dollhouse
Chris continues his work on making the isometric game world look oh so more pretty, ironing out the remaining bugs on the ‘single building cutaway’ system, while we talk about the new cutaway system that will render the interiors of the houses much more pleasant and navigable, and finally do away with the transparent blob effect we currently have in the game. Mash has started work on the necessary cutaway tiles and things are steaming along.
Other Stuff
- RJ is currently in the process of re-balancing the corpse disease system, to make sure it’s less brutal and instantly lethal, stacks properly with multiple bodies, and more in line with what you’d expect from hanging around corpses.
- Connall’s taking some time to go out on a bug hunt, and will be helping out in the main PZ branch, zapping a few of the longer standing bugs knocking around the codebase and bug tracker.
[ 2017-07-03 10:32:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
House of Fuels
Okay, so first off we’ve just had some of ChrisW’s cool engine/visuals stuff drop into the IWBUMS public test in build 38.4. They look a little bit like this. Vid supplied by the lovely Mark.exe: https://www.twitch.tv/mark_exe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvlOiAdgPE0 Essentially the only levels that are hidden from the player are the ones of the building that you’re inside or directly outside – meaning that higher floors and rooftops around you become visible. ChrisW has also made the act of peeking through windows to see what’s inside a lot more immersive, as well as improving the engine so walls no longer stencil to transparent when you’re outside unless they’re blocking your view. All this makes the map feel a lot more tangible and real, so feel free to take the IWBUMS beta for a spin – and please let us know of any bugs or issues that might crop up for you. One that’s immediately in the above video, for example, is that some overhang tiles appear as black upon approach. After fixing bugs/issues that emerge, then next on ChrisW’ list are Sims style cutaways to make internal building navigation more pleasant and visually attractive.
Also just added to the IWBUMS public beta is an MP server option that Stas from General Arcade has been working on. This momentarily pauses all player activity when admins require server saving, instead of having it stretch out while players are out performing various in-game actions. Stas has also worked on shortening these save times – so this should all help lag, black boxes and the like. It’ll also need a stress test. So… This Wednesday 28th June at 7pm GMT we will be running a test IWBUMS server with this new function (full details to appear in this thread) and anyone willing to jump on and play the game for an hour will get a free Project Zomboid code to give to a friend/enemy/close family relation. All we need is for you to be running around on the server for an hour or so, and it’ll probably be quite a fun escapade.
Also added in this beta is an SP custom map selection that’ll allow you to load up multiple community maps without having to create your own mod, and some new grave imagery too as the initial ones were too long and looked a little too neat.
Next up RJ is reworking how the current ‘nearby rotting corpses don’t make survival pleasant’ code operates, as its current implementation clearly needs some improvement.
MarkR has created a tool called AnimZed, which is one of the mediums through which he’s simplifying the anim integration process both for us and, in future, the modding community. It looks a little bit like this. Ooh, and we’d also like to officially welcome Connall to the PZ codebase, who’ll be starting off by going back through the bug tracker and fixing up legacy irritations alongside various other nips and tucks.
In today’s new vehicles build, as well as hopefully nixing the irritating flies bug that came in with the last version, Yuri has been fixing up MP syncing issues that saw lights apparently flicking on and off by themselves, and zombies running through closed doors to try to get to you. This week the plan is for him to work on aspects of the physics that need improvement. For example: collision with zombies, the fact that driving into zombie crowds without acceleration seems to have more impact on them than doing so with your foot down, deceleration in general, braking distance and, of course, the famed tumbling/hovering StepVan of Doom. This week’s lonely gas station clerk from Goonty Asatrigger. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless Mondoids for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-06-26 21:58:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
Happy Steam Summer Sale week survivors. May all your money-off dreams come true.
CHRISW’S BUILDING TIER MAGIC
Okay, so first off we’ve just had some of ChrisW’s cool engine/visuals stuff drop into the IWBUMS public test in build 38.4. They look a little bit like this. Vid supplied by the lovely Mark.exe: https://www.twitch.tv/mark_exe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvlOiAdgPE0 Essentially the only levels that are hidden from the player are the ones of the building that you’re inside or directly outside – meaning that higher floors and rooftops around you become visible. ChrisW has also made the act of peeking through windows to see what’s inside a lot more immersive, as well as improving the engine so walls no longer stencil to transparent when you’re outside unless they’re blocking your view. All this makes the map feel a lot more tangible and real, so feel free to take the IWBUMS beta for a spin – and please let us know of any bugs or issues that might crop up for you. One that’s immediately in the above video, for example, is that some overhang tiles appear as black upon approach. After fixing bugs/issues that emerge, then next on ChrisW’ list are Sims style cutaways to make internal building navigation more pleasant and visually attractive.
SERVER COMMUNITY MEGATEST
Also just added to the IWBUMS public beta is an MP server option that Stas from General Arcade has been working on. This momentarily pauses all player activity when admins require server saving, instead of having it stretch out while players are out performing various in-game actions. Stas has also worked on shortening these save times – so this should all help lag, black boxes and the like. It’ll also need a stress test. So… This Wednesday 28th June at 7pm GMT we will be running a test IWBUMS server with this new function (full details to appear in this thread) and anyone willing to jump on and play the game for an hour will get a free Project Zomboid code to give to a friend/enemy/close family relation. All we need is for you to be running around on the server for an hour or so, and it’ll probably be quite a fun escapade.
GENERAL IWBUMS
Also added in this beta is an SP custom map selection that’ll allow you to load up multiple community maps without having to create your own mod, and some new grave imagery too as the initial ones were too long and looked a little too neat.
Next up RJ is reworking how the current ‘nearby rotting corpses don’t make survival pleasant’ code operates, as its current implementation clearly needs some improvement.
OTHER STUFF
MarkR has created a tool called AnimZed, which is one of the mediums through which he’s simplifying the anim integration process both for us and, in future, the modding community. It looks a little bit like this. Ooh, and we’d also like to officially welcome Connall to the PZ codebase, who’ll be starting off by going back through the bug tracker and fixing up legacy irritations alongside various other nips and tucks.
VEHICLES
In today’s new vehicles build, as well as hopefully nixing the irritating flies bug that came in with the last version, Yuri has been fixing up MP syncing issues that saw lights apparently flicking on and off by themselves, and zombies running through closed doors to try to get to you. This week the plan is for him to work on aspects of the physics that need improvement. For example: collision with zombies, the fact that driving into zombie crowds without acceleration seems to have more impact on them than doing so with your foot down, deceleration in general, braking distance and, of course, the famed tumbling/hovering StepVan of Doom. This week’s lonely gas station clerk from Goonty Asatrigger. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless Mondoids for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
[ 2017-06-26 21:58:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
Spiffo’s Speakeasy
[ 2017-06-19 19:17:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Tons going on at the moment, but something of a ‘in progress’ blog. So here’s some nuggets on what our various workers are up to for Build 38 and beyond.
- RJ has just released IWBUMS public beta build 38.3 – which remedies the incessant fly buzz around rotten body piles, adds some new of Turbo’s new sounds for TV/radio and corrects various issues around the new graves and in-game memorials. This follows on from last Tuesday’s 38.2 that added some new sandbox options, random selection on zed strength/toughness/cognition and some darkness and nutrition balance.
- Next up RJ is working alongside RingoD to improve the selection process for solo game map mods – and let you boot up with multiple map mods without players having to create their own combined map mod.
- The plan is for ChrisW’s cool work on the building floor render code (stopping rooftops and higher floors being hidden all the time) to get merged into the 38 IWBUMS this week too – although this is dependent on a few fixes getting in, alongside improved window-peeking and getting the system working with garage/awning roof structures that the game currently doesn’t consider as being part of buildings.
- The public Vehicles Tech Test has been getting Yuri love backstage for the past week or so, as he’s been hunting out memory leaks through profiles of different machines running the build. It’s been a tricky process, but it seems like we’ve finally got to the bottom of one of the issues that was hampering FPS – and as such we’ll hopefully be returning to more ‘fun’ updates on the cars themselves, and remedying the MP inventory difficulties, later in the week. Our thanks to EG and Nasko for their help in the performance bug hunt.
- The Vehicles Tech Test has been going so well that we’ll definitely be doing something similar with Anims when the time comes. MarkR’s got a pipeline toward that locked down now – building on the new model format he’s put in for us, tidying up the work we already had in the can with his technical cleverness, as well as creating a quick tool to aid creation of more complex animation states, implementing ‘layers’ which is like an extra dimension to the current animation system that would exponentially simplify all the remaining game logic stuff that still needs fixing up and tying together. [TLDR: There’s a hell of a lot of technical chat going on, the guy who writes the Mondoids doesn’t really understand it all, but there’s a real push on and we are going to owe MarkR more than a few beers.]
- We also have another bold Russian, also from the General Arcade stable, currently tasked with improving the PZ online experience. Stas’ current task is to improve how servers perform ‘SaveAll’ – and in turn hopefully address the terror of ‘black boxing’, frozen zeds and map stream pauses. His is a long term mission, it could take a while, but it’s great to have someone of his talents getting in amongst it all.
[ 2017-06-19 19:17:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
38 IWBUMS n’ Roofs
First off we’ve got a new IWBUMS public beta release for Build 38 out today. This contains a first version of our new ‘corpse management’, aimed at encouraging players not to leave piles of rotting zombie corpses outside their safehouse. To this end you can dig graves, craft memorials for RP and also proximity to rotten corpses will make you feel ill/sad (although it seems that this aspect is bugged and breathing in zed fumes is loads too dangerous at the moment, 38.2 will remedy this when it arrives tomorrow).
[ Also included in this first version of 38 are some changes to the clothing system, and a bunch of new Sandbox options to help you personalise your game – touching on darkness, randomised zombie speeds, day/night active zombies, chances of annotated map and randomized house discoveries and fuel consumption. Oh, and TV and Radio programmes now have an impact on the character’s moodles, and if watching an instructional show then an XP multiplier is received. 38.2 will be arriving tmorrow, and it’ll have some extra sandbox options as well as the fixes – and higher capacity graves.
As mentioned last week NewChris (ChrisW) is making change to the PZ building floor render code, and already has a build of his changes working backstage. His first task is to stop the game from hiding rooftops and upper floors as soon as you go up to them. This should give a much better sense of immersion, and better show off the buildings that Mash (and the community) has created. The following vid is WIP, but gives a fair indication of how things will look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yidh6Xy4etI This week’s challenge has been in ensuring that zombies are still visible, and not covered up, if the player is in a tight spot where walls/roof tops would previously have been collapsed. As such in the following video Chris has made sure that if your character has seen the nearest zombie, then the engine won’t hide it behind a wall. Depending on how ChrisW gets on with the system over the next week, this might become a part of Build 38 too – before he moves on to our much-desired Sims-style cutaway.
Alongside the new IWBUMS beta we still have our public vehicles Tech Test running, details of which you can find here. In the past week Yuri has fixed the ‘cars floating away on the Z axis’ bugs, some memory leaks and the ability to sleep when driving – and has also updated the physics of each individual car. For the past few days he’s been investigating other potential memory leaks and general FPS issues, and his next task will be to work on the annoying invisible shared inventory bugs that are getting in the way of our MP testers. In the mean-time we’ll also set up some threads on the forum to help us get particular feedback on the current physical set-ups of each vehicle. Our thanks to the community for the invaluable bug reports and insight they’ve been providing. When it comes to the animations (which new boy Mark has been doing some great work with over the past week) we’ll probably use the same approach.
This week’s burning issue from Steffen over Discord. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-06-12 20:59:52 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello! Another Monday, another Mondoid. Quite a lot of cool stuff bubbling under today…
BUILD 38 IWBUMS
First off we’ve got a new IWBUMS public beta release for Build 38 out today. This contains a first version of our new ‘corpse management’, aimed at encouraging players not to leave piles of rotting zombie corpses outside their safehouse. To this end you can dig graves, craft memorials for RP and also proximity to rotten corpses will make you feel ill/sad (although it seems that this aspect is bugged and breathing in zed fumes is loads too dangerous at the moment, 38.2 will remedy this when it arrives tomorrow).
[ Also included in this first version of 38 are some changes to the clothing system, and a bunch of new Sandbox options to help you personalise your game – touching on darkness, randomised zombie speeds, day/night active zombies, chances of annotated map and randomized house discoveries and fuel consumption. Oh, and TV and Radio programmes now have an impact on the character’s moodles, and if watching an instructional show then an XP multiplier is received. 38.2 will be arriving tmorrow, and it’ll have some extra sandbox options as well as the fixes – and higher capacity graves.
BUILDING FUN
As mentioned last week NewChris (ChrisW) is making change to the PZ building floor render code, and already has a build of his changes working backstage. His first task is to stop the game from hiding rooftops and upper floors as soon as you go up to them. This should give a much better sense of immersion, and better show off the buildings that Mash (and the community) has created. The following vid is WIP, but gives a fair indication of how things will look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yidh6Xy4etI This week’s challenge has been in ensuring that zombies are still visible, and not covered up, if the player is in a tight spot where walls/roof tops would previously have been collapsed. As such in the following video Chris has made sure that if your character has seen the nearest zombie, then the engine won’t hide it behind a wall. Depending on how ChrisW gets on with the system over the next week, this might become a part of Build 38 too – before he moves on to our much-desired Sims-style cutaway.
VEHICLE BRANCH
Alongside the new IWBUMS beta we still have our public vehicles Tech Test running, details of which you can find here. In the past week Yuri has fixed the ‘cars floating away on the Z axis’ bugs, some memory leaks and the ability to sleep when driving – and has also updated the physics of each individual car. For the past few days he’s been investigating other potential memory leaks and general FPS issues, and his next task will be to work on the annoying invisible shared inventory bugs that are getting in the way of our MP testers. In the mean-time we’ll also set up some threads on the forum to help us get particular feedback on the current physical set-ups of each vehicle. Our thanks to the community for the invaluable bug reports and insight they’ve been providing. When it comes to the animations (which new boy Mark has been doing some great work with over the past week) we’ll probably use the same approach.
OTHER STUFF
- RingoD has published some cool new guides on the TIS forum. First off, How to Combine Map Mods and then How to Create Lootable Maps for community created towns and settlements. If there are any other map-making and modding tutorials that you think are required then please just let us know.
- Deputy on the TIS forums paid the locals of the real Muldraugh and West Point a visit! Check out his pics, as he terrified the locals with printed out Spiffo images, through here.
This week’s burning issue from Steffen over Discord. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-06-12 20:59:52 CET ] [ Original post ]
Road kill
The public Vehicles Tech Test continues, and its been fascinating watching testers adapting their PZ play-styles and spreading themselves out over the map. This week we even had our first retexture in the form of Lexx2k’s camper van, which bodes extremely well for the modding community. Right now Yuri is reworking aspects of the physics model to fix a bug we’ve had with car bouncing, and simultaneously improving the slow turns on vans, and over-sensitive steer on the sports car. Once this has been done we’ll be opening up a specific feedback thread that’ll cover each different model of car on the TIS forum, so that it’s clear exactly what needs refinement on each different vehicle. We’re also midway through some work on zombie collision. Currently holding down ‘W’ key while driving into zeds actually means they react less, and coasting into them without acceleration has a greater impact. As such zombie/car impacts should improve in the next couple of builds. Finally, Yuri has been chasing down the occasional memory leaks that were popping up and causing stutter-mayhem – and, in particular, a tricky one that appeared when testers died and reloaded. We seem to be getting there with major performance tasks on the vehicles Tech Test, but fringe cases of game-breaking issues do occasionally pop up in player reports. As such if you’re experiencing any super slowdown and juddering on the vehicles build then we 100% need to hear from you. So please leave your findings, and importantly the details of the system you’re running PZ on, here.
NewChris has taken to the eccentricities of Java worship (following his former days in the church of Unreal) really well – and already has a backstage branch running showcasing his changes to the PZ building floor render code. His first mission, to get him acquainted with PZ, is through rejigging the world rendering to stop the game from hiding the roofs and upper floors of every building on-screen as soon as you step close to any building. Instead, the game will intelligently collapse just the building you are stood behind or are stood inside. It’s already clear from playing the test version that players will get a more immersive feeling, instead of having to view buildings that have been sliced up by PZ’s old ways of doing things.
The next step will be to look into implementing some more ‘Sims-like’ cut away walls to interiors, to eliminate the transparent walls we currently have, and provide a much nicer system for navigating inside buildings – while being able to see the floorplan layout much easier. It’s currently unclear whether these improvements will be going into the coming IWBUMS or the next, but good stuff is already starting to flow.
As mentioned previously we’re now working with our new/old friend Mark to get animations over the line. Mark was previously Technical Director at SEGA Europe, he loves PZ and he really knows his shit. He’s investigated the roadblocks we were facing, and we’re now working together with him to navigate it all. For example, Mark is implementing some good ideas for handling rotational root motion from his experience on other games, and this week will also be working on a new tool that will make anim state xml handling easier for both the wider team and the community. He’s also going to be adding in some optimizations for how our existing system handled hair that’ll save on skeleton processing, and to allow for us to improve the way we were integrating the new animation system with the existing state machine that the rest of the game logic relies on. It’s all good and necessary stuff that’s given us renewed momentum backstage, and hopefully that’ll become clearer front-of-house too in the weeks to come.
We’ll likely be opening up a new IWBUMS for Build 38 over the next week or so – featuring RJ’s corpse management discussed in previous blogs, bloody clothes increasing wound infection risks, graves, pyres etc. It will also feature General Arcade’s work on MP Discord integration that we’ve had stacked up behind the scenes for a while, potentially some of the NewChris work described above and hopefully some Turbo stuff and Stas MP stuff too.
A quick note to say that the in-game maps of Build 37 have now been joined by one for ourRingoD-curated community map Bedford Falls as well, as designed by Ringo himself. He’s now working on some stash maps for it too, as well as writing some guidance for the community on how they can create their own.
This week’s car frenzy from (ЗлОй_КаКтУс). The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-06-05 18:44:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Afternoon one and all! Here’s t’news.
Vehicles
The public Vehicles Tech Test continues, and its been fascinating watching testers adapting their PZ play-styles and spreading themselves out over the map. This week we even had our first retexture in the form of Lexx2k’s camper van, which bodes extremely well for the modding community. Right now Yuri is reworking aspects of the physics model to fix a bug we’ve had with car bouncing, and simultaneously improving the slow turns on vans, and over-sensitive steer on the sports car. Once this has been done we’ll be opening up a specific feedback thread that’ll cover each different model of car on the TIS forum, so that it’s clear exactly what needs refinement on each different vehicle. We’re also midway through some work on zombie collision. Currently holding down ‘W’ key while driving into zeds actually means they react less, and coasting into them without acceleration has a greater impact. As such zombie/car impacts should improve in the next couple of builds. Finally, Yuri has been chasing down the occasional memory leaks that were popping up and causing stutter-mayhem – and, in particular, a tricky one that appeared when testers died and reloaded. We seem to be getting there with major performance tasks on the vehicles Tech Test, but fringe cases of game-breaking issues do occasionally pop up in player reports. As such if you’re experiencing any super slowdown and juddering on the vehicles build then we 100% need to hear from you. So please leave your findings, and importantly the details of the system you’re running PZ on, here.
NewChris Stuff
NewChris has taken to the eccentricities of Java worship (following his former days in the church of Unreal) really well – and already has a backstage branch running showcasing his changes to the PZ building floor render code. His first mission, to get him acquainted with PZ, is through rejigging the world rendering to stop the game from hiding the roofs and upper floors of every building on-screen as soon as you step close to any building. Instead, the game will intelligently collapse just the building you are stood behind or are stood inside. It’s already clear from playing the test version that players will get a more immersive feeling, instead of having to view buildings that have been sliced up by PZ’s old ways of doing things.
The next step will be to look into implementing some more ‘Sims-like’ cut away walls to interiors, to eliminate the transparent walls we currently have, and provide a much nicer system for navigating inside buildings – while being able to see the floorplan layout much easier. It’s currently unclear whether these improvements will be going into the coming IWBUMS or the next, but good stuff is already starting to flow.
Anims
As mentioned previously we’re now working with our new/old friend Mark to get animations over the line. Mark was previously Technical Director at SEGA Europe, he loves PZ and he really knows his shit. He’s investigated the roadblocks we were facing, and we’re now working together with him to navigate it all. For example, Mark is implementing some good ideas for handling rotational root motion from his experience on other games, and this week will also be working on a new tool that will make anim state xml handling easier for both the wider team and the community. He’s also going to be adding in some optimizations for how our existing system handled hair that’ll save on skeleton processing, and to allow for us to improve the way we were integrating the new animation system with the existing state machine that the rest of the game logic relies on. It’s all good and necessary stuff that’s given us renewed momentum backstage, and hopefully that’ll become clearer front-of-house too in the weeks to come.
IWBUMS
We’ll likely be opening up a new IWBUMS for Build 38 over the next week or so – featuring RJ’s corpse management discussed in previous blogs, bloody clothes increasing wound infection risks, graves, pyres etc. It will also feature General Arcade’s work on MP Discord integration that we’ve had stacked up behind the scenes for a while, potentially some of the NewChris work described above and hopefully some Turbo stuff and Stas MP stuff too.
Bedford Falls
A quick note to say that the in-game maps of Build 37 have now been joined by one for ourRingoD-curated community map Bedford Falls as well, as designed by Ringo himself. He’s now working on some stash maps for it too, as well as writing some guidance for the community on how they can create their own.
This week’s car frenzy from (ЗлОй_КаКтУс). The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-06-05 18:44:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Parking Lots (of zombies)
Quite an intriguing update to the Public Vehicles Tech Test build today – but first off a quick Public Awareness Notice that the ‘engine ignition’ key has been changed to ‘W’ as that should feel more natural for new players. We’ve also taken the password off the beta channel, as everyone knows it’s WIP content now. So what’s in the new build? Previously all vehicles had their wheels in the same place so, following Animator/Modelling man Martin’s guidelines, Yuri has been making sure each car has its tyres spinning in the correct place. This, temporarily, made the vehicles fly – which was not the desired effect. Yuri, then, has now gone back in to debug each vehicle individually and also used the opportunity to experiment and improve handling/feel on each of them. They should feel a lot more distinct now, but we’re still at an experimental stage so you may well like some changes more than others. Early feedback is really good, but sounds like we need to finetune sports cars and vans a little more in terms of turning circles and spin-outs. In terms of performance, things are a lot more stable now but there’s certainly still room for improvement in terms of FPS. As such with this build we’ve also introduced some new caching to the LightingJNI interface which should make things smoother game-wide. To make life easier for our amazing testers (who are providing so much good feedback) we’re also now addressing various ‘irritation issues’ that have crept into the Tech Test that prevent ‘proper’ PZ playthroughs – stuff like the loot table being messed up on reloads, rain somehow breaching ceilings on anything above the ground floor etc. These will be added to build during the week. The most pressing however, the ‘survivor is stuck on top of a flipped car until they starve’ bug, should be fixed in this new release.
Those who were struggling to send/receive Steam invites to private servers should now find the issue fixed via a recent Steam update. If you’re still having issues then please try restarting Steam to make sure you’ve caught the latest version. Our thanks to Sergei from General Arcade for all his investigation work into the issue, and to Valve for being on the ball in terms of the fix that remedied the situation both for us and a variety of other games.
RJ’s work on Build 38 continues – as mentioned last week at first it’ll introduce a bunch of new sandbox options, experimentation with darker nights, negative consequences for survivors who let fetid corpses stack up outside their safehouse and new ways to bury/burn/dispose of corpses. Mash is currently creating new sprites for graves, pyres and RP-enhancing memorials and crosses. We should have news on when the IWBUMS public beta will be ready in the week ahead. It’s also a fair bet that Mash’s next map update, including the Knox Heights Country Club, will be a part of Build 38 – although it’s unlikely to be a part of the initial testing. Elsewhere our new workers are getting used to the new codebase. GA’s Stas is ready for his deep-dive into the MP code and his warm-up ‘introduction task’ is to look into some of the crashes our server hosts face. NewChris, meanwhile, has begun investigations into improving the single building cutaway system and making interior cutaways while inside buildings to be more Sims-esque. This, in turn, should lead into his wider mission that we’ll discuss a little later down the line. Mark’s work on streamlining the foundations of the animation system, meanwhile, has brought him up to speed with the ins and outs of the code – and with his expertise on board we feel we’ll finally be able to bring you good news while vehicles are finished off elsewhere. In the background Animator and Model Man Martin hasn’t been resting easy, and recently has been polishing weapon and weapon upgrade visuals according to community feedback and getting ready for the time at which Mark requires everything re-exported under the improved export/format system. [Away from this Martin has also been creating some awesome-looking military vehicles for implementation further down the line.] At this point we’ve got double the bodies working on PZ that we did at this point last year (it really has been like ‘London buses all turning up at once’ in terms of the talent that has become available) and, much as we know that PZ development has been slow, we hope that the introduction of The New Batch will bear more and more fruit as the year goes on. In final news, if PZ Modding Hero Nolan ever wants to create a Back to the Future Part II flying car mod then the opportunity is now here! Where we’re going we don’t need roads… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z_7CYFjylo This week’s car lot tragedy from Ellihow. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-05-29 22:10:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello! Let’s get down to zombie business.
VEHICLES
Quite an intriguing update to the Public Vehicles Tech Test build today – but first off a quick Public Awareness Notice that the ‘engine ignition’ key has been changed to ‘W’ as that should feel more natural for new players. We’ve also taken the password off the beta channel, as everyone knows it’s WIP content now. So what’s in the new build? Previously all vehicles had their wheels in the same place so, following Animator/Modelling man Martin’s guidelines, Yuri has been making sure each car has its tyres spinning in the correct place. This, temporarily, made the vehicles fly – which was not the desired effect. Yuri, then, has now gone back in to debug each vehicle individually and also used the opportunity to experiment and improve handling/feel on each of them. They should feel a lot more distinct now, but we’re still at an experimental stage so you may well like some changes more than others. Early feedback is really good, but sounds like we need to finetune sports cars and vans a little more in terms of turning circles and spin-outs. In terms of performance, things are a lot more stable now but there’s certainly still room for improvement in terms of FPS. As such with this build we’ve also introduced some new caching to the LightingJNI interface which should make things smoother game-wide. To make life easier for our amazing testers (who are providing so much good feedback) we’re also now addressing various ‘irritation issues’ that have crept into the Tech Test that prevent ‘proper’ PZ playthroughs – stuff like the loot table being messed up on reloads, rain somehow breaching ceilings on anything above the ground floor etc. These will be added to build during the week. The most pressing however, the ‘survivor is stuck on top of a flipped car until they starve’ bug, should be fixed in this new release.
STEAM INVITE FIX
Those who were struggling to send/receive Steam invites to private servers should now find the issue fixed via a recent Steam update. If you’re still having issues then please try restarting Steam to make sure you’ve caught the latest version. Our thanks to Sergei from General Arcade for all his investigation work into the issue, and to Valve for being on the ball in terms of the fix that remedied the situation both for us and a variety of other games.
OTHER STUFF
RJ’s work on Build 38 continues – as mentioned last week at first it’ll introduce a bunch of new sandbox options, experimentation with darker nights, negative consequences for survivors who let fetid corpses stack up outside their safehouse and new ways to bury/burn/dispose of corpses. Mash is currently creating new sprites for graves, pyres and RP-enhancing memorials and crosses. We should have news on when the IWBUMS public beta will be ready in the week ahead. It’s also a fair bet that Mash’s next map update, including the Knox Heights Country Club, will be a part of Build 38 – although it’s unlikely to be a part of the initial testing. Elsewhere our new workers are getting used to the new codebase. GA’s Stas is ready for his deep-dive into the MP code and his warm-up ‘introduction task’ is to look into some of the crashes our server hosts face. NewChris, meanwhile, has begun investigations into improving the single building cutaway system and making interior cutaways while inside buildings to be more Sims-esque. This, in turn, should lead into his wider mission that we’ll discuss a little later down the line. Mark’s work on streamlining the foundations of the animation system, meanwhile, has brought him up to speed with the ins and outs of the code – and with his expertise on board we feel we’ll finally be able to bring you good news while vehicles are finished off elsewhere. In the background Animator and Model Man Martin hasn’t been resting easy, and recently has been polishing weapon and weapon upgrade visuals according to community feedback and getting ready for the time at which Mark requires everything re-exported under the improved export/format system. [Away from this Martin has also been creating some awesome-looking military vehicles for implementation further down the line.] At this point we’ve got double the bodies working on PZ that we did at this point last year (it really has been like ‘London buses all turning up at once’ in terms of the talent that has become available) and, much as we know that PZ development has been slow, we hope that the introduction of The New Batch will bear more and more fruit as the year goes on. In final news, if PZ Modding Hero Nolan ever wants to create a Back to the Future Part II flying car mod then the opportunity is now here! Where we’re going we don’t need roads… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z_7CYFjylo This week’s car lot tragedy from Ellihow. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-05-29 22:10:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
DrivPZr
We’re just finishing off a new update for the Public Vehicles Tech Test – details on how to join this can be found here. This will address some of the FPS degradation issues that testers have been reported, rebalance zombie attraction so it sits somewhere in-between the two levels we’ve already provided and added a few debug settings to let us play around with balance. It’ll likely go live tomorrow. Last Wednesday we also updated to include Mash’s newer textures (seen above and below) which seemed to go down pretty well, alongside an improvement to draw order and woodland that’s less drive-through.
Our thanks for all the great feedback and thoughts on the system that’s appearing on Steam and our forums. Likewise the reports of the various things that have been broken on the vehicles branch that have been getting in the way of general survival (loot tables wrong, light switches not there etc). We’ll address the latter, and then get into more gameplay development once the current tech and performance-centred work is complete. (Cheers to Hunger John for the above pic too btw).
Over to France for the latest on the workings of our next IWBUMS beta release…
“Essentially, having piles of rotting corpses around your safehouse could now make you sick. It will be a slow process that’s dependent on the amount of bodies near you, but the longer you stay near them, the more your survivor will feel queasy. To avoid this, you should get rid of the corpses near your main base by burning them or burying them in our new graves. I’m also including a new sandbox option to let you determine just how much rotting corpses will repulse you and make you feel ill.”
“This is a system that will come into its own with the new animations/models when they appear, but it will be clear enough in-game currently that things like getting zed blood on clothing through melee combat and leaving it there will be a bad idea. If you have any open wounds the chances of it getting infected will be higher. To a lesser extent clothing will get dirty and more ragged over (a long period of) time, with a similar system. This will have a super-gradual impact on wound infection, and will essentially mean that you won’t want to be wearing the same outfit for months on end as you currently do. This, again, will be built on once the new models are in but will work fine in the mean-time – and you’ll be able to switch it off in Sandbox options should you wish.”
“Yeah, here are some of the fun ones. This is not a full list! I’m still adding them!
As mentioned last week, we’d now like to officially welcome General Arcade’s Stas to the PZ codebase. First up he’ll be making a deep dive into our MP codebase to optimize systems and get to grips with some of the more complex bugs that impact on our server admins – and beyond this our current plan is to get him optimizing the main game to make the engine smoother so we can get to integrating our more built-up urban environments. He joins Chris (a new one) and Mark in terms of recent coder acquisitions, and everyone seems to be bedding down quite well. More to follow when their work starts to flow! This week’s pile-up from the (perhaps) rudely-named Koitus. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-05-22 21:30:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey hey, here’s the news from Zombietown.
VEHICLES
We’re just finishing off a new update for the Public Vehicles Tech Test – details on how to join this can be found here. This will address some of the FPS degradation issues that testers have been reported, rebalance zombie attraction so it sits somewhere in-between the two levels we’ve already provided and added a few debug settings to let us play around with balance. It’ll likely go live tomorrow. Last Wednesday we also updated to include Mash’s newer textures (seen above and below) which seemed to go down pretty well, alongside an improvement to draw order and woodland that’s less drive-through.
Our thanks for all the great feedback and thoughts on the system that’s appearing on Steam and our forums. Likewise the reports of the various things that have been broken on the vehicles branch that have been getting in the way of general survival (loot tables wrong, light switches not there etc). We’ll address the latter, and then get into more gameplay development once the current tech and performance-centred work is complete. (Cheers to Hunger John for the above pic too btw).
BUILD 38
Over to France for the latest on the workings of our next IWBUMS beta release…
Hello RJ! So what’s up with this ‘corpse management’ stuff we mentioned last week?
“Essentially, having piles of rotting corpses around your safehouse could now make you sick. It will be a slow process that’s dependent on the amount of bodies near you, but the longer you stay near them, the more your survivor will feel queasy. To avoid this, you should get rid of the corpses near your main base by burning them or burying them in our new graves. I’m also including a new sandbox option to let you determine just how much rotting corpses will repulse you and make you feel ill.”
We’re not going full ‘wash your hands, folks!’ but in general we’re going to add some hygienic sensibilities when it comes to zombies too. Could you explain a little?
“This is a system that will come into its own with the new animations/models when they appear, but it will be clear enough in-game currently that things like getting zed blood on clothing through melee combat and leaving it there will be a bad idea. If you have any open wounds the chances of it getting infected will be higher. To a lesser extent clothing will get dirty and more ragged over (a long period of) time, with a similar system. This will have a super-gradual impact on wound infection, and will essentially mean that you won’t want to be wearing the same outfit for months on end as you currently do. This, again, will be built on once the new models are in but will work fine in the mean-time – and you’ll be able to switch it off in Sandbox options should you wish.”
You also mentioned some new sandbox options for when people start up new games?
“Yeah, here are some of the fun ones. This is not a full list! I’m still adding them!
- Zombie Construction Damage: Governs whether or not zombies can destroy player constructions and defences.
- Multi-speed Shambling: Zombies can now have a “random speed” setting.
- Day/Night Active Zombies: Governs whether zombies are more active during the day, or whether they act more nocturnally. Inactive zombies will be slower, and tend not to give chase. (If you fancy checking out something similar in the meantime then Nolan’s Nocturnal Zombies mod is great.)
- Injury Severity: Increase and decrease the impact injuries have on your body, and their healing time.
- Bone Fracture: Enable or disable broken limbs when survivors receive injuries from impacts, zombie damage and falls.
- Darker Nights: A slider that will let you make nights darker. We’d like SP Survival to have darker nights, and this is a step towards it, though there’s still a lot of work with shaders to be done in the future to get it perfect.
OTHER STUFF
As mentioned last week, we’d now like to officially welcome General Arcade’s Stas to the PZ codebase. First up he’ll be making a deep dive into our MP codebase to optimize systems and get to grips with some of the more complex bugs that impact on our server admins – and beyond this our current plan is to get him optimizing the main game to make the engine smoother so we can get to integrating our more built-up urban environments. He joins Chris (a new one) and Mark in terms of recent coder acquisitions, and everyone seems to be bedding down quite well. More to follow when their work starts to flow! This week’s pile-up from the (perhaps) rudely-named Koitus. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-05-22 21:30:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
CarDevDoid
Last week we released our Vehicles Tech Test build (details here) and the community has been giving us loads of technical feedback, spotlighting bugs and useful ideas for their future development. We’re going to keep this beta branch open and updated for the foreseeable future. It seems that most testers have been having a lot of fun with them, and are pretty enthused so: yay! We released a new version on Thursday that gives vehicles placeholder sounds and also addressed a physics bug that was causing FPS degradation – but some choppiness remains for some systems. As such Yuri is currently looking into further rendering optimizations and also investigating the way draw order currently operates. In the mean-time Mash has finished her pass on the more neutral ‘PZ’ colours for car textures, and this new art style will be added into the game fairly imminently for testers to check out. Getting the tech working well for everyone is currently the 100% priority (this, and then physics improvements, will be the focus for the next little while) but it’s probably a good juncture to respond to common queries that have been raised since the release. Overall we’re planning for car maintenance to work (and look) a lot like the current player health/medical system – everyone can use it in a basic sense, but those with specific skills and professions will be able to identify what’s wrong with an engine. We also plan to cross-pollinate some aspects of ‘vehicle work’ with relevant existing professions that are already in the game. Zombie attraction levels to car noise, and the radius it’s heard within, is currently set really high in the Tech Test. This is partly because we wanted to push systems fairly hard, and partly because it’s better when balancing to drop things down in terms of difficulty rather than raise them up. As such Zed vehicle-love will be dropped as we go until we hit a sweet spot. This said, down the line, vehicle noise will depend on what’s being driven and engine condition – as well as how easy it is to start the car, backfiring etc.
Barring a few necessary fixes to Build 37, RJ is now in full-flow on Build 38. A key component of it is likely going to be the necessity of body disposal should corpses stack up around your safehouse. The current method for corpse-riddance (gas + flame) is fairly inelegant, and the punishment for decaying corpses around your home is more through it looking untidy rather than it having an impact on health, infected wounds etc. In a real zombie apocalypse this would be a bigger issue for a survivor than it currently is in PZ. As such we’re going to be looking into more effective corpse management (body pits, graves, perhaps pyres and wooden crosses / memorials for RP) as well as some gameplay encouragement to do so.
As regular readers will know we now have Mark with us on the long-promised animations system who, in another life, a few of us knew either from his long-ago time at Reflections (‘Driver’ games era!) or in his more recent technical roles at SEGA Europe. He’s currently going great guns in creating a new model format for the animations (now pretty much complete) and providing a new exporter to streamline it all and circumvent a bunch of the issues that have routinely been blocking us. This week we’ve also had another coder join us from our triple A pasts, another Chris from the wilds of northern England, but we’ll introduce him in more detail in future once he gets settled in. We’re also delighted that General Arcade will be also be providing additional support in MP and Engine optimization for the next few months too. Speaking of…
Something weird has happened with Steam Invites and the guys from General Arcade, who built us the system, are looking into it. Basically: in most cases when Steam invites are sent from a host, they’re not being received. The issue currently doesn’t seem to be tied to any particular PZ update or patch, so it seems likely that it’s something that’s changed somehow in Steam’s workings. In any event, Detective Sergei is currently on the case. In the mean-time a workaround to the issue that has been working for some people, as highlighted out by Onkeen and further investigated by Nasko on the PZ Discord, runs as follows:
Have you ever wondered what it’d be like to survive a zombie apocalypse in would be like in ye olden days of yore? Well wonder no more… This week’s featured news van from Retro. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-05-16 00:32:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all. Many thanks for all the vehicles thoughts and feedback over the past week. More of which below…
CARS
Last week we released our Vehicles Tech Test build (details here) and the community has been giving us loads of technical feedback, spotlighting bugs and useful ideas for their future development. We’re going to keep this beta branch open and updated for the foreseeable future. It seems that most testers have been having a lot of fun with them, and are pretty enthused so: yay! We released a new version on Thursday that gives vehicles placeholder sounds and also addressed a physics bug that was causing FPS degradation – but some choppiness remains for some systems. As such Yuri is currently looking into further rendering optimizations and also investigating the way draw order currently operates. In the mean-time Mash has finished her pass on the more neutral ‘PZ’ colours for car textures, and this new art style will be added into the game fairly imminently for testers to check out. Getting the tech working well for everyone is currently the 100% priority (this, and then physics improvements, will be the focus for the next little while) but it’s probably a good juncture to respond to common queries that have been raised since the release. Overall we’re planning for car maintenance to work (and look) a lot like the current player health/medical system – everyone can use it in a basic sense, but those with specific skills and professions will be able to identify what’s wrong with an engine. We also plan to cross-pollinate some aspects of ‘vehicle work’ with relevant existing professions that are already in the game. Zombie attraction levels to car noise, and the radius it’s heard within, is currently set really high in the Tech Test. This is partly because we wanted to push systems fairly hard, and partly because it’s better when balancing to drop things down in terms of difficulty rather than raise them up. As such Zed vehicle-love will be dropped as we go until we hit a sweet spot. This said, down the line, vehicle noise will depend on what’s being driven and engine condition – as well as how easy it is to start the car, backfiring etc.
