Project Zomboid News

Hey all, here’s 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 TEA’s animation systems.

https://youtu.be/HhM6eIrxNYA

Please note that there are still numerous bugs and issues as long as all our combined arms, and it’s 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 we’re 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 you’ve 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 of zombies and such.

Here’s 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 we’ve 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 Turbo’s vast timed action spreadsheet.









We’re also in the process of working out exactly which animations will be included in the first release, and what won’t – 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)



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 40’s climate stuff, and we’re super happy with how he’s been able to add that visual spark to the water effects in the game. Here’s a video of where he’s 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 Yuri’s visual effects overhaul couldn’t 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. We’re excited to see what he does with it, and at the same time as a visual boost, we’re 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 we’re 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 don’t feel too cookie-cutter.
Here’s a rare glimpse of a WIP urban location that’s been prised from Mash’s 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.

Hey all, quick run around the houses talking about who’s on what this week.

In anims-land for Build 41 Zac’s been looking at optimization, which we’ll be coming back to pretty routinely from this point – as we want to make sure everything is nice and smooth. Here he’s 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

He’s 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 system we’ve lost some of the earthy colours and harsher lighting that tended towards a slight over-saturation and bleached effect that doesn’t quite make the new character models fit the scene.



Animator Martin, meanwhile, is looking at all the different locations we’ve 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.





Xeonyx, the creator of the much-loved New Denver / Slocan Lake map, is now working on Challenge Maps for the main game. These, including the Film Studio map we’ve 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 we’ll go quiet on it for now while Jamie gets on with his work. Here’s 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. Here’s 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.

NOTE: Very much WIP and not a finished system, of course. The other room currently isn't cut but will be in the final version. This is just a sneak peak for the WIP system and showing off how the rounded corners look; the goal for the final version is improving vision, not limiting it.



 

• 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, he’s shackling a hilarious car physics demon that’s sprung up on an internal server.) 
• Stas just released an updated Controller Test beta for those helping out with our gamepad improvement scheme. If you are interested in getting a free PZ code for your troubles, then join 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).

We’d like to direct your attention to the 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. It’s pretty damn cool.



We’d 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 haven’t 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 you’re at it -please use these values in Bitbaboon Steve’s 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 week’s infested neighborhood from Dark Oracle. 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 MailingList 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.

Howdy almost-yuletide survivor.


Today we released our final (sort of, read below for more on that) patch for Build 40. Full patchnotes can be found here, 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.

While the rest of the team move into the animations build and version 41, we’re 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 it’d 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 we’re hoping this might improve matters.

In essence, we’re 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 we’d 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 it’s clear there’s 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.

• Stas has just updated the Gamepad 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 what’s a desirable item, and what’s junk – so we can then fill containers with a lot more realistic junk items even on higher difficulty levels. He’s 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.
• ChrisW’s work on in-building Sims-style cutaways and the abolition of the dithered circle view stencil continues. As seen here both with, and without.

Today’s warehouse horde from Frank. 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 PZWiki 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! OurDiscord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Hey all, Thursday greetings.


We’ve currently got the final Build 40 patch in a public IWBUMS beta, and since last week have released 40.37 and 40.38  into it. This includes Turbo’s 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 Thursdoid here.

So far IWBUMS testers have reacted really positively the new nights, which is heartening to see. We’ve 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. Here’s a video of it without, and here’s a video of it with.



Work continues with the AnimZed tool, clothing, layering, spawned zed outfits and similar. There’s still loads of stuff to do under the hood for 41, but we’re 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 system’s 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.

He’s also fixed some model issues he was having with the anims build, and improved the way banks look. As we’ve 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.

“I’m 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 it’s finished, it’ll include curved transitions between the full walls and the cutaway walls. You can see my first work on this in the screen below, but there’s still a lot to change and fix.”

• Stas continues his work on the ControllerTest Build, with a fixes version released to testers today. 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.

This week’s plea from the forum from Sick Boy. 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. TheCentralized 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.