Project Zomboid News

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 don’t necessarily require a particular workstation

Not all of these will come with 100% precise animations at first, and direct character interaction with the larger crafting workstations is reliant on the ‘GrappleTech’ we showed previously with dragged corpses and will therefore be mixed in later down the line.

Craft disciplines we will be bringing in during Unstable will include Brewing, Glassmaking and Butchery. Bowyery meanwhile (which clearly will require far more animation, tech, combat and design work) will be at the back of the queue, and is most likely to appear in a later version.

We also believe that, seeing as we have a good art pipeline running, we can relatively easily introduce a wide range of decorative craftable building items to the mix for Unstable – which will likely be of interest to MP and RP players who want to make their bases a little more personalised.

When we put all this out to the public beta we intend to do so alongside a comprehensive modding guide (as we will also for the MP changes) as the refresh here will be fundamental, and new to all.

In pursuit of this, and to generally expedite the process and aid in polish/fixes, we have also reached out to our friends at TEA Games who are providing some extra manpower.

Finally, a quick look at the current status of the UI that appears when you choose to craft on a surface – a table, a worktop, an exposed tree stump if you’re in a forest and such.

(This will become more refined, clearly, and crafting options will also be available as text rather than icons if you prefer it as such.)




[h3]BIOMES / FORAGING[/h3]
One aspect of 42 is that we no longer have a rigid black border, and instead have generated wilderness at the map’s 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. It’s a big annoyance for players who like to stray from the beaten path only to discover they’re no longer in a foraging zone.

Here, for example is an overview of some of the 41 map’s 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 here’s 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 community’s additions, but otherwise all the above is now in the internal test build.




[h3]LIGHTING[/h3]
In the past few weeks we’ve done more work on in-game lights in terms of balance, purpose and mechanics.



There’s 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 42’s 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][/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.




[h3]GLOW UP(DATE)[/h3]
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 Cortman’s 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.

Here’s another glow-up spot, meanwhile, that went through recently.




[h3]OTHER STUFF[/h3]

• 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 42’s 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.

[previewyoutube][/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 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

How do, all.
 
[h3]CRAFTING CONSOLIDATION[/h3]
At this point the main element of the Build 42 update that’s been holding stuff back has been the substantial crafting overhaul that’s 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.

We’ve made good progress towards this end but the more time has gone on we’ve realized that aiming to achieve these goals are holding back Build 42’s entrance to an Unstable beta release. While it’s 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 they’ve been waiting for.

As such we’ve 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 haven’t worked out exactly what will be in the first iteration, there’ll 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 we’d 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 there’s 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.

We’ve 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: it’ll 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 we’ll get the build shipshape remains to be seen, it will take some time to settle, but we’ll likely have a much better picture by the next time the blog rolls around.

[h3]MULD GLOW-UP[/h3]
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 we’re hopeful that you’ll all enjoy what we’ve done with the place once 42 goes Unstable.



[h3]LIGHTING GLOW-UP[/h3]

42’s lighting system is a big improvement from 41’s, 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 we’re doing is adding a sprite as an overlay on top of light sources to give them a ”on” status. After tinkering with 42’s 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 room’s spread of light.



[h3]PAPERS PLEASE[/h3]
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 you’d reasonably expect to be found on a particular date in 1993 have been fleshed out. So here’s one of our recent examples.



Swiftly followed by the sort of place you’d 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.

[h3]MP TEAM UPDATE[/h3]
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 server’s 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.
  

This is all clearly on top of many, many other smaller and wide-ranging improvements.

[h3]FUN LOOTIN’[/h3]
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 month’s 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 month’s 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 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 industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here

[h2]LIFE’S A DRAG[/h2]

Something that, clearly, was fundamental to Build 41 was the new animations system – and thus far for Build 42 we haven’t mentioned any improvements to this.

Importantly, it should be underlined that his work isn’t in the internal test build yet (and is certainly unconfirmed as a part of 42 when it first enters an Unstable beta) but we’re far enough along now with work done in this area that we’re comfortable to talk about ‘Zac’s 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 41’s 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.

What’s more, because this is an extension of the Animation system the Grappled state isn’t 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][/previewyoutube]
As you can see here, Zac has leveraged the logic in the Animation State system, and has been able to wire up Martin’s 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 don’t 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 that’ll 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 don’t usually show animations that aren’t in-game yet (this is in Zac’s 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][/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 we’ll 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 we’re 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 you’ll 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. We’re 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 we’ve 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 what’s out there currently.
  