BUILD 38
Barring a few necessary fixes to Build 37, RJ is now in full-flow on Build 38. A key component of it is likely going to be the necessity of body disposal should corpses stack up around your safehouse. The current method for corpse-riddance (gas + flame) is fairly inelegant, and the punishment for decaying corpses around your home is more through it looking untidy rather than it having an impact on health, infected wounds etc. In a real zombie apocalypse this would be a bigger issue for a survivor than it currently is in PZ. As such we’re going to be looking into more effective corpse management (body pits, graves, perhaps pyres and wooden crosses / memorials for RP) as well as some gameplay encouragement to do so.
STAFFING UP
As regular readers will know we now have Mark with us on the long-promised animations system who, in another life, a few of us knew either from his long-ago time at Reflections (‘Driver’ games era!) or in his more recent technical roles at SEGA Europe. He’s currently going great guns in creating a new model format for the animations (now pretty much complete) and providing a new exporter to streamline it all and circumvent a bunch of the issues that have routinely been blocking us. This week we’ve also had another coder join us from our triple A pasts, another Chris from the wilds of northern England, but we’ll introduce him in more detail in future once he gets settled in. We’re also delighted that General Arcade will be also be providing additional support in MP and Engine optimization for the next few months too. Speaking of…
STEAM INVITE ISSUE
Something weird has happened with Steam Invites and the guys from General Arcade, who built us the system, are looking into it. Basically: in most cases when Steam invites are sent from a host, they’re not being received. The issue currently doesn’t seem to be tied to any particular PZ update or patch, so it seems likely that it’s something that’s changed somehow in Steam’s workings. In any event, Detective Sergei is currently on the case. In the mean-time a workaround to the issue that has been working for some people, as highlighted out by Onkeen and further investigated by Nasko on the PZ Discord, runs as follows:
- As Host: make sure your friend/friends are [Allowed] on the invite menu
- As Not-Host: make sure the game is shut down
- As Not-Host: in Steam right-click on the Host’s picture in the “Friends” panel and click “Join Game” (this will launch the game and connect you right away)
- Make sure your Router/Firewall has UPnP activated
- Play together. Avoid zombies.
WOLDREN’S MEDIEVAL MAP
Have you ever wondered what it’d be like to survive a zombie apocalypse in would be like in ye olden days of yore? Well wonder no more… This week’s featured news van from Retro. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-05-16 00:32:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Vehicle Tech Test
This is a Vehicles Tech Test and, as such, is unpolished and unfinished. You should be aware of the following:
Once you have loaded up a new game then you’ll find cars in some driveways, and most parking lots. You can enter a car with ‘E’, though be sure to get in on the driver’s side if you want a swift exit. Press ‘V’ to open up a vehicle’s radial menu – from which you’ll find access to the ignition, car radio, headlights and more.
You use the key icon to start the car BUT sometimes repeated attempts at ignition will be required. The lack of sound effects means that failed start attempts are not made clear. When the icon at the bottom of the screen turns green then the engine is on, and you can drive. The keyboard shortcut for ‘start engine’ is ‘N’ – and this is a less fussy way to turn the key. Once the car has started then use the WSAD keys to drive. Other keyboard shortcuts you can use when in the vehicle are ‘L’ (Headlights) and ‘U’ (vehicle info).
Yuri’s focus is currently on performance, and we will be updating the Vehicles Tech Test branch this week with whatever fixes are required as and when they become clear. In coming weeks we will also be working on zombie collision and vehicle impact, the exaggeration of tilts and leans when you take corners and implementing greater differences in handling between vehicles. There’s also some ‘reverse momentum physics’ when the front of the car moves up when hitting the brakes instead of pushing down which we need to add the fix for. Yuri has a full tasklist, but it’s one that’s being ticked through at a steady rate. We’re hoping that we’ll be able to release further vehicles test builds to the community whenever milestones are hit, so that we can harvest feedback whenever it’s most required in the run-up to vehicles becoming one with the main game. It’s cool to stream, as long as you clearly tell your viewers the WIP status and it being a tech test version. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-05-08 16:11:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello! Today we’re releasing an early version of our vehicles build as a Tech Test. We are currently streamlining performance, and as such need to know how the build runs on the many/various/countless different machines that make up the PZ community.
It’s a Work in Progress version (and still needs a bunch of gameplay and features attached to it) but it’s also quite fun to drive around and see the sights in – so we do hope you enjoy it and like where it’s all headed. The only fly in the ointment is that we don’t have a Mac build right now, and this will be coming later this week. So apologies to our non-Linux and non-PC people.
Our thanks to EasyPickins, Yuri and all the General Arcade gang for all their work so far on this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Fhc2WwYpyI
HOW TO GET IT
- First off, if you currently have an ongoing PZ game then be sure to back up all your save files.
- Right click on Project Zomboid in your Steam library and select ‘Properties’
- Navigate to the ‘Steam Beta’ tab
- Input the following password: workinprogress
- A beta branch called ‘vehicle’ will now be unlocked, which can be selected on the dropdown menu.
WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW
- We need to know about (computer-based) crashes that we haven’t come across in our internal testing. Please report these alongside the crash log in this thread.
- We need to know how your game performs on your machine for the first 10 minutes of play, and of course your system specs – and the platform version of PZ you’re running. (MSI Afterburner is a good program for this task, and its set-up instructions are here). Reports should again be put into this thread.
- Online capabilities are enabled but not widely tested. Any feedback from testing it out online would be appreciated.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
This is a Vehicles Tech Test and, as such, is unpolished and unfinished. You should be aware of the following:
- At present cars are overpowered, and general gameplay balance is out of whack.
- The art-style of cars is temporary and hasn’t had the new, less intrusive, Mash textures added yet. Likewise, they are not ‘grounded’ by shadows right now.
- We are aware of a significant FPS drop after driving for long periods due to a physics bug. Getting this patched out of this build is currently our number one priority – but it shouldn’t impact your initial gameplay/testing too much.
- To aid community testing all cars are unlocked and fuelled. Current work on locked cars, gas tanks of varying emptiness and other gameplay can be seen with the startup command –disableeasyvehicles.
- We currently don’t have vehicle sounds, crash damage to player/car and zombies you run over have no effect on vehicle momentum. You may also see some tree pop-in, that we’re also currently working on.
- Due to the current draw order some sprites and zombies car appear over cars. This means some ground sprites such as grass and zombie bodies can be drawn over cars, and occasionally cars may be drawn in the wrong order.
- Due to this being worked on on a separate branch, expect more bugs than usual in the non-vehicle-related realm and don't expect this to work as a stable or even IWBUMS version
DRIVING LESSON
Once you have loaded up a new game then you’ll find cars in some driveways, and most parking lots. You can enter a car with ‘E’, though be sure to get in on the driver’s side if you want a swift exit. Press ‘V’ to open up a vehicle’s radial menu – from which you’ll find access to the ignition, car radio, headlights and more.
Important:
You use the key icon to start the car BUT sometimes repeated attempts at ignition will be required. The lack of sound effects means that failed start attempts are not made clear. When the icon at the bottom of the screen turns green then the engine is on, and you can drive. The keyboard shortcut for ‘start engine’ is ‘N’ – and this is a less fussy way to turn the key. Once the car has started then use the WSAD keys to drive. Other keyboard shortcuts you can use when in the vehicle are ‘L’ (Headlights) and ‘U’ (vehicle info).
WHAT WE’LL BE DOING NEXT
Yuri’s focus is currently on performance, and we will be updating the Vehicles Tech Test branch this week with whatever fixes are required as and when they become clear. In coming weeks we will also be working on zombie collision and vehicle impact, the exaggeration of tilts and leans when you take corners and implementing greater differences in handling between vehicles. There’s also some ‘reverse momentum physics’ when the front of the car moves up when hitting the brakes instead of pushing down which we need to add the fix for. Yuri has a full tasklist, but it’s one that’s being ticked through at a steady rate. We’re hoping that we’ll be able to release further vehicles test builds to the community whenever milestones are hit, so that we can harvest feedback whenever it’s most required in the run-up to vehicles becoming one with the main game. It’s cool to stream, as long as you clearly tell your viewers the WIP status and it being a tech test version. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-05-08 16:11:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
May Dayoid
We’re currently prepping a public test build for our crash/smash physics-enhanced vehicles that we can release on a Steam beta branch, so we can get performance feedback from the community. To this end Yuri has been concentrating on the more obvious performance issues that would dominate forum feedback, as well as making stuff clearer for a wider test group – such as textual indications when engines aren’t starting while we don’t have engine noise, and keyboard control alternatives for the new UI so you don’t need to navigate menus just to turn the key. We’re going to create a new internal build tomorrow to test out Yuri’s work on crash-quashing and his fixes for the performance dip when you zoom in and out. The plan is for him to continue addressing the strange performance cataclysm you get after 20-30 minutes of play and incidents of magical parked car pop-in this week (and hopefully other niggly stuff too) and then we’ll see where we are in terms of a tech build release on a beta branch. In last week’s blog we showed you all an image of different styles of car textures that we were considering – and internally we were pretty split between the more metallic versions cooked up by Martin, and those painted over by Mash that used flatter colours and more baked-in shading. Feedback on the forum almost universally pointed towards the flatter and more neutral green-y olive car, and as such this is the way we’ll be going. It’s doubtful that every vehicle will have been given the Mash once-over by the time the test build emerges, but once they’re all done they’ll look (more-or-less) like this:
As mentioned previously, Mash is currently being seconded onto vehicle textures – but her next map expansion is also nearing completion. While it doesn’t contain any urban conglomerations larger than Rosewood and March Ridge it does contains fun stuff to hold up in, explore (and drive) around – for example the Knox Heights Country Club, golf course and the clusters of posh houses that can be found around its greens. This is another addition that can’t be found on the real world map, but we hope will add some variety and also some interesting places to appear into once our more detailed ‘character spawns’ plans are realised in post-anims builds.
Speaking of, new boy Mark has almost finished implementing Assimp in the place of our old and more troublesome animation loader – and the current animation system (which is now operating more pleasantly with vehicles, post-merge) is now waiting for it to be tied in. After this we can walk through all issues we’ve been up against during the long, long wait for the system together (starting with rotational root movement, most likely) and get you some solutions.
RJ’s week has largely been in fixing up issues that appeared once Build 37 went live this time last week – seen here in builds 37.9, 37.10 and 37.11. There will be another fix build going out over the next few days, then once we’re sure the dust has settled we’ll call time on 37 and update the version on GOG. In the meantime, for 38, RJ has been looking into greater Admin powers over player inventories (seen in WIP form here), some anti-hack bits/bobs and additional sandbox options. This week’s PAWS-loving safehouse from Eddie. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-05-01 21:12:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
Greetings on a May Day Mondoid everyone, hope you’ve had a good holiday if that’s an international thing as well as in good old Blighty.
VEHICLES
We’re currently prepping a public test build for our crash/smash physics-enhanced vehicles that we can release on a Steam beta branch, so we can get performance feedback from the community. To this end Yuri has been concentrating on the more obvious performance issues that would dominate forum feedback, as well as making stuff clearer for a wider test group – such as textual indications when engines aren’t starting while we don’t have engine noise, and keyboard control alternatives for the new UI so you don’t need to navigate menus just to turn the key. We’re going to create a new internal build tomorrow to test out Yuri’s work on crash-quashing and his fixes for the performance dip when you zoom in and out. The plan is for him to continue addressing the strange performance cataclysm you get after 20-30 minutes of play and incidents of magical parked car pop-in this week (and hopefully other niggly stuff too) and then we’ll see where we are in terms of a tech build release on a beta branch. In last week’s blog we showed you all an image of different styles of car textures that we were considering – and internally we were pretty split between the more metallic versions cooked up by Martin, and those painted over by Mash that used flatter colours and more baked-in shading. Feedback on the forum almost universally pointed towards the flatter and more neutral green-y olive car, and as such this is the way we’ll be going. It’s doubtful that every vehicle will have been given the Mash once-over by the time the test build emerges, but once they’re all done they’ll look (more-or-less) like this:
MAP
As mentioned previously, Mash is currently being seconded onto vehicle textures – but her next map expansion is also nearing completion. While it doesn’t contain any urban conglomerations larger than Rosewood and March Ridge it does contains fun stuff to hold up in, explore (and drive) around – for example the Knox Heights Country Club, golf course and the clusters of posh houses that can be found around its greens. This is another addition that can’t be found on the real world map, but we hope will add some variety and also some interesting places to appear into once our more detailed ‘character spawns’ plans are realised in post-anims builds.
ANIMS
Speaking of, new boy Mark has almost finished implementing Assimp in the place of our old and more troublesome animation loader – and the current animation system (which is now operating more pleasantly with vehicles, post-merge) is now waiting for it to be tied in. After this we can walk through all issues we’ve been up against during the long, long wait for the system together (starting with rotational root movement, most likely) and get you some solutions.
37 to 38
RJ’s week has largely been in fixing up issues that appeared once Build 37 went live this time last week – seen here in builds 37.9, 37.10 and 37.11. There will be another fix build going out over the next few days, then once we’re sure the dust has settled we’ll call time on 37 and update the version on GOG. In the meantime, for 38, RJ has been looking into greater Admin powers over player inventories (seen in WIP form here), some anti-hack bits/bobs and additional sandbox options. This week’s PAWS-loving safehouse from Eddie. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-05-01 21:12:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
37 n’ Next
This morning we pushed Build 37.8 to Stable. This is predominantly an RJ build, apart from the Mash maps and some Yuri fixes, so our thanks to him keeping the wheel turning while work continues in our various other branches. It contains lots of fiddly longstanding fix stuff that can be read here, but the highlights run as follows:
The internal tests and updates of our new physics-enhanced vehicles continue, if you haven’t seen it then our latest vid (made by Mark.exe) can be seen here. The current focus is in fixing up what we have now so that it’s all in a state that could be considered for wider testing. We will need, after all, performance feedback from as many PC set ups as we can. This week, then, Yuri had been looking at the build’s most glaring performance issues and glitches. There’s an oddly catastrophic slowdown that hits after twenty minutes of play that’s being looked at right now, for example, while vehicle and tree pop-in also needs addressing. Likewise frame-rate stutters seemingly tied to zooming. In recent days we’ve made good progress on reported (non-vehicular) crashes and garbage collection hang-ups, so we’ll keep on ticking off the list. Likewise, it’d be nice if we could solve some clipping and draw order issues. As a general ‘where we’re at’ overview, right now we have pick-ups, station wagons, ambulances, sports cars, small cars and vans in-game (although they’re yet to have different handling stats). They spawn in relevant places, and according to the affluence/role of area on the Exclusion Zone map. They crash and roll, and they really, really attract zombies – potentially a little too much. They have working headlights and are generally found locked – although keys can be found on zombies or in houses. Every car has storage in the boot, and have a handy glove box too. We’re also looking at two (subtle) different ways of colouring vehicle textures – so answers on a postcard if you can tell us your opinion of which if these vehicles fits in best with the PZ game world.
What vehicles haven’t got is much ‘Zomboid’ gameplay tied to them right now – mechanic profession, maintenance, damage, player injury and other vital stuff isn’t in yet. Likewise they have no engine sound playing, the info panel UI is temporary and collision with zeds and survivors needs work. The focus right now, however, is getting their operation as glitch-free as possible – so all this will come in future weeks.
We mentioned it last week but now have an extra body on-board in TIS Towers, in the form of Mark – a man who comes with a wealth of games industry experience and battle-hardiness. He’s going to be jumping into the trenches fairly imminently to help us sort out various other technical issues surrounding the new animation system, as well as tie up any other loose ends or missing bits that are holding back the release. In the meantime he has been implementing Assimp as our default model and animation loader, this will allow models to be loaded in in a variety of common formats that will not only aid modders in being able to easily expand the game, but will hopefully unearth a few issues with the existing loader that have prevented the rotational root motion system from being finished off. Mark’s experience in animation systems could then lead onto other improvements once everything is in-game, but we’ll leave expanding on that until we finally have the basic models in testing. In the mean-time it’s now clear that vehicles will release before animations, so we’re continuing the work required to let them make the best of each other. Work in and around animations will provide some advantages to the vehicles once they land, such as the elimination of the old system of off-screen textures that are rendered every frame in 3D and drawn in place as sprites, being replaced with the game actually drawing the 3D models directly into the screen at the correct position in a more accurate ISO perspective. This will hopefully improve things such as zombie like vehicle collisions, and make multiple vehicles integrate into the scene together better.
With the release of 37 work begins on the more general features and improvements for 38. Its overall contents are currently under discussion but the new map expansion is pretty much certain to be in 38, alongside the MP Discord integration. Hopefully Turbo’s devices code rewrite will also be ready in time, as well as some of the improvements it can provide.
We ran an interview with prolific PZ modder Nolan the other week, but forgot to give it a Mondoid flag. Do check it out though, as he’s a very interesting chap. This week’s last stand from Isnah81. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-04-24 17:56:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello! A public build release today, along with a general overview of where we’ll be at with different stuff in the coming weeks.
37 RELEASED
This morning we pushed Build 37.8 to Stable. This is predominantly an RJ build, apart from the Mash maps and some Yuri fixes, so our thanks to him keeping the wheel turning while work continues in our various other branches. It contains lots of fiddly longstanding fix stuff that can be read here, but the highlights run as follows:
- Maps of urban locations within the Knox Event Exclusion Zone can be found in relevant towns, in particular spawning in gas stations. They look a bit like this.
- You can make text and emblem markings on maps and share with friends and faction members in MP.
- In SP you also run a chance of discovering pre-annotated maps that’ve been marked up by deceased fellow survivors. These are mainly found on zombies and can lead you to stashes of weapons, tools and general places of interest. Loot at these locations could be hidden in cupboards, crates, bags left on the floor or even hidden under the floorboards.
- General improvements to cooking, cooking systems and food. Split screen co-op fixes. Gamepad fixes. Improved sleeping system for online servers who like to snooze. New forage UI to limit item build-up on the map. Portuguese Brazilian community translation by HiveFuse. Clearer moodle impact descriptions. New ‘version info’ box on main screen.
VEHICLES
The internal tests and updates of our new physics-enhanced vehicles continue, if you haven’t seen it then our latest vid (made by Mark.exe) can be seen here. The current focus is in fixing up what we have now so that it’s all in a state that could be considered for wider testing. We will need, after all, performance feedback from as many PC set ups as we can. This week, then, Yuri had been looking at the build’s most glaring performance issues and glitches. There’s an oddly catastrophic slowdown that hits after twenty minutes of play that’s being looked at right now, for example, while vehicle and tree pop-in also needs addressing. Likewise frame-rate stutters seemingly tied to zooming. In recent days we’ve made good progress on reported (non-vehicular) crashes and garbage collection hang-ups, so we’ll keep on ticking off the list. Likewise, it’d be nice if we could solve some clipping and draw order issues. As a general ‘where we’re at’ overview, right now we have pick-ups, station wagons, ambulances, sports cars, small cars and vans in-game (although they’re yet to have different handling stats). They spawn in relevant places, and according to the affluence/role of area on the Exclusion Zone map. They crash and roll, and they really, really attract zombies – potentially a little too much. They have working headlights and are generally found locked – although keys can be found on zombies or in houses. Every car has storage in the boot, and have a handy glove box too. We’re also looking at two (subtle) different ways of colouring vehicle textures – so answers on a postcard if you can tell us your opinion of which if these vehicles fits in best with the PZ game world.
What vehicles haven’t got is much ‘Zomboid’ gameplay tied to them right now – mechanic profession, maintenance, damage, player injury and other vital stuff isn’t in yet. Likewise they have no engine sound playing, the info panel UI is temporary and collision with zeds and survivors needs work. The focus right now, however, is getting their operation as glitch-free as possible – so all this will come in future weeks.
ANIMS
We mentioned it last week but now have an extra body on-board in TIS Towers, in the form of Mark – a man who comes with a wealth of games industry experience and battle-hardiness. He’s going to be jumping into the trenches fairly imminently to help us sort out various other technical issues surrounding the new animation system, as well as tie up any other loose ends or missing bits that are holding back the release. In the meantime he has been implementing Assimp as our default model and animation loader, this will allow models to be loaded in in a variety of common formats that will not only aid modders in being able to easily expand the game, but will hopefully unearth a few issues with the existing loader that have prevented the rotational root motion system from being finished off. Mark’s experience in animation systems could then lead onto other improvements once everything is in-game, but we’ll leave expanding on that until we finally have the basic models in testing. In the mean-time it’s now clear that vehicles will release before animations, so we’re continuing the work required to let them make the best of each other. Work in and around animations will provide some advantages to the vehicles once they land, such as the elimination of the old system of off-screen textures that are rendered every frame in 3D and drawn in place as sprites, being replaced with the game actually drawing the 3D models directly into the screen at the correct position in a more accurate ISO perspective. This will hopefully improve things such as zombie like vehicle collisions, and make multiple vehicles integrate into the scene together better.
IWBUMS NEXT
With the release of 37 work begins on the more general features and improvements for 38. Its overall contents are currently under discussion but the new map expansion is pretty much certain to be in 38, alongside the MP Discord integration. Hopefully Turbo’s devices code rewrite will also be ready in time, as well as some of the improvements it can provide.
MOD SPOTLIGHT
We ran an interview with prolific PZ modder Nolan the other week, but forgot to give it a Mondoid flag. Do check it out though, as he’s a very interesting chap. This week’s last stand from Isnah81. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-04-24 17:56:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hot Wheels
A new build of physics-enabled vehicles fun is currently doing the rounds in internal testing. The general consensus is still that they are ‘way better than we were expecting’, so hats off to all the work put in by EP, Martin and Yuri from General Arcade. In our new build different car models have different handling and performance and when you’re speeding down the road you’ll occasionally be forced into a hard brake by the pile-ups of wrecked cars that we have envisaged for the edges of the map. These still need work, but one thing that’s pretty cool is that each wreck is a physics object, so you’ll be able to smash your way through if you’re in a pinch.
Right now it takes 5-6 minutes to drive from West Point to Muldraugh, and around 10 if you’re making the trip all the way up to Rosewood Prison – which will knock off about a quarter of tank of gas in an average car. This already feels fairly balanced, but will clearly come under scrutiny when we’re playing around with the system later on. We will also need to make zombies very interested in engine noise. Here’s a video of our current vehicles build, as provided by the ever-lovable Mark.exe. Please note, as ever, that everything in the vid is WIP and in development – visuals, handling, UI, zombie collision and everything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Fhc2WwYpyI Martin’s new textures mean that cars pop out of the screen less than they did , but we are also going to experiment without using gradients – which could result in them looking more at home in the PZ world and its colours. We’re currently doing a few new textures with this in mind, and hope to get a few examples into our next internal test build. Alongside general implementation and gameplay tasks that still need doing, this test flagged a few more things that need attention, and a few of which we’ve worked on today. Wheels need more detail so you can see them spin, there needs to be less ‘float’ on sharp turns, we need shadows placed under vehicles so they look a little more grounded and there’s also a few flickers and (non vehicular) MP crashes that need attention. We should also do our best to limit this sort of zombie car-tipping – although it is quite fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKAXSADiUtU
So Build 37 is nearly here – it’s just a matter of checking its fixes are working correctly, and maaaybe squeezing a few more nuggets from The Great Bug Purge in too. To this end we’ve just released Build 37.6 into the IWBUMS public beta. This adds new annotated stash maps to the game for equipment hidden in offices, restaurants and warehouses – and introduces maps for all the major urban hubs on the PZ map. You can also rename map items should you want to make their uses clearer in your inventory, and that of you MP buddies. As mentioned last week, this also features changes to the MP sleep system and some assaults on longstanding issues like saucepan rain, co-op curtain sync and many/various gamepad eccentricities.
Clearly work on overriding systems and animations continue in the background while vehicles thunder forwards into view, but we’ve also got some smaller nuggets in the can for Build 38. Stuff like extra powers for Admins over player inventories, Discord integration into MP chat and the ever increased likelihood that the next map update will be ready to roll for it too. In more general PZ news: as of today we have a new team-member! He’s a super-talented guy with a bunch of games industry experience garnered from a multitude of different projects (some small, some massive, some Zomboid-size) and he’ll be working deep in our codebase for the foreseeable future. It’s only his first week though, so we’ll let him bed in a bit before demanding Mondoid contributions. This week’s last stand from Levi [Hun]. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here. Mod Spotlight blog featuring the lovely Nolan now coming tomorrow on projectzomboid.com. Thanks all!
[ 2017-04-10 21:40:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
This weekend has seen a whole bunch of vehicular fun, so… buckle up? Is that too corny?
CAR TESTING
A new build of physics-enabled vehicles fun is currently doing the rounds in internal testing. The general consensus is still that they are ‘way better than we were expecting’, so hats off to all the work put in by EP, Martin and Yuri from General Arcade. In our new build different car models have different handling and performance and when you’re speeding down the road you’ll occasionally be forced into a hard brake by the pile-ups of wrecked cars that we have envisaged for the edges of the map. These still need work, but one thing that’s pretty cool is that each wreck is a physics object, so you’ll be able to smash your way through if you’re in a pinch.
Right now it takes 5-6 minutes to drive from West Point to Muldraugh, and around 10 if you’re making the trip all the way up to Rosewood Prison – which will knock off about a quarter of tank of gas in an average car. This already feels fairly balanced, but will clearly come under scrutiny when we’re playing around with the system later on. We will also need to make zombies very interested in engine noise. Here’s a video of our current vehicles build, as provided by the ever-lovable Mark.exe. Please note, as ever, that everything in the vid is WIP and in development – visuals, handling, UI, zombie collision and everything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Fhc2WwYpyI Martin’s new textures mean that cars pop out of the screen less than they did , but we are also going to experiment without using gradients – which could result in them looking more at home in the PZ world and its colours. We’re currently doing a few new textures with this in mind, and hope to get a few examples into our next internal test build. Alongside general implementation and gameplay tasks that still need doing, this test flagged a few more things that need attention, and a few of which we’ve worked on today. Wheels need more detail so you can see them spin, there needs to be less ‘float’ on sharp turns, we need shadows placed under vehicles so they look a little more grounded and there’s also a few flickers and (non vehicular) MP crashes that need attention. We should also do our best to limit this sort of zombie car-tipping – although it is quite fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKAXSADiUtU
BUILD 37
So Build 37 is nearly here – it’s just a matter of checking its fixes are working correctly, and maaaybe squeezing a few more nuggets from The Great Bug Purge in too. To this end we’ve just released Build 37.6 into the IWBUMS public beta. This adds new annotated stash maps to the game for equipment hidden in offices, restaurants and warehouses – and introduces maps for all the major urban hubs on the PZ map. You can also rename map items should you want to make their uses clearer in your inventory, and that of you MP buddies. As mentioned last week, this also features changes to the MP sleep system and some assaults on longstanding issues like saucepan rain, co-op curtain sync and many/various gamepad eccentricities.
BUILD BEYOND
Clearly work on overriding systems and animations continue in the background while vehicles thunder forwards into view, but we’ve also got some smaller nuggets in the can for Build 38. Stuff like extra powers for Admins over player inventories, Discord integration into MP chat and the ever increased likelihood that the next map update will be ready to roll for it too. In more general PZ news: as of today we have a new team-member! He’s a super-talented guy with a bunch of games industry experience garnered from a multitude of different projects (some small, some massive, some Zomboid-size) and he’ll be working deep in our codebase for the foreseeable future. It’s only his first week though, so we’ll let him bed in a bit before demanding Mondoid contributions. This week’s last stand from Levi [Hun]. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here. Mod Spotlight blog featuring the lovely Nolan now coming tomorrow on projectzomboid.com. Thanks all!
[ 2017-04-10 21:40:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
Impendin' 37
Build 37 should be out this week, it’s content-locked but we’re also having a real bug purge at the moment – and are dead set on getting a clean version out for our upcoming bigger features to then build on. This is extremely boring and frustrating (we know) but we’ve had a bunch of persistent bugs in the main game build for a while now and they needed attending to. It also does feel good to have put some regular villains to the sword, all of whom have been really tough to track and duplicate. As such, much as it all sounds like a terrifying cheese dream, we think that bugs like saucepan rain, self-opening de-synced co-op curtains and windows, several server crashes and a myriad of gamepad/split-screen eccentricities have been fixed in the next IWBUMS public beta build. Additionally, while fixing the persistent black screen flicker you experience in MP when another player wakes up or falls asleep, we also used the opportunity to fix up some sleep mode logic requested by servers that prefer to keep player-sleep active – meaning that players can now wake up independently of each other, wake up if they press the move keys and have a visible sleep clock. This may well need some more polish, but we’re intrigued to see how the system fares online.
The maps and annotated maps of Build 37 were made possible by a tool made by TurboTuTone – and in amongst his current devices work in the main game CartoZed has now been revamped. We hope its additions will be of a benefit to our map makers, and to aid the creation of in-game maps for the many community-created custom maps that PZ players survive on. It’s now easier to use, scroll and pan, allow mouse selection of specific areas and can be used with user maps. So, for example, here’s a top-down of some of Xeonyx’s New Denver.
Meanwhile CartoZed will also now export an isometric version showing cells of 300×300 tiles, should you crave your own downloadable chunk of the overall PZ map or your own map creation.
Turbo has also updated ItemZed to version 1.2 using feedback from the modders who’ve picked up its mantle, which can be found here.
A quick shout out to the redoubtable Blackbeard06 who has gone about the laborious task of polishing up, fixing up and categorizing hundreds of user-created buildings that were left with errors after 2x sprites became part of the main game. He’s clearly put a lot of work in, and this means that there are now even more potential new industries and abodes to be added to user maps.
There seems to be a bit of a spurt of new PZ servers appearing at the moment (and if you’d like yours to get some spotlight then please get in touch) but just a brief mention for that hoary old stalwart Redboid – the server of the PZ subreddit. Now under new management and with a few rule changes amidst the familiar faces, it’s a major organ in the online contingent of PZ and it’s good to see it continue to flourish.
In terms of general PZ output – we are listening, wanting to get the ‘good stuff’ out to you and are (hopefully) improving both behind the scenes and in terms of release frequency. Our recent collaborations with General Arcade in the vehicles branch have shown us how fruitful it can be to have fresh faces working at our many different coalfaces, and as such are looking to expand our bank of coders with AAA or indie game dev experience. We already have an iron or two in the fire, but if you have a good, established programming CV in the games industry and enjoy our game (and especially if you’re in NE England) then feel free to give us a shout. This week’s ‘Cheers’ vibe from Duncan. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here. Please also note that the BOIT will be back mid-week with the return of our Mod Spotlight blog on the main PZ site, with a wheel-y good guest star. For those not aware we exist outside of Steam, last weeks Mondoid can be found here: https://projectzomboid.com/blog/2017/03/spiffin/
[ 2017-04-03 21:36:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all. Simmering in the background the fundaments of our vehicles and animation branches are being tied closer together, Martin’s car and truck models continue to pop into the communal directory to surprise/delight, and the map continues to expand. And while all those cogs and gears are whirring, the following bizness is occurring:
BUILD 37
Build 37 should be out this week, it’s content-locked but we’re also having a real bug purge at the moment – and are dead set on getting a clean version out for our upcoming bigger features to then build on. This is extremely boring and frustrating (we know) but we’ve had a bunch of persistent bugs in the main game build for a while now and they needed attending to. It also does feel good to have put some regular villains to the sword, all of whom have been really tough to track and duplicate. As such, much as it all sounds like a terrifying cheese dream, we think that bugs like saucepan rain, self-opening de-synced co-op curtains and windows, several server crashes and a myriad of gamepad/split-screen eccentricities have been fixed in the next IWBUMS public beta build. Additionally, while fixing the persistent black screen flicker you experience in MP when another player wakes up or falls asleep, we also used the opportunity to fix up some sleep mode logic requested by servers that prefer to keep player-sleep active – meaning that players can now wake up independently of each other, wake up if they press the move keys and have a visible sleep clock. This may well need some more polish, but we’re intrigued to see how the system fares online.
NU-TOOLS
The maps and annotated maps of Build 37 were made possible by a tool made by TurboTuTone – and in amongst his current devices work in the main game CartoZed has now been revamped. We hope its additions will be of a benefit to our map makers, and to aid the creation of in-game maps for the many community-created custom maps that PZ players survive on. It’s now easier to use, scroll and pan, allow mouse selection of specific areas and can be used with user maps. So, for example, here’s a top-down of some of Xeonyx’s New Denver.
Meanwhile CartoZed will also now export an isometric version showing cells of 300×300 tiles, should you crave your own downloadable chunk of the overall PZ map or your own map creation.
Turbo has also updated ItemZed to version 1.2 using feedback from the modders who’ve picked up its mantle, which can be found here.
BUILDING HERO
A quick shout out to the redoubtable Blackbeard06 who has gone about the laborious task of polishing up, fixing up and categorizing hundreds of user-created buildings that were left with errors after 2x sprites became part of the main game. He’s clearly put a lot of work in, and this means that there are now even more potential new industries and abodes to be added to user maps.
REDBOID REFORGED
There seems to be a bit of a spurt of new PZ servers appearing at the moment (and if you’d like yours to get some spotlight then please get in touch) but just a brief mention for that hoary old stalwart Redboid – the server of the PZ subreddit. Now under new management and with a few rule changes amidst the familiar faces, it’s a major organ in the online contingent of PZ and it’s good to see it continue to flourish.
A BRIEF NOTE
In terms of general PZ output – we are listening, wanting to get the ‘good stuff’ out to you and are (hopefully) improving both behind the scenes and in terms of release frequency. Our recent collaborations with General Arcade in the vehicles branch have shown us how fruitful it can be to have fresh faces working at our many different coalfaces, and as such are looking to expand our bank of coders with AAA or indie game dev experience. We already have an iron or two in the fire, but if you have a good, established programming CV in the games industry and enjoy our game (and especially if you’re in NE England) then feel free to give us a shout. This week’s ‘Cheers’ vibe from Duncan. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here. Please also note that the BOIT will be back mid-week with the return of our Mod Spotlight blog on the main PZ site, with a wheel-y good guest star. For those not aware we exist outside of Steam, last weeks Mondoid can be found here: https://projectzomboid.com/blog/2017/03/spiffin/
[ 2017-04-03 21:36:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Under the Hood
We generally don’t talk about map expansion until it’s ready to hit, but the next area will make full advantage of players being able to naturally spread out from their traditional urban starting points. There’ll also be vehicle-based locations we haven’t been able to feature before.
Other stuff! Two more items of note this week. First off, one of our bigger international player-bases can be found in Brazil – yet the PZ community translation for Brazilian-Portuguese has generally been ‘not brilliant’ and incomplete. As such we’re very pleased that a new version is imminent. We’re also really excited to see the first mod appear on the workshop created through ItemZed (MilkMod!) and hope it’s the first of many. Our thanks to Thiosk for his feedback too. Finally, we always knew that Spiffo was a badass but… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Zgt2F48X8 This week’s featured image from the one and only ʅ（´◔౪◔）ʃ. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-03-21 06:40:23 CET ] [ Original post ]
The vehicles branch has a lot of momentum at present, so right now there’s currently a lot being done behind the scenes to pave the way for cars, emergency vehicles and the like.
First off, however, now RJ is back in the dev saddle after his paternity leave we need to finalise and release Build 37 – primary highlights of which are in-game maps players can annotate, pre-annotated survivor maps for SP, new cooking features and many/varied other tweaks and fixes. To this end we’ll be releasing version 37.4 into the IWBUMS public beta tomorrow.
In the run-up to vehicles and anims we are taking the opportunity to fix as many of the longstanding bugs that’ve built up as we possibly can – including some long-term UI/moodle ones that’ve been a pain to those who play in split-screen for a fair old while. This bug tracker purge is ongoing, and if you want to help out with a report then the tracker lives here.
This week we finalized the in-house document that we’ll be putting in place to ensure that vehicles are a health hazard as much as a survival asset, that we’ll detail as stuff is built into the game. In the interim, though, what’s been done this past week to ease in and facilitate EasyPickins’ and General Arcade’s long-promised physics-enhanced vehicles into a new test build, and beyond?
Engine smoothening. One of General Arcade’s primary vehicles branch entanglements has been in improving PZ’s capabilities in terms of map streaming and pop-up – but another issue we’ve butted up against frequently in the past is stuttering caused by Java’s resident gremlin ‘the garbage collector’. As such this week TIS have successfully spelunked into the deepest depths of PZ’s code to optimize affairs, which will have an impact game-wide and also make prolonged vehicle travel through busy/forested areas a far smoother ride.
Road decorating. When the a vehicles test build is released there won’t be a car on every drive (although vehicle proliferation will be a sandbox option) and as such we’ll be adding reasoning to the radio/TV lore and we also intend to have build-ups of destroyed vehicles on roads – especially towards the edge of the current map. It’s possible we’ll face engine limitations, but what we’re aiming for is a feeling of failed escapes from the Exclusion Zone when the sickness first descended on the area.
Anims Compatibility Ensuring. Given the recent surge in activity that vehicles work finally coming to the boil has wrought, and the possibility that this will see them going into the full game prior to anims, a focus this week has been in ensuring that vehicles and anims systems will play nicely together. The main difference between the two branches is that the animation build effectively removes a system that’s been in the game since 3D models were first introduced: the fact that every frame renders the 3D characters into 2D sprites that draw in place.
Now, in the internal anims branch, isometric projection draws the characters in-place at the right place in the screen. This is a major optimization that removes the requirement of off-screen FBOs that are unavailable on some older cards, as well as optimizing the draw speed and makes the root motion (as well as interactions between multiple characters) work properly since the models and game world share the same coordinate space. As such, right now we’re sucking the vehicle juice out of their branch and redistributing it into our anims work – to make sure it all gels together when the time comes. There will be other things that need fixing up, but this is the main issue to resolve between the vehicles and anims branches and greatly benefit both in the end product.
Map Expansion.
We generally don’t talk about map expansion until it’s ready to hit, but the next area will make full advantage of players being able to naturally spread out from their traditional urban starting points. There’ll also be vehicle-based locations we haven’t been able to feature before.
