Project Zomboid News

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.

[h3]TECH UPGRADE[/h3]
Okay so this week one of the four pillars of the next main PZ build is going back into the spotlight. We’ve seen good progress backstage in crafting, MP improvement and animals/wildlife – but it’s the engine upgrades that’ve 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 8×8 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 naïve and simpler viewing cone that was drawn over the screen which also allowed you to see what parts of the screen were outside the character’s viewing arc. You can see it on the old Light Propagation Demo we posted in the initial 42 Techdoid a while back.

[previewyoutube][/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 he’s done is pretty cool!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As you can see, there’s now much more precise and smooth LOS information than the old tile system ever could muster.

We’re 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 we’ve got it right now in this second video is still super cool (note the effect when doors and curtains are opened and closed) but it’s possibly a little too transparent on these lighter tiles.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We’ll continue tweaking until we find something that works best as a default, but as ever we’ll do our utmost to provide settings that will let you adjust it to whatever you’re most comfortable with.

[h3]MAPPAGE[/h3]
It’s 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 there’s a lot of grass and wilderness, but that covered 56 cells – and what you’re 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 we’ve 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.

[h3]SANDBOX SETTING SPREE[/h3]
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 layout’s been redone,  and an ‘advanced’ tick box has been added that switches over to deeper settings and selections. We’ve also mixed in a search and separation of settings by category on the right.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Next up, an in-depth set of improvement for the mod UI. Here you’ll 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 you’ll 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 won’t play nicely with.

Finally, but perhaps most importantly, there’s a raft of new info for modders themselves and an expanded functionality for mod.info. There’s 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.

Here’s what it currently looks like REMEMBER WIP etc! Feedback required!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]GRUNTING[/h3]
The first results of our recording sessions are now properly in-game: the grunts, groans and wheezes of your survivor are now in-game. What’s more they add a LOT to the experience, and we’ve got some really positive thoughts coming through from our internal testers.

We’ve 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 it’s 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][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]BUGS[/h3]

Look, an aphid. Aint it sweet.



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.

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Haylo, here’s 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.


[h3]CRAFTY BUSINESS[/h3]
For the past few weeks Turbo’s 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 we’re 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 won’t 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 there’ll 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 wasn’t 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][/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 that’s FAR easier to create than it is with B41’s 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.


[h3]SOWING DISCORD[/h3]
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 doesn’t 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.

What’s 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 won’t 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.

[h3]ELSEWHERE[/h3]
Other mentionable work on the mighty PZ that’s 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. He’s currently working out what information you receive, and where, and also at which farming skill level. He’s also sorting out some of the wonkiness you saw in the animations you saw in the last Thursdoid we did.
• We’re 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. Here’s a quick video of some of the existing fun places they’ve come across.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

• New masks. New hats.

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.

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 that’s 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.

[h3]FARMZ[/h3]
Let’s 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 aren’t final, and also that there’s a fair amount of animation polish required to make it all look super-smooth.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Also, here’s a quick timelapse of them plants a growin’.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



[h3]OTHER STUFF[/h3]

• 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 player’s own personal map. This week we’ve really been knuckling down on this, as we’ve realized it’s 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, we’re 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. Martin’s 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 doesn’t 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][/previewyoutube]


This week’s survivalist from SerØ. 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.

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 today’s blog we’ll 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.

[h3]FARMING[/h3]
First off, let’s darken Blair’s door – and watch him lean over a fence with a piece of straw in his mouth while he outlines what he’ll imminently be merging into our internal branch for our testers to play around with.



Currently I’m 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 what’s 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.

With the farming rework we are adding growing seasons (which can also be disabled in the sandbox settings).

With these most plants will have a planting season, with optimal months that produce additional yields. Plants that are planted out of season will be destined to wither away and die. This means, that aside from some winter crops, winter farming will be no more.

Growing seasons are learnable knowledge. A farmer character starts knowing all of them; a character with the gardener trait will know most of them; and they can also be learned from reading seed packets and special farming handbooks.

[h3]CHEEKY RABBITS[/h3]
Last time we properly met the Knox Event’s deer population and their migration habits, and now it’s 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 don’t know that either.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
 
Also we had a bug this week with the carrots.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
 

Also also, with animals comes poop:

https://twitter.com/theindiestone/status/1659235346301714450


[h3]MAPPING[/h3]
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][/previewyoutube]

[h3]AND FINALLY[/h3]
Elsewhere Fenris has been chewing on a key accessibility issue that we’ve 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 week’s misty hunt from Felkhan. 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.