With this wide variety of weapons to craft in the game, it’s 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.

[h2]LEGACY MEDIA[/h2]

In general with the Build 42 items we tried to have more cool, fun and collectible items. It’s 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 doesn’t cause players to feel bottlenecked in the way that sledgehammers and generator manuals do in 41.

Although we’ve mainly been talking weapons this month, as you can see there’s also recipe magazines for armour and hollow books that’ll let you hide things inside them. Our artists, meanwhile, have made them all interesting to look at and (you’d 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 we’re 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 you’d find.

[h2]LIQUID LUNCH[/h2]
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 you’ve imbibed.

In more boring matters, we’ve also added in systems like rain filling open items left outside, and made rain barrels work with B42 systems also.

[h2]ANIMAL CRAFT[/h2]

Let’s take a quick tour around what RJ’s 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 there’s 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 you’re good.

Also visible: a churning bucket, to create delicious butter from milk and a calf skeleton, just for fun.

[h2]OPERATION: PACKAGING[/h2]
Granular and non-sexy item, this one, but we hope you’ll agree still one that’ll 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, there’s 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][/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 we’re making we can have a single “open canned food” recipe for everything, and the recipe will create the proper result item.

[h2]SMALL STUFF[/h2]

• The map team’s quest to polish up Louisville, and beyond, continues with an emphasis on rooftops and higher floors.
  

• In general, we’re trying to add more variety to existing items in the world – as well as adding new ones. A good example is that you’ll 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 week’s 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.

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.

[h3]STRIKE A POSE[/h3]
We’ve mentioned the fact that Build 42 will have a variety of readable materials that you can loot and inspect, but we hadn’t shown them off in-game as quite frankly they didn’t look great. They were crammed inside our existing Survival Guide UI, and it really wasn’t going to bat for us.

We didn’t really want to create a load of individual images that wouldn’t 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][/previewyoutube]

So what is this?

Well, it’s a secondary UI API system – and with it both ourselves and modders can create readable text UIs in easier and more flexible ways, and what’s more reuse templates for them too.

Techie bit: currently, 4 Java elements have been added: Base, Text, Texture, TextEntry, and then based on these we’ve built a more complex UI in lua that’s 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 community’s favourite safehouse locations.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


What’s 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 didn’t feel quite right for our in-game newspapers as such.

We’re 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 Nolan’s Used Cars, by easily placing his cowboy hat zombie at the location of the car lot that the flyer has revealed on your map.



[h3]GRASSED ME RIGHT UP[/h3]
Something in PZ that’s needed improvement for the absolute longest time, is one of the things that you see the most.

We’ve been unhappy with the way that grass looks for a long while, and it became more unsightly with the advent of Build 41’s 3D models.

Build 42 is now blessed with a depth buffer. This means that we can reduce the player’s 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 won’t have to use mods to access the sedentary animations for the directions that don’t clip.

It’s also great for grass and general undergrowth too, so alongside updating the existing grass sprites to feel more detailed and natural – we’ve 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][/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 we’re 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.



[h3]SOUND UNDERGROUND[/h3]
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 they’ve 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 that’s different here?

Ground level and outdoor sounds gradually dip away the lower you go, and once you’re 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 there’s 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][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

A key part of zombie fiction that Project Zomboid hasn’t 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 hasn’t 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][/previewyoutube]


[h3]GUN CHANGES[/h3]
Fenris’ extensive upgrades to PZ’s 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 didn’t actually affect hit chances (just critical and damage). This has been corrected. Remain calm, don’t panic, you’ll 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.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The above video shows Fenris’ experimentation and how he’s polishing guns – the graph shows the hit and critical chances across the various tile distances, updated in realtime, and overlays range circles showing the point blank, optimal targeting ranges (for the given sights), and maximum firing ranges. The chances of a hit can be seen rising and falling with movement, and after each shot

[h3]ARMOR[/h3]
This month we’ve also had focus on improving our late-game B42 armour system. As with the weapon crafting, the intent was to make something that wasn’t referential to zombie media or other games, but instead something that seemed natural for the time and circumstances.