Other stuff! Two more items of note this week. First off, one of our bigger international player-bases can be found in Brazil – yet the PZ community translation for Brazilian-Portuguese has generally been ‘not brilliant’ and incomplete. As such we’re very pleased that a new version is imminent. We’re also really excited to see the first mod appear on the workshop created through ItemZed (MilkMod!) and hope it’s the first of many. Our thanks to Thiosk for his feedback too. Finally, we always knew that Spiffo was a badass but… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Zgt2F48X8 This week’s featured image from the one and only ʅ（´◔౪◔）ʃ. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-03-21 06:40:23 CET ] [ Original post ]
Here In My Car
[ 2017-03-06 21:15:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey everyone! Welcome to Mondoid. This week, and we’ll cut straight to the chase with some video goodness! (Remember: work in progress, some bugs visible! More work in implementation and visuals to come!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlJzeCB4Vow
So, what are we looking at? Physics-enhanced vehicles in Project Zomboid, both online and off, and some hefty improvements on map streaming and object processing to handle it all. You enter a car with ‘E’, control with WSAD and have various vehicley-options open to you through a radial menu when you’re in the driver’s seat.
We’ve had the vehicles branch on the boil for a while (alongside the usual anims branch, standard build branches and a few others) but this year’s work in melding of EP’s car physics and framework with General Arcade’s special sauce has seen great things occurring. Progress has been good this past week too (as you can hopefully tell from comparing this video with one recorded five or six days ago) and we’re really excited about how the vehicles look and feel to drive. There have already been tests in multiplayer that went very well, with the new map streaming changes working niftily and boding well for future optimization.
So what’s still to be done amidst the general bug fixing? Well, in amongst others and the tidying up of zombie collision visuals – the following:
- Firstly, and most importantly, we need to make sure that we’re not introducing a new breed of indestructo-tanks to Project Zomboid. We have to make sure that survival times aren’t hugely extended by cars, and that their use carries as many negatives as positives for the players. Also we need to figure out a good balance between zombie squashing fun and the realism Zomboid tends toward, avoiding the vehicles being too OP and sturdy against groups of zombies, while still providing the satisfaction of mowing down zombies in bigger vehicles.
- There’s an issue to resolve with how cars are drawn into the scene, sometimes resulting in weird draw sorting bugs with ground grass or zombies drawn in front of the car when they should be blocked by it. This is due to the fact that currently 3D models are drawn at the same time as the tile they are ‘stood’ on. This doesn’t cater for larger 3D objects very well, so we’ll need to think on how to handle this and make sure they all occlude each other correctly.
- The current sounds of the vehicles are 100% placeholder, and we’ll be working on these before release.
- More cars! This video is fairly packed with ‘speciality’ vehicles, and Martin is currently in the process of making more vehicles to provide more variety and/or Kentucky normality.
- Balancing: Each vehicle type needs balancing not only on their rarity, but in terms of handling, top speed, and all the other factors to make them feel different to drive. Right now, apart from their size and wheel positions, they are all functionally identical.
- Wrecks and pile-ups: At the moment all cars spawn in parked locations, neatly parked in car parks or outside homes. We need to add wrecks, abandoned vehicles, pile ups and other more apocalyptic set ups of cars while also keeping in-touch with what Will’s set up in the PZ lore.
OTHER STUFF
- RingoD has patched up the faults in the TIS-curated community map Bedford Falls that were introduced through the 2x revolution. It should now be fully playable and can return to general PZ MP server use. Download here.
- Turbo has updated his modding and dev tool ItemZed, along with some fresh easier-to-read instructions that explain how you too can play around with recipes, items, looting locations and lots lots more.
- Mapper Cardenaglo’s crazy/awesome Gaia is out in its first form. Do check it out!
[ 2017-03-06 21:15:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
V for Victor (and Vehicles)
A big milestone today as vehicles officially went into closed testing, which is a big step toward getting them out there to you all. They aren’t completely finished yet–There will undoubtedly be bugs to fix reported by our testers, and at the moment there is only a test model, a blue pickup-truck with an oddly placed wheel on the bumper, in the game. The cool vehicle models Martin has been pumping out still need to be implemented, and on a cosmetic level some additional work needs doing on the lighting to make them appear less uniformly lit and a bit more metallic in appearance, we may bump up their size a little too, but they are getting close and all the heavy lifting has been done. Feedback so far shows that the streaming seems to work extremely well, and the vehicles controls and handles surprisingly well considering the isometric perspective. You use a radial menu to start the car, rolling down windows, turn on the heater, change seats, or play with the car radio. It’s also extremely fun running over zombies–as you can imagine! We’ll save on the videos until we get more cars implemented and feel an IWBUMS is more imminent (also, as cool as it looks already it’s a bit odd to see neighbourhoods of blue pickup trucks!) but here are a few pics to whet your appetite.
Thanks again to General Arcade for their amazing and tireless work getting the system working over the net, and getting through the remaining technical roadblocks that complicated and delayed their completion, and of course to EasyPickins who put a monumental amount of work into the vehicles prior to that, alongside his day to day work on PZ updates.
That’s right, always a productive one, our very own Romain has gone and co-created a tiny person, whom he has dubbed Victor, who was born literally yesterday. He is very cute, and as per his contract with TIS we have given RJ two weeks to get him up to speed on java so he can be put to work in the TIS code mines. Here is a picture of him alongside the Eternal Leader Spiffo:
Will, usual Mondoid writer, father and sentimental one of the bunch is away at GDC advancing the cause of The Indie Stone in the U.S, but if he was here I’m sure it’d he’d say much more eloquently that we’re ecstatically happy for RJ, Celine and their new son, it’s wonderful to see the Zomboid family grow, and we wish Victor every future success against the zombie hordes. That’ll be all for this week, see you all next week after we see how the closed testing goes! This week’s image is by us. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-02-27 16:17:35 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! Welcome to this week’s Mondoid. It’ll be a relatively short one this week, yet we got some cool things in the pipe to show non-the-less.
Vehicles
A big milestone today as vehicles officially went into closed testing, which is a big step toward getting them out there to you all. They aren’t completely finished yet–There will undoubtedly be bugs to fix reported by our testers, and at the moment there is only a test model, a blue pickup-truck with an oddly placed wheel on the bumper, in the game. The cool vehicle models Martin has been pumping out still need to be implemented, and on a cosmetic level some additional work needs doing on the lighting to make them appear less uniformly lit and a bit more metallic in appearance, we may bump up their size a little too, but they are getting close and all the heavy lifting has been done. Feedback so far shows that the streaming seems to work extremely well, and the vehicles controls and handles surprisingly well considering the isometric perspective. You use a radial menu to start the car, rolling down windows, turn on the heater, change seats, or play with the car radio. It’s also extremely fun running over zombies–as you can imagine! We’ll save on the videos until we get more cars implemented and feel an IWBUMS is more imminent (also, as cool as it looks already it’s a bit odd to see neighbourhoods of blue pickup trucks!) but here are a few pics to whet your appetite.
Thanks again to General Arcade for their amazing and tireless work getting the system working over the net, and getting through the remaining technical roadblocks that complicated and delayed their completion, and of course to EasyPickins who put a monumental amount of work into the vehicles prior to that, alongside his day to day work on PZ updates.
RJ has spawned
That’s right, always a productive one, our very own Romain has gone and co-created a tiny person, whom he has dubbed Victor, who was born literally yesterday. He is very cute, and as per his contract with TIS we have given RJ two weeks to get him up to speed on java so he can be put to work in the TIS code mines. Here is a picture of him alongside the Eternal Leader Spiffo:
Will, usual Mondoid writer, father and sentimental one of the bunch is away at GDC advancing the cause of The Indie Stone in the U.S, but if he was here I’m sure it’d he’d say much more eloquently that we’re ecstatically happy for RJ, Celine and their new son, it’s wonderful to see the Zomboid family grow, and we wish Victor every future success against the zombie hordes. That’ll be all for this week, see you all next week after we see how the closed testing goes! This week’s image is by us. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-02-27 16:17:35 CET ] [ Original post ]
Stash in the Attic
In the next IWBUMS beta release there’ll be a system that we’ve added to our new in-game maps. In essence on the maps you loot from zombie corpses in SP (specifically the ‘survivor’ zombies post-anims, when we have more control over clothing and appearance) they will often come with annotations written on them by that pre-zombie survivor, or perhaps their friends/family who tried to help them. Sometimes annotations won’t help (zombie hordes that have since moved on etc) but more often than not there’ll be directions to interesting finds that have been left in buildings on the map. A weapon cache, tools, a booby-trapped safehouse, a dangerous building of boarded-up zeds and the like. Depending on where in the PZ timeline you are, the more apt the different variety of ‘treasure’ that’s marked on the map. This will also be tied into our ‘random house’ system, meaning that we will also have control over how boarded up the places are, zombie numbers inside etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_miSFTS_mys [url=https://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/luaexample.png] All stash description, contents and locations are done in lua, meaning that the community will be able to easily add to the system – and of course how frequent you can find these maps will also be a sandbox option. The system will also work in MP, but because the system is reliant on highlighting unvisited locations it won’t last for long on big servers. Clearly, however, the annotated maps will be discoverable written by ‘real’ people in this instance though – so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue. Unseen in the above video is an improved ‘handwritten’ font, and also new stamps for the maps system. We also intend to have stashes be a bit more visually appealing without them just appearing in crates or ‘underneath the sink’ – so things look like they’ve actually been hidden by someone in a hurry.
Okay, so here’s what’s happening with vehicles. Yuri, one of our inestimable friends from General Arcade, is currently making the streets and streaming of Muldraugh and environs a smoother ride for EasyPickins’ fab work on vehicles and physics. The results have been really exciting, and at a later date the vehicle movement interpolation code can also be extended over into player movement to make life smoother for non-drivers too. We’re not looking at a release in an imminent build, but we clearly are at a stage when we’re more comfortable with talking out loud about them – and Yuri’s engine-smoothening, performance-improving and zombie/player collision work over the past few weeks has been great to see. In terms of visuals, meanwhile, Martin (whose name you’ll know for his animating mentions) has been tasked with creating various different vehicle models that’ll be found on the Zomboid map – and the various skins that’ll pretty them up and differentiate them. He’s working on these whenever he’s not working directly with us on the animations (or the other wilderness features the anims will unlock) so here’s an example of his current work on two different varieties of ‘pick up truck’.
There’s something of a community mapping frenzy at the moment with lots of cool projects bubbling away on our forum and in the mapper Discord. We just wanted to highlight Cardenaglo’s awesome sequence of islands known as ‘Bungil’ which is a really imaginative ‘Zomboid journey’ we’d love to see in action. Xeonyx has also recently updated his New Denver map on Steam so that it plays nicely with Rosewood Prison, while it also sounds like he has the Rosebery expansion brewing nicely. Also a quick shout-out to Pat_Bren and his small Irish village of Ballincoolin. We saw your plea for love Pat. Happy Valentines. This week’s featured image from the, hopefully not rude-named, Kobrakum. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-02-14 00:05:32 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello! A few things from the big list of what’s cooking:
MAP STASHES
In the next IWBUMS beta release there’ll be a system that we’ve added to our new in-game maps. In essence on the maps you loot from zombie corpses in SP (specifically the ‘survivor’ zombies post-anims, when we have more control over clothing and appearance) they will often come with annotations written on them by that pre-zombie survivor, or perhaps their friends/family who tried to help them. Sometimes annotations won’t help (zombie hordes that have since moved on etc) but more often than not there’ll be directions to interesting finds that have been left in buildings on the map. A weapon cache, tools, a booby-trapped safehouse, a dangerous building of boarded-up zeds and the like. Depending on where in the PZ timeline you are, the more apt the different variety of ‘treasure’ that’s marked on the map. This will also be tied into our ‘random house’ system, meaning that we will also have control over how boarded up the places are, zombie numbers inside etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_miSFTS_mys [url=https://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/luaexample.png] All stash description, contents and locations are done in lua, meaning that the community will be able to easily add to the system – and of course how frequent you can find these maps will also be a sandbox option. The system will also work in MP, but because the system is reliant on highlighting unvisited locations it won’t last for long on big servers. Clearly, however, the annotated maps will be discoverable written by ‘real’ people in this instance though – so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue. Unseen in the above video is an improved ‘handwritten’ font, and also new stamps for the maps system. We also intend to have stashes be a bit more visually appealing without them just appearing in crates or ‘underneath the sink’ – so things look like they’ve actually been hidden by someone in a hurry.
VEHICLES
Okay, so here’s what’s happening with vehicles. Yuri, one of our inestimable friends from General Arcade, is currently making the streets and streaming of Muldraugh and environs a smoother ride for EasyPickins’ fab work on vehicles and physics. The results have been really exciting, and at a later date the vehicle movement interpolation code can also be extended over into player movement to make life smoother for non-drivers too. We’re not looking at a release in an imminent build, but we clearly are at a stage when we’re more comfortable with talking out loud about them – and Yuri’s engine-smoothening, performance-improving and zombie/player collision work over the past few weeks has been great to see. In terms of visuals, meanwhile, Martin (whose name you’ll know for his animating mentions) has been tasked with creating various different vehicle models that’ll be found on the Zomboid map – and the various skins that’ll pretty them up and differentiate them. He’s working on these whenever he’s not working directly with us on the animations (or the other wilderness features the anims will unlock) so here’s an example of his current work on two different varieties of ‘pick up truck’.
COOL MAPS
There’s something of a community mapping frenzy at the moment with lots of cool projects bubbling away on our forum and in the mapper Discord. We just wanted to highlight Cardenaglo’s awesome sequence of islands known as ‘Bungil’ which is a really imaginative ‘Zomboid journey’ we’d love to see in action. Xeonyx has also recently updated his New Denver map on Steam so that it plays nicely with Rosewood Prison, while it also sounds like he has the Rosebery expansion brewing nicely. Also a quick shout-out to Pat_Bren and his small Irish village of Ballincoolin. We saw your plea for love Pat. Happy Valentines. This week’s featured image from the, hopefully not rude-named, Kobrakum. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.
[ 2017-02-14 00:05:32 CET ] [ Original post ]
Roots n’ Branches
We released a bugfix update last week to Build 37’s Muld/Rosewood etc lootable maps, and also their marking and annotation system. There’s another ‘fix build’ on the brew, and any and all feedback is welcome. Specifically, the new ‘oven dial’ UI has been built for multiple uses across the game’s many devices – so feedback on its general usability would be greatly appreciated. Next up, although we’ll give full details once it’s in the can, RJ is going to work on expanding this system so that it benefits MP safehouses with annotated maps that can be put on public display, and a plan we have about pre-annotated maps discovered on zed bodies that’ll be useful/fun in SP and co-op. Details on how to access the IWBUMS beta – here. [We’ve removed password from the beta, as everyone’s quite used to unstable branches these days.]
One element that’s been a part of the perils of getting the animation build playable and into testing, is that the closer you get – the more issues in general gameplay become clear, and the more evident it is that they need fixing. The ‘not fun’ factor looms large. Primarily, in this instance, was cludgy indoor movement with a side salad of ‘rotate on-the-spot’ zeds and survivors looking pretty crap. As such, while pulling everything together, there’s been a side-thread of work going on with Martin the Animator to see how we can improve things. It’s all to do with ‘root motion’ – in the new PZ anims the movement of characters has always been directly taken from the animation data itself, instead of being pumped into the character in the game logic. Thing is, there was one important part of the system that it became increasingly clear that we needed: we only had support for movement in a straight line, and no support for characters to rotate within animations and for this rotation to translate into the rotation of characters in-game. Up until now we still had to rotate characters/zeds in the game code and completely divorced from the animation. The most obvious consequence of this was that despite characters making realistic steps when walking, sneaking and so on (and in videos as you’ve seen, if the character is rotated while sneaking it works pretty well) rotating on the spot would still produce ‘slidey on the spot rotating’. This works okay in the current game, but looks a bit silly when the animations around it are much more realistic. Without going into lots of technical details this was a much more complicated and confusing problem to solve than the positional root motion system [Mondoid writer aside, direct to camera: seriously there’s been all this chat about Quarteronions that’s pretty much incomprehensible to me], but after a meet-up with Martin last week we finally worked out the best way of how to approach it. Now (well, almost now, there’s still one more bug to sort out that would have resulted in an in-game video today) we have support for rotations, it allows us to improve in various areas, as well as fix the issues mentioned above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXtK2xEh0XQ
a) Rotating on the spot. When the player rotates on the spot, we’ll be able to have them actually make steps to turn themselves without the aforementioned sliding in a circle with feet stationary. b) A big issue with movement that we found it difficult to solve was that with deferred movement it’s important that the character’s movement mirrors the animation, and that characters don’t rotate super-fast to change direction. In-game this lead to a kind of inertia effect, with characters speeding up from stationary and having a finite turning speed, meant that indoor navigation got a lot more difficult. Now, however, we’ll be able to have the character turn and step in any direction as part of their ‘starting to walk/run’ animation. Zeds and survivors, for example, can twist their torso while immediately stepping to the right, left, or making a turn through 180 degrees. This should make movement a lot more responsive and immediate, and though this is clearly nothing to do with our game specifically this should give you an idea of the kind of rotational character locomotion we’re talking about. c) There are a fair few animations, particularly in the ‘wall hugging’ advanced cover traversal system, that require this rotational movement to be able to function. This is a system that isn’t currently planned to be implemented in the anims test build release, but was a major technical barrier to it – and it feels good to have a system in-place that bypasses it. d) In future a lot of stuff like zombie walks could now have rotational movement encoded into the animations, to make their movement much more realistic and non-linear. The same could apply to an injured character’s movement, drunken stumbles and other things. It opens up a lot of doors.
Turbo has just released the full version of ItemZed. This is a development and modding tool that’s used to edit the contents of script modules (foodstuff items, weapons, recipes etc) and the distribution table that dictates where different in-game items can be found and looted on the map. On top of the tool’s previous test release, there’s now options for the batch refactoring of large numbers of items and in-game objects and lua integration that allows the entire data set to be programmatically modified, and output to any sort of format – meaning that changes and new items can quickly and easily become part of user mods, and a part of the main game. Here’s a vid Turbo’s made to explain it all a bit, turn on English subtitles for written descriptions.
[ 2017-02-07 07:53:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, hope you’re well. Updates from various departments in zombie land this fair Mondoid.
BUILD 37 IWBUMS BETA
We released a bugfix update last week to Build 37’s Muld/Rosewood etc lootable maps, and also their marking and annotation system. There’s another ‘fix build’ on the brew, and any and all feedback is welcome. Specifically, the new ‘oven dial’ UI has been built for multiple uses across the game’s many devices – so feedback on its general usability would be greatly appreciated. Next up, although we’ll give full details once it’s in the can, RJ is going to work on expanding this system so that it benefits MP safehouses with annotated maps that can be put on public display, and a plan we have about pre-annotated maps discovered on zed bodies that’ll be useful/fun in SP and co-op. Details on how to access the IWBUMS beta – here. [We’ve removed password from the beta, as everyone’s quite used to unstable branches these days.]
ANIMS
One element that’s been a part of the perils of getting the animation build playable and into testing, is that the closer you get – the more issues in general gameplay become clear, and the more evident it is that they need fixing. The ‘not fun’ factor looms large. Primarily, in this instance, was cludgy indoor movement with a side salad of ‘rotate on-the-spot’ zeds and survivors looking pretty crap. As such, while pulling everything together, there’s been a side-thread of work going on with Martin the Animator to see how we can improve things. It’s all to do with ‘root motion’ – in the new PZ anims the movement of characters has always been directly taken from the animation data itself, instead of being pumped into the character in the game logic. Thing is, there was one important part of the system that it became increasingly clear that we needed: we only had support for movement in a straight line, and no support for characters to rotate within animations and for this rotation to translate into the rotation of characters in-game. Up until now we still had to rotate characters/zeds in the game code and completely divorced from the animation. The most obvious consequence of this was that despite characters making realistic steps when walking, sneaking and so on (and in videos as you’ve seen, if the character is rotated while sneaking it works pretty well) rotating on the spot would still produce ‘slidey on the spot rotating’. This works okay in the current game, but looks a bit silly when the animations around it are much more realistic. Without going into lots of technical details this was a much more complicated and confusing problem to solve than the positional root motion system [Mondoid writer aside, direct to camera: seriously there’s been all this chat about Quarteronions that’s pretty much incomprehensible to me], but after a meet-up with Martin last week we finally worked out the best way of how to approach it. Now (well, almost now, there’s still one more bug to sort out that would have resulted in an in-game video today) we have support for rotations, it allows us to improve in various areas, as well as fix the issues mentioned above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXtK2xEh0XQ
In Summary:
a) Rotating on the spot. When the player rotates on the spot, we’ll be able to have them actually make steps to turn themselves without the aforementioned sliding in a circle with feet stationary. b) A big issue with movement that we found it difficult to solve was that with deferred movement it’s important that the character’s movement mirrors the animation, and that characters don’t rotate super-fast to change direction. In-game this lead to a kind of inertia effect, with characters speeding up from stationary and having a finite turning speed, meant that indoor navigation got a lot more difficult. Now, however, we’ll be able to have the character turn and step in any direction as part of their ‘starting to walk/run’ animation. Zeds and survivors, for example, can twist their torso while immediately stepping to the right, left, or making a turn through 180 degrees. This should make movement a lot more responsive and immediate, and though this is clearly nothing to do with our game specifically this should give you an idea of the kind of rotational character locomotion we’re talking about. c) There are a fair few animations, particularly in the ‘wall hugging’ advanced cover traversal system, that require this rotational movement to be able to function. This is a system that isn’t currently planned to be implemented in the anims test build release, but was a major technical barrier to it – and it feels good to have a system in-place that bypasses it. d) In future a lot of stuff like zombie walks could now have rotational movement encoded into the animations, to make their movement much more realistic and non-linear. The same could apply to an injured character’s movement, drunken stumbles and other things. It opens up a lot of doors.
ITEMZED RELEASE
Turbo has just released the full version of ItemZed. This is a development and modding tool that’s used to edit the contents of script modules (foodstuff items, weapons, recipes etc) and the distribution table that dictates where different in-game items can be found and looted on the map. On top of the tool’s previous test release, there’s now options for the batch refactoring of large numbers of items and in-game objects and lua integration that allows the entire data set to be programmatically modified, and output to any sort of format – meaning that changes and new items can quickly and easily become part of user mods, and a part of the main game. Here’s a vid Turbo’s made to explain it all a bit, turn on English subtitles for written descriptions.
OTHER STUFF
- General Arcade continue their work on getting map-streaming, physics and MP sync ready for EP’s vehicles. New recruit Eugene is also getting used to the codebase by mixing in Discord compatibility with game chat as an extension of our old IRC plugin, given our increasing love for the service.
- The inestimable RingoD has updated his comprehensive guide to creating user maps in WorldZed and TileZed, with an updated Section 3 detailing exactly how to make individual buildings. The Steam version can found here. We’re delighted to see that there’s a bunch of people already using these, and creating cool stuff.
[ 2017-02-07 07:53:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
Perishable Items
In keeping with this year’s focus on getting regular builds out rather than sitting on ever-growing changelists, today we’re releasing what’s currently in the can for Build 37 out into an IWBUMS public beta. You can find out how to join in and test here. Edited highlights run as follows:
Renewed work on the SP anims release continues, intermingled with a successful and fun day last week melding minds with Animator Martin so that he could get to work on an issue that we felt could vastly improve the capabilities of our reanimated zeds. Right now, in every build of the game, zombies can only move backwards and forwards. This is fine, but severely limits what’s possible in the long run. Proper turning animations have never been possible (survivors and zeds slide in a circle unless they’re moving), and likewise zombies stumbling in a realistic way and being able to move from side-to-side as well as their traditional PZ bee-line. As of last week, then, we managed to work out a way to implement rotational root motion and Martin could return to his animator’s den and get to work on the visual side of it all. In more technical terms we’ve now opened up the opportunity to have deferred rotation within anims, which in turn means that animations will be able to drive a character’s rotation just as much as movement. Behind the scenes Martin has been working on a bunch of the other features/visuals that the animations system will open up to us, and this expansion will give him even more options from refinements and improvements (extra wall-hugging stealth stuff fr’instance) while we continue to get the SP anims branch into operation for testing back at TIS Towers.
To accompany the exciting new set of mapmakers that seem to be springing up on the forum, and clearly the old hands too, this week EasyPickins released the latest versions of the PZ map-making tools – alongside a full tileset updated with stuff from Build 35’s March Ridge and Rosewood. As such, aspiring map-makers can find the latest versions of TileZed and WorldZed here. RingoD has also compiled and collated a comprehensive guide to map modding using TileZed on our forums – taking you from initial dabblings all the way to uploading onto Steam Workshop. It has also been hosted on Steam, while Paul will also generally be tidying up the relevant sections on our forums in the coming week. While we’re on the subject we also wanted to flag up PZ community member Blackbeard06 and his extremely in-depth video guide to how to make a PZ map. It’s worth noting that the Workshop channel on the PZ Discord has become quite active of late, and if you’re thinking of making your own Zomboid mods or dipping your toe into map-making it’s definitely a great and useful place to hang out. Featured image from Joe. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here. Also of interest: Atoxwarrior’s cinematic Spiffo shenanigans.
[ 2017-01-31 00:57:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Greetings citizen. Here’s all the latest from the latest isometric dips into undead anarchy…
BUILD 37 PUBLIC BETA
In keeping with this year’s focus on getting regular builds out rather than sitting on ever-growing changelists, today we’re releasing what’s currently in the can for Build 37 out into an IWBUMS public beta. You can find out how to join in and test here. Edited highlights run as follows:
- Lootable Map Items. Maps of urban locations within the Knox Event Exclusion Zone can be found in relevant towns, in particular spawning in gas stations. Current maps you can find cover Muldraugh, West Point, Rosewood and March Ridge.
- Using the new map UI you can zoom with the mouse wheel, add your own notes and a bunch of provided symbols in four different colours – if you have the relevant coloured pens. Annotated maps can be shared with friends and faction members in MP. Last week’s vid here.
- Improved ovens and microwaves. You now have access to a new oven/microwave settings UI upon which you can change the temperature, and use the timer dial. Ovens will ‘ding’ when the time is up, microwaves will turn off. Metal in microwaves can cause fire.
- Some food will become less edible when microwaved, increasing character sadness. Eating food hot/cold will have relevant impact on character happiness/sadness.
- Smaller stuff: ‘Always run’ toggle added to Key Bindings Screen. ‘Version info’ button added to menu screen.
- Bug fixes: Rosewood player spawns resetting spawn region remedied. Evolved recipe cooked food additions bug fixed, weapon reload in normal/hard reloading difficulties fixed.
ANIMERTRONICS
Renewed work on the SP anims release continues, intermingled with a successful and fun day last week melding minds with Animator Martin so that he could get to work on an issue that we felt could vastly improve the capabilities of our reanimated zeds. Right now, in every build of the game, zombies can only move backwards and forwards. This is fine, but severely limits what’s possible in the long run. Proper turning animations have never been possible (survivors and zeds slide in a circle unless they’re moving), and likewise zombies stumbling in a realistic way and being able to move from side-to-side as well as their traditional PZ bee-line. As of last week, then, we managed to work out a way to implement rotational root motion and Martin could return to his animator’s den and get to work on the visual side of it all. In more technical terms we’ve now opened up the opportunity to have deferred rotation within anims, which in turn means that animations will be able to drive a character’s rotation just as much as movement. Behind the scenes Martin has been working on a bunch of the other features/visuals that the animations system will open up to us, and this expansion will give him even more options from refinements and improvements (extra wall-hugging stealth stuff fr’instance) while we continue to get the SP anims branch into operation for testing back at TIS Towers.
TOOLS N’ TUTORIALS
To accompany the exciting new set of mapmakers that seem to be springing up on the forum, and clearly the old hands too, this week EasyPickins released the latest versions of the PZ map-making tools – alongside a full tileset updated with stuff from Build 35’s March Ridge and Rosewood. As such, aspiring map-makers can find the latest versions of TileZed and WorldZed here. RingoD has also compiled and collated a comprehensive guide to map modding using TileZed on our forums – taking you from initial dabblings all the way to uploading onto Steam Workshop. It has also been hosted on Steam, while Paul will also generally be tidying up the relevant sections on our forums in the coming week. While we’re on the subject we also wanted to flag up PZ community member Blackbeard06 and his extremely in-depth video guide to how to make a PZ map. It’s worth noting that the Workshop channel on the PZ Discord has become quite active of late, and if you’re thinking of making your own Zomboid mods or dipping your toe into map-making it’s definitely a great and useful place to hang out. Featured image from Joe. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here. Also of interest: Atoxwarrior’s cinematic Spiffo shenanigans.
[ 2017-01-31 00:57:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
In-Game Mappage
For many PZ players the alt-tab to Blindcoder’s map has become something of a ritual, but for a long time we’ve needed a way for players to get their bearings in-game. Using the power of Turbo’s CartoZed tool we now have the power to create top-down maps, which means that we can now also feed them to our resident artist Mash to create lootable in-game items like this. [Still somewhat work in progress – town slogan to change!]
These maps won’t track your position, but you will be able to get you bearings and make markings on them. After all, what’s a map if you can’t mark safehouses, the homes you’ve looted and whatever other vital survival locations on it? Using this initial March Ridge template map RJ has been implementing mouse zoom, the ability to mark notes and also a ‘symbol stamping’ system that will let you annotate the maps that you find with skulls, house images, crosses etc. You can even choose your own text and icon colours. Please note that the following video is a work-in-progress! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPt_59M-tok Importantly, too, the work has been done to make sure that these are transferable between co-op and MP players. This is a fully moddable system too, and the .png files could be expanded to faction leaflets, community maps and various other world-building materials. Right now the system is in place, but it’ll take a little while for maps of each major town area to be produced – West Point and Muldraugh are sizeably bigger than the March Ridge test case after all. At first, meanwhile, we will only be concentrating on urban areas and avoiding any areas that are still in-flux or could potentially change in the main game.
A quick shout out to Z3759xy on our forums who has had to step away from some, quite frankly, incredible PZ map-making projects due to the amount of spare time he has on his hands – and we dearly hope that someone else picks up his .tbx baton, or performs a team-up operation. Some really great stuff in here! Featured image from Mashie. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here. Today’s image of desolation and destruction from .exe.
[ 2017-01-23 22:52:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
Howdy survivor. Hope your apocalyptic nightmare scenario is going well. Here’s some news from the land of zeds…
IN-GAME MAPS
For many PZ players the alt-tab to Blindcoder’s map has become something of a ritual, but for a long time we’ve needed a way for players to get their bearings in-game. Using the power of Turbo’s CartoZed tool we now have the power to create top-down maps, which means that we can now also feed them to our resident artist Mash to create lootable in-game items like this. [Still somewhat work in progress – town slogan to change!]
These maps won’t track your position, but you will be able to get you bearings and make markings on them. After all, what’s a map if you can’t mark safehouses, the homes you’ve looted and whatever other vital survival locations on it? Using this initial March Ridge template map RJ has been implementing mouse zoom, the ability to mark notes and also a ‘symbol stamping’ system that will let you annotate the maps that you find with skulls, house images, crosses etc. You can even choose your own text and icon colours. Please note that the following video is a work-in-progress! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPt_59M-tok Importantly, too, the work has been done to make sure that these are transferable between co-op and MP players. This is a fully moddable system too, and the .png files could be expanded to faction leaflets, community maps and various other world-building materials. Right now the system is in place, but it’ll take a little while for maps of each major town area to be produced – West Point and Muldraugh are sizeably bigger than the March Ridge test case after all. At first, meanwhile, we will only be concentrating on urban areas and avoiding any areas that are still in-flux or could potentially change in the main game.
IN OTHER NEWS
- Turbo’s development and modding tool ItemZed has just been released in beta form for community testing. It lets you easily play around with loot locations, item attributes, recipe contents, spawn rates and all that jazz. For further information please go here.
- Work at the anims coalface continues, as mentioned last week we’re turning our focus back to getting an SP build out in a Steam beta branch.
- We have General Arcade on the case with improving PZ’s netcode and map streaming to pave the way for EasyPickins’ vehicles work, again as discussed last week, but now also have an extra body from the Russian Mothership in the form of Eugene for the next few months. He’ll be working on engine and quality of life stuff and we’re super-excited to have him with us for the next little while.
- Our apologies for the delay of the recent build releases on GOG. The new versions are with the GOG guys, and should be going live very soon, if not already.
COMMUNITY MAPPAGE
A quick shout out to Z3759xy on our forums who has had to step away from some, quite frankly, incredible PZ map-making projects due to the amount of spare time he has on his hands – and we dearly hope that someone else picks up his .tbx baton, or performs a team-up operation. Some really great stuff in here! Featured image from Mashie. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here. Today’s image of desolation and destruction from .exe.
[ 2017-01-23 22:52:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
Dead Territory
Since the release of Build 36 ten days ago, RJ continues to tinker with ovens, microwaves, timers and analogue dials â
[ 2017-01-16 23:22:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
Â
Hello! The zombie paperboy just threw the following chewed and bloodied missive onto your lawn. Read on, survivor!
BUILD 37: ORIGINS
Since the release of Build 36 ten days ago, RJ continues to tinker with ovens, microwaves, timers and analogue dials â
[ 2017-01-16 23:22:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 36 Team up
This year we intend to keep the build release process fairly free-flowing, as opposed to leaving improvements on the brew in IWBUMS public beta for longer than is necessary. With this in mind, then, last Thursday we publicly released a fast-fire Build 36 to follow on from Build 35’s release just before Christmas. This has now found a home on survivor hard drives everywhere. The full changelist can be found here but the abbreviated highlights run as follows:
After their amazing work integrating VOIP with the PZ mainframe our friends at General Arcade have been digging deep into our codebase to find out ways they can help with the integration of various features destined for roll-out in the lead-up to PZ going 1.0. Namely, but not exclusively, vehicles. The deep-dive is now complete, and GA are now gearing up to work on what they’ve discovered: initially map streaming improvements, net code optimization and an acceleration of the rate at which PZ (online or off) processes game objects. It won’t be an overnight job, to say the least, but they’re improvements we can feed into the game build-by-build (improving the whole game’s performance as they go) to help us ease EasyPickins’ ace work on cars out of the dev garage and onto the road.
It should be underlined that the new animations, combat, outfits, weaponry and all that pizazz hasn’t fallen down a deep, dark well. We’re still going with it, and coming back to the coalface fresh from the Xmas and New Year break is proving fruitful. As we have done before, we apologise for the delay – but hope to have fresh news for you in the Mondoids to come.
The first thing on the menu for the first IWBUMS beta release for Build 37 is a UI feature to improve the life of chef survivors – an operational UI dial that will initially be used for alarm timers on ovens, and for microwave settings. Small thing, yes, but also one that Turbo can use when we update the radio and walkie-talkie system to have more analogue station-tracking (handy for scanning airwaves in MP, and for plans for SP survivor radio) and also for setting some timed explosive devices.
Blindcoder, custodian of the ‘Recently Updated With Build 35’ PZ map and author of several mods integrated in to the PZ mainframe, has released a cool new mod that deals with the tricksy and much debated happenstance of Sky Forts. The ‘Obey Gravity’ mod sees player-built structures fall down when supports are removed, and stops players being able to build floors more than three tiles away from supporting walls. Both ourselves and Ben would love to know what the wider PZ survivor populace thinks of his approach to sensible-shoes engineering. Featured image from НЕКОКУН. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here. And oh my GOODNESS GRACIOUS some graphical bugs are rude
[ 2017-01-09 22:02:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello! It’s Monday. It’s Project Zomboid. So it must be… Mondoiddddd.
Build 36 Released!
This year we intend to keep the build release process fairly free-flowing, as opposed to leaving improvements on the brew in IWBUMS public beta for longer than is necessary. With this in mind, then, last Thursday we publicly released a fast-fire Build 36 to follow on from Build 35’s release just before Christmas. This has now found a home on survivor hard drives everywhere. The full changelist can be found here but the abbreviated highlights run as follows:
- Survivor Trading UI. The initial MP iteration of a trading system that will later be expanded on in SP modes. Players can drag and drop items from their main inventory, and faction-owned surroundings, so they can barter with other players, make offers and finalise deals.
- PZ builds now show changelogs on initial boot-up of new builds so survivors don’t have to hunt through Steam or the forums to find out what has changed.
- Player can now move two-tile furniture like signs and paintings around, and also (with the correct tools) deconstruct larger objects into several smaller kit parts that can later be reconstructed. Movable item icons also improved in the UI to make system clearer.
- MP Admin improvements. ‘Connected Players’ UI window and associated options. Item Editor options for special server events.
- Small stuff: Electrician starts with radio recipes. New tooltips. Recipes now overwritable to make life easier for modders. ‘Invite Friends UI’ made prettier and more user-friendly. Expanded respawn/forage zones. Trapping nutrition adjusted. Plentiful bug fixes n’ balance.
GENERAL ARCADE
After their amazing work integrating VOIP with the PZ mainframe our friends at General Arcade have been digging deep into our codebase to find out ways they can help with the integration of various features destined for roll-out in the lead-up to PZ going 1.0. Namely, but not exclusively, vehicles. The deep-dive is now complete, and GA are now gearing up to work on what they’ve discovered: initially map streaming improvements, net code optimization and an acceleration of the rate at which PZ (online or off) processes game objects. It won’t be an overnight job, to say the least, but they’re improvements we can feed into the game build-by-build (improving the whole game’s performance as they go) to help us ease EasyPickins’ ace work on cars out of the dev garage and onto the road.
ANIMS AND COMBAT
It should be underlined that the new animations, combat, outfits, weaponry and all that pizazz hasn’t fallen down a deep, dark well. We’re still going with it, and coming back to the coalface fresh from the Xmas and New Year break is proving fruitful. As we have done before, we apologise for the delay – but hope to have fresh news for you in the Mondoids to come.
RJ’S KNOB
The first thing on the menu for the first IWBUMS beta release for Build 37 is a UI feature to improve the life of chef survivors – an operational UI dial that will initially be used for alarm timers on ovens, and for microwave settings. Small thing, yes, but also one that Turbo can use when we update the radio and walkie-talkie system to have more analogue station-tracking (handy for scanning airwaves in MP, and for plans for SP survivor radio) and also for setting some timed explosive devices.
OBEY GRAVITY MOD
Blindcoder, custodian of the ‘Recently Updated With Build 35’ PZ map and author of several mods integrated in to the PZ mainframe, has released a cool new mod that deals with the tricksy and much debated happenstance of Sky Forts. The ‘Obey Gravity’ mod sees player-built structures fall down when supports are removed, and stops players being able to build floors more than three tiles away from supporting walls. Both ourselves and Ben would love to know what the wider PZ survivor populace thinks of his approach to sensible-shoes engineering. Featured image from НЕКОКУН. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here. And oh my GOODNESS GRACIOUS some graphical bugs are rude
[ 2017-01-09 22:02:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
35-Alive
Blindcoder anticipates that the new areas of Rosewood, March Point, the Rosewood Prison complex and all the rural areas in-between will be a part of the main Project Zomboid Mapping Project next week. Updates to the PZ online map require a lot of time and processing power, due to the vastness and detail of what’s being hosted. Until then there’s a good annotated map on the TIS forum, while the recent release of our CartoZed tool means that there are now handy ‘standard’ maps available for your viewing pleasure. Rosewood is NW, March Ridge is SE.
A full cartographic look at the full current PZ map, meanwhile, can be found here – and here also if you’d prefer a more isometric version. CartoZed essentially uses the details from our map files to create NESW maps of whatever we choose – roads, buildings, electrical items, bodies of water etc. In the New Year we intend to start working on an in-game lootable map system, but clearly the tool also opens up a lot of avenues for our modding community. Speaking of…
Also from the desk of TurboTuTone comes ItemZed, a tool we’ll soon be releasing to help modders easily create, edit and refine in-game items and recipe scripts. The biggest pain in the arse for any item mod, or any item added by the developers, is the manual generation of these scripts so… https://youtu.be/adCxea-4KNI As you can see – ItemZed gives developers and modders alike control over item attributes, recipe contents, individual values, loot locations and spawn rates. We hope it’ll make life easier for everyone involved, and also allow for easier game balancing.
Next Mondoid will be Boxing Day so Mondoid will be on our site but fairly limited what with the holidays. In the New Year we’ll be back with news on the other stuff still in the dev furnace and new stuff for the build(s) to come. Have a great Christmas if you’re celebrating!
Featured image from Pechenyshkin! The (Not) Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here.
[ 2016-12-20 06:16:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
We released Build 35 four days ago, and it’s been awesome seeing folk running around and trying it out. If you missed the changelog then you can find the highlights of it here.
Clearly a fairly big proportion of this week is now making sure that we tackle the various bugs and issues discovered by the substantially increased numbers of people playing the new beta-turned-public version.
To this end we released 35.26 on Friday, and have today with the help of General Arcade addressed issues hampering survivor activity on certain Linux set-ups. It looks like we still might need to address issues with the new TransactionID system in MP too, alongside other bugs reported in the PZ Tracker.
We don’t want to update the main public build with fixes until we’re sure they’re watertight, however, so will be released 35.27 as a public IWBUMS beta in the coming days. Once everything is fixed up we will update non-Steam download services and move onto Build 36.
As a little bonus we will be including Turbo’s recent work on movable multi-tile items so it’s all playable in the IWBUMS beta – specifically the ability to deconstruct large furniture and move them around in partial kit form. We’ve already covered this in a Mondoid but here’s the video of it in motion again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzFy4VYW8c
MAP STUFF
Blindcoder anticipates that the new areas of Rosewood, March Point, the Rosewood Prison complex and all the rural areas in-between will be a part of the main Project Zomboid Mapping Project next week. Updates to the PZ online map require a lot of time and processing power, due to the vastness and detail of what’s being hosted. Until then there’s a good annotated map on the TIS forum, while the recent release of our CartoZed tool means that there are now handy ‘standard’ maps available for your viewing pleasure. Rosewood is NW, March Ridge is SE.
A full cartographic look at the full current PZ map, meanwhile, can be found here – and here also if you’d prefer a more isometric version. CartoZed essentially uses the details from our map files to create NESW maps of whatever we choose – roads, buildings, electrical items, bodies of water etc. In the New Year we intend to start working on an in-game lootable map system, but clearly the tool also opens up a lot of avenues for our modding community. Speaking of…
ITEMZED
Also from the desk of TurboTuTone comes ItemZed, a tool we’ll soon be releasing to help modders easily create, edit and refine in-game items and recipe scripts. The biggest pain in the arse for any item mod, or any item added by the developers, is the manual generation of these scripts so… https://youtu.be/adCxea-4KNI As you can see – ItemZed gives developers and modders alike control over item attributes, recipe contents, individual values, loot locations and spawn rates. We hope it’ll make life easier for everyone involved, and also allow for easier game balancing.
MERRY XMAS!
Next Mondoid will be Boxing Day so Mondoid will be on our site but fairly limited what with the holidays. In the New Year we’ll be back with news on the other stuff still in the dev furnace and new stuff for the build(s) to come. Have a great Christmas if you’re celebrating!
Featured image from Pechenyshkin! The (Not) Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here.
[ 2016-12-20 06:16:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 35 Released
LOCATION-BASED VOIP IN MP
NEW CONSTRUCTION
MP FACTIONS
RADIO/TV COMMUNITY TRANSLATIONS
FOOD AND NUTRITION REVAMP
SLEEPING REVAMP
UPDATED UI
[ 2016-12-15 16:59:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
IMPORTANT: If Build 35 fails to start on your machine then please check this thread. Steam may have failed to install the required VC Redist 2015 file.
Build 35 is here, and has a huge changelist. You can view it in its entirety here. The highlights are, however, listed below.
If you wish to report bugs then please use our bug tracker. If you have more complex needs please visit our Support forum.
We anticipate balance and loot tweaks that will be made from player feedback in the coming days. Build 35 will be released on non-Steam platforms after the initial patching process has ended.
Work on other systems such as anims/combat/clothing continues, but the large amount of additions already in the beta test of Build 35 made it sensible to release before the holiday season - this release is separate to the animation branch and will not impact on its arrival time. We anticipate that multi-tile object movement will go into a brief period of public testing next week before being merged into the main build.
Huge thanks go out to our friends at General Arcade for working on the VOIP aspect of this build.
Many thanks. Enjoy!
ROSEWOOD, MARCH POINT AND ROSEWOOD PRISON COMPLEX
- Visit the new towns of Rosewood and March Point, the farmland in-between and the vast Rosewood prison complex.
- New buildings include court house, fire station, shopping areas, new police station, community centre, residential areas and military apartment buildings.
- New profession-based player spawn locations in and around the town of Rosewood
- New map tiles, furniture, decoration and building styles
LOCATION-BASED VOIP IN MP
- Lets you talk directly to your co-op friends, and survivors you meet on MP servers.
- Player voices can be heard when in ‘audible’ distance from other characters on the map.
- VOIP available in 'Press to Talk', 'Voice Activated' and 'Listen Only' flavours, and accessed in the Options menu.
NEW CONSTRUCTION
- Metalwork crafting - weld metal sheets to create metal barricades, or put bars in windows
- Metalwork profession and skills.
- Multiple stage building to combine metalwork and carpentry skills.
- Building now utilises items from inside bags carried by survivor.
- Objects on the map can now be deconstructed to obtain materials if player has correct tools and skills.
MP FACTIONS
- Safehouse UI to claim buildings, change ownership and see connected players
- Formable factions, with a visible four character tag above survivors - should they choose to show it.
- Melee PvP disabled between faction-members
- ‘Tree noise’ to automatically improve/randomise wilderness areas of the map.
- Big trees in forested areas.
RADIO/TV COMMUNITY TRANSLATIONS
- Community Translations of Radio/TV narrative content in French, Polish, Spanish, Russian and Turkish.
- Radio/TV content and timelines now operate in-line with narrative tool WordZed, which has been released to the community.
FOOD AND NUTRITION REVAMP
- Realistic nutritional values that see your character impacted by what he/she eats and their physical activity.
- Visible nutritional information on food items with labels
- Added associated professions and traits
- Hugely improved player activity log system
- Admin panel to goven players, safehouses etc
- TransactionID savescumming prevention update
- Warning point system
- Admin abilities to check/modify player stats: add/remove XP, change displayed name, heal etc
- Server access level ranks for admin staff
- Ability for admin to easily create non-PvP zones on the map
- Player names decoupled from usernames
SLEEPING REVAMP
- Zombies more attracted to house lighting at night.
- Night Events. Zombie activity can result in safehouse incursions should it be left unsecured while sleeping.
- Alarm clocks and watch alarms are now used to wake up survivors. Tired survivors might wake up late without them.
- Character will struggle to sleep when in pain, so should take painkillers or sleeping pills.
- Anxious characters might wake up early, or even in the middle of the night.
- Quality of sleep now impacted by where player chooses to rest
- Composting - rotting food can be placed in a crafted composter to create crop fertilizer
- 'Container' items weight reduces the more they are used (water bottles, gas cans etc.) and can be combined.
- Pots and bowls fill with water in rain
- Zombies can tear down sheet ropes.
- Wet items dry over time.
- More realistic tea and coffee making (!)
- Paint all interior walls and wooden furniture
- First aid equipment automatically used by First Aid panel
- Smoker trait
- Various other things
- Selected loot container now highlighted
UPDATED UI
- 'Transfer All' button when looting
- New tutorials and updated tooltips
- Ability to 'favourite' items to highlight them and prevent them from being dropped
- 'Windows Explorer' Inventory improvements. Shift selects a sequence of items, Ctrl lets you selected different individual items.
- New Skill books (First Aid, Metalwork)
- New world-filler visuals
- Park Ranger and Lumberjack walk faster through forest
- General balance to loot locations, traits, fall damage, fatigue, recipe requirements, weights, fatigue, endurance, happiness, poisoning, generator fuel usage and XP.
- Loads and loads of bug fixes
[ 2016-12-15 16:59:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Don't Stop Me Now
So last Thursday we had 172 lovely members of the community jumping on the current Build 35 test version together, and it was great: directional VOIP governed by player position on the map clearly brings a ton to MP – so hurrah! To see if lightning can strike twice within our awesome survivor-base we will be having The Great Big Build 35 MP Megatest: Part II this week, again on Thursday evening (GMT). This will be an updated version of the game (released fairly imminently – details below) and focus more on Factions and new Admin features that were a little too bugged to get proper feedback on last week. Thankfully people seemed to have plenty of fun, but as a stress test our community playdate did its job by flushing out plenty of bugs for us and our friends at General Arcade to stamp out. We had a few crashes during the run of play, some heavy lag on the (rare, but important) times when there are 15+ players in the same area, a few issues with some Bluetooth headsets and a few bits/bobs of levels balance. Oh, and Rosewood Prison was mysteriously zombie-free. Nothing sinister though, so hopefully we can iron out these last creases before finally releasing what we currently have in the public IWBUMS beta test to the public. If you want to check out some footage from the Megatest than .exe’s stream can still be found here.
The current Build 35 IWBUMS beta is content locked, so this feature may well be left aside until a follow-on build unless Turbo can sweet-talk us into thinking otherwise, but Turbs has now finished off his movable item system so it’s extended to multi-sprite objects. It’s something our base-build fanatics have been asking for, so here’s a quick vid to show it off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzFy4VYW8c You can now manoeuvre bigger furniture around, and also (with the correct tools) deconstruct larger objects into several smaller kits that will be able to fit inside your inventory – but will clearly be fairly heavy too. Many two tile items, like signs and paintings, will just fit into your inventory however. Turbo has also updated the movable item icons so they look like the actual object in question, rather than one for a generic category, and generally made the UI a nicer place to be as well. The ‘kit’ sprite will also get a Mash revamp too, as the ‘little box’ look could be improved.
That’s about it for this week, although as mentioned above we do have a new 35.23 beta build dropping tonight or tomorrow that will appear here. This contains some important longstanding fixes for modders, new farmsteads and farmland between Rosewood and March Ridge, the ability to choose different colours when painting containers (handy for colour-coding in MP safehouses), extra Faction and Admin teleport options, a ‘support ticketing’ system to let players to get in touch with server admins and expanded foraging/trapping zones. This will, most likely, be the build that Thursday’s Megatest: II will run on. If you have any problems updating then please check out this thread, which outlines the VCRedist 2015 issue that some players are running into. Thanks everyone! This week’s featured image from Gassy Taco over on Steam, who we assume is Blasted Taco of the TIS forum’s cousin or something. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here.
[ 2016-12-05 20:35:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, Mondoid again. Work on the anims/combat build continues, and we’re still tying the new system into Zomboid’s multiplayer contingent. The new state machine stuff is quite a major shift in the game code, and MP is used to dealing with the old version so the dev wheel’s still (still) turning on that front. Elsewhere meanwhile…
MEGATEST PART II
So last Thursday we had 172 lovely members of the community jumping on the current Build 35 test version together, and it was great: directional VOIP governed by player position on the map clearly brings a ton to MP – so hurrah! To see if lightning can strike twice within our awesome survivor-base we will be having The Great Big Build 35 MP Megatest: Part II this week, again on Thursday evening (GMT). This will be an updated version of the game (released fairly imminently – details below) and focus more on Factions and new Admin features that were a little too bugged to get proper feedback on last week. Thankfully people seemed to have plenty of fun, but as a stress test our community playdate did its job by flushing out plenty of bugs for us and our friends at General Arcade to stamp out. We had a few crashes during the run of play, some heavy lag on the (rare, but important) times when there are 15+ players in the same area, a few issues with some Bluetooth headsets and a few bits/bobs of levels balance. Oh, and Rosewood Prison was mysteriously zombie-free. Nothing sinister though, so hopefully we can iron out these last creases before finally releasing what we currently have in the public IWBUMS beta test to the public. If you want to check out some footage from the Megatest than .exe’s stream can still be found here.
MULTI-TILE MOVES
The current Build 35 IWBUMS beta is content locked, so this feature may well be left aside until a follow-on build unless Turbo can sweet-talk us into thinking otherwise, but Turbs has now finished off his movable item system so it’s extended to multi-sprite objects. It’s something our base-build fanatics have been asking for, so here’s a quick vid to show it off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzFy4VYW8c You can now manoeuvre bigger furniture around, and also (with the correct tools) deconstruct larger objects into several smaller kits that will be able to fit inside your inventory – but will clearly be fairly heavy too. Many two tile items, like signs and paintings, will just fit into your inventory however. Turbo has also updated the movable item icons so they look like the actual object in question, rather than one for a generic category, and generally made the UI a nicer place to be as well. The ‘kit’ sprite will also get a Mash revamp too, as the ‘little box’ look could be improved.
INCOMING IWBUMS UPDATE
That’s about it for this week, although as mentioned above we do have a new 35.23 beta build dropping tonight or tomorrow that will appear here. This contains some important longstanding fixes for modders, new farmsteads and farmland between Rosewood and March Ridge, the ability to choose different colours when painting containers (handy for colour-coding in MP safehouses), extra Faction and Admin teleport options, a ‘support ticketing’ system to let players to get in touch with server admins and expanded foraging/trapping zones. This will, most likely, be the build that Thursday’s Megatest: II will run on. If you have any problems updating then please check out this thread, which outlines the VCRedist 2015 issue that some players are running into. Thanks everyone! This week’s featured image from Gassy Taco over on Steam, who we assume is Blasted Taco of the TIS forum’s cousin or something. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here.
[ 2016-12-05 20:35:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
Megatestin
As discussed last week, we’re currently polishing the current IWBUMS public beta build of PZ’s Build 35 to a point at which it’s at release quality – and we should be releasing a new test version mid-week. Overall there’s a bunch of new/updated features in 35 at the moment that feel ready to get out into the wider community. It seems daft to keep it all in IWBUMS beta, and anything additional put in will only add to the inevitable bug cascade for RJ after the public release. To this end, we need to stress-test both the new VOIP functions and the full set of MP improvements like the extended Admin powers and Factions. So… if you’re a server admin, a habitual PZ player online or just someone with a spare evening who fancies some desperate survival: you are cordially invited to ‘The Great Big Build 35 IWBUMS MP Megatest’ at 5pm GMT this Thursday, 1st December. This will carry on for as long as people want to play, and will have fun activities like clearing Rosewood Prison of the zed horde en-masse over VOIP, and a climactic Last Man Standing competition. There’ll also be PZ codes given out as prizes, and we’ll get a few devs and community people online too. (Just be warned that, by its very nature, this will be still be a test version so a few bumps in the road are to be expected.) The details will be found here, and as always information on how to download the public beta build can be found here.
Work on recoding Stormy’s ‘reloading’ mod is now complete, and we’re now running through PZ’s MP side to make sure our online and co-op components are all correctly synced up with the new animation system. Since it’s the animations themselves that now drive the states of survivor and zombie characters it could cause issues if they differ even slightly between servers and the clients talking to them. We need to make sure that all state changes (Bitten! Hit! Shot! Burnt! Bleached!) are synchronised, to keep the visuals and logic of the game consistent between clients no matter what precise animation frame you might be seeing yourself. While we’re in there, meanwhile, we’re making a few improvements to make the overall system better suited for the weapon mods we’re hoping will be unleashed by the overall combat/anims/models update. As such we’re working on getting the swing, hit and reaction animations for the combat working from the easily accessed items.txt script files, instead of them being hard coded deep within the game files. This will allow the new regime to play nicely with both modded weapons and items alike, and should allow plenty of cool new stuff to spring up on the Workshop.
Work on the new areas of the map (playable in the current IWBUMS beta) is continuing with a bit of life being added between the new towns of Rosewood and March Ridge in terms of farms, isolated homes, smaller roads and general rural buildings. This will make the journey between the Rosewood spawn point and March Ridge a more varied and pleasant one, with a few more places to rest overnight. The following is a WIP image of that coming to fruition. Rosewood can be seen to the top of the image, and March Ridge at the bottom.
One extra thing we think we can sneak into Build 35, as bugs will fall on Turbo’s shoulders, is an update to the movable items system. Currently any furniture that’s larger than a tile can’t be picked up and carried – so with this we’re talking about items like beds, tables and arcade cabinets. In the new system, however, players with the relevant tools and skills will be able to deconstruct these into specific (heavy) kit parts. These must then be carried to their eventual destination, most likely piece by piece. Some of this work has already been done code-wise, so it should go into the build fairly soon.
Looking forward to Build 36, in the next version we’ll be introducing specific characters you can spawn as – each with individual start locations, back-stories, inventories and characteristics. Our initial intent of this will be to make it less like people you’re playing as have just materialised five days into a full zombie apocalypse, but clearly will also fall neatly into line with our plans for survivor radio voices and other key features that we need for version 1.0. With this in mind, then, seeing as we need a selection of new archetypes from all over Zomboid’s character creation it would be really handy to know what the favoured character build from our players is. In fact, this would just be good to know for us in general – as we don’t have any of the Big Brother telemetry systems that big publisher games have at their command! As such, if you fancy helping us out, then please give us some examples of your favourite skill/trait/profession load-outs in the following thread. What doesn’t appear in peoples’ submissions will likely help us just as much as what does. Many thanks! This week’s featured image from Muscular Beaver. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here. Oh and hey, if you think we’re half okay then there’s this Steam Game Award thing still happening. We haven’t got a hope in hell of getting anything, but still…
[ 2016-11-28 22:14:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, hope you’re good and that US folk enjoyed their thanks-giving.
BUILD 35 AND THURSDAY MEGATEST
As discussed last week, we’re currently polishing the current IWBUMS public beta build of PZ’s Build 35 to a point at which it’s at release quality – and we should be releasing a new test version mid-week. Overall there’s a bunch of new/updated features in 35 at the moment that feel ready to get out into the wider community. It seems daft to keep it all in IWBUMS beta, and anything additional put in will only add to the inevitable bug cascade for RJ after the public release. To this end, we need to stress-test both the new VOIP functions and the full set of MP improvements like the extended Admin powers and Factions. So… if you’re a server admin, a habitual PZ player online or just someone with a spare evening who fancies some desperate survival: you are cordially invited to ‘The Great Big Build 35 IWBUMS MP Megatest’ at 5pm GMT this Thursday, 1st December. This will carry on for as long as people want to play, and will have fun activities like clearing Rosewood Prison of the zed horde en-masse over VOIP, and a climactic Last Man Standing competition. There’ll also be PZ codes given out as prizes, and we’ll get a few devs and community people online too. (Just be warned that, by its very nature, this will be still be a test version so a few bumps in the road are to be expected.) The details will be found here, and as always information on how to download the public beta build can be found here.
ANIMS
Work on recoding Stormy’s ‘reloading’ mod is now complete, and we’re now running through PZ’s MP side to make sure our online and co-op components are all correctly synced up with the new animation system. Since it’s the animations themselves that now drive the states of survivor and zombie characters it could cause issues if they differ even slightly between servers and the clients talking to them. We need to make sure that all state changes (Bitten! Hit! Shot! Burnt! Bleached!) are synchronised, to keep the visuals and logic of the game consistent between clients no matter what precise animation frame you might be seeing yourself. While we’re in there, meanwhile, we’re making a few improvements to make the overall system better suited for the weapon mods we’re hoping will be unleashed by the overall combat/anims/models update. As such we’re working on getting the swing, hit and reaction animations for the combat working from the easily accessed items.txt script files, instead of them being hard coded deep within the game files. This will allow the new regime to play nicely with both modded weapons and items alike, and should allow plenty of cool new stuff to spring up on the Workshop.
MAP
Work on the new areas of the map (playable in the current IWBUMS beta) is continuing with a bit of life being added between the new towns of Rosewood and March Ridge in terms of farms, isolated homes, smaller roads and general rural buildings. This will make the journey between the Rosewood spawn point and March Ridge a more varied and pleasant one, with a few more places to rest overnight. The following is a WIP image of that coming to fruition. Rosewood can be seen to the top of the image, and March Ridge at the bottom.
MOVABLES
One extra thing we think we can sneak into Build 35, as bugs will fall on Turbo’s shoulders, is an update to the movable items system. Currently any furniture that’s larger than a tile can’t be picked up and carried – so with this we’re talking about items like beds, tables and arcade cabinets. In the new system, however, players with the relevant tools and skills will be able to deconstruct these into specific (heavy) kit parts. These must then be carried to their eventual destination, most likely piece by piece. Some of this work has already been done code-wise, so it should go into the build fairly soon.
CHARACTER CREATION COMMUNITY QUERY
Looking forward to Build 36, in the next version we’ll be introducing specific characters you can spawn as – each with individual start locations, back-stories, inventories and characteristics. Our initial intent of this will be to make it less like people you’re playing as have just materialised five days into a full zombie apocalypse, but clearly will also fall neatly into line with our plans for survivor radio voices and other key features that we need for version 1.0. With this in mind, then, seeing as we need a selection of new archetypes from all over Zomboid’s character creation it would be really handy to know what the favoured character build from our players is. In fact, this would just be good to know for us in general – as we don’t have any of the Big Brother telemetry systems that big publisher games have at their command! As such, if you fancy helping us out, then please give us some examples of your favourite skill/trait/profession load-outs in the following thread. What doesn’t appear in peoples’ submissions will likely help us just as much as what does. Many thanks! This week’s featured image from Muscular Beaver. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here. Oh and hey, if you think we’re half okay then there’s this Steam Game Award thing still happening. We haven’t got a hope in hell of getting anything, but still…
[ 2016-11-28 22:14:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
Launch Procedures
Okay, so! Where we’re at is: we’ve filled in the yawning chasm that opened up before us in terms of getting the new game logic state machine system. So all the existing internal game messages to itself like (to choose three of a bazillion) ‘the zombie is attacking!’, ‘survivor health damaged!’ and ‘oh no, a bite!’ now work comfortably within the new animations. So, hurrah for that. The vast majority of combat code is ported over, and right now we’re rewriting the lua bullet-reloading system that was so expertly contributed by Stormy in the early days. This relied heavily on the old animation system, and for purposes of finally getting anims out of the door we will probably concentrate on the standard reloading system for now, and leave the Advanced Reloading option for a later date. After that we get it all running together, and then we spot any forgotten mechanics/states from PZ’s vast repertoire that appear during the gameplay. Then we fix them up (could be a big job, could be a small job) and a test version will finally (finally!) emerge. Finally.
We’re currently polishing the current IWBUMS public beta of Build 35 with the thinking that it’s got so much stuff in it at this point that we need to release it soon, or the mountain of bugs found by public testers in the full gamut of new/updated features will be too much for poor old RJ to handle. To this end, then, a few of us have been running around the new areas of Rosewood and March Ridge and building a list of things that need quick tidying up in terms of game systems – while RJ has been ploughing through the bug tracker and fixing stuff that the community has been reporting. Mash, too, is still in and around the new areas updating the new map’s farmland areas. We’ve just released IWBUMS public beta build 35.22 that (among other things) lets you see how many crafting recipes you still have to discover in each particular skill, reassigns cigarette and magazine loot distribution, fixes up some Factions issues, remedies some translation and UI woes and generally fix up bugs associated with new game systems.
Due for public release this week, to mappers and creators of general PZ paraphernalia, is CartoZed – a tool created by TurboTuTone to help the Zomboid team and our modders whenever we need a non-isometric ‘traditional’ map of what’s currently in-game to assign zed spawn maps, check locations and (in a build that lies beyond 35) maybe create a range of lootable in-game maps. CartoZed can be used on any map (so the likes of Dreadwood, New Denver and Bedford Falls can also be put through it) and it can draw up top-down maps searching for whatever you fancy whether it’s the traditional road/rail map seen below, or a more diverse map that (for example) flags different items and locations on the map.
This map produced with different CartoZed settings, meanwhile, draws Muld in terms of the electrical devices: radios in blue, TVs in green and furnaces in red.
Seriously, have you seen the stuff MesCaLiN has been building in PZ? We’ve used images of his creations in Mondoid before, but please check out his full range of Spiffo playrooms, chess boards, space shuttles, ornamental gardens, art galleries and jewellery stashes. Amazing stuff.
A quick call-out to groups of friends playing our IWBUMS build. We need feedback on ease of use, voice quality, settings and the default ‘hearing distance’ between co-op players on the map. While you’re in there, let us know what you think of the current zed count in Rosewood, Rosewood Prison and March Ridge too. Cheers all! This week’s featured image from MesCaLiN again, obv. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here.
[ 2016-11-21 19:52:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
‘Ello, here’s where we’re at:
ANIMS
Okay, so! Where we’re at is: we’ve filled in the yawning chasm that opened up before us in terms of getting the new game logic state machine system. So all the existing internal game messages to itself like (to choose three of a bazillion) ‘the zombie is attacking!’, ‘survivor health damaged!’ and ‘oh no, a bite!’ now work comfortably within the new animations. So, hurrah for that. The vast majority of combat code is ported over, and right now we’re rewriting the lua bullet-reloading system that was so expertly contributed by Stormy in the early days. This relied heavily on the old animation system, and for purposes of finally getting anims out of the door we will probably concentrate on the standard reloading system for now, and leave the Advanced Reloading option for a later date. After that we get it all running together, and then we spot any forgotten mechanics/states from PZ’s vast repertoire that appear during the gameplay. Then we fix them up (could be a big job, could be a small job) and a test version will finally (finally!) emerge. Finally.
BUILD 35
We’re currently polishing the current IWBUMS public beta of Build 35 with the thinking that it’s got so much stuff in it at this point that we need to release it soon, or the mountain of bugs found by public testers in the full gamut of new/updated features will be too much for poor old RJ to handle. To this end, then, a few of us have been running around the new areas of Rosewood and March Ridge and building a list of things that need quick tidying up in terms of game systems – while RJ has been ploughing through the bug tracker and fixing stuff that the community has been reporting. Mash, too, is still in and around the new areas updating the new map’s farmland areas. We’ve just released IWBUMS public beta build 35.22 that (among other things) lets you see how many crafting recipes you still have to discover in each particular skill, reassigns cigarette and magazine loot distribution, fixes up some Factions issues, remedies some translation and UI woes and generally fix up bugs associated with new game systems.
CARTOZED
Due for public release this week, to mappers and creators of general PZ paraphernalia, is CartoZed – a tool created by TurboTuTone to help the Zomboid team and our modders whenever we need a non-isometric ‘traditional’ map of what’s currently in-game to assign zed spawn maps, check locations and (in a build that lies beyond 35) maybe create a range of lootable in-game maps. CartoZed can be used on any map (so the likes of Dreadwood, New Denver and Bedford Falls can also be put through it) and it can draw up top-down maps searching for whatever you fancy whether it’s the traditional road/rail map seen below, or a more diverse map that (for example) flags different items and locations on the map.
This map produced with different CartoZed settings, meanwhile, draws Muld in terms of the electrical devices: radios in blue, TVs in green and furnaces in red.
MESCALIN MADNESS
Seriously, have you seen the stuff MesCaLiN has been building in PZ? We’ve used images of his creations in Mondoid before, but please check out his full range of Spiffo playrooms, chess boards, space shuttles, ornamental gardens, art galleries and jewellery stashes. Amazing stuff.
VOIP BALANCE
A quick call-out to groups of friends playing our IWBUMS build. We need feedback on ease of use, voice quality, settings and the default ‘hearing distance’ between co-op players on the map. While you’re in there, let us know what you think of the current zed count in Rosewood, Rosewood Prison and March Ridge too. Cheers all! This week’s featured image from MesCaLiN again, obv. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here.
[ 2016-11-21 19:52:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
Happy Place
Rosewood now has a player spawn option, meaning that you can check out the prison, courthouse and the like without a hike. The military residential area of March Point meanwhile, placed between Muld and Rosewood, can currently only be reached on foot. (This might change depending on the feedback we get from this test build.) As a part of this update there are various fixes to the map in the previous version, more applicable loot to be found in new buildings like the fire station, expanded foraging zones and also an updated ‘zombie spawn’ map that looks a little like this. Bottom right you’ll see the existing Muld zombie spawn, then to the lift is March Ridge and up at the top is Rosewood. The brighter the white, the heavier the zed presence.
We especially need feedback on difficulty in terms of the heightened zombie numbers for these areas, and of course any and all map bugs to be reported in the PZ bug tracker. We are aware that Rosewood has been spelt ‘Roosewood’ in the spawn selection screen. This will be addressed in an upcoming build, and has resulted in a Frenchman apologising profusely through the medium of Skype emoticon.
This feature allows you to talk to your co-op friends and survivors you meet on MP servers. It’s not a general overall PZ chat channel, but instead allows survivors to communicate when they’re in ‘audible’ distance from each other on the map itself. We’re hoping that it will add some great new dynamics to the game when played with friends, and enemies. To enable this venture into the options menu, then choose whether you want the system to broadcast when it automatically hears your dulcet tones – or through the press of a button (default: alt). Our thanks to General Arcade for all their amazing work on this.
We’d like feedback on levels, the default distance from which players hear each other (though server admins have control over this) and general usability/bugs. In future we will look into the VOIP system allowing you to broadcast your voice through Turbo’s in-game radios, and maybe record as well. Something else we’d like to do is have lower speech volumes when players are on different floors in the same building and, although it’s quite a way down an already hefty priority list, one day have a more sophisticated sound propagation model to deal with indoor-to-outdoor sound levels and large obstacles/walls that block hearing. For now though, it’ll be as-is with finetuning – although General Arcade are currently working on giving Admins the ability to talk between themselves, which will be added into a future 35 Build.
Community Translations of all 4500 lines of current radio and TV content are now in-game for Russian, Turkish, German, Spanish, French and Polish (which we forgot to mention last week – sorry Geras!).
As of the latest beta build MP Factions are now a part of the game. Press Escape to access the user panel, add a tag of up to four letters, choose a colour and all of a sudden you’ll be a part of your very own survivor gang – with it being your decision as to whether you reveal your allegiance to the players you meet, or not. This system also disables melee PvP between group members, which you can also turn off should you need to turn on your friends or the recently infected. Overall control over how Factions work, meanwhile, is governed by the Admins – who can govern how many players can form a group, and how many days must pass before they are given the option.
Next up RJ will turn his attention to clearing the backlog of 35-specific bugs that have built-up in the Bug Tracker. In the background, of course, is still the much-anticipated (much delayed) work on our new animations/combat/etc system that remains ongoing. We’re still filling in something of a crevasse the opened up when on the final approach, but we will get there. As such, once RJ has chewed through bugs in the current IWBUMS build, we’ll make a judgement call on whether to release it to the public. It’s already got a fair wedge of new stuff (new map, VOIP, metalwork, finalized food system, jumbo trees, multi-stage building, sleeping revamp, item disassembly, composting, tools to make life as an MP Admin easier, lots of UI and Inventory tweaks and tons of community requested changes etc). The more we add at this point, the higher the bug mountain from the wider public player-base. So we’ll be seeing how it goes over the coming week. This week’s crazy landscaping from the formidable MesCaLin, who’s also responsible for mannequin chess and this overall Prisoner-esque abode. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here.
[ 2016-11-15 05:33:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
We have just released a new update to our public IWBUMS beta channel (details of how to access found here) with some cool new stuff. The build is 35.21, and the primary items it contains run as follows:
ROSEWOOD AND MARCH POINT DEVELOPMENTS
Rosewood now has a player spawn option, meaning that you can check out the prison, courthouse and the like without a hike. The military residential area of March Point meanwhile, placed between Muld and Rosewood, can currently only be reached on foot. (This might change depending on the feedback we get from this test build.) As a part of this update there are various fixes to the map in the previous version, more applicable loot to be found in new buildings like the fire station, expanded foraging zones and also an updated ‘zombie spawn’ map that looks a little like this. Bottom right you’ll see the existing Muld zombie spawn, then to the lift is March Ridge and up at the top is Rosewood. The brighter the white, the heavier the zed presence.
We especially need feedback on difficulty in terms of the heightened zombie numbers for these areas, and of course any and all map bugs to be reported in the PZ bug tracker. We are aware that Rosewood has been spelt ‘Roosewood’ in the spawn selection screen. This will be addressed in an upcoming build, and has resulted in a Frenchman apologising profusely through the medium of Skype emoticon.
VOIP NOW IN-GAME
This feature allows you to talk to your co-op friends and survivors you meet on MP servers. It’s not a general overall PZ chat channel, but instead allows survivors to communicate when they’re in ‘audible’ distance from each other on the map itself. We’re hoping that it will add some great new dynamics to the game when played with friends, and enemies. To enable this venture into the options menu, then choose whether you want the system to broadcast when it automatically hears your dulcet tones – or through the press of a button (default: alt). Our thanks to General Arcade for all their amazing work on this.
We’d like feedback on levels, the default distance from which players hear each other (though server admins have control over this) and general usability/bugs. In future we will look into the VOIP system allowing you to broadcast your voice through Turbo’s in-game radios, and maybe record as well. Something else we’d like to do is have lower speech volumes when players are on different floors in the same building and, although it’s quite a way down an already hefty priority list, one day have a more sophisticated sound propagation model to deal with indoor-to-outdoor sound levels and large obstacles/walls that block hearing. For now though, it’ll be as-is with finetuning – although General Arcade are currently working on giving Admins the ability to talk between themselves, which will be added into a future 35 Build.
COMMUNITY RADIO/TV TRANSLATION IN-GAME
Community Translations of all 4500 lines of current radio and TV content are now in-game for Russian, Turkish, German, Spanish, French and Polish (which we forgot to mention last week – sorry Geras!).
FACTIONS JOINABLE
As of the latest beta build MP Factions are now a part of the game. Press Escape to access the user panel, add a tag of up to four letters, choose a colour and all of a sudden you’ll be a part of your very own survivor gang – with it being your decision as to whether you reveal your allegiance to the players you meet, or not. This system also disables melee PvP between group members, which you can also turn off should you need to turn on your friends or the recently infected. Overall control over how Factions work, meanwhile, is governed by the Admins – who can govern how many players can form a group, and how many days must pass before they are given the option.
35 NEXT
Next up RJ will turn his attention to clearing the backlog of 35-specific bugs that have built-up in the Bug Tracker. In the background, of course, is still the much-anticipated (much delayed) work on our new animations/combat/etc system that remains ongoing. We’re still filling in something of a crevasse the opened up when on the final approach, but we will get there. As such, once RJ has chewed through bugs in the current IWBUMS build, we’ll make a judgement call on whether to release it to the public. It’s already got a fair wedge of new stuff (new map, VOIP, metalwork, finalized food system, jumbo trees, multi-stage building, sleeping revamp, item disassembly, composting, tools to make life as an MP Admin easier, lots of UI and Inventory tweaks and tons of community requested changes etc). The more we add at this point, the higher the bug mountain from the wider public player-base. So we’ll be seeing how it goes over the coming week. This week’s crazy landscaping from the formidable MesCaLin, who’s also responsible for mannequin chess and this overall Prisoner-esque abode. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here.
[ 2016-11-15 05:33:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
Rosewood and March Ridge
[ 2016-10-31 22:33:23 CET ] [ Original post ]
Two new areas have been added to the Project Zomboid map in the latest IWBUMS public beta build 35.20f. They are called Rosewood and March Ridge, and are a first for PZ in that we’re straying slightly away from a fictional version of the real world map so we can get in a few more interesting and engaging places for you to loot and survive in. If you want to get involved with the public beta then please go here.
We always like people to explore our new areas rather than just dump a load of screenshots on you and ruin any feeling of exploration, so we have made this spoiler thread for community discoveries.
The primary areas with new content can be found in the directions shown by these very professional looking arrows, but there are other small areas on the existing map that have been updated too.
If you spot anything that looks like a map bug, then, as ever please report in the mapping section of the TIS Bug Tracker.
We will be adding extra visual detail to these areas and fixing the issues you find as the Build 35 IWBUMS beta continues. Good luck out there!
OTHER STUFF
- We invited a bunch of MP community host people into a test of the latest VOIP build yesterday and the results were great, and as such we anticipate merging this into the current IWBUMS public beta this week. Voice quality is significantly improved, the build is way more stable, the system seems easy to use and the only issues that really came up were those of finetuning, in-game audibility distance and minor bugs. As such it makes sense to cast the net wider into the IWBUMS beta testers for its final tweaks while cherries are placed atop its audio cake. (If you want to check out how it’s currently shaping up then Mark.exe’s stream can be found here, though please note there are period when his streaming software causes issues – this was at Mark’s end rather than a problem with the build.)
- Animation work continues with the hook system we described last week – transplanting the existing governance over zombie and character ‘action states’ at any given frame of animation (‘Biting!’, ‘Bitten!’ etc) into the system. This is tying together all the underlying gameplay dynamics of the old sprites into the bright new animated dawn – alongside standardising the code format we’ve written for all the new combat, weapons, outfits, backpacks and big-name features the animations will bring with them.
- Also landing this week on a separate branch for community translation teams to check out, and also liable to be merged with the main IWBUMS channel pretty quickly if everything is in its right place, is Turbo’s work on translated Radio/TV content and mod support for the now released WordZed. This will allow players to add to existing broadcast content, as well as create their own for reasons of roleplay and roleplay servers.
- We should also mention that in IWBUMS Build 32.20F are the many and varied MP Admin improvements we discussed last week. Admin panel polish, the ability to draw out ‘Non PVP Zones’, a new Safehouse UI and various other upgrades to make running PZ servers more tolerable have all been added. Our thanks to the various server hosts who helped us with guidance and bug testing in this mission.
[ 2016-10-31 22:33:23 CET ] [ Original post ]
Swing State
The two new map areas are pretty much done, and Mash is currently linking them up to the main map with some new roads. They’ll need a brief stay on an internal build for sanity checking, but afterwards will be packaged into one of RJ’s imminent-ish Build 35 IWBUMS beta releases. We want exploration-minded beta testers to discover them on their own terms, but here’s a clue.