We don’t want crafted armour to look too anachronistic or “knightly” – looking like they should be part of a renaissance fair. We don’t want to be too goofy, although there are a few more ‘fun’ options in there, and we don’t want anything that doesn’t 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 42’s 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 won’t take inspiration from other games) the way Rust implements its metal armours is very much along our line of thinking – though clearly we’ll make our own way with it.

Please note: there won’t 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 didn’t make it too odious to progress from dirt and sticks to solving the riddle of steel, there’s 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 don’t 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, there’s 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][/previewyoutube]

[h3]EXPLORING UP HIGH[/h3]
Finally, we’re 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][/previewyoutube]

Thanks all. Sadly not too much from the new crafting in motion this time. Please be assured, though, that there’s a lot of work going on there, but some aspects aren’t ready for show, and others are waiting for a core code update to hook things into and as such aren’t filmable.

There’s a bit of a logjam building of stuff that can be pumped out, so we hope it’ll 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 it’s 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 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 industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here

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 that’s become its first application.)

Onwards, then.


[h3]HUNKER INNA BUNKER[/h3]
Permanent underground structures are being added to the internal build’s map for testing.

As discussed before some basement locations will be randomised to add surprise flavour to your looting, but there’ll be plenty of ever-present locations that will likely be survivor favourites for taking over and making your own.

Here’s a fun example, which also very clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of B42’s tech upgrade that governs the realistic spread of light. It really is very dark down there, and with that very claustrophobic and scary…

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Another aspect of the underground structures is sound, and now we’ve 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.

It’s 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 we’d never have Minecraft-style insta-tunnels in vanilla, clearly) but is probably a can of worms best opened later down the line.


[h3]CRAFTING[/h3]
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.

We’ve got something ready to go into the internal build, but in its current WIP form still needs some polish – and probably isn’t 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 aren’t as straightforward as ripping clothing to make bandages or opening a can of beans (which will always be feasible just in your hands) but don’t 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 it’s 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 that’s felt most keenly. There’s a lot of muscle memory we’ll 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 crafting of 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.

We’re not there yet on this surface level, but functionally on the code level it’s 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 it’s 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. Here’s a few that popped through recently.




[h3]MULTIPLAYER[/h3]
We haven’t heard from the MP bods in a little while so let’s 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 you’ve 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.

Thanks to Andrei for his thoughts and, again, to underline – this isn’t the only stuff that’s on their ‘to do’ list. It is, however, what’s in their sights over the month ahead.

While we are talking MP, however, it would be remiss to not mention another side project that’s gone into the game recently.

This is disguise option for multiplayer which, if enabled by the server admin, will allow players to disguise their username by wearing a combination of lower and upper face coverings, or indeed full face coverings.

The hope is that these will create some interesting dynamics for RP and PVP servers, and indeed for general banditry purposes.

(Clearly there’s also a few failsafes having to be built into this! Admins will be able to can also disguise themselves too if enabled and will always see right through disguises, there’s an option to disable disguises inside safehouses, and the system can be disabled entirely on servers that don’t want anonymity to be a feature).


[h3]OTHER FUN STUFF[/h3]
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][/previewyoutube]

The Event Zone’s Wild West tourist attraction is now in testing and open for business – now featuring a new game item that is the wooden coffin.

[previewyoutube][/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.

We’re primarily getting it integrated for some cosmetic changes you’ll discover when you boot up the game that’ll 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 that’ll be a luxury that comes about long after 42 unstable.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Finally, in the Fun Stuff section – Fox’s 4K-ification mission continues. In fact, it’s 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, aren’t they?




[h3]PROF’S PROC-GEN[/h3]
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 he’s 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 it’s 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.

He’s 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, it’s 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


[h3]IMGUI DEBUGGING[/h3]
Okay – this is the technical bit for modders I warned you about. There’s 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 it’s already paying dividends.

If you are bored at this point it’s fine to skip to the guns.

First of all, before anyone gets excited about this being used for mod UIs for gameplay, we’re 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 doesn’t 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 we’d 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 game’s innards for our modding community.

[previewyoutube][/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, let’s move over to Fenris at the gun range.


[h3]GUN IMPROVEMENTS[/h3]
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 player’s actions.

Here he is on the firing range, with imgui active.

[previewyoutube][/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.

[h3]FINALLY[/h3]
We saw this pop up on the YouTubes and thought it was a great run-down on what we’ve been working on. Our thanks to CosmiicSteem for the vid!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This week’s 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 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 industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.