(We should probably say that it isn’t Fort Knox, as that would presumably have a few of these!).
We had a quick chat about your/our frustration with anims not joining in with all the testing last week, and are still under the bonnet connecting gears and sprockets today. At present the code PZ uses for the state machines (ie. what’s going on ‘right now!’ for characters – so a zombie could be in ‘bite state’, or a player could be in ‘swing state’) is being transplanted into the new animation state system. We’re writing a hook system to allow the xml that defines the animations and states to call Java or lua functions that mimic the structure of the existing PZ state machine very closely. In this way it becomes far easier to transplant the masses of code found in the state system into a similar structure within the new version. We can remove all the code that relies on 2D animation frames (for example: ‘on the 12th frame of swing bat animation, connect the hit and apply damage and XP!’) and then we can take the appropriate chunks of code and transplant them fairly unchanged into the new status quo. This will both minimize the amount of work in the process, and standardise the system for new gameplay additions and modding in the future.
A test of General Arcade’s latest VOIP build last week revealed a few problems in terms of players whose microphones weren’t being picked up – which further analysis has revealed is connected to the sampling rate of the capture device. Popular ranges like 48000Hz and 16000Hz weren’t working, but now the bug has been worked out our industrious Russian friends are beavering away on a fresh build that (fix dependent) should be ready for a wider test.
RJ has been on a roll with MP improvements for long-suffering admins and hosts in the current public beta, and as such didn’t want to break his momentum. To this end the 35.20 release will have a vastly improved Safehouse system, and easier clan/group management that we’ll be calling Factions just because it sounds a bit more apocalyptic-y. Over to RJ: “I’ve been talking to some of the people who run PZ servers to find out how we can make MP a better place for players. This has entailed a bunch of powerful new tools for Admin, and also new stuff for players themselves.” “I’ve reworked the Safehouse system with a brand new UI. This will make a Safehouse owner’s life much more easy: you can quickly add people from a list, change Safehouse title, hand over ownership and players can now also remove themselves from the building’s list.” “There’s also a new server option: ‘DisableSafehouseWhenPlayerConnected’. Basically, if set to ‘true’ by the admin, it’ll remove the safehouse’s anti-trepass and non-looting security if anyone tied to it is connected online, and also a little while after the last player of a safehouse disconnects to avoid ‘safety-quitting’. I’m playing around with the system to check for loopholes and hoping that this will encourage some cool faction wars, while also still keeping peoples’ loot safe when they’re not playing the game.” “Something else going into 35.20, or maybe 35.21, is the ability to form a Faction and invite players to it. Once you have enough in your gang you can choose a tag, which will always be visible to your faction friends – but you can choose whether or not the strangers you meet can see it and identify your allegiance. Faction PvP will automatically mean that melee attacks won’t hurt your friends, but this can be turned off by players themselves should they want to put friends out of their misery – while firearms will always be deadly no matter what.” “Something else that’ll be good for servers has also been added and tested too: a ‘No PvP Zone’ that Admins can drag out over the map. Players within this zone will be invulnerable to attack, but also won’t be able to attack – even with firearms. This also comes with a brand new UI that allows for quick deletion, changing the zone’s name and teleportation to other zones that have been created.” This week’s pin-up player is the thunderstruck Thundahstuck. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here.
[ 2016-10-24 20:24:55 CET ] [ Original post ]
Happy Mondoid all. Here’s all the latest on all the stuff soon to come to PZ’s Kentucky heartlands.
NEW MAP STUFF
The two new map areas are pretty much done, and Mash is currently linking them up to the main map with some new roads. They’ll need a brief stay on an internal build for sanity checking, but afterwards will be packaged into one of RJ’s imminent-ish Build 35 IWBUMS beta releases. We want exploration-minded beta testers to discover them on their own terms, but here’s a clue.
(We should probably say that it isn’t Fort Knox, as that would presumably have a few of these!).
ANIMS
We had a quick chat about your/our frustration with anims not joining in with all the testing last week, and are still under the bonnet connecting gears and sprockets today. At present the code PZ uses for the state machines (ie. what’s going on ‘right now!’ for characters – so a zombie could be in ‘bite state’, or a player could be in ‘swing state’) is being transplanted into the new animation state system. We’re writing a hook system to allow the xml that defines the animations and states to call Java or lua functions that mimic the structure of the existing PZ state machine very closely. In this way it becomes far easier to transplant the masses of code found in the state system into a similar structure within the new version. We can remove all the code that relies on 2D animation frames (for example: ‘on the 12th frame of swing bat animation, connect the hit and apply damage and XP!’) and then we can take the appropriate chunks of code and transplant them fairly unchanged into the new status quo. This will both minimize the amount of work in the process, and standardise the system for new gameplay additions and modding in the future.
VOIP
A test of General Arcade’s latest VOIP build last week revealed a few problems in terms of players whose microphones weren’t being picked up – which further analysis has revealed is connected to the sampling rate of the capture device. Popular ranges like 48000Hz and 16000Hz weren’t working, but now the bug has been worked out our industrious Russian friends are beavering away on a fresh build that (fix dependent) should be ready for a wider test.
BUILD 35 IWBUMS BETA
RJ has been on a roll with MP improvements for long-suffering admins and hosts in the current public beta, and as such didn’t want to break his momentum. To this end the 35.20 release will have a vastly improved Safehouse system, and easier clan/group management that we’ll be calling Factions just because it sounds a bit more apocalyptic-y. Over to RJ: “I’ve been talking to some of the people who run PZ servers to find out how we can make MP a better place for players. This has entailed a bunch of powerful new tools for Admin, and also new stuff for players themselves.” “I’ve reworked the Safehouse system with a brand new UI. This will make a Safehouse owner’s life much more easy: you can quickly add people from a list, change Safehouse title, hand over ownership and players can now also remove themselves from the building’s list.” “There’s also a new server option: ‘DisableSafehouseWhenPlayerConnected’. Basically, if set to ‘true’ by the admin, it’ll remove the safehouse’s anti-trepass and non-looting security if anyone tied to it is connected online, and also a little while after the last player of a safehouse disconnects to avoid ‘safety-quitting’. I’m playing around with the system to check for loopholes and hoping that this will encourage some cool faction wars, while also still keeping peoples’ loot safe when they’re not playing the game.” “Something else going into 35.20, or maybe 35.21, is the ability to form a Faction and invite players to it. Once you have enough in your gang you can choose a tag, which will always be visible to your faction friends – but you can choose whether or not the strangers you meet can see it and identify your allegiance. Faction PvP will automatically mean that melee attacks won’t hurt your friends, but this can be turned off by players themselves should they want to put friends out of their misery – while firearms will always be deadly no matter what.” “Something else that’ll be good for servers has also been added and tested too: a ‘No PvP Zone’ that Admins can drag out over the map. Players within this zone will be invulnerable to attack, but also won’t be able to attack – even with firearms. This also comes with a brand new UI that allows for quick deletion, changing the zone’s name and teleportation to other zones that have been created.” This week’s pin-up player is the thunderstruck Thundahstuck. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here.
[ 2016-10-24 20:24:55 CET ] [ Original post ]
Court Short
We’re in the guts of combat at the moment – tying in a bunch of mechanics that had to be disconnected from the previous set-up and transferring them across to the new animation system. The new animation approach essentially replaces the state machine that the game has used since the very first version of PZ for a whole bunch of character actions. There are two separate systems, one of which has fresh animation states that blend into each other in the upcoming, newfangled, modern and more powerful way. However, there’s also a whole bunch of code still relying on code that says stuff like: ‘Check if the player is in the last frame of this 2D animation! Switch to this new state! Add some XP defined by what this crazy survivor is up to!’. Sure, as you’ve seen in our videos, the combat’s working – but beneath that there’s XP, damage from stats, world collision, MP, etc etc. All this needs transplanting into our new events within our new state system. There’s a lot to get through, and it’s of a volume that’s greater than anticipated. But, with that said, we’re chugging our way through the pile.
Ooh, look at this intriguing new location…
(Note: this is part of an area that’s not based directly on the real world map that we’re adding.)
RJ is going to return to more universal gameplay areas for both SP and MP areas of the game next, but for now it seemed relevant and sensible to expand the new multiplayer server admin powers in Build 35 to people hosting smaller co-op servers too. To this end he’s just released Build 35.19, which IWBUMS public beta testers can gain access to here. If you’re a regular co-op host then we
could do with your feedback and bug reports.
In terms of VOIP: internal balance and tests continue. We’re currently widening the testing pool to include hosts and moderators from our various online communities to get extra feedback, after which IWBUMS will come a-calling. This week’s amaze-o hideout from Mescalin. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. If you want to see a general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming then we also have an updated PZ status page these days.
[ 2016-10-17 19:55:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey survivor people. A quick note before we start things off:
We’re aware the wait for the new animation system is frustrating, and it’s also frustrating for us to feel like we’re inches away from kicking them out of the door – only for unforeseen tasks to stretch out beneath our feet and further elongate your already elongated wait.
We don’t want it to sound like an excuse (as we clearly feel that you should have been slapping police zombies with spiked rifles long before now – and as a side-product seen where the new system will take us with our other 1.0 features) but we when we think about it every ‘big’ change in PZ has felt a bit like this. The initial release of the 0.1.5d demo, the long ‘Winter of No-Content’ before the 0.2.0 build and indeed the advent of MP. They have always been necessary and impactful, but they’ve also always strained patience and resulted in ‘trust us, we’re on it’ style blogs like this one.
These days matters are cushioned (to an extent) by us having a wider team: ace and plentiful community request work from RJ can go into Build 35, General Arcade can deliver a steady stream of VOIP builds as we approach its integration, Mash can industriously fill in new areas of the map. The final descent of the anims may feel frustrating, but at least it’s evident that other cogs in the machine continue to whirr.
The peril of devs working in an open window though, and reporting on hopes, problems and progress on the game features we feel will be in our upcoming builds is more than apparent here – likewise the pressure of reporting dev stuff to you on a weekly basis when there are hype trains, roadblocks and necessary diversions to contend with on the journey. We’re far from perfect in this respect, but we hope you appreciate this mentality rather than some of the alternatives. You don’t have to look far online to see what other approaches (or a blanket silence) can bring.
As such, we do apologise for the anims/combat/clothing/backpacks wait and dearly wish it were not so – but we know that ultimately it’s good for Zomboid, good for all the big-name features that people want to play with and ultimately good for players. It’s just a pain in the bum for everyone and their dog in the mean-time.
So, with all this in mind… on to Mondoid!
ANIMS
We’re in the guts of combat at the moment – tying in a bunch of mechanics that had to be disconnected from the previous set-up and transferring them across to the new animation system. The new animation approach essentially replaces the state machine that the game has used since the very first version of PZ for a whole bunch of character actions. There are two separate systems, one of which has fresh animation states that blend into each other in the upcoming, newfangled, modern and more powerful way. However, there’s also a whole bunch of code still relying on code that says stuff like: ‘Check if the player is in the last frame of this 2D animation! Switch to this new state! Add some XP defined by what this crazy survivor is up to!’. Sure, as you’ve seen in our videos, the combat’s working – but beneath that there’s XP, damage from stats, world collision, MP, etc etc. All this needs transplanting into our new events within our new state system. There’s a lot to get through, and it’s of a volume that’s greater than anticipated. But, with that said, we’re chugging our way through the pile.
MAP
Ooh, look at this intriguing new location…
(Note: this is part of an area that’s not based directly on the real world map that we’re adding.)
BUILD 35 BETA
RJ is going to return to more universal gameplay areas for both SP and MP areas of the game next, but for now it seemed relevant and sensible to expand the new multiplayer server admin powers in Build 35 to people hosting smaller co-op servers too. To this end he’s just released Build 35.19, which IWBUMS public beta testers can gain access to here. If you’re a regular co-op host then we
really, really
could do with your feedback and bug reports.
In terms of VOIP: internal balance and tests continue. We’re currently widening the testing pool to include hosts and moderators from our various online communities to get extra feedback, after which IWBUMS will come a-calling. This week’s amaze-o hideout from Mescalin. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. If you want to see a general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming then we also have an updated PZ status page these days.
[ 2016-10-17 19:55:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
Trucking On
Romain continues hammering away on IWBUMS build 35.18, adding the ability to access and modify the server’s database directly, simplifying server management, and hopefully limiting the need for mods to have direct access to the server’s file system.
He’s also attempted to slay the multi-headed hydra of save scumming, this time by implementing transaction IDs for player actions, commonly used for financial transactions in the real world, so no more copying saves between computers whilst on multiplayer (sorry!) or reloading a backup. This will hopefully solve a lot of problems with cheating that still exist in the game, though it's too early to tell if there’ll be any complications that will arise. Additionally, General Arcade continues putting out new, more stable VOIP builds. Internal testing continues, we’re trying to make sure it won’t crash servers or corrupt saves, not to mention introduce lag. We’re also trying to get the default VOIP settings just right, a Goldilocks task if ever there was one.
Turbo has released the first version of WordZed to the modding and translation community! You can find a link here along with a tutorial video – this will both allow for modded radio and TV data to be added to the game, allowing modders to build in their own lore into the world. In addition to this, Turbo has updated all the language translation files to allow for us to get all the community translations of the radio and TV content into the games. Thanks again to our dedicated translator communities, bringing the news along with Spiffo cartoons to our non-English speaking players! After this, Turbo is going to explore how to integrate the in-game radio system with the VOIP, allowing players to transmit their voices across Muldraugh’s virtual airwaves.
Over on the workshop, someone’s managed to add a lightsaber into the game, for all your zombie-chopping needs. Nolan appears to have suffered a cloning disaster, perfect for your latest plan to Take Over The World! Be sure to check out South Wuxburg, USA, as well!
The Small, but Important thread, detailing all those little issues people have with the game that have so far not been addressed, a big focus of build 35, is now over 270 suggestions. If you think of anything small, but annoying, things about Project Zomboid, please add them to the list! This week’s Multiplayer disaster is courtesy of Lenin, over on steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! The BOIT now also flags that our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks.
[ 2016-10-10 18:53:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
It’s a bit of a quiet Mondoid this week, as we continue ironing out the remaining bugs in the new animation system. As such, there’ll be no animation video this week, but we know the wait’ll be worth it. We’re fully aware this is taking its time and some people are frustrated at the wait, but we’d rather take a bit of flack, than release something that will disappoint. Often short 30 second videos give the impression that everything is ready to release so we understand the frustrations, but there really are still too many game-breaking issues that would leave many more people much more frustrated, but we’re getting through them all. We know we can take our time, but when we do deliver we’ll deliver what we’ve promised.
Build Status
Romain continues hammering away on IWBUMS build 35.18, adding the ability to access and modify the server’s database directly, simplifying server management, and hopefully limiting the need for mods to have direct access to the server’s file system.
He’s also attempted to slay the multi-headed hydra of save scumming, this time by implementing transaction IDs for player actions, commonly used for financial transactions in the real world, so no more copying saves between computers whilst on multiplayer (sorry!) or reloading a backup. This will hopefully solve a lot of problems with cheating that still exist in the game, though it's too early to tell if there’ll be any complications that will arise. Additionally, General Arcade continues putting out new, more stable VOIP builds. Internal testing continues, we’re trying to make sure it won’t crash servers or corrupt saves, not to mention introduce lag. We’re also trying to get the default VOIP settings just right, a Goldilocks task if ever there was one.
WordZed
Turbo has released the first version of WordZed to the modding and translation community! You can find a link here along with a tutorial video – this will both allow for modded radio and TV data to be added to the game, allowing modders to build in their own lore into the world. In addition to this, Turbo has updated all the language translation files to allow for us to get all the community translations of the radio and TV content into the games. Thanks again to our dedicated translator communities, bringing the news along with Spiffo cartoons to our non-English speaking players! After this, Turbo is going to explore how to integrate the in-game radio system with the VOIP, allowing players to transmit their voices across Muldraugh’s virtual airwaves.
Cool Mods
Over on the workshop, someone’s managed to add a lightsaber into the game, for all your zombie-chopping needs. Nolan appears to have suffered a cloning disaster, perfect for your latest plan to Take Over The World! Be sure to check out South Wuxburg, USA, as well!
And, Finally
The Small, but Important thread, detailing all those little issues people have with the game that have so far not been addressed, a big focus of build 35, is now over 270 suggestions. If you think of anything small, but annoying, things about Project Zomboid, please add them to the list! This week’s Multiplayer disaster is courtesy of Lenin, over on steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! The BOIT now also flags that our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks.
[ 2016-10-10 18:53:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
Last Resort
Work continues binding in all our various animations to the game and making it all as seamless as possible. Here’s something that just went in. Hope you like. [CONTAINS DISTURBING SCENES] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJJtN6BdSmM Secondly, we’ve been hearing a few community thoughts on the appearance of the new model faces, and were thinking similar ourselves – so we’ve fiddled with the mesh and the UVS of what’s being implemented to change the way the faces look, and especially on the female models. We added a few more vertices to the head (not enough to impact the poly count) so have more control over the eyes – and hopefully the results will be an improvement when they’re in-game.
As discussed last week, RJ’s turned his attention away from the suggestions of the survivor community – and towards the suggestions and quality of life of those who run and maintain PZ servers. We’ve already got his tiered admin system into the IWBUMS public test (and really could do with people setting up servers and bug-testing), so now he’s onto the next stage of his quest before returning to vanilla SP content. “The new “player stats” admin panel is currently in test and going well” explains our favourite Frenchman, bar none. “I’ve fixed lot of bugs on it for the IWBUMS 35.18 which should be out soon. In 35.18 I’m also looking at dealing with people who copy/paste saves, and think I may have a decent solution but I need to make sure there aren’t any sync problems.” “I’ve also added user logs to the player stats panel. Every time something weird happens to a player (lua checksum fail, dupe item found etc…) a log will be added and can be inspected by the Admin, who can also administer warning points and keep tabs on griefing and similar.”
This past Friday we had another successful test of the new player voice system, that’ll let other players hear your verbal threats, mutterings and zombie-gasps should your character be standing in their proximity. Comments from testers included “my voice came in loud and clear”, “the distance at which you can still hear people talking is great”, “Voice detection seemed quite good” and “The quality and 3D was awesome!”. This all said there were a few stability issues, so the guys at General Arcade are on a bug hunt that’ll hopefully soon culminate in a version we can tie into the current IWBUMS build.
Cool cat ShylokVakarianf is running a survey about what exactly gets you killed in your playthroughs. It’s super-interesting and gives us a good idea of what’s causing the most fatalities currently in-game. This week’s smart, sassy safehouse from Mr.Narsh. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! The BOIT now also flags that our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks. Now with modding section!
[ 2016-10-03 19:08:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
First off another quick note that we’re now curating a Build Status and Version History overview list so people don’t have to dredge through weekly Mondoids to find vids/images of stuff that’s liable to drop into the next build, or to check out what’s in IWBUMS testing. Smaller tweaks in PZ history aren’t mentioned, but the version list does go all the way back to the Steam release so is hopefully informative. We fleshed it out today, so have a peek if you fancy.
ANIMS AND MODELS
Work continues binding in all our various animations to the game and making it all as seamless as possible. Here’s something that just went in. Hope you like. [CONTAINS DISTURBING SCENES] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJJtN6BdSmM Secondly, we’ve been hearing a few community thoughts on the appearance of the new model faces, and were thinking similar ourselves – so we’ve fiddled with the mesh and the UVS of what’s being implemented to change the way the faces look, and especially on the female models. We added a few more vertices to the head (not enough to impact the poly count) so have more control over the eyes – and hopefully the results will be an improvement when they’re in-game.
ADMIN THE BADMIN
As discussed last week, RJ’s turned his attention away from the suggestions of the survivor community – and towards the suggestions and quality of life of those who run and maintain PZ servers. We’ve already got his tiered admin system into the IWBUMS public test (and really could do with people setting up servers and bug-testing), so now he’s onto the next stage of his quest before returning to vanilla SP content. “The new “player stats” admin panel is currently in test and going well” explains our favourite Frenchman, bar none. “I’ve fixed lot of bugs on it for the IWBUMS 35.18 which should be out soon. In 35.18 I’m also looking at dealing with people who copy/paste saves, and think I may have a decent solution but I need to make sure there aren’t any sync problems.” “I’ve also added user logs to the player stats panel. Every time something weird happens to a player (lua checksum fail, dupe item found etc…) a log will be added and can be inspected by the Admin, who can also administer warning points and keep tabs on griefing and similar.”
VOIP
This past Friday we had another successful test of the new player voice system, that’ll let other players hear your verbal threats, mutterings and zombie-gasps should your character be standing in their proximity. Comments from testers included “my voice came in loud and clear”, “the distance at which you can still hear people talking is great”, “Voice detection seemed quite good” and “The quality and 3D was awesome!”. This all said there were a few stability issues, so the guys at General Arcade are on a bug hunt that’ll hopefully soon culminate in a version we can tie into the current IWBUMS build.
HOW DO YOU DIE?
Cool cat ShylokVakarianf is running a survey about what exactly gets you killed in your playthroughs. It’s super-interesting and gives us a good idea of what’s causing the most fatalities currently in-game. This week’s smart, sassy safehouse from Mr.Narsh. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! The BOIT now also flags that our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks. Now with modding section!
[ 2016-10-03 19:08:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
Ultima Warrior
Work in the anims branch continues – tying up loose ends and making sure the entire game is playable and makes sense visually in terms of character action and behaviour. An example of this can be seen in the second half of the following video, to prevent the fairly odd sight of the player character sprinting at full pelt through thick woods. The following are just two of the many animation sequences we’ve implemented over the past week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1nWNdPU768
After our successful first test of in-game VOIP, positional player voices and volume we have just received the second updated drop of General Arcade’s fiddlings with the PZ mainframe. It’s got added server options, configurable voice audibility over distance, better microphone boost and voice volume control and now supports all our various supported platforms. We still need to spin the build up on an internal dedicated server and give it a proper test, but GA are hopeful that we’re now not far from integrating VOIP into Build 35 – or at least to open up the VOIP build to a wider brigand of testers on the TIS forums. We’ll keep you updated on that front.
RJ has spent the last few weeks amassing a vast number of new features, tweaks and smoothenings requested by our hardcore playing community – all of which are now playable inour open IWBUMS public beta. This week, however, he’s turned his attention towards the fine folks who host servers for MP play, and who have needed more control and player-inspection powers for a long old time. The model we’re using is that of the awesome, wonderful and rightly revered Ultima Online and introduces Server Access levels for Admin Staff with different levels of power and responsibility. Full details of Observer, GM, Overseer, Moderator and Admin roles can be found here on the TIS forums. Added into this are better recorded spawn/death coordinates, a teleportation command and other ways to deal with cheatiness. There’s also a new UI that’ll let moderators and upwards modify player traits, professions, names, usernames, XP and whatnot.
Right now RJ is working on an info sheet of sorts so admins can track player activity better, but he’ll be returning to the ever-growing pile of main game player suggestions found here on the forum in the near future, so if you want to add your thoughts then please do so!
Mash continues work on Build 35’s second big new map location, as well as filling in a bunch of the nowhere-zone cells currently on the PZ map with detail and traces of civilization. She has, however, performed what we call a ‘Mash Smash’ as to revealing what the new area is – wanting it to be a surprise to beta testers when it hits IWBUMS.
Turbo has tied his implementation of our community’s fine narrative content translation work(Russian, German, Spanish, Turkish Polish and French right now) to finalising a public version WordZed for the modding community – our in-house radio and TV writing/editing/timing and wavelength broadcast tool. It wasn’t hugely user-friendly formerly (which is why it wasn’t released) but now comes with an added Search functionality, options and a general smoother edit process.
We want to tweak it further, and to write a decent manual, but intend to beta release it in our Community Translation it for feedback as soon as we can. In the mean-time Writer Will has also been editing existing narrative content for use on VHS tapes and CDs for character entertainment and boredom relief after most broadcasts cut out, and is also tapping up some new home-taped content too. This week’s zombie stick-up from Original Nickname of Steamton, Steamshire. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! The BOIT now also flags that our Discord is now open. There are many cats that live in there, and all of them are cool. Oh, and check out the new PZ Status and Build History page if you’re so inclined too.
[ 2016-09-26 21:57:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey everyone, quite a bit in this week’s Mondoid. Just a quick note before we dive in though. It’s sometimes tricky to ascertain what’s in upcoming builds (and past ones) from a browse of our weekly blogs – so we’ll be now be maintaining a ‘PZ Status and Build history‘ page on our website from now on. Everything from our launch on Steam up until the present day will be covered there, so it should also be handy to let returning players see what’s been added during their absence.
ANIMS
Work in the anims branch continues – tying up loose ends and making sure the entire game is playable and makes sense visually in terms of character action and behaviour. An example of this can be seen in the second half of the following video, to prevent the fairly odd sight of the player character sprinting at full pelt through thick woods. The following are just two of the many animation sequences we’ve implemented over the past week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1nWNdPU768
VOIP
After our successful first test of in-game VOIP, positional player voices and volume we have just received the second updated drop of General Arcade’s fiddlings with the PZ mainframe. It’s got added server options, configurable voice audibility over distance, better microphone boost and voice volume control and now supports all our various supported platforms. We still need to spin the build up on an internal dedicated server and give it a proper test, but GA are hopeful that we’re now not far from integrating VOIP into Build 35 – or at least to open up the VOIP build to a wider brigand of testers on the TIS forums. We’ll keep you updated on that front.
RJ’S COMMUNITY REQUEST QUEST
RJ has spent the last few weeks amassing a vast number of new features, tweaks and smoothenings requested by our hardcore playing community – all of which are now playable inour open IWBUMS public beta. This week, however, he’s turned his attention towards the fine folks who host servers for MP play, and who have needed more control and player-inspection powers for a long old time. The model we’re using is that of the awesome, wonderful and rightly revered Ultima Online and introduces Server Access levels for Admin Staff with different levels of power and responsibility. Full details of Observer, GM, Overseer, Moderator and Admin roles can be found here on the TIS forums. Added into this are better recorded spawn/death coordinates, a teleportation command and other ways to deal with cheatiness. There’s also a new UI that’ll let moderators and upwards modify player traits, professions, names, usernames, XP and whatnot.
Right now RJ is working on an info sheet of sorts so admins can track player activity better, but he’ll be returning to the ever-growing pile of main game player suggestions found here on the forum in the near future, so if you want to add your thoughts then please do so!
MAP
Mash continues work on Build 35’s second big new map location, as well as filling in a bunch of the nowhere-zone cells currently on the PZ map with detail and traces of civilization. She has, however, performed what we call a ‘Mash Smash’ as to revealing what the new area is – wanting it to be a surprise to beta testers when it hits IWBUMS.
TURBO TRANSLATIONS
Turbo has tied his implementation of our community’s fine narrative content translation work(Russian, German, Spanish, Turkish Polish and French right now) to finalising a public version WordZed for the modding community – our in-house radio and TV writing/editing/timing and wavelength broadcast tool. It wasn’t hugely user-friendly formerly (which is why it wasn’t released) but now comes with an added Search functionality, options and a general smoother edit process.
We want to tweak it further, and to write a decent manual, but intend to beta release it in our Community Translation it for feedback as soon as we can. In the mean-time Writer Will has also been editing existing narrative content for use on VHS tapes and CDs for character entertainment and boredom relief after most broadcasts cut out, and is also tapping up some new home-taped content too. This week’s zombie stick-up from Original Nickname of Steamton, Steamshire. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! The BOIT now also flags that our Discord is now open. There are many cats that live in there, and all of them are cool. Oh, and check out the new PZ Status and Build History page if you’re so inclined too.
[ 2016-09-26 21:57:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Smash n' Grab
The public beta of Build 35 now has a pretty goliath changelist, and if you so choose you can get into the IWBUMS action using the info available here. Over the past week there have been three builds: 35.13, 35.14, 35.15 and 35.16 and they’ve covered a bunch of fantastic additions, smoothenings and ‘quality of life’ improvements. Many of these have been direct community suggestions, so if you’d like to add to the pile then you can do so in this handy thread. Here are some notable additions that’ve gone in over the past week:
We’ve got plenty in and working, and doing so in awesome ways, but want to release something for testing once we’ve got the gaps that’ve popped up filled in. Now we’ve got slick animations any omissions, or stuff the game could get away with in its more basic form, stick out like a sore thumb. Formerly we could just have it happen with no animation (have the character walk through the counter to open a window for example) and it’d be fine, now everything looks so good this sort of ‘visual smudge’ looks wrong and really stands out. Another example of this is making ‘looting while carrying a weapon’ look half sensible. We’re going to keep on filling in the gaps rather than throw it out into the mix of the current IWBUMS test, which is a pain but will be worth it in the end. Once we’ve got the Incidentals out of the way (and, yes, that was an Alisha’s Attic reference) we can release and get motoring with the pipeline that leads to all of our other 1.0 features. While we have this back and forth with Martin the Animator we’re also making sure that keyboard and mouse feel fun and responsive with the new system. You can’t turn on a dime with the new animations, so it can feel a little clunky when you’re indoors – so we’re also balancing that as we go along. Likewise we’re making sure that the shift between running and walking, and vice versa, feels nice and responsive. More next week gang, thanks for dropping by. This week’s zombie stick-up from Sergeant Giacomo in Steamsville . The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! The CBOIT is now also excited about our Discord chat too. Oh, and check out Nolan’s awesome Nocturnal Zombies mod.Nolan is cool.
[ 2016-09-19 22:00:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Mondoid time everyone. We’ve got good progress going on the new map stuff, handy feedback being addressed on last week’s VOIP integration tests and should have community radio/TV content going into the test later this week – but here’s the more headliner items:
BUILD 35 IWBUMS
The public beta of Build 35 now has a pretty goliath changelist, and if you so choose you can get into the IWBUMS action using the info available here. Over the past week there have been three builds: 35.13, 35.14, 35.15 and 35.16 and they’ve covered a bunch of fantastic additions, smoothenings and ‘quality of life’ improvements. Many of these have been direct community suggestions, so if you’d like to add to the pile then you can do so in this handy thread. Here are some notable additions that’ve gone in over the past week:
- The container or corpse that your character is currently looting now is now highlighted in orange, meaning that it’s now far easier to be sure you haven’t missed anything. This seems to be making the beta testers make happy noises. (Final colour choice still being debated).
- Drainable items now reduce in weight according to how many times they’ve been used – so water bottles, bags of coal, gas cans etc. get appropriately lighter when they contain less and less. Drainable items can also now be consolidated into one so, for example, two half full gas cans can be now be consolidated into one that’s full and another that’s empty.
- Composting is now in-game, providing a use for rotten food. A wooden compost bin can be built from the Carpentry menu, after which food placed inside will slowly turn into compost. You can then use a sack to retrieve it, and use it to fertilize your crops.
- It was indicated that on MP servers it’d be good to have clearly identifiable crates for particular item storage, so you can now paint anything wooden in your chosen colours – as well as almost any interior walls, which was another request.
- Leaving cooking pots, bowls, buckets or saucepans on the ground when it’s raining will result in them (slowly) filling with rainwater.
- A new smoker trait has been added, which means smoking will reduce stress and increase your character’s happiness, but increase stress and unhappiness if he or she goes without smoking for an extended period. Non-smokers might also feel mild nausea if they have a puff or two.
- Other stuff: UI panel tutorial info added, fatigue/boredom/unhappiness tweaks, Health panel auto-uses inventory items and fire extinguishers added to loot table.
- More other stuff: Park Ranger and Lumberjack move faster through trees, Generators are more drained the more objects they’re plugged into, mail boxes now spawn magazines and newspapers and zombie-damaged sheet rope sprites are now added.
- More, more other stuff: Jars can now be found in packs of six to encourage players to pickle their food. XP balancing. Lots of bugs quietly smothered in their bug beds.
ANIMS
We’ve got plenty in and working, and doing so in awesome ways, but want to release something for testing once we’ve got the gaps that’ve popped up filled in. Now we’ve got slick animations any omissions, or stuff the game could get away with in its more basic form, stick out like a sore thumb. Formerly we could just have it happen with no animation (have the character walk through the counter to open a window for example) and it’d be fine, now everything looks so good this sort of ‘visual smudge’ looks wrong and really stands out. Another example of this is making ‘looting while carrying a weapon’ look half sensible. We’re going to keep on filling in the gaps rather than throw it out into the mix of the current IWBUMS test, which is a pain but will be worth it in the end. Once we’ve got the Incidentals out of the way (and, yes, that was an Alisha’s Attic reference) we can release and get motoring with the pipeline that leads to all of our other 1.0 features. While we have this back and forth with Martin the Animator we’re also making sure that keyboard and mouse feel fun and responsive with the new system. You can’t turn on a dime with the new animations, so it can feel a little clunky when you’re indoors – so we’re also balancing that as we go along. Likewise we’re making sure that the shift between running and walking, and vice versa, feels nice and responsive. More next week gang, thanks for dropping by. This week’s zombie stick-up from Sergeant Giacomo in Steamsville . The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! The CBOIT is now also excited about our Discord chat too. Oh, and check out Nolan’s awesome Nocturnal Zombies mod.Nolan is cool.
[ 2016-09-19 22:00:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
SpiffoLand
The new animations system is the first step in our internal plan to feed all our remaining 1.0 features into the game, something we’ll expand on once we’ve kicked the anims out of the door. Right now we’re under the hood implementing the remaining actions and tying some others into gameplay systems, plus going back and forth with Martin the Animator if anything needs adjusting. We’re also at the stage now that we can spot any stray required animations that slipped through the net. For example in last week’s video we saw the new ‘zombie climbs through a window and over a counter’ animation – but implementing it flagged that we didn’t have that in reverse. Now counters next to windows are collidable again zombies no longer had an exit route, so Martin is on the case. Meanwhile, Binky has been finalising the look of the re-animated zeds – which will in turn be able to have various injury, blood, headwear and clothing overlays.
We’ve had the first drop of General Arcade’s VOIP-ed version of PZ! It still needs finetuning, polish, UI work and complex fiddling on the Mac/Linux versions but the first test carried out over the weekend revealed plenty of encouraging details, alongside spotlighting bugs for our Russian friends to fix. In the words of Benjamin ‘Blindcoder’ Schieder, the man behind the PZ map: “One thing that immediately stood out was that positional sound works great! When another player ran circles around me I heard his voice shift from left headphone speaker to right and back. Very good! Another thing that worked was voices growing quieter with distance, but it currently does so too quickly.” The video of the VOIP test is below, but please remember that this is very much a work in progress. [It’s also getting us quite excited about getting the system tied into Turbo’s in-game radios.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfF8kWwH50M
Mash’s map work continues, with finishing touches to the perimeter of the new residential area now complete. She’s now moving onto some new fun areas that are being dropped into the current map for players to discover. As flagged by Blake81 on the forums, meanwhile, now EP’s tree noise work will let us complete all the wilderness cells on the current map she can also complete the train tracks that many players use as a route between Muld and WP. Writer Will, meanwhile, is working with Turbo on his entertainment/boredom moodle projects – expanding out Zomboid lore into recorded media, and also correcting the many and varied typos in the game that have been flagged by our gallant community translation teams. RJ, meanwhile, sits at the foot of a mountain of the community’s ‘small tweak, big impact’ suggestions that we’d like to integrate into the ongoing Build 35 public IWBUMS test before animations drop into the game – with all the cool new gameplay and features they’ll unlock. A lot of the suggestions have been brilliant so far, so if you have another for the list then please post it up in here. This week’s AMAZING featured image by DramaSetter. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! The BOIT now also flags that our Discord is now open, and that because people seem to prefer it we’ll probably kill off our IRC soon. Oh and, KPACUBO – someone’s trying to tell you something I think?
[ 2016-09-12 21:00:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, welcome back to PZ’s weekly goings-on blog. Let’s delve into what’s going on with some of the features dropping into near-future builds.
ANIMATION/COMBAT/CLOTHING/STUFF
The new animations system is the first step in our internal plan to feed all our remaining 1.0 features into the game, something we’ll expand on once we’ve kicked the anims out of the door. Right now we’re under the hood implementing the remaining actions and tying some others into gameplay systems, plus going back and forth with Martin the Animator if anything needs adjusting. We’re also at the stage now that we can spot any stray required animations that slipped through the net. For example in last week’s video we saw the new ‘zombie climbs through a window and over a counter’ animation – but implementing it flagged that we didn’t have that in reverse. Now counters next to windows are collidable again zombies no longer had an exit route, so Martin is on the case. Meanwhile, Binky has been finalising the look of the re-animated zeds – which will in turn be able to have various injury, blood, headwear and clothing overlays.
VOIP
We’ve had the first drop of General Arcade’s VOIP-ed version of PZ! It still needs finetuning, polish, UI work and complex fiddling on the Mac/Linux versions but the first test carried out over the weekend revealed plenty of encouraging details, alongside spotlighting bugs for our Russian friends to fix. In the words of Benjamin ‘Blindcoder’ Schieder, the man behind the PZ map: “One thing that immediately stood out was that positional sound works great! When another player ran circles around me I heard his voice shift from left headphone speaker to right and back. Very good! Another thing that worked was voices growing quieter with distance, but it currently does so too quickly.” The video of the VOIP test is below, but please remember that this is very much a work in progress. [It’s also getting us quite excited about getting the system tied into Turbo’s in-game radios.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfF8kWwH50M
OTHER STUFF
Mash’s map work continues, with finishing touches to the perimeter of the new residential area now complete. She’s now moving onto some new fun areas that are being dropped into the current map for players to discover. As flagged by Blake81 on the forums, meanwhile, now EP’s tree noise work will let us complete all the wilderness cells on the current map she can also complete the train tracks that many players use as a route between Muld and WP. Writer Will, meanwhile, is working with Turbo on his entertainment/boredom moodle projects – expanding out Zomboid lore into recorded media, and also correcting the many and varied typos in the game that have been flagged by our gallant community translation teams. RJ, meanwhile, sits at the foot of a mountain of the community’s ‘small tweak, big impact’ suggestions that we’d like to integrate into the ongoing Build 35 public IWBUMS test before animations drop into the game – with all the cool new gameplay and features they’ll unlock. A lot of the suggestions have been brilliant so far, so if you have another for the list then please post it up in here. This week’s AMAZING featured image by DramaSetter. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! The BOIT now also flags that our Discord is now open, and that because people seem to prefer it we’ll probably kill off our IRC soon. Oh and, KPACUBO – someone’s trying to tell you something I think?
[ 2016-09-12 21:00:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Waking the Zeds
Work on anims is pretty intense at the moment, not least because once they’re out there in future builds we can finally start dropping all the background dev work we’ve been accumulating into the game. We’re still tying the anims into gameplay proper, and making some optimizations while we do so, with the current focus being on the zombies themselves. Here’s a WIP look at some anims that we don’t think you’ve seen before. There’s a few bits of weirdness (zombie skin colour, clipping and whatnot) but please forgive that if poss! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiUy7ljuVwc Animator Martin has also made a close-up vid of the animations for your delectation, although clearly the skin and look aren’t how they now are in-game. Oh, and we didn’t show you this video of ladies at work the other week either. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9_zXxqrsks
Mash is now wrapping up on the new residential area that’ll be found to the South of Muldraugh, and is now turning her attention to dropping in some interesting new locations to explore and hold out in over the map-at-large. We’d like most of this content to come as nice mini-surprises when it’s all dropped into the 35 IWBUMS, but managed to wrestle an image of Mash’s new townhouses from her grasp.
Our favourite Russian-types General Arcade, who beaver away at the larger-scale MP improvements while we concentrate on the main game, report that they’ve made a lot of good progress on getting VOIP into Zomboid, and that all our planned features have been implemented – with adjustments, finetuning and general compatibility stuff now to follow. “Basic VOIP is definitely working well, and voice quality and bandwidth consumption are quite nice” explains lovely Sergei Shubin. “3D sound positioning is also working well! The most complex feature is AEC – Acoustic Echo Cancellation – and one of our next jobs is to test it out thoroughly. Currently everything works well on Windows in non-Steam mode. Other platform and Steam support is what we’re working on at the moment.”
RJ’s work in the IWBUMS public beta channel continues. His current focus is on ‘small but impactful’ stuff that’s been on the ‘to do’ list for ages, and of course that’s being suggested by the community, so that it’s all been tidied up before the animations drop in. As covered last week there’s now improved fall damage, randomised starting conditions, towels that dry (!) and much more besides. The latest, 35.12, doubles down on the inventory improvements – bringing in ‘favorited’ items alongside 35.11’s ‘Transfer All’ button and a more Windows-esque approach to Ctrl and Shift selecting items in your bags and inventories. There are also updated tool-tips so it’s clearer what your looted equipment is capable of, and an adjustment to how/where fire spreads in-game. It sounds like Turbo is also ready to start dropping his community translations, entertainment work and other stuff into testing too – so hopefully that’ll start appearing soon.
A few notes of goings on! First off, if your toast is buttered that way, then there’s a brand new PZ Community Discord channel that’s recently opened for business. Find it here: Secondly, our thanks to Connall for his recent improvements to the Bug Tracker which, as ever, intrepid error-chasers can find here. Finally, there’s a survey being run about exactly what brings about your demise in PZ – so we can get an idea of what causes the most fatalities currently in-game. It lives behind the link that’s behind the word ‘survey’ in the previous sentence. Thanks you! This week’s featured image, again, by the inappropriately named Dildo_Baggins. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Oh, and it should probably flag the Discord from now on too.
[ 2016-09-05 23:34:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Good evening all, and happy Tuesdoid to those in hemispheres different to our own. Here’s the latest!
ANIMS:
Work on anims is pretty intense at the moment, not least because once they’re out there in future builds we can finally start dropping all the background dev work we’ve been accumulating into the game. We’re still tying the anims into gameplay proper, and making some optimizations while we do so, with the current focus being on the zombies themselves. Here’s a WIP look at some anims that we don’t think you’ve seen before. There’s a few bits of weirdness (zombie skin colour, clipping and whatnot) but please forgive that if poss! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiUy7ljuVwc Animator Martin has also made a close-up vid of the animations for your delectation, although clearly the skin and look aren’t how they now are in-game. Oh, and we didn’t show you this video of ladies at work the other week either. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9_zXxqrsks
MAPPAGE:
Mash is now wrapping up on the new residential area that’ll be found to the South of Muldraugh, and is now turning her attention to dropping in some interesting new locations to explore and hold out in over the map-at-large. We’d like most of this content to come as nice mini-surprises when it’s all dropped into the 35 IWBUMS, but managed to wrestle an image of Mash’s new townhouses from her grasp.
VOIP-AGE
Our favourite Russian-types General Arcade, who beaver away at the larger-scale MP improvements while we concentrate on the main game, report that they’ve made a lot of good progress on getting VOIP into Zomboid, and that all our planned features have been implemented – with adjustments, finetuning and general compatibility stuff now to follow. “Basic VOIP is definitely working well, and voice quality and bandwidth consumption are quite nice” explains lovely Sergei Shubin. “3D sound positioning is also working well! The most complex feature is AEC – Acoustic Echo Cancellation – and one of our next jobs is to test it out thoroughly. Currently everything works well on Windows in non-Steam mode. Other platform and Steam support is what we’re working on at the moment.”
35 IWBUMS
RJ’s work in the IWBUMS public beta channel continues. His current focus is on ‘small but impactful’ stuff that’s been on the ‘to do’ list for ages, and of course that’s being suggested by the community, so that it’s all been tidied up before the animations drop in. As covered last week there’s now improved fall damage, randomised starting conditions, towels that dry (!) and much more besides. The latest, 35.12, doubles down on the inventory improvements – bringing in ‘favorited’ items alongside 35.11’s ‘Transfer All’ button and a more Windows-esque approach to Ctrl and Shift selecting items in your bags and inventories. There are also updated tool-tips so it’s clearer what your looted equipment is capable of, and an adjustment to how/where fire spreads in-game. It sounds like Turbo is also ready to start dropping his community translations, entertainment work and other stuff into testing too – so hopefully that’ll start appearing soon.
COMMUNITY BITS/BOBS
A few notes of goings on! First off, if your toast is buttered that way, then there’s a brand new PZ Community Discord channel that’s recently opened for business. Find it here: Secondly, our thanks to Connall for his recent improvements to the Bug Tracker which, as ever, intrepid error-chasers can find here. Finally, there’s a survey being run about exactly what brings about your demise in PZ – so we can get an idea of what causes the most fatalities currently in-game. It lives behind the link that’s behind the word ‘survey’ in the previous sentence. Thanks you! This week’s featured image, again, by the inappropriately named Dildo_Baggins. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Oh, and it should probably flag the Discord from now on too.
[ 2016-09-05 23:34:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello ladies
The release of the combat/anims/clothing build will open up the path to plugging in the big pile of work we’ve done for our remaining feature milestones. It will also, meanwhile, provide coders like RJ with a deluge of fun new jobs like zoning the ‘career zombies’, adding in new weapons, sounds etc. As such, in the remaining time before the anims go in, the Build 35 IWBUMS will be used to do lots of ‘small job, big impact’ jobs that we’ve been meaning to do since forever – many of them community and mod team suggestions that’ve been stacking up. As IWBUMS public beta testers are aware – from build 35.9 zombies will be able to tear down sheet ropes, while in future builds we’ll tie sheet rope breakage and fall damage to player weight and attributes. We’ll also be finally letting towels dry, giving some foods a thirst value, making rotten food disappear rather than be a permanent fixture – that sort of thing. It’s basically ticking off a bunch of ‘small stuff’ that’s been nagging on players in one big go before the animations arrive with all the extra (and awesome) potential that they bring. If you have any such suggestions,like this one nudging us towards tying the ‘E’ button to TVs and channel changes, then please drop ‘em in the forums.
Just a quick note to say that PZ will have a presence at this weekend’s Insomnia gaming event at the Birmingham NEC, and a few members of the team who aren’t banging upcoming builds with spanners will be present on the Sunday and Monday if you want to come over and say hello. This week’s topless survivor by Eden404 of Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-08-23 00:15:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
The ladies have finally made it into the animation build! After a couple of weeks of puzzling incompatibilities and glitches across the export chain, we got everyone together and finally winkled numerous bugs out of the system. So now all the female models are working with the animations that’ve been exported and thrown into the PZ mainframe so far.
As we mentioned before, until the animation build is good to go we’re not going to do Mondoid videos as the time they take to produce/edit/whatever diverts us away from cranking the actual new systems out into the open. That said, we can still show you a few images of the new lady survivors in action.
This should stand as the last technological hurdle for the getting the anims out into testing, although there could possibly be some multiplayer sync issues to work out that would make us consider a single player anim branch initially if that were to turn out to be the case.
Since we’ve been focused on getting the female models working in-game for a fair wedge of the last little while we still have some of the ‘tying in’ of the new animation and combat system to finish off. There’s still a fair few fixes and things to add ahead of us too, but getting the women into the game was by far the biggest. So we’re definitely edging much closer to getting this stuff out there to you all but, as usual, will refrain from putting a specific ETA on it.
Build 35 IWBUMS
The release of the combat/anims/clothing build will open up the path to plugging in the big pile of work we’ve done for our remaining feature milestones. It will also, meanwhile, provide coders like RJ with a deluge of fun new jobs like zoning the ‘career zombies’, adding in new weapons, sounds etc. As such, in the remaining time before the anims go in, the Build 35 IWBUMS will be used to do lots of ‘small job, big impact’ jobs that we’ve been meaning to do since forever – many of them community and mod team suggestions that’ve been stacking up. As IWBUMS public beta testers are aware – from build 35.9 zombies will be able to tear down sheet ropes, while in future builds we’ll tie sheet rope breakage and fall damage to player weight and attributes. We’ll also be finally letting towels dry, giving some foods a thirst value, making rotten food disappear rather than be a permanent fixture – that sort of thing. It’s basically ticking off a bunch of ‘small stuff’ that’s been nagging on players in one big go before the animations arrive with all the extra (and awesome) potential that they bring. If you have any such suggestions,like this one nudging us towards tying the ‘E’ button to TVs and channel changes, then please drop ‘em in the forums.
Insomnia
Just a quick note to say that PZ will have a presence at this weekend’s Insomnia gaming event at the Birmingham NEC, and a few members of the team who aren’t banging upcoming builds with spanners will be present on the Sunday and Monday if you want to come over and say hello. This week’s topless survivor by Eden404 of Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-08-23 00:15:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
Pancake House (of death)
RJ seems to have ironed out the majority of headline bugs in the current open IWBUMS betaof the first Build 35 features. Gameplay feedback would still be much appreciated though. You can find details on how to join here. In the past week we’ve had 35.7 and 35.8 that (among a bunch of other things) makes wall frames easier to click on, allows construction materials to be removed from your backpack during barricading and ties room size into the panic felt by claustrophobic traits. There’s also a new MP server option ‘FastForwardMultiplier’ that defines how much time accelerates when all players are sleeping. We’ll see how work in the anims branch goes in the next week or so in terms of whether we release 35’s sleeping/nutrition/building/metal content to the wider PZ audience before an immediate new animations IWBUMS test, or integrate it with the snazzy new combat/clothing and whatnot. In the mean-time however, as mentioned last week, RJ is coding in some tutorial-style information windows and also working with Writer Will to make sure new players get all the info they need to know about PZ’s ever-expanding roster of backpack contents. He’s also going to be doing some exploratory work into how to finesse our current house alarm system.
Unfortunately we’re still having problems getting the female models to behave. It’s a really odd problem and we’ve tried numerous things to get them to work properly in-game. We’re not sure if it may be something strange going on with the .X file exporter we’re using, but we have lit the beacons and are getting everyone together in the same office this week so we can have a better coordinated look under the hood to try and figure it out. Work on the rest of the animation build is going well, though obviously the female bug hunting has taken up a lot of time we’ve still made progress in getting the rest of the build sorted. This is why we don’t do ETAs, as stuff like this always seems to glee in popping out of the woodwork as you approach the day you expect to release stuff. Here’s a few images of ladies getting up to mischief without last week’s nightmare fuel. [The lady’s face will benefit from the different lighting in-game and isometric-ness btw, and we can probably play around with her textures too.]
Mash’s work continues on the new residential area south of Muldraugh. Also back for a quick spell on mapping is EasyPickins, who has created a ‘tree noise generator’ to make the wilderness more random/realistic and less clumpy. Here’s a ‘before’ shot, and here’s one from ‘after’ – although these are only pines, and don’t show the new big trees either.
This will impact on 90% of our current map cells on the overall PZ map – everything that hasn’t been manually updated basically. It will make all future groundwork for new areas a lot less troublesome for Binky.
Just a quick note to say that we’ll be showing Project Zomboid at Insomnia in Birmingham between the 26th and 29th of August on a stand with a few of our indie chums. We’re not sure how many of the team will be along what with all the work we have on, but if you’re around then there’ll be someone there to pop over and say hello to. This week’s featured image by Slothy J of the vast Steam conglomerate. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Byeees.
[ 2016-08-15 21:05:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, it’s that day of the week once more…
BUILD 35
RJ seems to have ironed out the majority of headline bugs in the current open IWBUMS betaof the first Build 35 features. Gameplay feedback would still be much appreciated though. You can find details on how to join here. In the past week we’ve had 35.7 and 35.8 that (among a bunch of other things) makes wall frames easier to click on, allows construction materials to be removed from your backpack during barricading and ties room size into the panic felt by claustrophobic traits. There’s also a new MP server option ‘FastForwardMultiplier’ that defines how much time accelerates when all players are sleeping. We’ll see how work in the anims branch goes in the next week or so in terms of whether we release 35’s sleeping/nutrition/building/metal content to the wider PZ audience before an immediate new animations IWBUMS test, or integrate it with the snazzy new combat/clothing and whatnot. In the mean-time however, as mentioned last week, RJ is coding in some tutorial-style information windows and also working with Writer Will to make sure new players get all the info they need to know about PZ’s ever-expanding roster of backpack contents. He’s also going to be doing some exploratory work into how to finesse our current house alarm system.
ANIMS
Unfortunately we’re still having problems getting the female models to behave. It’s a really odd problem and we’ve tried numerous things to get them to work properly in-game. We’re not sure if it may be something strange going on with the .X file exporter we’re using, but we have lit the beacons and are getting everyone together in the same office this week so we can have a better coordinated look under the hood to try and figure it out. Work on the rest of the animation build is going well, though obviously the female bug hunting has taken up a lot of time we’ve still made progress in getting the rest of the build sorted. This is why we don’t do ETAs, as stuff like this always seems to glee in popping out of the woodwork as you approach the day you expect to release stuff. Here’s a few images of ladies getting up to mischief without last week’s nightmare fuel. [The lady’s face will benefit from the different lighting in-game and isometric-ness btw, and we can probably play around with her textures too.]
MAPPAGE
Mash’s work continues on the new residential area south of Muldraugh. Also back for a quick spell on mapping is EasyPickins, who has created a ‘tree noise generator’ to make the wilderness more random/realistic and less clumpy. Here’s a ‘before’ shot, and here’s one from ‘after’ – although these are only pines, and don’t show the new big trees either.
This will impact on 90% of our current map cells on the overall PZ map – everything that hasn’t been manually updated basically. It will make all future groundwork for new areas a lot less troublesome for Binky.
INSOMNIA
Just a quick note to say that we’ll be showing Project Zomboid at Insomnia in Birmingham between the 26th and 29th of August on a stand with a few of our indie chums. We’re not sure how many of the team will be along what with all the work we have on, but if you’re around then there’ll be someone there to pop over and say hello to. This week’s featured image by Slothy J of the vast Steam conglomerate. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Byeees.
[ 2016-08-15 21:05:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Protect the Spiff
The public IWBUMS beta test for the first Build 35 features remains going, with RJ pushingversions 35.4 to 35.6 over the past week. We’ve forced the nutrition system to ‘on’ and also upped the rate of sleep disturbances for extra feedback, in amongst the fixes and smoothening. There are also new skill books, metalwork recipes, sounds and an experimental link-up between carrying a watch and the UI digital clock. RJ will still be adding to the build and balancing away (the various different wall strengths need some attention) but will also be turning his attention, alongside Writer Will, to add a Rimworld-style ‘Show info’ option (as suggested in this forum thread) for useful in-game objects so that new and existing players can be sure they’re aware of all relevant actions open to them, and the dangers associated.
Progress has been good on the animation system front, but super-irritatingly the lady survivors and lady zed meshes and clothing that were exported and deposited in the central development strongbox have snagged an issue – and will likely need a re-export to ensure they don’t look like nightmare fuel. This isn’t a blocker to getting it all sorted, we’ll still be working on other necessary parts of the anims system, but it’ll likely be a massive ballache for poor old Martin the Animator to go through it all manually re-exporting it all. Sorry Martin, but your pain is for a greater good. :’(
Mash continues with her work on the new residential area that’ll be found to the South of Muldraugh. When pressured for something visual to entice survivors she proffered this image of a local community centre, where you can see the upper floor of a library with study rooms, a gym, kiddie area and whatnot.
Turbo is ticking stuff off his entertainment/boredom system ‘to do’ list and has decided to use the opportunity to bring in a long-term computer-y side project into the game alongside the videotapes, books and CDs you’ll use to entertain yourself in long-term lonesome situations. He’s also got community translations running through the radio/TV system, which will be available as selectable toggles in the options UI alongside credits to the relevant translation teams.
Thanks all, we should have a more exciting blog for y’all next week. Have a good one. This week’s featured image by Akhil of House Gabe. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Thx all.
[ 2016-08-08 21:20:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, let’s get down to Mondoidin’
IWBUMS 35
The public IWBUMS beta test for the first Build 35 features remains going, with RJ pushingversions 35.4 to 35.6 over the past week. We’ve forced the nutrition system to ‘on’ and also upped the rate of sleep disturbances for extra feedback, in amongst the fixes and smoothening. There are also new skill books, metalwork recipes, sounds and an experimental link-up between carrying a watch and the UI digital clock. RJ will still be adding to the build and balancing away (the various different wall strengths need some attention) but will also be turning his attention, alongside Writer Will, to add a Rimworld-style ‘Show info’ option (as suggested in this forum thread) for useful in-game objects so that new and existing players can be sure they’re aware of all relevant actions open to them, and the dangers associated.
ANIMS UPDATE
Progress has been good on the animation system front, but super-irritatingly the lady survivors and lady zed meshes and clothing that were exported and deposited in the central development strongbox have snagged an issue – and will likely need a re-export to ensure they don’t look like nightmare fuel. This isn’t a blocker to getting it all sorted, we’ll still be working on other necessary parts of the anims system, but it’ll likely be a massive ballache for poor old Martin the Animator to go through it all manually re-exporting it all. Sorry Martin, but your pain is for a greater good. :’(
MAP UPDATE
Mash continues with her work on the new residential area that’ll be found to the South of Muldraugh. When pressured for something visual to entice survivors she proffered this image of a local community centre, where you can see the upper floor of a library with study rooms, a gym, kiddie area and whatnot.
TURBO STUFF
Turbo is ticking stuff off his entertainment/boredom system ‘to do’ list and has decided to use the opportunity to bring in a long-term computer-y side project into the game alongside the videotapes, books and CDs you’ll use to entertain yourself in long-term lonesome situations. He’s also got community translations running through the radio/TV system, which will be available as selectable toggles in the options UI alongside credits to the relevant translation teams.
Thanks all, we should have a more exciting blog for y’all next week. Have a good one. This week’s featured image by Akhil of House Gabe. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Thx all.
[ 2016-08-08 21:20:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
Thirty fivin'
The public IWBUMS test of some of Build 35’s features (reworked building, metal defences, big trees, nutrition, revamped sleeping system, night events etc) is ongoing and people seem to be liking it. We’ve now run through 35.1, 35.2 and 35.3 and recent changes include new skill books, clearer recipes, new sounds, object deconstruction balance, welding rods, sleep/pain balance and a bunch of other bug fixes. We need especially need feedback on how the sleeping system and welding change/improve the feel of the gameplay, so if you’re taking the IWBUMS build for a spin then please deposit your thoughts in this thread. The bug tracker, meanwhile, lives here.
As discussed last week, all the relevant tech and anims are now in our dev branch – and what’s going on behind the scenes is tying all together. The ladies have been finished by Binky and have been passed over to Animator Martin to do the final stage of integrating the women, getting the clothing sized appropriately for them, making sure all the anims work okay with them etc. Here’s a WIP lady model vid, with a quick image for good measure. (Martin’s only received the female stuff today, so it’s all fairly rough at the present time.)
Meanwhile Lemmy been working on the remainder of integrating the anims and clothing into the gameplay, making sure opening/climbing through windows works, getting the weapon models integrated with the inventory etc, and is currently working on getting the clothing items working with the inventory system. There’s still more to do but we’re getting there.
We haven’t expanded the PZ map in a while, and with Louisville still a ways off we’re currently building a new residential area to the south for Build 35. We’ll leave the specifics as a surprise, but it’ll add an engaging new option to the usual WP/Muld spawn decision. While we’re back in the map, too, we’ll look at additions such as a body of water for Muld so ardent fishermen and fisherladies (for example) get more choice in their play area. Till next week gang! Cheers for reading! This week’s featured image by Большой Ник in Steamland. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-08-01 19:45:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
Something of an intermediary Mondoid this week, while RJ cranks out Build 35 features and fixes – while the wires of the new animation, clothing, model and combat systems we’ve developed are hooked up to the PZ mainframe.
BUILD 35 IWBUMS
The public IWBUMS test of some of Build 35’s features (reworked building, metal defences, big trees, nutrition, revamped sleeping system, night events etc) is ongoing and people seem to be liking it. We’ve now run through 35.1, 35.2 and 35.3 and recent changes include new skill books, clearer recipes, new sounds, object deconstruction balance, welding rods, sleep/pain balance and a bunch of other bug fixes. We need especially need feedback on how the sleeping system and welding change/improve the feel of the gameplay, so if you’re taking the IWBUMS build for a spin then please deposit your thoughts in this thread. The bug tracker, meanwhile, lives here.
ANIMS BIT
As discussed last week, all the relevant tech and anims are now in our dev branch – and what’s going on behind the scenes is tying all together. The ladies have been finished by Binky and have been passed over to Animator Martin to do the final stage of integrating the women, getting the clothing sized appropriately for them, making sure all the anims work okay with them etc. Here’s a WIP lady model vid, with a quick image for good measure. (Martin’s only received the female stuff today, so it’s all fairly rough at the present time.)
Meanwhile Lemmy been working on the remainder of integrating the anims and clothing into the gameplay, making sure opening/climbing through windows works, getting the weapon models integrated with the inventory etc, and is currently working on getting the clothing items working with the inventory system. There’s still more to do but we’re getting there.
MAP WORK
We haven’t expanded the PZ map in a while, and with Louisville still a ways off we’re currently building a new residential area to the south for Build 35. We’ll leave the specifics as a surprise, but it’ll add an engaging new option to the usual WP/Muld spawn decision. While we’re back in the map, too, we’ll look at additions such as a body of water for Muld so ardent fishermen and fisherladies (for example) get more choice in their play area. Till next week gang! Cheers for reading! This week’s featured image by Большой Ник in Steamland. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-08-01 19:45:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
IWBUMS AWAY!
Pretty much all the tech and anims are now in the game and we’re getting really close, but as mentioned above, there are still a few things that need to be completed before we could possibly release it in IWBUMs. Notable things are:
To those that may be frustrated about certain specific features not getting talked about, we’ve got a very detailed plan underway behind the scenes that we simply don’t want to talk about too much until the build that lays the foundation for what comes next (the animation build) is out there in player’s hands. We’ve learned a lesson about talking about stuff too early in the past and feel very strongly that the best time to open up about them is when the animation stuff is out there and ticked off. Regardless we’ve been making a lot of internal plans how to approach all this stuff and feel it a good idea to gingerly point at them even though we’re not ready to start talking freely about the specifics. Once this build has finally been released to everyone, we will be a lot more forthcoming with our future schedule that will see pretty much all the so far promised yet unreleased features begin to drop into subsequent builds. We have a 5 step road-map that will hopefully cover 5 consecutive builds all containing very exciting stuff (yes, this includes THAT feature too), and have had plenty of work being carried out on numerous of the big features going on in the background, that we’re holding close to our chests until the right time to start talking about it. Each step of the 5 stage road-map, of which the animation build is the first fundamental stage, provides big and meaningful features while simultaneously laying the foundation for the next stage. Also each stage crucially allows us to release–in pieces that are easier to manage, test, bug fix, and polish–the huge pile of stuff we’ve been constructing in the shadows behind the scenes for a long time, yet have had some trouble connecting all the wires and circuit boards together into a working and releasable whole. That’s as forthcoming we’re comfortable with right now, as we don’t want any hype trains leaving the station too long before their departure time–but to those who have been frustrated by the radio silence on certain things mentioned on our store page’s ‘planned features’, we want you know that we do have some very specific tracks laid out, and we’re really excited to start seeing this stuff fall into place.
In other news, we had an update from the awesome peoples at General Arcade the other day, letting us know that the first big step in the development of Zomboid Voice over IP system has been completed. They have managed to transmit voice communication over the zomboid server connection, with a good latency and quality reported. At the moment they are being transmitted to the server and mixed together into a single stream to be broadcast back, so going forward the work will be to allow for independent streams back and forth between clients, as well as work on further improving the voice quality, and ultimately in tying the voice communication into player proximity. We’re super excited for the VOIP features, that will not only ease the requirement of coming to a complete stand-still amidst a horde of bitey undead to frantically type ‘HELP ME’, but we hope will also usher in a new age of online role-playing servers and open up more scope for multiplayer encounters. This week’s featured image by Gilga Mesch out in the provinces of Gabenland. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-07-25 16:58:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 35 IWBUMs has begun! To the uninitiated, the ‘I Will Back Up My Save’ is the PZ beta branch and details on how to access it can be found here.
You can also find a changelist here with the main additions to the build.
Whilst we’ve got some really cool stuff to release in today’s IWBUMs; the new welding system, multi-stage wall construction, dismantling furniture and other world tiles for materials, a new sleeping system, and realistic big trees in the wilderness being the headliners — this is not the complete feature set planned for build 35. Instead of holding it back until everything was in, we wanted to get some new stuff out there for people to play with, as we’re mindful that it’s been a while since our last build–however there is still plenty more to come, which will drop into the build in the subsequent bug fix builds, before it is promoted to the main branch and released to all.
The main big feature that will drop into the IWBUMs further along the way is obviously the animation and clothing overhaul, and while there are still a few things to finish off, we’ll likely hold back the IWBUMs until that is ready to drop into it. As such you should expect this particular IWBUMs to go on for some time, as the animation system will likely yield a whole bunch of bugs and compatibility issues that need to be resolved once it lands, and it will also likely play havoc with the game balance, which is something we certainly need our community to help us fix up.
ANIMATION TODO
Pretty much all the tech and anims are now in the game and we’re getting really close, but as mentioned above, there are still a few things that need to be completed before we could possibly release it in IWBUMs. Notable things are:
- Females – We’re still in the process of running the ladies through the same model and texture revamp that allowed for the new clothing and overlay system you’ve seen in previous Mondoids. They are close but not quite done yet. Right now it’s a bit of a sausage fest and that will not do.
- Dead bodies – at the moment, the dead bodies of zombies seen in previous videos are actually still 3D models lying stationary on the ground with collision disabled. Anyone who’s played PZ will know quite how many bodies can accumulate, and that this is not a great long-term situation for zombie carcasses and frame rates playing nice together. We will need to adapt the current build 34 system (effectively taking a photo snap of the 3D dead body and using that texture in future to represent the body from that point on), however due to the optimizations and improvements made and changes in the method of isometric drawing of 3D models there are a few hurdles we have to overcome to get this working with the animation build.
- We need to make sure the entire game is playable with the new anims – Some things like climbing through windows, climbing over high fences, and a few other things need fixing up since they were broken by the bag system, model, and texture revamp. They won’t take long to fix, but we need to do a pass over the game and make sure there are no others that have cropped up that escaped our notice, and that all interactions the player can do work properly with the new animation system.
- Balancing of the new combat, along with tying a few things into the existing zomboid damage and weapon / player stats system, tying the new sprint animations into sprint speed and a few other things of this ilk. A chunk of this may be something we can do during IWBUMs however, we’ll see how it goes but we want to make sure the first version plays okay.
WHERE NEXT?
To those that may be frustrated about certain specific features not getting talked about, we’ve got a very detailed plan underway behind the scenes that we simply don’t want to talk about too much until the build that lays the foundation for what comes next (the animation build) is out there in player’s hands. We’ve learned a lesson about talking about stuff too early in the past and feel very strongly that the best time to open up about them is when the animation stuff is out there and ticked off. Regardless we’ve been making a lot of internal plans how to approach all this stuff and feel it a good idea to gingerly point at them even though we’re not ready to start talking freely about the specifics. Once this build has finally been released to everyone, we will be a lot more forthcoming with our future schedule that will see pretty much all the so far promised yet unreleased features begin to drop into subsequent builds. We have a 5 step road-map that will hopefully cover 5 consecutive builds all containing very exciting stuff (yes, this includes THAT feature too), and have had plenty of work being carried out on numerous of the big features going on in the background, that we’re holding close to our chests until the right time to start talking about it. Each step of the 5 stage road-map, of which the animation build is the first fundamental stage, provides big and meaningful features while simultaneously laying the foundation for the next stage. Also each stage crucially allows us to release–in pieces that are easier to manage, test, bug fix, and polish–the huge pile of stuff we’ve been constructing in the shadows behind the scenes for a long time, yet have had some trouble connecting all the wires and circuit boards together into a working and releasable whole. That’s as forthcoming we’re comfortable with right now, as we don’t want any hype trains leaving the station too long before their departure time–but to those who have been frustrated by the radio silence on certain things mentioned on our store page’s ‘planned features’, we want you know that we do have some very specific tracks laid out, and we’re really excited to start seeing this stuff fall into place.
VOIPing
In other news, we had an update from the awesome peoples at General Arcade the other day, letting us know that the first big step in the development of Zomboid Voice over IP system has been completed. They have managed to transmit voice communication over the zomboid server connection, with a good latency and quality reported. At the moment they are being transmitted to the server and mixed together into a single stream to be broadcast back, so going forward the work will be to allow for independent streams back and forth between clients, as well as work on further improving the voice quality, and ultimately in tying the voice communication into player proximity. We’re super excited for the VOIP features, that will not only ease the requirement of coming to a complete stand-still amidst a horde of bitey undead to frantically type ‘HELP ME’, but we hope will also usher in a new age of online role-playing servers and open up more scope for multiplayer encounters. This week’s featured image by Gilga Mesch out in the provinces of Gabenland. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-07-25 16:58:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Die in Style
[ 2016-07-18 19:15:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey Mondoideers! (Yes, that’s Mondoid, not Monoid!)
One big factor we’re wanting to nail with the clothing update is variety and customization. With the new overlay system it allows us to do some funky stuff to vastly increase the variety in clothing with little cost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPqcrgFxrR8
Bear in mind that the logos shown are temporary and just present for a lowly art challenged programmer to test the system, and we’ll likely be getting less Spiffo / TIS / Romain-centric logos in the final version. Also some of the colours picked by the system are a little clashy at the moment as the system hasn’t had colour-complementary fashion sense programmed into its synapses.
With just a few templates at present that will no doubt expand before release, we can already composite them together in different combinations to allow for a multitude of designs and patterns for t-shirts, tracksuits, coats or any other item of clothing. Along with decal logos and the like, of which one thing we’d love to do is allow these textures to be transmitted to servers in multiplayer games, allowing players to take their own clothing designs with their characters to add some extra identity (and also give people some unique things to pick up off their dead corpses, as well as making their zombie selves more instantly identifiable in the event of them turning). However it’s unlikely that this feature would make it into the initial version since we already have plenty on our plate getting the new animation system and clothing update ready for launch.
Meanwhile, RJ has been finishing off the welding system within the metalworking overhaul, although the smelting aspect of the metalworking build is still getting a lot of discussion and it’s not clear if this particular aspect will make it into the next version, as the system is constantly under debate and scrutiny from the team to make sure we avoid the game becoming too unrealistic and ‘Minecrafty’–which was something a lot of our community were concerned about previously, and this is a concern we take seriously.
In addition to the welding, RJ has been working on new sleeping events and balances detailed in previous Mondoids, and it is now sat in closed testing alongside Tim and Mash’s awesome new jumbo trees and numerous other fixes and balances. Nutrition has also been changed a bit, specifically balancing to have a more linear progression of the weight gain/loss instead of steps depending on your weight trait (obese, skinny etc) which should help balance out the system to the point that it could be activated for Survival mode. We’re getting feedback from a few testers and fixing any of the more serious issues that crop up before it could potentially see the wider world outside in IWBUMs.
Once released to IWBUMs it will likely remain in there for a while until animation update is ready to join the features already there, or if it feels stable soon after we’ll push it out to everyone and start a new IWBUMs for the anims. Whichever comes first.
Elsewhere in Zomboidland, Turbo is working on a catch all system for handling multimedia recordings for stuff like hi-fis, videos, arcades, tape recorders and possibly computers. This will be able to tie into the overhaul he’s currently doing to the entertainment and boredom systems in the game, as well as giving us a lot of options to extend the lore in the game, and plenty of fun opportunities for players in multiplayer to leave or transmit looped recordings for others to find. This is something we hope to integrate into the VOIP system when that lands, but of course lots of consideration will be needed into how the data from this will be managed and how much of a strain this could pose to servers, so we’ll need to see where we stand on that when the time comes.
This week’s featured image by Легенда on that there Steam.
The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-07-18 19:15:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
Night Terrors
In RJ’s case we wanted to get back to the feeling that falling asleep in the zombie apocalypse is a dangerous thing to do, just as it was back in the earliest builds of PZ. As such this week RJ has been coding in a reduced player control on when you’re actually able to sleep (so if you’re anxious or in pain you might require sleeping pills) and also removing control from what time you actually wake up in SP and local co-op. RJ has also been inside the Sadistic AI Director so that he can better govern zombie movement and intrusions while you’re sleeping. “Basically, if you’re going to sleep in the next build then you need to be extra-sure that the TV is off, the curtains are closed and the lights are off.” he explained, when he received his weekly Mondoid prod. “We’re looking into zombie behaviour a bit, and buildings with zombies outside and have light showing or sounds audible could attract attention. These events will be rare, but enough to keep you on edge – just as anxious characters might wake in the middle of the night now.” “My next job will be to remove the choice of how much time you want to sleep, and adding a working alarm clock system for you, and maybe your nearby co-sleepers. You might want to be careful to turn the alarm off if you waking up early and go off scavenging with your clock in your backpack though!” In terms of general tweaks from community suggestions and improvements it’s also worth noting that in the next build RJ has also coded in some nerfs to the Lucky trait (abundant Spiffo plushies will be no more L ), some extra and more easily identifiable skill books where they were previously lacking, a bunch of new items relevant to metalwork, more world-filler to flesh out your shelf space and the ability to turn off helicopter/gunshot meta-game events in your sandbox options.
While he waits for more community radio/TV translation work to roll in (Russian is in the works!) Turbo is currently working on ways to tie the system closer to gameplay through their impact on the boredom moodle, and then the boredom moodle’s impact on the player. As we’ve mentioned before, we also need to finish off the work that sees XP/recipes learned from certain shows. He’s also working on improving the visual/audio aspect of this system to make it feel like a bigger part of the game world. As a test-bed for this, here’s a rough and ready (and very WIP!)vid of a community suggestion that came up when thinking of ways to make the game feel a bit more 90s.
Finally, a public service announcement. Blindcoder’s amazing PZ map project has a new home at http://map.projectzomboid.com/, so it’s all nice and official – albeit still under the strict custodianship of Mister Blindcoder. There’s still work to be done on the 2x overlays for some of the community maps, but BC is happy to throw the doors open to the general public, and asks for any issues to be reported on the PZ forums. As ever, our eternal thanks go out to Benjamin and his amazing work on this. This week’s featured image by Spot on your Steam service over there.The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes directly to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-07-11 18:14:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi there survivors. Work continues on the animation, combat, blood, gore and clothing systems that will in turn unlock the implementation of our final primary game features. We’ve had new textures going into the system (different clothing, like long-sleeved shirts) but most of the work has been under the hood, so this week’s Mondoid isn’t quite the blow-out that the last one was.
That said, we’re expecting an internal test build of nu-nutrition, metalwork and sleep systems fairly soon, which will then be released to the community in an IWBUMS for testing and balance feedback. (Please note that, at the time of writing, this hasn’t been merged with the animation system though, which still requires tinkering.
As such let’s turn to what RJ and Turbo are up to, which is primarily in turning a spotlight onto longstanding features to bring some added spice to survival.
RJ RIGMAROLE
In RJ’s case we wanted to get back to the feeling that falling asleep in the zombie apocalypse is a dangerous thing to do, just as it was back in the earliest builds of PZ. As such this week RJ has been coding in a reduced player control on when you’re actually able to sleep (so if you’re anxious or in pain you might require sleeping pills) and also removing control from what time you actually wake up in SP and local co-op. RJ has also been inside the Sadistic AI Director so that he can better govern zombie movement and intrusions while you’re sleeping. “Basically, if you’re going to sleep in the next build then you need to be extra-sure that the TV is off, the curtains are closed and the lights are off.” he explained, when he received his weekly Mondoid prod. “We’re looking into zombie behaviour a bit, and buildings with zombies outside and have light showing or sounds audible could attract attention. These events will be rare, but enough to keep you on edge – just as anxious characters might wake in the middle of the night now.” “My next job will be to remove the choice of how much time you want to sleep, and adding a working alarm clock system for you, and maybe your nearby co-sleepers. You might want to be careful to turn the alarm off if you waking up early and go off scavenging with your clock in your backpack though!” In terms of general tweaks from community suggestions and improvements it’s also worth noting that in the next build RJ has also coded in some nerfs to the Lucky trait (abundant Spiffo plushies will be no more L ), some extra and more easily identifiable skill books where they were previously lacking, a bunch of new items relevant to metalwork, more world-filler to flesh out your shelf space and the ability to turn off helicopter/gunshot meta-game events in your sandbox options.
TURBO TIME
While he waits for more community radio/TV translation work to roll in (Russian is in the works!) Turbo is currently working on ways to tie the system closer to gameplay through their impact on the boredom moodle, and then the boredom moodle’s impact on the player. As we’ve mentioned before, we also need to finish off the work that sees XP/recipes learned from certain shows. He’s also working on improving the visual/audio aspect of this system to make it feel like a bigger part of the game world. As a test-bed for this, here’s a rough and ready (and very WIP!)vid of a community suggestion that came up when thinking of ways to make the game feel a bit more 90s.
BLINDCODER’S MARVELLOUS MAPPAGE
Finally, a public service announcement. Blindcoder’s amazing PZ map project has a new home at http://map.projectzomboid.com/, so it’s all nice and official – albeit still under the strict custodianship of Mister Blindcoder. There’s still work to be done on the 2x overlays for some of the community maps, but BC is happy to throw the doors open to the general public, and asks for any issues to be reported on the PZ forums. As ever, our eternal thanks go out to Benjamin and his amazing work on this. This week’s featured image by Spot on your Steam service over there.The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes directly to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-07-11 18:14:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
You got red on you
[ 2016-07-04 13:48:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
It’s been a week of awesome progress in anims-land, which means a new video for Mondoid. Hurrah! Have a look-see at this. We’ll also highlight the notable stuff in the blog once you’ve returned from all the violence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4I2PE5MqxY
So, what are we seeing here?
- Blood spatter now accumulates on zombies, players and even weapons.
- We only have males in t-shirts, vests and jeans active in the build currently (pending the new clothing/women being made to work with the new texture overlay system) but we already have much greater variation in zombies - and there will be more to come.
- The new blood effects mean that on the player character blood from wounds will be able to spread, and give the player a visual cue that they are bleeding. Or, perhaps, their companions an indication that they've taken a bite...
- Clothing that gets bloody will need washing or replacing, though when we code that in we'll be sure to underline that blood stains are a nightmare to get out...
- Next on the list are visible bandages, while it's also worth pointing out that the overlay system means that t-shirt logos can easily be placed as overlays allowing for any texture placed in a marked PZ directory to appear on shirts.
[ 2016-07-04 13:48:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
Bloody Business
Now all the main technological hurdles are done with with the new animation and clothing system, the remaining work involves Binky and Martin doing some new texture versions of the clothing that you’ve already seen in previous videos, if they are clothing that can be worn under other clothing. As well as this more blood and grime overlays to allow us to completely make every zombie unique, with different visible body damage, missing limbs or whatever else, along with the much greater variety of clothing. Meanwhile, now we have the new 3D model and all the anims exported to work with it, we’ll be able to finish off the remaining stuff required to get the animation system out there for testing. A few bugs have been introduced since we added the new models and textures, so it’s not imminent but we feel we’re getting close. Once animations are in the game, we will talk about where we’re going next. The animation and combat overhaul is the first (and vital) step in an internal 5 stage roadmap that covers future PZ version releases, and will finally tick off a number of the remaining things on our planned feature list. We’ve done a lot of planning as to the best way to get toward the feature(s) people are most eager for, and Martin is already working on some cool stuff for stage 2. Once the animation system goes out the door the rest of the team will join in full force and talk more about what it is and where it’s going, and we’re confident that it’ll make life much smoother for everyone. This week’s featured image by Kuzmich off of Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-06-28 07:14:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Last week we finally cracked our new method of handling the textures on the new 3D character models, allowing us to use various compositing techniques to provide diverse overlays onto players and zombies alike. The initial need for this came from issues we’ve had with the geometry of clothing poking out on occasion, particularly if we ever tried to layer clothing on top of each other. As such we needed support to allow clothing to be textures as well as 3D models.
(please note Survivor Spiffo is not canon and will be the restaurant chain in-game, it was used as a test though we’re sure plenty of t-shirt designs will appear in the workshop not long after it is released!)
The new system will allow for us to layer multiple items of clothing on top of each other, so the player is able to wear a t-shirt, with a sweater, and maybe a coat on top of that. This will allow us much more versatility when it comes not only to how characters and zombies look, but also to the stats of those clothing as it relates to heat and protection. Managing your heat in the game at the moment essentially boils down to taking off or putting on a sweater and it will be cool to make all this more interesting. Not only this, but it gives us the ability to combine as many textures as we like with which to do effects such as blood or dirt overlays. Here is a little video demonstrating some of the sexy gore coming to the world of PZ, with some bonus back-wear to boot!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boIpk40xvVk
Though please note we still have a fair amount of texture work to do to provide the variety we’re going for and this is just a taster.
Just a reminder to those out there with low spec PCs, we’ve put a huge amount of work into optimization and are very pleased with the results. While we can’t promise that those right at the bottom end will never hit any issues, we are confident that the new animation system using some crafty tricks is in many respects hugely more optimized than the existing 3D zombies in the game, and that should mostly if not completely offset the extra work the game is doing with the new animations and overlays.
Where Next
Now all the main technological hurdles are done with with the new animation and clothing system, the remaining work involves Binky and Martin doing some new texture versions of the clothing that you’ve already seen in previous videos, if they are clothing that can be worn under other clothing. As well as this more blood and grime overlays to allow us to completely make every zombie unique, with different visible body damage, missing limbs or whatever else, along with the much greater variety of clothing. Meanwhile, now we have the new 3D model and all the anims exported to work with it, we’ll be able to finish off the remaining stuff required to get the animation system out there for testing. A few bugs have been introduced since we added the new models and textures, so it’s not imminent but we feel we’re getting close. Once animations are in the game, we will talk about where we’re going next. The animation and combat overhaul is the first (and vital) step in an internal 5 stage roadmap that covers future PZ version releases, and will finally tick off a number of the remaining things on our planned feature list. We’ve done a lot of planning as to the best way to get toward the feature(s) people are most eager for, and Martin is already working on some cool stuff for stage 2. Once the animation system goes out the door the rest of the team will join in full force and talk more about what it is and where it’s going, and we’re confident that it’ll make life much smoother for everyone. This week’s featured image by Kuzmich off of Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-06-28 07:14:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Strike a Pose
[ 2016-06-20 19:13:19 CET ] [ Original post ]
The biggest ‘key’ feature, as regular readers will know, are the new animations, models and combat which are, in themselves, a fundamental stepping stone in the plan for all the big-name content in later builds.
Right now Martin’s big re-export of all his work is at an end and Lemmy and Binks are getting the new system completed that will allow for both overlay clothing (so people can pop on a t-shirt, then a jacket on top of it) as well as overlays that will be used to allow for blood splatters during combat, zombie blood and gore to make the zombies a bit more grizzly to look at, and hopefully the ability to age zombies to make the zombies that have been shuffling around on the six months later scenario look a bit more like corpses that have been walking around for six months.
The ability to apply texture overlays will give us a huge amount of freedom to make the zombies extremely varied, something that has been lacking in the game up to this point. The backpack is in and working, as you can see, but still has a few weird issues we are trying to resolve before we can do any sexy in-game videos of it in action. So for now, an image! Hurrah.
RJ, meanwhile, is building up to an internal test of his metalwork revamp, and is currently back inside his Nutrition system to make weight loss/gain a less of a sheer face to fall down and climb – and also to nerf clever tactics like ‘chugging down jars of mayonnaise’ with a daily limit on calorific impact whether it’s dropping off you, or piling itself on.
A month or so ago we compiled a big report from all the community posts about the nutrition system (from both those who liked it, those who disliked it and who wanted improvement) and got a lot of good pointers that we’re currently acting on.
Something that we want to get RJ on to next, that we might have mentioned was in our minds a while back, is a refurb of the current sleeping system. In the earliest builds of PZ sleep felt a lot more haphazard – you had no control over when you woke up (or when you were woken by possible night incursions) and as such the simple act of resting felt quite scary and unpredictable. You’d also struggle to fall asleep when in pain, making sleeping pills more of a necessity.
This was all somewhat lost as the game developed, not least due to MP making sleep a trickier issue, but it’s now something we can get back to. It’s all under current discussion, but less controlled SP sleep, in-game alarm clock items (impact of which is heard by all players, and maybe zeds in close proximity in co-op) and maybe a few random events that player sleep opens up to us are all on the agenda.
TurboTuTone meanwhile is coming back onto the main game after getting WordZed up to a standard that’s fine for internal use, but probably not as user-friendly as we’d like for a public release. We’re at a point at which we can easily package what we considered our priority (the release of community translations for Radio/TV in the next build which is currently looking like French, Russian, Polish and Turkish) so now Turbs is coming back onto the main build for a bit – to finish integrating his work on player boredom, the necessity of entertainment, learning from live and recorded TV and radio shows and hopefully a more analogue radio tuning system to help with tuning into secret wavelengths etc.
On top of all this we have EP in the Engine Room looking to slicken things up for future features in the pipeline, Mash is in the sprite/map room prettying things up further and obviously we’ve got the helpful chaps at General Arcade investigating the best avenues to integrate VOIP into PZ for our MP crowd too. More on all of the above in future Mondoidage. Have a good week everyone.
This week’s featured image by Markarkady off of Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-06-20 19:13:19 CET ] [ Original post ]
Career Zeds
[ 2016-06-13 20:47:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
With Martin the animator’s great big anims export ongoing (the one necessitated by an update to the way the visible backpacks, blood overlays and layered clothing are going to work) we haven’t got a great big exciting new vid for you this Mondoid, but perhaps we can extrapolate a little deeper from what we’ve already put on show. Namely, the introduction of different sorts of zeds.
Zeds who were once people who collapsed while at work, and rose again wearing their uniform, carrying their work tools and can (most likely) be found shambling near to their place of employment. We introduced survivor corpses, ‘occupation’ homes, pre-barricaded homes and the like back in Build 33 – and having this sort of variation in zombies will let us double-down on this.
[Please note we’ll be adding a lot of dirt and blood splatter to clothing. These are WIP images.]
‘Career’ zombies will not be common, but if you spot a policeman zombie in the horde then you’ll know there’s a high chance he’ll be carrying a police radio and a firearm. If you head into a restaurant and notice a chef zed in the kitchen then it could well be carrying a high quality knife. Likewise, workmen zombies at in the McCoy logging will carry a high chance of having decent tools and axes in their inventories. The hope is that you’ll feel an element of risk and reward when you spot a Career Zed in a huge crowd, and weigh up the pros and cons of trying to separate it and take it down.
It’s still unknown just how much of Martin’s work will be going into the first animation build, we’re not sure whether backpacks-on-zombies will be in there for example. As we go along, however, then zombies with severed limbs will clearly have less chance of scratching you. In terms of firemen zeds, meanwhile, we can populate areas around burnt out buildings with them – to suggest that they were called out to the fire during the opening days of the outbreak when the occupants had been laid low with sickness.
And, of course, if you so choose these are all clothes you can strip from the bodies of the deceased and wear yourself. The impact the new system will have on RP servers online will, hopefully, be quite profound. Likewise, that feeling of excitement you feel when you’re playing online or off, and you see the zombie of a recently turned survivor. For the first time, we’re hoping, that the horde will be able to give you an enticing risk/reward amidst all the sneaking around.
More next week, but before you go (and because it’s always nice to have moving images) here’s a quick video to show the new trees that are going into forests. It’s mainly a visual thing, sure, but we hope you agree that it’ll be a cool addition for those who favour wilderness survival. [Please note we’ll likely play around with line of sight a bit more than what’s shown in the video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddj7e9vUx6c
This week’s featured image from FIRE over on Steam The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-06-13 20:47:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
Stabboid
[ 2016-06-06 19:46:49 CET ] [ Original post ]
This week we’re going back over to Animation man Martin. Martin’s currently finishing up a fairly laborious re-export of all his anims, which needed some adjustments to bring them up alongside the way visible backpacks are working.
In the midst of all this, then, he seemed quite pleased to dole out some new animated treats for us.
“Animation-wise I’ve been doing some new zombie hit reactions, new player melee attacks, some more incidental anims like eating, drinking and a whole host of other stuff.”
“Beyond that I’ve modelled a couple of new items of clothing, but a lot of the work has really been new textures – adding some variety to what the player can wear. With Captain Binky’s new player character models we’ve been trying to optimise the models and textures so we can have layered clothing with the addition of dirt and blood splatter; but doing it in such a way that it won’t overly impact performance.”
“Then, as we showed two weeks ago we’ve got new items, some of which are derivatives of existing weapons like the hammer which, along with the original, now has variations like ballpeen, mallet and clubhammer. Other items are everyday objects a survivor may use to fend off zombies who get too close, like a toilet plunger, saucepan, pipe wrench etc.”
“As I mentioned last time though, there’s a lot of stuff to implement and balance. Creating the assets is only one part of the process – so don’t expect everything in the very first anim update.”
“With that in mind, then, I’ve also made a batch of improvised “spears” that have their own set of melee attacks. Whilst their material cost and damage still need to be worked out and balanced, the intention is that anything you can use to stab with will also have an improvised ‘spear’ version.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qihdLM1QdrQ
“You’ll also be able to fix a bayonet or other improvised stabby thing to certain guns and use them in a similar way to a spear. Finally, as I said last week, please keep your suggestions coming on the forums. I read everything and people have come up with some great ideas!”
There’s plenty more cooking that we’ll discuss next week, although it might be worth mentioning that last week’s Operation Big Tree is done and awaiting the first internal test build of Build 35. Thanks to the hard work of community translators like Teesee, Geras and their teams, meanwhile, it’s looking likely that French, Polish (and maybe a few other localizations) of the Radio and TV channels will also be in 35.
Oh, and we also just wanted to spotlight a new PZ RP server that’s sprung up over the past week. So, if you’re of an RP persuasion, then please do check out ZomboidRP.com.
This week’s featured image by AwesomeMMM off of Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-06-06 19:46:49 CET ] [ Original post ]
Operation Big Tree
First off, something that happened a smidge after the last Mondoid was published is that the final iterations of Build 34 came to a close with the release of 34.28 This has now also been released on GOG, if you’re one of the GOG guys/gals. Given as our free demo was long in the tooth to say the least (from Build 2x!) we’ve also updated it on Steam with all the 2x goodness, added gameplay features and general betterness of the current game. Next time we update it, it’ll be once all our lovely new animation systems are live and stable.
While the new animation, clothing, models and whatnot system is banged with hammers elsewhere Mash and EasyPickins have been working on something that became a natural progression from the 2X sprites that were a core part of Build 34. And so, without much further ado, here comes Operation Big Tree.
There are two new sizes of trees, in addition to the four the game already has, that ascend to a maximum of a two-storey height. Currently, larger trees will provide three and four logs respectively when you chop them down, but will clearly take extra work to fell them.
As a part of all this, we’re also experimenting with transparency when the player is behind the bigger trees, and also the slow-down when you pass between them and smaller shrubbery. Right now, these larger trees only appear in Forest and Deep Forest zones so they’ll come with an added bonus of being a visual indication of where you can start foraging.
RJ’s work on refocusing metal stuff continues, but in the mean-time here’s a fun screen showing new craftable walls and quick run-down on where we’re at with two-step building and multi-discipline building projects. “As you can see the wall frame are getting in, which means that now to create a wall you’ll need to build the frame, then the actual wall. I’m also experimenting with how much walls ‘cost’ compared to what they do currently, but if you don’t want to do high-level walls then the option will be there to make a crappy one while you’re short on supplies and upgrade it later.” “In general, a lot of the metal stuff you can build will come in poorer versions, but can then be improved later on when you have a higher level in that skill.” This week’s featured image by lovely, lovely Tim from Canada. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes directly to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-05-30 18:41:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello! Here is the Zomboid news. *Shuffles papers on desk*
Farewell 34 and new demo
First off, something that happened a smidge after the last Mondoid was published is that the final iterations of Build 34 came to a close with the release of 34.28 This has now also been released on GOG, if you’re one of the GOG guys/gals. Given as our free demo was long in the tooth to say the least (from Build 2x!) we’ve also updated it on Steam with all the 2x goodness, added gameplay features and general betterness of the current game. Next time we update it, it’ll be once all our lovely new animation systems are live and stable.
Operation Big Tree
While the new animation, clothing, models and whatnot system is banged with hammers elsewhere Mash and EasyPickins have been working on something that became a natural progression from the 2X sprites that were a core part of Build 34. And so, without much further ado, here comes Operation Big Tree.
There are two new sizes of trees, in addition to the four the game already has, that ascend to a maximum of a two-storey height. Currently, larger trees will provide three and four logs respectively when you chop them down, but will clearly take extra work to fell them.
As a part of all this, we’re also experimenting with transparency when the player is behind the bigger trees, and also the slow-down when you pass between them and smaller shrubbery. Right now, these larger trees only appear in Forest and Deep Forest zones so they’ll come with an added bonus of being a visual indication of where you can start foraging.
Two-step building latest
RJ’s work on refocusing metal stuff continues, but in the mean-time here’s a fun screen showing new craftable walls and quick run-down on where we’re at with two-step building and multi-discipline building projects. “As you can see the wall frame are getting in, which means that now to create a wall you’ll need to build the frame, then the actual wall. I’m also experimenting with how much walls ‘cost’ compared to what they do currently, but if you don’t want to do high-level walls then the option will be there to make a crappy one while you’re short on supplies and upgrade it later.” “In general, a lot of the metal stuff you can build will come in poorer versions, but can then be improved later on when you have a higher level in that skill.” This week’s featured image by lovely, lovely Tim from Canada. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes directly to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-05-30 18:41:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
Gundoid
[ 2016-05-23 21:32:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
Today we’ve got an update from Martin, our lovely animator friend. Something the animation update will bring is some improvements on in-game firepower, so he thought he’d share…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdEbigXwQHw
“One of the areas currently lacking breadth in PZ are firearms,” he explains. “The amount of guns in the game has been discussed in many threads on the forums in the past, but it’s always been the intention to have a wider range of boomsticks. It is America after all!”
“What calibres, and how many, is still under discussion. We’re by no means talking about as exhaustive a list of some of the (very cool) mods like ORMtnMan’s one, but we will be adding a few more guns and ammo types that’lll give the player some more options and problems to think about.”
“Obviously when I came to model the guns I was basing them around particular calibres/types that would generally be available to Kentuckians during the early-90s era that PZ is set in. They’ve been modelled with a degree of generalisation, in part to avoid licensing issues, but also to let them represent several guns of similar types.”
“In the above video you’ll also see that there are models with proper bayonets and improvised versions. This was something I was keen to include as using guns with bayonets is as old as firearms themselves – but you’ll also notice not all guns have proper bayonets or indeed can be modified to use improvised versions. The same can be said about modifying with sights. Again, this will give the player more options and problems to think about.”
“As part of some new melee attacks I’ve also included a couple of rifle butts and pistol whips for when things get desperate – like when you’ve run out of ammo and the zeds get too close for comfort!”
“While we’re talking offense it’s also worth mention that, along with new clothes, I’ve also modelled and textured some new items that can be used as melee weapons. Some of these are representing items already in game that currently don’t have a model (ie the crowbar!) but quite a lot of them are new. Suffice to say there’s a lot of stuff to implement and balance. Creating the assets is only part of the process, so not all of it may make it in the first animation update but will be rolled out as and when they get put in game. Should all be good though!”
“There’s plenty more I’m up to, and have been up to, but we’ll leave that to another Mondoid! I don’t tend to reply on the forums or reddit but I do lurk and take notes, so keep the suggestions for animations or items coming. It all helps, and a lot of it is going in. Thanks!”
This week’s featured image by Zo off of Steam.
The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to thePZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-05-23 21:32:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
Two step
[ 2016-05-16 21:40:04 CET ] [ Original post ]
Good Mondoid everyone! Here we go…
BUILD 34 BITS AND BOBS
Build 34 came out last Monday, and most people seem to be digging it. So: yay! We’ve currently got a version three iterations further down the line in IWBUMS public testing which should eliminate the issues flagged up by the wider release, fixed some issues with fatigue and generally did some good old EasyPickins fixin’.
As soon as it’s clear we’re all done and good we’ll be releasing the GOG version, we needed to have everything 100% before we call 34 ‘done’ and fully move onto the next version y’see. That time isn’t far off though. And speaking of the next version…
TWO-STEP BUILDING
Right now RJ is polishing metalwork, and adding more depth and mod-abilty to how you build things in Project Zomboid. The primary change in this is the ability to have multi-stage objects.
The best way to describe this is to use a simple example: the wall. Before, building a wall was simple. You’d right click select it, the build – but you couldn’t ever upgrade it. As of the next build, however, that time will be over. Once you hit the correct level you’ll be able to improve on it, which should see the end of people building countless wooden floor tiles to get to level 6/7 before you decide to start building walls.
Here’s a WIP image, with WIP UI stuff and… did we mention this was WIP?
To build a wall, you’ll first need to build a frame – and then onto this you’ll then be able to right click it and build the wall using it. So yes, construction will take a little more time – but also there’ll be more precious XP points on offer.
This is also where we introduce cross-skill abilities. Using the new metalwork skills you’ll be able to have similar metal frames that can be used with wood to create more reinforced walls. Meanwhile, another more zed-resistant wall will be a wooden-frame with light metal plates attached – which will have more HP than a standard wooden wall, but will make a lot more noise when zombies are slamming against it.
There’s plenty more to come with all this that we’ll discuss at a later date – but another example would be putting two poles in the ground and choosing what sort of construction material to use to link them. Wooden fencing, metal wire… all that cool stuff.
OTHER STUFF
Also in the works are an unexpected book-end for Mash’s ‘2x sprites’ secret mission that we’ll wait on showing off until we have some vids to show off its cool factor, Nutrition polish and of course the animation system that, as this Mondoid is being written, Lemmy, Binky and Martin the Animator are having a big exciting meeting about. More on all the above, in a less ‘national holiday in France’ abbreviated format, next week!
This week’s featured image by Kaguya-Hime. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-05-16 21:40:04 CET ] [ Original post ]
Build 34 released!
[ 2016-05-09 19:35:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, zomboys and zombettes… Build 34 is now open for general consumption on Steam! (note: this version will be uploaded to GOG once we’re sure there are no unexpected bugs–probably in the next few days).
Highlights include the 2x ‘Secret Mission’ that has seen every single tile in the game redone by hand at twice the resolution, and the ‘Easy PZ Co-op’ feature that via networking magic will let you conjure your friends into your game with a fraction of the faff you previously experienced. For a neat FAQ on the latter, visit this here thread.
The new food system is also in there (freezers, new foodstuffs, recipes etc) but the actual Nutrition component of it has to be activated in sandbox settings. Although player feedback has shown us we’re on the right track with our food tracking system, it isn’t quite there yet in terms of polish. As such you can expect a Metalwork/Nutrition ‘RJ Special’ IWBUMS public test in coming weeks – which will then either be released as their own build or (if timings fit) as a part of our the animation/backpacks/clothing/combat update, that will itself be the stepping stone to our next big features.
If you’ve been away for a bit, here’s what ‘2x’ looks like compared to the previous version:
For full details on what’s in Build 34 you can read-up on what’s under the hood, including the improved new lighting system and co-op sleeping, in the release notes.
As always the sheer number of extra systems that live in the world beyond our IWBUMS testers might throw up issues, in which case our bug tracker lives here.
This week’s featured image by Garvel Locan on Steam. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitterright here! Okay thanks bye! Oh, but finally. What on EARTH is going on here?
[ 2016-05-09 19:35:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Zombo Baggins
The marvellous EasyPickins continues to build some nice tweaks and fixes in to the public test of Build 34, which seems to be coming to a natural climax now – although we still need to work out which side of the release fence polished nutrition and metalwork will be landing. An item of note in .19 is EP’s new precipitation system, which looks nicer and opens the door to falling snow and whatnot. If you want to join in with testing you can find details here.
So with the animation update now surging through the pipeline we’ve got anims that allow the player to take bags off their back, and rifle through the contents on the floor. As well as looking pretty as they jiggle about – they’ll also make a significant gameplay difference. If you’re carrying a bag on your back you will, in most cases, be unable to go rooting around in it unless you first take it off and put it on the floor in front of you. This means there will be no more intensive backpack resorting done while wandering around, as well as making looting much more interesting, with the potential of a panicked looter leaving their bag behind if they are not observant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ-3773oSm4 (Note: in the anim cycle the strap currently disappears when the bag is taken off and reappears when it’s put back on. There aren’t any easy ways to avoid this, but with clothing worn and in-game it will be far, far less noticeable.) Holding a bag in your hand will add the extra advantage of being able to interact with it without stopping, which will make bag management much more strategic. Finally we may be able to look into a few more traits to further increase player’s capability to interact quickly with backpacks, as well as provide different speeds based on the type and convenience of the bag used. If you weren’t around for the previous bag vid then let’s have another repeat, as it does look lovely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS6o2o44JHM
To complement all this, character-wise, Binky is currently experimenting with unifying the textures between the male and female animation meshes. Currently our new player and zed anims are all chaps, y’see. The result of this (if successful) will be a more in-depth way of assembling the base models. We’ll lose the need to double-up textures – have more variety in skin tones, will let players wear whatever they like and will also tie into having blood and bandage overlays on the characters themselves. With the base mesh and clothing overlays all using consistent texture layouts we’d be free to overlay this stuff wherever appropriate. Better clean that bite mark, dress the wound, and grab a clean long-sleeved shirt if you want to pretend you’re unscathed and not in imminent danger of eating your compadres!
Do check out lovely Blindcoder, of map fame, and his new building mod. Thanks all! This week’s featured image by Shadows on Steam.The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the] PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye! Oh, and community GoT spoiler chat goes…here!
[ 2016-05-02 21:09:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey survivors, here’s the latest from Zomboidton.
IWBUMS 34.19
The marvellous EasyPickins continues to build some nice tweaks and fixes in to the public test of Build 34, which seems to be coming to a natural climax now – although we still need to work out which side of the release fence polished nutrition and metalwork will be landing. An item of note in .19 is EP’s new precipitation system, which looks nicer and opens the door to falling snow and whatnot. If you want to join in with testing you can find details here.
BACKPACK LATEST
So with the animation update now surging through the pipeline we’ve got anims that allow the player to take bags off their back, and rifle through the contents on the floor. As well as looking pretty as they jiggle about – they’ll also make a significant gameplay difference. If you’re carrying a bag on your back you will, in most cases, be unable to go rooting around in it unless you first take it off and put it on the floor in front of you. This means there will be no more intensive backpack resorting done while wandering around, as well as making looting much more interesting, with the potential of a panicked looter leaving their bag behind if they are not observant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ-3773oSm4 (Note: in the anim cycle the strap currently disappears when the bag is taken off and reappears when it’s put back on. There aren’t any easy ways to avoid this, but with clothing worn and in-game it will be far, far less noticeable.) Holding a bag in your hand will add the extra advantage of being able to interact with it without stopping, which will make bag management much more strategic. Finally we may be able to look into a few more traits to further increase player’s capability to interact quickly with backpacks, as well as provide different speeds based on the type and convenience of the bag used. If you weren’t around for the previous bag vid then let’s have another repeat, as it does look lovely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS6o2o44JHM
HELLO LADIES
To complement all this, character-wise, Binky is currently experimenting with unifying the textures between the male and female animation meshes. Currently our new player and zed anims are all chaps, y’see. The result of this (if successful) will be a more in-depth way of assembling the base models. We’ll lose the need to double-up textures – have more variety in skin tones, will let players wear whatever they like and will also tie into having blood and bandage overlays on the characters themselves. With the base mesh and clothing overlays all using consistent texture layouts we’d be free to overlay this stuff wherever appropriate. Better clean that bite mark, dress the wound, and grab a clean long-sleeved shirt if you want to pretend you’re unscathed and not in imminent danger of eating your compadres!
FINALLY
Do check out lovely Blindcoder, of map fame, and his new building mod. Thanks all! This week’s featured image by Shadows on Steam.The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the] PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye! Oh, and community GoT spoiler chat goes…here!
[ 2016-05-02 21:09:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
Easy PZ IWBUMS
[ 2016-04-25 22:22:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Greetings survivors. It’s been an exciting week watching testers ease into General Arcade’s fantastic ‘Easy PZ’ co-op set-up, and we’re now pleased to announced that the OnlineTest build into the main IWBUMS Public Test Build. There are still kinks to be ironed out, but overall we’re really pleased that such a complex bit of work appears to be operating well on the many and varied internet connections of our users.
If you want to engage with IWBUMS public testing procedures then visit this post. The full IWBUMS release notes and feedback thread, meanwhile, can be found here.
Even better, the GA guys are game for doing some more work on our MP contingent while we crack on with the main game features. A preliminary poke around VOIP integration is next on the list, but we won’t talk of it again until it’s close – as this will again be long and difficult job for our Russian code buddies.
Elsewhere TurboTuTone has released his direct-to-game radio and TV localization software, and the full modding tool known as WordZed will be released in coming days. We’d like to ask all our community translators to have a look, have a play around and come back to us with comments and questions.
Once Turbo has finished with WordZed he’ll then be returning to main-game activities, making our somewhat digital radio system feel more ‘analogue’ so secret transmissions (whether scripted or player-made) can be discovered more easily, improving the impact particular shows or transmissions have on character boredom, letting the player learn recipes from recorded VCR tapes and all that kinda fun stuff.
We also had a really productive Metalwork meeting last week with RJ (who is ill today, with ailments you don’t want to hear about at all) and hammered out improvements and changes that are again more in-line with community feedback.
Multiple versions of makeshift forges, wall and barrier recipes that involve building frames to build-upon (and crossover with the carpentry skill), tools that aren’t up to the same standards as looted equipment and more were on the menu. We’ll go into more detail with that when it’s in and working in-game, as it’s a subject that’s had a lot of debate and we want to get it right.
Finally, it’s been a while since we did a main build release – players outside of our test builds haven’t been experienced the 2x visuals yet. Now co-op is in we’ll be directing attention towards getting Build 34 out of the door. That said, with Nutrition requiring polish and Metalwork still in progress it’s likely one will be left behind and kept for 35. We’ll have a chat with RJ once he’s off his sick-bed and work out what’s best.
That’s about it for today, fingers crossed we’ll have some anim fun for you to have a look at next Mondoid. Laters!
This week’s featured image by the amazing base of Opt_0 over on Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye! Oh, and community GoT spoiler chat goes… here!
[ 2016-04-25 22:22:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Community Watch
Nothing super interesting to talk about this week with the animation system, but plenty of progress. We’ve been doing a lot of work on fixing up various bugs with the new software skinning system (the system that allows for 3D models to work across much older hardware) that became apparent when trying to make the video for last week’s Mondoid and resulted in huge scary spikes of flesh petruding from players chests. We’re meeting up with Martin on Thursday to discuss what comes next for models or animation work for the update, or perhaps future ones (ideas are always welcome!), and Binky is progressing with the model texture and UV revamp that will bring in new opportunities for blood overlays, as well as to get the ladies back into the animation build of the game.
We were planning on releasing a build of the co-op system alongside the Mondoid, however a few last minute fixes are still being pushed out, and as 11 o clock ticks around in the UK we thought we better get the Mondoid out there before the panic buying of canned food starts. It’s still possible it will make it out tonight, but if not you can otherwise expect it very soon, likely tomorrow. Keep a look out on the TIS forums for an announcement, as it will not be appearing on IWBUMS and will in fact be on an entirely new branch for testing purposes. (Edit: Help us help you: http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/19172-easy-co-op-test/#comment-231159) Big thanks to General Arcade for their tireless efforts bringing some clever networking tech to Zomboid, as well as to EasyPickins for his work on the in-game server settings and his work getting the new system ready to test out,. At the moment it’s only the Steam version using steam invites that we’re testing out. There are still a few changes in the pipe to make non-steam servers work comfortably, though we’re on the case and this will be in place before it goes into IWBUMS proper. The new multiplayer uses UPnP to completely avoid any requirement for port forwarding. In addition the way maps are transmitted to clients has been changed, and we’re hoping it’ll be much more robust with less chance of the langolier style black border issues that strike some players. At the moment the current version in testing still has a few UI improvements required to make it completely newbie proof, but it should prove infinitely more straightforward for the technically challenged. The steps are as follows: 1) The ‘host’ simply starts a game using the HOST menu option, launches the server from within the game, creates their character and selects a spawn location. 2) Once in-game, the host can send invites to their friends via the ESCAPE menu INVITE FRIENDS menu, here all their steam friends who own PZ and are online will appear. Invite away! 3) Their friends will get the invite through a Steam message, and when they click on it, the game will launch and … That’s it. It really is that simple! In fact, in lieu of the version being live for the Mondoid, we planned to provide a few screenshots until we realized the process is so simple there’s not really anything to show! There is of course the potential for bugs with some people’s set ups, in which case please let us know your router and PC configuration and we’ll try and get them resolved as soon as possible. We hope this will bring multiplayer with small groups of friends to a lot of people who until now found the process daunting and confusing. In a related topic we apologize for the random update people will be getting. This is the Visual Studio 2013 redistributable package the co-op system will require to function. Sadly we don’t have the option of switching this on for only the testing branch, so will undoubtedly get a few people excited about a main branch update.
We want feedback from people playing the current IWBUMS build (34.15) on the way they currently feel about the food system balance. We’re aware it needs some extra love before it’s released, and will only release stuff to the wider community when we’re happy – so knowing your relative happiness levels to the whole shebang is pretty vital. So please deposit thoughts here. We want to know how its impacting on your survival, what you’re doing differently while you play and overall if it makes you happy/sad. If possible, please keep your suggestions as to ‘how’ it can be improved to other threads – it really is the ‘feeling’ of the game in this current iteration that we want to hear back about in this instance.
Recently added to Build 34.15 is a server option that allows sleep during co-op MP , something that EP and the team felt important given the imminent easy co-op builds. When all players sleep the server clock speeds up until players wake themselves by aiming or moving. As we move on into other builds our non ‘BIG STUFF’ focus will be a lot more on polishing our older systems to gain more control and gameplay nuance – fire, moodles, boredom, building… that kinda thing. Sleep is also on the list, wanting to return to the scariness of waking up at unknown times from our earliest builds – and this is a step towards that. Similarly, EP has been experimenting with how we process rain in-game and seeing what other effects we could get from the system . Unrelatedly, while we’re on EP stuff, wood stoves now work like fireplaces. They emit light, warm/dry the player, can be used for cooking, and don’t require electricity. Likewise barbecues, campfires and woodstoves can now warm/dry you.
We didn’t realize that quite an important feature for large construction projects wasn’t known about by some proportion of our playerbase. Upon reading mertsu’s quite humourous revelation on Reddit and a few people responding in shock at his findings, we thought we should give the community a reminder that while our game is hardcore permadeath, there is nothing to stop you creating a new character in your single player world, finding your old stomping ground, introducing your old dead self to your base-ball bat, and your new character claiming your previous self’s construction projects and loot as their own. This week’s Featured Image from Max, with an RP shot taken from the Aggressive Gaming New Dawn Server. Amazing stuff guys! The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to point earnestly in the general direction of the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter here!
[ 2016-04-18 22:17:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
ANIMATION UPDATE
Nothing super interesting to talk about this week with the animation system, but plenty of progress. We’ve been doing a lot of work on fixing up various bugs with the new software skinning system (the system that allows for 3D models to work across much older hardware) that became apparent when trying to make the video for last week’s Mondoid and resulted in huge scary spikes of flesh petruding from players chests. We’re meeting up with Martin on Thursday to discuss what comes next for models or animation work for the update, or perhaps future ones (ideas are always welcome!), and Binky is progressing with the model texture and UV revamp that will bring in new opportunities for blood overlays, as well as to get the ladies back into the animation build of the game.
EASY CO-OP
We were planning on releasing a build of the co-op system alongside the Mondoid, however a few last minute fixes are still being pushed out, and as 11 o clock ticks around in the UK we thought we better get the Mondoid out there before the panic buying of canned food starts. It’s still possible it will make it out tonight, but if not you can otherwise expect it very soon, likely tomorrow. Keep a look out on the TIS forums for an announcement, as it will not be appearing on IWBUMS and will in fact be on an entirely new branch for testing purposes. (Edit: Help us help you: http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/19172-easy-co-op-test/#comment-231159) Big thanks to General Arcade for their tireless efforts bringing some clever networking tech to Zomboid, as well as to EasyPickins for his work on the in-game server settings and his work getting the new system ready to test out,. At the moment it’s only the Steam version using steam invites that we’re testing out. There are still a few changes in the pipe to make non-steam servers work comfortably, though we’re on the case and this will be in place before it goes into IWBUMS proper. The new multiplayer uses UPnP to completely avoid any requirement for port forwarding. In addition the way maps are transmitted to clients has been changed, and we’re hoping it’ll be much more robust with less chance of the langolier style black border issues that strike some players. At the moment the current version in testing still has a few UI improvements required to make it completely newbie proof, but it should prove infinitely more straightforward for the technically challenged. The steps are as follows: 1) The ‘host’ simply starts a game using the HOST menu option, launches the server from within the game, creates their character and selects a spawn location. 2) Once in-game, the host can send invites to their friends via the ESCAPE menu INVITE FRIENDS menu, here all their steam friends who own PZ and are online will appear. Invite away! 3) Their friends will get the invite through a Steam message, and when they click on it, the game will launch and … That’s it. It really is that simple! In fact, in lieu of the version being live for the Mondoid, we planned to provide a few screenshots until we realized the process is so simple there’s not really anything to show! There is of course the potential for bugs with some people’s set ups, in which case please let us know your router and PC configuration and we’ll try and get them resolved as soon as possible. We hope this will bring multiplayer with small groups of friends to a lot of people who until now found the process daunting and confusing. In a related topic we apologize for the random update people will be getting. This is the Visual Studio 2013 redistributable package the co-op system will require to function. Sadly we don’t have the option of switching this on for only the testing branch, so will undoubtedly get a few people excited about a main branch update.
NUTRITION FEEDBACK
We want feedback from people playing the current IWBUMS build (34.15) on the way they currently feel about the food system balance. We’re aware it needs some extra love before it’s released, and will only release stuff to the wider community when we’re happy – so knowing your relative happiness levels to the whole shebang is pretty vital. So please deposit thoughts here. We want to know how its impacting on your survival, what you’re doing differently while you play and overall if it makes you happy/sad. If possible, please keep your suggestions as to ‘how’ it can be improved to other threads – it really is the ‘feeling’ of the game in this current iteration that we want to hear back about in this instance.
SLEEPS
Recently added to Build 34.15 is a server option that allows sleep during co-op MP , something that EP and the team felt important given the imminent easy co-op builds. When all players sleep the server clock speeds up until players wake themselves by aiming or moving. As we move on into other builds our non ‘BIG STUFF’ focus will be a lot more on polishing our older systems to gain more control and gameplay nuance – fire, moodles, boredom, building… that kinda thing. Sleep is also on the list, wanting to return to the scariness of waking up at unknown times from our earliest builds – and this is a step towards that. Similarly, EP has been experimenting with how we process rain in-game and seeing what other effects we could get from the system . Unrelatedly, while we’re on EP stuff, wood stoves now work like fireplaces. They emit light, warm/dry the player, can be used for cooking, and don’t require electricity. Likewise barbecues, campfires and woodstoves can now warm/dry you.
FIND YOURSELF
We didn’t realize that quite an important feature for large construction projects wasn’t known about by some proportion of our playerbase. Upon reading mertsu’s quite humourous revelation on Reddit and a few people responding in shock at his findings, we thought we should give the community a reminder that while our game is hardcore permadeath, there is nothing to stop you creating a new character in your single player world, finding your old stomping ground, introducing your old dead self to your base-ball bat, and your new character claiming your previous self’s construction projects and loot as their own. This week’s Featured Image from Max, with an RP shot taken from the Aggressive Gaming New Dawn Server. Amazing stuff guys! The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to point earnestly in the general direction of the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter here!
[ 2016-04-18 22:17:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
Ship Shape
[ 2016-04-12 07:56:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Evening all! Hope we’re all ship-shape and Bristol fashion, and yes this is a line purely intended to reference the amazing boat construction that appeared on Steam this week.
Release-wise we’re hoping to have public test versions of the easy server creation and easy friend invite co-op that General Arcade are working on towards the end of the week. It’s complex stuff that’ll need to work with an array of different set-ups, so may well justify having its own beta channel rather than being part of the current IWBUMS releases. Right now we have a few minor issues with the steam co-op build and a few UI things we need to sort, however it feels close. No ETAs as usual, but by close we hopefully mean close – not ‘in a few weeks’.
We should also be releasing a test version of Turbo’s radio/TV modding and translation tool in the near future, which is currently being played with internally. What else? Read on…
METALWORKING
As we mentioned last week we’ve rethought metalworking so that it features two new skills – welding and metalworking. We’re still underlining the specifics, but welding will see players using a noisy/bright blow torch and mask to adapt heavy scrap metal found around the map into defences – often used in conjunction with our existing carpentry skill.
Metalworking, meanwhile, involves you investing a many in-game days building a stone furnace stage-by-stage – and then creating makeshift tools/items through iron that you make workable within the furnace, then hammer away at on a lump of metal used as an anvil.
Metal objects will come with their own positives and negatives (a metal sheet welded together with discovered scrap will make more noise when banged on and attract more zeds, for example) and we intend it to be a high level and high input aspect of survival – and fully complementary to our existing skills. We really want to nail the delivery of it though, which is why RJ is industriously busying himself with it all backstage.
GREETINGS FELLOW SURVIVOR
Here’s a quick demo of a few of the new individual character animations, incidental movements and emotes coming to Project Zomboid. Whether triggered by a player or by the character automatically, the new animation system will bring a ton of new animations into the game so players know how their doomed survivors are feeling. And let them sit down! Woo!
As a bonus we’ve thrown in a few other anims. Can you guess what they all are without the benefit of context?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eKjSCEt_fo
This week’s Featured Image from Pikiiipow, from the tiny non-crowded hamlet known as Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to point earnestly in the general direction of the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter here!
[ 2016-04-12 07:56:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Animated Antics
Lots of cool animation stuff but it’s not yet clear exactly what’s going to drop into Build 34, the most recent public test build of which is 34.14 and was released over the weekend. Some new animation sexiness to come from Martin’s direction are various shoving animations for the player while sprinting and bashing into zombies (that could go backfire terribly for the player, we should remind the one concerned Zomboid survivor on the forums wondering if being able to bash zombies over would make getting through them easier), more hit reactions for combat, as well as dedicated ‘walking/running through bushes / trees’. We’re really excited to see it come together!
Since we got the double sized tiles in, and seen the new animation system and clothing in the game, there is one element of the zombies and characters that still needs to be updated to complete the zombie experience, and Binky’s undergoing an overhaul on the texture mapping across the characters and clothes. While this may sound rather dull (and Binky made it clear it is very dull) it will allow the characters skin to no longer be mirrored across both halfs of the body, allowing for more varied detail on the zombies. One particular benefit from UVs shared across clothing and skin is it will allow us to construct varied blood overlays for injuries and more crucially zombie damage / decomposition. We want to be able to overlay more gore and blood onto their clothing and skin (astute viewers already spotted a hint of what else is to come related to this at the end of the animation video a few weeks back).
We’ve current got a new build of the ‘easy co-op’ stuff that General Arcade have been conjuring up for us in internal testing, and so far so good, so *fingers crossed* that might drop in soon too, GA just looking into a few remaining issues with friend invites – alongside all the lovely server option stuff that EasyPickins has prepared for it in 34.14.
As we mentioned last week in our brief Easter Mondoid blog, meanwhile, we’re also rethinking, recoding and rearting our previous plans for late-game metalworking. A lot of valid points were raised both within the dev team and in the wider community, so hopefully our retooled (and now ingot-free) version will feel a lot more in-keeping with the game. It’s a hot topic, so we’ll talk about it in a Mondoid when it’s in a test build and we’re sure it’s working well.
Blindcoder is pleased to report that the PZ map now has a beta version showing off all Mash’s cool new higher definition sprite-work. It can be found here. Some interesting stats from Blindcoder: The old map was 537600px x 230400px, and the new one is now 1075200px x 396800px. The old map was 36 gigabytes, the new one is 132 gigabytes. The number of files in the map project has also gone up from 630.450 per level to 2.171.000 per level. Our thanks to Blindcoder for creating something that can handle such gargantuan figures! This week’s featured image by Exjia over on Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-04-04 21:21:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey all, lots of ‘under the hood’ whatnots this week. We’ve got a few nuggets of info on how various things are progressing though.
ANIMATION GOINGS ON
Lots of cool animation stuff but it’s not yet clear exactly what’s going to drop into Build 34, the most recent public test build of which is 34.14 and was released over the weekend. Some new animation sexiness to come from Martin’s direction are various shoving animations for the player while sprinting and bashing into zombies (that could go backfire terribly for the player, we should remind the one concerned Zomboid survivor on the forums wondering if being able to bash zombies over would make getting through them easier), more hit reactions for combat, as well as dedicated ‘walking/running through bushes / trees’. We’re really excited to see it come together!
ANIMATION RELATED GOINGS ON
Since we got the double sized tiles in, and seen the new animation system and clothing in the game, there is one element of the zombies and characters that still needs to be updated to complete the zombie experience, and Binky’s undergoing an overhaul on the texture mapping across the characters and clothes. While this may sound rather dull (and Binky made it clear it is very dull) it will allow the characters skin to no longer be mirrored across both halfs of the body, allowing for more varied detail on the zombies. One particular benefit from UVs shared across clothing and skin is it will allow us to construct varied blood overlays for injuries and more crucially zombie damage / decomposition. We want to be able to overlay more gore and blood onto their clothing and skin (astute viewers already spotted a hint of what else is to come related to this at the end of the animation video a few weeks back).
ONLINE COOP UPDATE
We’ve current got a new build of the ‘easy co-op’ stuff that General Arcade have been conjuring up for us in internal testing, and so far so good, so *fingers crossed* that might drop in soon too, GA just looking into a few remaining issues with friend invites – alongside all the lovely server option stuff that EasyPickins has prepared for it in 34.14.
METALWORK
As we mentioned last week in our brief Easter Mondoid blog, meanwhile, we’re also rethinking, recoding and rearting our previous plans for late-game metalworking. A lot of valid points were raised both within the dev team and in the wider community, so hopefully our retooled (and now ingot-free) version will feel a lot more in-keeping with the game. It’s a hot topic, so we’ll talk about it in a Mondoid when it’s in a test build and we’re sure it’s working well.
In other news…
Blindcoder is pleased to report that the PZ map now has a beta version showing off all Mash’s cool new higher definition sprite-work. It can be found here. Some interesting stats from Blindcoder: The old map was 537600px x 230400px, and the new one is now 1075200px x 396800px. The old map was 36 gigabytes, the new one is 132 gigabytes. The number of files in the map project has also gone up from 630.450 per level to 2.171.000 per level. Our thanks to Blindcoder for creating something that can handle such gargantuan figures! This week’s featured image by Exjia over on Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!
[ 2016-04-04 21:21:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
Death Metal
Metalworking will come for build 34, in 2 separated skills, smelting and metalworking. Smelting will be used to melt metal into ingot in a stone furnace, stone furnace require to be build from stones (recipe needed!) and will run on coal or charcoal. From there, just light up your stone furnace and put metal items such as spoon, fork, empty tin can/pop can, etc.. Wait and you have a metal ingot! Which leads to our next skill, metalworking. First thing you’ll need to craft is an anvil (again, recipe locked, so either you find the correct magazine or you start as a metal worker or the blacksmith trait!) From there, you can start crafting useful metal items like nails, spoon and fork again.. To do this, you need a hammer, but high-end smithing will need ball peen hammer and tongs, which can be crafted as well. Later on, the smith will be able to craft hammer, metal barricades (way more strong than the planks one, but also require a blowtorch to be put on windows/doors) and even metal furniture like locker, crate, shelves… but no sword smithing for now as it’ll require new animations and it’ll be way more difficult to do anyway! Metalworking is currently in internal testing and it goes well, it should be in IWBUMS branch rather soon!
Since we released the video on the animations last week, we’ve had a lot of excited people, but also a fair few low spec PC owners worried about the impact it will have on their system. We’ve done a lot of work in optimization on the 3D models and animation system over the past year for the animation overhaul, the requirement for shaders has been completely axed, as has the requirement for FBOs to draw the 3D characters on. This means the minimum requirement to run the 3D models has dropped dramatically. There have also been significant optimizations made during development, so while the addition of the advanced animation system will have an impact on performance, we hope it will be a negligible one or even improve matters for some, and will allow most if not all people who currently cannot run the models to play with them in the animation build. It’s honestly still too early to know for sure with performance, but as we’ve always said we’ll always take all steps we can to avoid cutting people out at the bottom end with incompatibilities. At the same time we have a responsibility to make the game as good as we can so if performance slips a few FPS and we can’t avoid it then that’s the way it has to be. Sadly those at the bottom are those hit hardest by any performance losses. All this said, we’ve had the game working at a solid 30fps on a 1.8Ghz Duo Intel HD laptop, Six Months Later, with all zombies and player using the new animations. Results have varied on other systems though, and the whole system isn’t in yet (let alone future additions to the game) but just so you know we’re on the case and take it seriously.
Co-op fixes continue apace! (With one being quashed during the writing of this very Mondoid!) It’s still unclear how much more testing and fixes will be needed to make sure it works for all the testers router configurations, but we hope to have a wider test as soon as that time comes. We know co-op is tremendously exciting to a lot of people out there so we’re very excited to get it out there! Also the release of Turbo’s WordZed 2.0 community translation and Radio/TV broadcast is starting to loom large. Turbo has a habit of going a bit quiet and then having a ‘tada!’ moment when his work is complete, and this week’s was probably his best ‘tada!’ yet. It’s a lovely little tool, and we hope to have a version in testing and with some of our community translators for feedback as soon as is possible. This week’s Featured Image from Yuragon, from the tiny non-crowded hamlet known as Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to point earnestly in the general direction of the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter here!
[ 2016-03-21 15:34:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
After the ‘2x tile’ Secret Mission reveal and last week’s focus on Martin’s amaze-o animations, this ‘getting on with it’ Mondoid might not hit the same ‘like’ frenzy – but hopefully we’ve still got you a few fun nuggets.
In our IWBUMS branch we continue to update and improve the current testing build, while we wait to see what other goodies might drop in. As of last Tuesday we’re currently on Build 34.13, while amongst other fixes and tweaks the next build will increase your day length from 45 minutes to an hour in an experiment to see how it impacts on player productivity and, perhaps, to cater for the amount of different systems that are now in the game compared to how the game was originally. Let us know what you think when .14 hits.
In terms of other stuff…
METALWORKING
Metalworking will come for build 34, in 2 separated skills, smelting and metalworking. Smelting will be used to melt metal into ingot in a stone furnace, stone furnace require to be build from stones (recipe needed!) and will run on coal or charcoal. From there, just light up your stone furnace and put metal items such as spoon, fork, empty tin can/pop can, etc.. Wait and you have a metal ingot! Which leads to our next skill, metalworking. First thing you’ll need to craft is an anvil (again, recipe locked, so either you find the correct magazine or you start as a metal worker or the blacksmith trait!) From there, you can start crafting useful metal items like nails, spoon and fork again.. To do this, you need a hammer, but high-end smithing will need ball peen hammer and tongs, which can be crafted as well. Later on, the smith will be able to craft hammer, metal barricades (way more strong than the planks one, but also require a blowtorch to be put on windows/doors) and even metal furniture like locker, crate, shelves… but no sword smithing for now as it’ll require new animations and it’ll be way more difficult to do anyway! Metalworking is currently in internal testing and it goes well, it should be in IWBUMS branch rather soon!
ANIMATION COMPATIBILITY / PERFORMANCE
Since we released the video on the animations last week, we’ve had a lot of excited people, but also a fair few low spec PC owners worried about the impact it will have on their system. We’ve done a lot of work in optimization on the 3D models and animation system over the past year for the animation overhaul, the requirement for shaders has been completely axed, as has the requirement for FBOs to draw the 3D characters on. This means the minimum requirement to run the 3D models has dropped dramatically. There have also been significant optimizations made during development, so while the addition of the advanced animation system will have an impact on performance, we hope it will be a negligible one or even improve matters for some, and will allow most if not all people who currently cannot run the models to play with them in the animation build. It’s honestly still too early to know for sure with performance, but as we’ve always said we’ll always take all steps we can to avoid cutting people out at the bottom end with incompatibilities. At the same time we have a responsibility to make the game as good as we can so if performance slips a few FPS and we can’t avoid it then that’s the way it has to be. Sadly those at the bottom are those hit hardest by any performance losses. All this said, we’ve had the game working at a solid 30fps on a 1.8Ghz Duo Intel HD laptop, Six Months Later, with all zombies and player using the new animations. Results have varied on other systems though, and the whole system isn’t in yet (let alone future additions to the game) but just so you know we’re on the case and take it seriously.
OTHER STUFF
Co-op fixes continue apace! (With one being quashed during the writing of this very Mondoid!) It’s still unclear how much more testing and fixes will be needed to make sure it works for all the testers router configurations, but we hope to have a wider test as soon as that time comes. We know co-op is tremendously exciting to a lot of people out there so we’re very excited to get it out there! Also the release of Turbo’s WordZed 2.0 community translation and Radio/TV broadcast is starting to loom large. Turbo has a habit of going a bit quiet and then having a ‘tada!’ moment when his work is complete, and this week’s was probably his best ‘tada!’ yet. It’s a lovely little tool, and we hope to have a version in testing and with some of our community translators for feedback as soon as is possible. This week’s Featured Image from Yuragon, from the tiny non-crowded hamlet known as Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to point earnestly in the general direction of the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter here!
[ 2016-03-21 15:34:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
Re-Animator
[ 2016-03-14 10:47:27 CET ] [ Original post ]
A nice treat for us all this Mondoid. An update on the new animation system, along with a video that we feel really underlines just how much of an impact it will all have on PZ once it goes live. Alongside the fruits of The Secret Mission it’s a great thing to see in motion! First the video, then a few explanations… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0jwcqjdELk Background work featuring Martin the animator man has been ongoing for a while now, and we now have a huge library of animations for players and zombies that we’re in the process of implementing. We’ve got everything in the can from core stuff like combat and character movement, all the way to vomiting, rubbing painful body parts and swigging from bottles. In the recent implementation work one aspect we got working far better than expected were ‘masked animations’ and more specifically ‘upper body only’ ones. This means that we can play animations on the player’s top half (and that of the zombies) without interrupting what their feet are doing. This is proving useful for zombie attacks and player emotes – seeing them work on characters who are standing, walking, sneaking or shambling. Some things to note about the video:
- Please be aware that not all the zombie and clothing variants are in. You’ll probably notice a lack of ladies, and an awful lot of ‘professional’ zombie. Ladies are coming, but it’s easier to focus on one model at a time. Likewise, there’ll be a bunch more civilian zeds in the final thing, in fact ‘profession zeds’ will likely be found in/around relevant buildings and areas. We just wanted to ramp up the cool hat-wearing zombies during the testing process.
- Also, bear in mind that if there are any glitches visible in the video or non-synced animations then they’ll be fixed by release.
[ 2016-03-14 10:47:27 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Secret Mission
The valiant team behind the popular Hydrocraft community modare pulling out all the stops to bring their creation in-line with the development of the main game, and what with ‘2x’ appearing they need as many hands on the art-pump as they can muster. If you have artistic fingers and enjoy their mod then please enquire within, and ask for Hydromancerx. Thank you! The Block of Italicised Text would like to point earnestly in the general direction of the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter here! The CBOIT would also like to thank all those who donated screenshots to the Great 2X Screenshot Comparison Competition for this Mondoid. Cheerio!
[ 2016-03-07 20:53:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
For the past six months our artist Mash has been painstakingly recreating every single tile in Project Zomboid at twice the resolution. It looks utterly lovely, and is now playable in our IWBUMS public beta as a part of the release of Build 34.11. If you’d like to check it out and play it yourself, then the details arehere.
Pictures speak louder than words, so…
Old vs New in a kitchen!
Old vs New in a convenience store!
Old vs New in the Mall!
For more comparison screenshots please visit this thread on our forums, and gaze upon the fruits of the 2x revolution. There still may be rough edges to smooth in there, in which case you’ll find our bug tracker here. Many thanks to everyone who’s been helping out with the in-game grabs!
34.11 was released at the end of last week, and also contains EasyP’s terrific lighting improvements (the mall is now way slicker to survive in) and RJ’s current iteration of the new food system that we need wider feedback on for balance and bug-chasing on. (If you find yourself getting hungrier than you think right, please let us know – it’s very much a work in progress still and we need feedback from each and every play-style going.)
Plenty more exciting stuff still to be fed into the workings of Build 34 too!
ATTN COMMUNITY ARTISTS
The valiant team behind the popular Hydrocraft community modare pulling out all the stops to bring their creation in-line with the development of the main game, and what with ‘2x’ appearing they need as many hands on the art-pump as they can muster. If you have artistic fingers and enjoy their mod then please enquire within, and ask for Hydromancerx. Thank you! The Block of Italicised Text would like to point earnestly in the general direction of the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter here! The CBOIT would also like to thank all those who donated screenshots to the Great 2X Screenshot Comparison Competition for this Mondoid. Cheerio!
[ 2016-03-07 20:53:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
Visual Studio Redist 2012 hotfix
[ 2016-03-04 01:21:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello all! We needed to enabled Visual Studio Redist 2012 for our beta branch. Unfortunately this resulted in a 'hopes getting up' download to take place on the main version of the game. This does nothing - we can only enable redistributables across all branches on Steam and this is required for the new beta. Please ignore if you are wondering what the small update is about. It will be utilized in the next build. Details on the IWBUMS beta patch here in case you'd like to try it out: http://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/405693392912477639/
[ 2016-03-04 01:21:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
Leap Mondoid
[ 2016-02-29 21:41:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Zomboiders of Kentucky and environs! This week’s primary development will be the IWBUMS public beta release of a build that’s chock full of engine improvements and the improved memory-saving light system. It will also include the current iteration of our revamped food system that we feel needs more feedback than its current separate public branch provides, despite its excellent brigade of dedicated culinary community explorers who’ve been so helpful during its teething tests.
This IWBUMS beta is currently being held in a holding pattern as we’re in the process of upgrading our forums to their new form and, most necessarily, installing Connall’s new bug tracker. Everything is now live, but we really want to make sure everything is ticking over nicely before introducing a new build with a pile of new bugs to report.
If we release mid/end of the week we can also get some more tweaks and fixes in from Turbo and EasyPickins in there too, so we’ve decided to hold it back rather than throw it out there just because it’s a Monday.
Meanwhile, Turbo’s WordZed 2.0 utility is approaching completion (though he may well have time quickly fix up the new in-house hifi systems with the TV/Radio system before release), while the WIP build of Creative Mode has seen a lot of updates to cater for the aforementioned Secret Mission – the content of which will soon become clear.
Finally for today, after garnering far more attention than was perhaps anticipated last week… the revamped food system’s sliced ham icon looks far less like a penis.
to:
This week’s featured image by DonnyD. The Block of Italicised Text would like to point earnestly in the general direction of the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter here! The BOIT would also like to indicate that nasKo and Undust4able are looking for feedback on their new PZ Subrebbit theme, and wanted to nudge your attention there too. Laters!
[ 2016-02-29 21:41:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
Deeper Underground
[ 2016-02-22 19:41:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
[img=http://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Butters-712x462.jpg] After last week’s blow-out on Creative Mode, the improvement of map height limits in preparation for Louisville, the inclusion of subterranean locations and the internal testing of General Arcade’s co-op build and EasyPickins’ snazzy and more efficient lighting rewrite… the general gist of this Mondoid is that we’re getting on with all of the above. With that said, here are a few extra nuggets. ⦁ We intend to open up an IWBUMS public beta containing EP’s lighting upgrade and, quite possibly, the ‘easier to get going with co-op’ stuff too. They’re the sort of things that’ll require testing out on a wide variety of machines. Watch the forums and our Twitter for news on that one. (When Creative arrives, meanwhile, it’ll be in the form of a separate beta channel that’ll operate in much the same fashion as the way we first introduced MP to the community.) ⦁ RJ’s food system revamp continues, and it feels like most of the code elements are in place – and now just need balance so that long term survivalists will feel its impact and respond accordingly, while shorter-term players live/die/repeat without having to worry too much. If you want to provide statistical feedback then the playable build can be discovered here. [We also have sliced ham now, look it’s true.] [img=http://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/IMG_22022016_105734.png] ⦁ Turbo’s work on taking the work that formerly was done by Microsoft Excel and packaging a Radio/TV/Survivor Broadcast editing suite and timeline into WordZed continues before its release to our modders and community translators. It currently looks like this. There’s also been some map work done so that hi-fis are found in a fair few houses, so radio transmission content is far easier to come across without the need for inventory/carried radios and walkie-talkie systems. ⦁ A fair few members of the team are now brainstorming ways to improve on our current Inventory UI, which is perfectly fine in terms of workability – but certainly could be a little slicker and easily comprehensive. The results of this won’t be in-game before we’ve talked, experimented loads and found something we’re 100% happy with, but it’s worth mentioning that it’s very much something that’s under the microscope. This week’s featured image by Butters. The Block of Italicised Text would like to point earnestly in the general direction of the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter here! The BOIT salutes you!
[ 2016-02-22 19:41:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
Dark Places
As those who’ve ventured to the Mall will attest to, occasionally the current lighting system takes too long to catch up with the player’s line of sight. What with the future map expansion into the city of Louisville, and its range of larger buildings, this is clearly something we need to get on top of. EasyPickins has been working on improving and reintegrating a new line-of-sight and lighting system underneath the hood of the PZ-mobile – in the next build this will now be written in C++ and will be a lot faster. He’s also changed the way room lighting is handled by the game to speed things up, by having internal spaces more uniformly lit with the same light bleeding from its edges. It should look much the same as it used to, but run a lot faster. Another positive impact from this will be that lighting updates are no longer interrupted whenever a ‘map chunk’ is loaded. We’re hoping that this will help players with slower computers who’ve been forced to turn lighting quality down by ‘Help, I’m running into black fog!’ issues. This is all now in internal testing and we’ll let you know how it goes.
We’ve also just started a closed test of the new online co-op system worked on by General Arcade – that allows personal server creation with far less of a headache. There are still a few issues to resolve with the magic hocus pocus uPNP system to make it play nice and reconfigure the right router if more than one is on the network – or indeed a PC on that network that’s stubbornly deciding it wants to pretend to be one. It’s already really really exciting to see how players will be able to simply launch multiplayer games straight out of the box as it were though. It’s too early to say when it will first reach IWBUMs public testing but, as with everything going on at the moment, when it’s done we’ll likely organize either a .5 build or a Full Build around it. It all depends on what else is good to go at that stage.
The rudiments of RJ’s food, cooking and physiology revamp are still in playable and experimental form (found here!) for the community to take through its paces and report back their stats and findings. RJ has now hit his fifth build, and now features freezer compartments on in-game fridges. We’re hoping that the introduction of frozen food will add to the usefulness of those noisy generators in the late-game, as well as being a decent way of storing perishables. Alongside this there’s nutition balance, new recipes and (unrelated and minor, but still cool) the ability to clear up blood stains with a mop. If you want to join in our playable survival survey then please dive in.
Creative Mode is our upcoming playable map building and MP project mode, and it’s in the works both to fuel a community explosion in content and as a means to an end when building the suburbs of our own Louisville map. What we haven’t really mentioned, however, are the side-benefits that coding this system has brought to the game. Namely, that it lets us fix a few long standing issues and limitations with the tile engine. And so…
This one is particularly exciting to Mash, who made all those buildings, the Mall and all those other exciting survival locations – only to see them sliced and diced 99% of the time because the cutaway segments are wholesale across the entire screen. When you run in front of buildings, say in West Point, buildings cut off and you generally never really see more than one storey high. In a perfect world only the building you’re stood inside and that obstruct your view should slice away, leaving the surrounding town more aesthetically pleasing. This, then is also a large part of the Creative mission, and becomes a lot more important when you consider the following…
The primary reason for the current (very limiting) 8-storey height map is that it’s pretty hefty in terms of memory: we have to be reserved with the maximum height as ‘one size fits all’. If a tower block has to be 8 high then so does the rest of the entire game, including all the bits above the fields and forests. All that space ‘reserved’ and swallowing up bits of memory and processing time. This will change however, since changes made for Creative will ultimately allow for each chunk of the map to define its own extents. Therefore a tower block chunk will have its own upper limit without cruelly condemning the middle of a forest to be the same height. While it’s not yet clear how far this could or should be pushed, it’s safe to say we’d be able to consider more than 8 height buildings. This, again, is vital to the foundations of our Louisville city map. [IMPORTANT NOTE: Discussions need to be had with EasyP about his newfangled C++ light system and how that would be impacted by this system, so it’s not certain this will make it into the first release.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ02OnOSx1E&feature=youtu.be This week’s featured image by Merino. The Block of Italicised Text would like to point earnestly in the general direction of the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter here! The CBOIT has also been very much enjoying submissions to the PZ Community General Creativity thread recently, and wanted to nudge your attention there too. Laters!
[ 2016-02-16 00:46:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
[img=http://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/dark-places-712x462.jpg] A Mondoid update from deep inside the guts of the next build as we all bash away on our various different coalfaces. So let’s get going…
LIGHTING FIX-UP
As those who’ve ventured to the Mall will attest to, occasionally the current lighting system takes too long to catch up with the player’s line of sight. What with the future map expansion into the city of Louisville, and its range of larger buildings, this is clearly something we need to get on top of. EasyPickins has been working on improving and reintegrating a new line-of-sight and lighting system underneath the hood of the PZ-mobile – in the next build this will now be written in C++ and will be a lot faster. He’s also changed the way room lighting is handled by the game to speed things up, by having internal spaces more uniformly lit with the same light bleeding from its edges. It should look much the same as it used to, but run a lot faster. Another positive impact from this will be that lighting updates are no longer interrupted whenever a ‘map chunk’ is loaded. We’re hoping that this will help players with slower computers who’ve been forced to turn lighting quality down by ‘Help, I’m running into black fog!’ issues. This is all now in internal testing and we’ll let you know how it goes.
CO-OP
We’ve also just started a closed test of the new online co-op system worked on by General Arcade – that allows personal server creation with far less of a headache. There are still a few issues to resolve with the magic hocus pocus uPNP system to make it play nice and reconfigure the right router if more than one is on the network – or indeed a PC on that network that’s stubbornly deciding it wants to pretend to be one. It’s already really really exciting to see how players will be able to simply launch multiplayer games straight out of the box as it were though. It’s too early to say when it will first reach IWBUMs public testing but, as with everything going on at the moment, when it’s done we’ll likely organize either a .5 build or a Full Build around it. It all depends on what else is good to go at that stage.
FOOD SYSTEM
The rudiments of RJ’s food, cooking and physiology revamp are still in playable and experimental form (found here!) for the community to take through its paces and report back their stats and findings. RJ has now hit his fifth build, and now features freezer compartments on in-game fridges. We’re hoping that the introduction of frozen food will add to the usefulness of those noisy generators in the late-game, as well as being a decent way of storing perishables. Alongside this there’s nutition balance, new recipes and (unrelated and minor, but still cool) the ability to clear up blood stains with a mop. If you want to join in our playable survival survey then please dive in.
CREATIVE AND WHATNOT
Creative Mode is our upcoming playable map building and MP project mode, and it’s in the works both to fuel a community explosion in content and as a means to an end when building the suburbs of our own Louisville map. What we haven’t really mentioned, however, are the side-benefits that coding this system has brought to the game. Namely, that it lets us fix a few long standing issues and limitations with the tile engine. And so…
Cut aways
This one is particularly exciting to Mash, who made all those buildings, the Mall and all those other exciting survival locations – only to see them sliced and diced 99% of the time because the cutaway segments are wholesale across the entire screen. When you run in front of buildings, say in West Point, buildings cut off and you generally never really see more than one storey high. In a perfect world only the building you’re stood inside and that obstruct your view should slice away, leaving the surrounding town more aesthetically pleasing. This, then is also a large part of the Creative mission, and becomes a lot more important when you consider the following…
Improval of map height limits
The primary reason for the current (very limiting) 8-storey height map is that it’s pretty hefty in terms of memory: we have to be reserved with the maximum height as ‘one size fits all’. If a tower block has to be 8 high then so does the rest of the entire game, including all the bits above the fields and forests. All that space ‘reserved’ and swallowing up bits of memory and processing time. This will change however, since changes made for Creative will ultimately allow for each chunk of the map to define its own extents. Therefore a tower block chunk will have its own upper limit without cruelly condemning the middle of a forest to be the same height. While it’s not yet clear how far this could or should be pushed, it’s safe to say we’d be able to consider more than 8 height buildings. This, again, is vital to the foundations of our Louisville city map. [IMPORTANT NOTE: Discussions need to be had with EasyP about his newfangled C++ light system and how that would be impacted by this system, so it’s not certain this will make it into the first release.]
Oh and going underground…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ02OnOSx1E&feature=youtu.be This week’s featured image by Merino. The Block of Italicised Text would like to point earnestly in the general direction of the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter here! The CBOIT has also been very much enjoying submissions to the PZ Community General Creativity thread recently, and wanted to nudge your attention there too. Laters!
[ 2016-02-16 00:46:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
Food for Thought
It’s important that we get the work we’re doing with hunger, nutrition impact during extended survival, new traits and foodstuffs right – so as of right now we’ve released a ‘Food Tracker’ test build containing early versions of the new systems. In fact, a new version of this has been released for testing only this afternoon – featuring new recipes, balance and traits. The primary purpose of this playable build is to let us statistically trace your exertion and your intake during typical Zomboid lifespans. The Food Tracker build comes with a constantly updated debug file that saves information from your playthrough that’s useful for us in the creation of the overall system. We’re also going to use this space for some experimentation, for example limiting the sheer amount of stuff you can shovel down your throat when your stomach is full etc. You can learn how to access this beta branch of the game in this thread, where you can report your findings and post your debug files. We’d like to thank everyone currently taking part (especially Ohbal, Moose65 and Vanorfeadial) for their diligence and enthusiasm!
Over to Holland where TurboTuTone has been back under the bonnet of his WordZed utility in preparation for its release to modders and community translators. “WordZed was originally a light editor, with the biggest chunk of editing being done within an Excel file. However, what with translations and the necessity of keeping track of changes in the huge PZ broadcast files I’m updating it so all radio/TV data can be built up from scratch and has similar editing capabilities to Excel.” [img=http://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Wordzedimage.jpg] “After this rehaul it will be easy for the community to create their own broadcasts and stations through radiodata mods that supplement/tweak the existing ones, along with lua mod support for the radio stuff in an upcoming version. Another key factor within it, meanwhile, is translation management. The radio data has thousands of lines that may change which could potentially vary from changes within the line itself to lines changing position within the structure – and all this needs to be tracked.” “As such WordZed will now generate translation files which translators can fill in, and should later changes be made to the overall radio/TV data then it’ll generate smaller files that only flag what the translators need to see and work on. Our community translators will also be pleased to hear that translated files can come from multiple authors, and then merged more a final version. It’s like a radio/TV translation version control.” “All a bit involved and techie I know, but a necessary step as we move the whole system towards gameplay-impacted broadcasts and to get creative juices flowing within the budding apocalyptic writers in the modding community.”
Messrs Connall and Kirrus would like it known that the Indie Stone forums and Bug Tracker will be updated with spangly new versions over the next few weeks. As such the Bug Tracker will be set to Read Only on Thursday in preparation for its new form, so if you spot stuff disappearing/reappearing you’ll know why. Our thanks to the guys for all their hard work. This week’s featured image by Бомге over on Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to point earnestly in the general direction of the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter here! Happy Lunar New Year to all those celebrating!
[ 2016-02-08 20:42:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
[img=http://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/mynameisseahorse-712x462.jpg] Quite a lot of ‘under the hood’ stuff going on this week at Zomboid Towers, including the exciting integration of Mash’s Secret Art Mission with the foundations of the next build and the current iteration of Creative Mode. This is now being cleaned and tidied for its future reveal, but had us all in a tizzy and no mistake. Elsewhere, meanwhile, in Zedland the following have seen occurrences:
FOOD SYSTEM BETA RELEASE
It’s important that we get the work we’re doing with hunger, nutrition impact during extended survival, new traits and foodstuffs right – so as of right now we’ve released a ‘Food Tracker’ test build containing early versions of the new systems. In fact, a new version of this has been released for testing only this afternoon – featuring new recipes, balance and traits. The primary purpose of this playable build is to let us statistically trace your exertion and your intake during typical Zomboid lifespans. The Food Tracker build comes with a constantly updated debug file that saves information from your playthrough that’s useful for us in the creation of the overall system. We’re also going to use this space for some experimentation, for example limiting the sheer amount of stuff you can shovel down your throat when your stomach is full etc. You can learn how to access this beta branch of the game in this thread, where you can report your findings and post your debug files. We’d like to thank everyone currently taking part (especially Ohbal, Moose65 and Vanorfeadial) for their diligence and enthusiasm!
NU-WORDZED
Over to Holland where TurboTuTone has been back under the bonnet of his WordZed utility in preparation for its release to modders and community translators. “WordZed was originally a light editor, with the biggest chunk of editing being done within an Excel file. However, what with translations and the necessity of keeping track of changes in the huge PZ broadcast files I’m updating it so all radio/TV data can be built up from scratch and has similar editing capabilities to Excel.” [img=http://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Wordzedimage.jpg] “After this rehaul it will be easy for the community to create their own broadcasts and stations through radiodata mods that supplement/tweak the existing ones, along with lua mod support for the radio stuff in an upcoming version. Another key factor within it, meanwhile, is translation management. The radio data has thousands of lines that may change which could potentially vary from changes within the line itself to lines changing position within the structure – and all this needs to be tracked.” “As such WordZed will now generate translation files which translators can fill in, and should later changes be made to the overall radio/TV data then it’ll generate smaller files that only flag what the translators need to see and work on. Our community translators will also be pleased to hear that translated files can come from multiple authors, and then merged more a final version. It’s like a radio/TV translation version control.” “All a bit involved and techie I know, but a necessary step as we move the whole system towards gameplay-impacted broadcasts and to get creative juices flowing within the budding apocalyptic writers in the modding community.”
HOUSEKEEPING NOTICE
Messrs Connall and Kirrus would like it known that the Indie Stone forums and Bug Tracker will be updated with spangly new versions over the next few weeks. As such the Bug Tracker will be set to Read Only on Thursday in preparation for its new form, so if you spot stuff disappearing/reappearing you’ll know why. Our thanks to the guys for all their hard work. This week’s featured image by Бомге over on Steam. The Block of Italicised Text would like to point earnestly in the general direction of the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter here! Happy Lunar New Year to all those celebrating!
[ 2016-02-08 20:42:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
Project Zomboid
The Indie Stone
Developer
The Indie Stone
Publisher
2013-11-08
Release
Game News Posts:
205
🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
🕹️ Partial Controller Support
🕹️ Partial Controller Support
Very Positive
(245853 reviews)
The Game includes VR Support
Public Linux Depots:
- Project Zomboid Linux Depot [1.41 G]
Project Zomboid is an open-ended zombie-infested sandbox. It asks one simple question – how will you die?
In the towns of Muldraugh and West Point, survivors must loot houses, build defences and do their utmost to delay their inevitable death day by day. No help is coming – their continued survival relies on their own cunning, luck and ability to evade a relentless horde.
For more details on the game follow us on @theindiestone or visit http://www.projectzomboid.com
A huge thanks to the wonderful MathasGames and Dean Cutty for making the awesome intro video. If you love indie games their channels are well worth a sub.
In the towns of Muldraugh and West Point, survivors must loot houses, build defences and do their utmost to delay their inevitable death day by day. No help is coming – their continued survival relies on their own cunning, luck and ability to evade a relentless horde.
Current Features
- Hardcore Sandbox Zombie Survival Game with a focus on realistic survival.
- Online multiplayer survival with persistent player run servers.
- Local 4 player split-screen co-op
- Hundreds of zombies with swarm mechanics and in-depth visual and hearing systems.
- Full line of sight system and real-time lighting, sound and visibility mechanics. Hide in the shadows, keep quiet and keep the lights off at night, or at least hang sheets over the windows.
- Vast and growing map (loosely based on a real world location) for you to explore, loot and set up your fortress. Check out Blindcoder’s map project: http://pzmap.crash-override.net/
- Use tools and items to craft weapons, barricade and cook. You can even build zombie proof forts by chopping trees, sawing wood and scavenging supplies.
- Deal with depression, boredom, hunger, thirst and illness while trying to survive.
- Day turns to night. The electricity falters. Hordes migrate. Winter draws in. Nature gradually starts to take over.
- Farming, trapping, fishing, carpentry, cooking, trapping, character customization, skills and perks that develop based on what you do in-game.
- Proper zombies that don’t run. (Unless you tell them to in the sandbox menu).
- A ton of amazing atmospheric music tracks by the prodigy that is Zach Beever.
- Imaginative Challenge scenarios and instant action ‘Last Stand’ mode, on top of regular Sandbox and Survival
- Full, open and powerful Lua modding support.
- Xbox Controller Gamepad support on Windows. [Others pads can be set up manually. Gamepad support not currently available on Mac]
We’re a small team at the moment, but we’re also committed to providing the following:Planned Features:
- The return of our PZ Stories mode that also serves as first ever tutorial actively trying to kill you at every turn. Kate and Baldspot return!
- In-depth and varied NPC encounters driven in a persistent world, powered by a metagame system that turns each play-through into your very own zombie survival movie with emergent narrative gameplay.
- Constant expansion of the countryside and cities around Muldraugh and West Point
- Full wilderness survival systems, animals and hunting for food.
- More items, crafting recipes, weapons and gameplay systems.
- Steam Workshop and Achievements support
For more details on the game follow us on @theindiestone or visit http://www.projectzomboid.com
A huge thanks to the wonderful MathasGames and Dean Cutty for making the awesome intro video. If you love indie games their channels are well worth a sub.
MINIMAL SETUP
- Processor: Intel 2.77GHz Quad-core Ubuntu LTS 16.04/Steam Machine. Requires Libgcc 6 or higherMemory: 8Gb RamHard Disk Space: 5gigVideo Card: Dedicated graphics card with 2 GB of RAM minimum. OpenGL 2.1 and GLSL 1.2 support (generally 2012 or newer) Sound: FMOD compatible sound card
- Memory: 8Gb RamHard Disk Space: 5gigVideo Card: Dedicated graphics card with 2 GB of RAM minimum. OpenGL 2.1 and GLSL 1.2 support (generally 2012 or newer) Sound: FMOD compatible sound card
GAMEBILLET
[ 6132 ]
GAMERSGATE
[ 2625 ]
FANATICAL BUNDLES
Time left:
9 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
15 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
12 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
12 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
12 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
12 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
12 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
12 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
12 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
12 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
12 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
12 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
12 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
12 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
12 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
37 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
17 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
9 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
44 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
33 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
30 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
38 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
40 days, 1 hours, 19 minutes
HUMBLE BUNDLES
Time left:
3 days, 19 hours, 19 minutes
Time left:
17 days, 19 hours, 19 minutes
by buying games/dlcs from affiliate links you are supporting tuxDB
![Here’s that map showing the general areas you’ll be able to find new stuff.]](https://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/themapfixed-1.png){kind=link}
