Hey all, here’s the highlights of the last few weeks of Project Zomboid development – compiled from the Thursday blogs that appear at http://www.projectzomboid.com/blog/ and on the PZ Steam boards.
First up, we recently had a full stream for 2-3 hours of the current internal build courtesy of steamer Mark.exe. This can be viewed in its entirety
here.
If you don’t have time for that, however, then here’s a quick video that’s shows off most of the things discussed in more detail below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyuAw_I5kNA
The primary thing that’s being shown in this video is the rotational animation system that our team, primarily Zac and Martin, have finally managed to conquer – barring polish and minor bugs.
We’re not going to give any indication of a countdown for an IWBUMS release, but eagle-eyed Thursdoid blog readers will have noticed that this was always on of the major barriers to releasing a public beta.
At the time of writing, however, gameplay connected to this new system, still needs to be wired up and polished– and optimization still needs to be fed into the machine to improve performance with large zed hordes and also bolster lower-spec PCs.
Something we are considering is releasing the IWBUMS beta in SP form first – before wiring up the MP during the beta process. Not only would this speed up a release (as there are likely gremlins waiting to jump out on us as there always are) but it will make a lot of sense to test and improve MP on a community server – and to restart all the usual Community Megatests and such to aid with the testing.
COMBAT BALANCE
Previously, while looking good in videos and such, player movement felt tank-like and sluggish – but now 180s are smooth, combat/defense can take place at an angle and you can move in the direction you want to move in a far slicker fashion.
A big aspect in build 41 has been the combat balancing. We wanted to make the one on one combat feel a lot easier, where fighting with groups would be much much more deadly.
This however has been too successful if anything, and we ended up with groups being SO deadly it was actually near impossible to survive a few fights with small groups, which ended up way too punishing even for ours, the most masochistic of gaming communities. (Sorry)
As such, due to the new animation system’s ability to allow animations to play only on the top half of the body, RJ has made a change that allows you to strafe while shoving and swinging your weapon.
https://youtu.be/R2x6a8inq7s
We have also, partly in response to community concerns raised that it would be very easy to ‘kite’ the zeds – continually batting them off and keeping yourself safe from the horde, made sure that hordes are… something of a danger.
https://youtu.be/k4r-mKPjiDA
MOVEMENT BALANCE
Far and away the biggest change in recent weeks came as a result of some serious discussions about the responsiveness of the main player controls.
For the entirety of anims development the mission had been to balance the increased realism of movement and increased presence with the slight lag of control you have from the character moving realistically: with character footsteps actually accounting for movement, instead of an internal switch that’s flicked the moment you press a key.
Many AAA games have a slight delay in movement, even extremely amazing and popular ones such as Red Dead Redemption 2, so overall we thought this was a noble aim. The end results of which however, amidst a lot of positives, led to grumbling from internal testers. This week then, we experimented – tightening it further. Trying to push it to its very limit of control responsiveness, without the animations looking robotic.
We tightened blend times between standing idle and walking, tightened blends when turning etc, and now we think we’ve found a much tighter balance. Most of the internal testers, re-accustomed to the weightier movement through extended play, were already pretty much satisfied with what we had – but all now agree that the tightening of these screws has made things a lot better.
As such we’re now feeling a lot more confident that, after some adjustment period once both beta and final version are live, most established PZ players will have far less issues over how animations have changed the feeling of mobility within the game. Which has come as a relief
OPTIMIZATION
Zac’s current challenge is to be able to draw large quantities of articulated, walking, shambling, crawling, eating, and swarming zeds at a reasonable frame rate. Right now it’s okay-ish on a decent system, but wouldn’t stand up to a huge amount of zombie horde herding – which we know is a favourite pastime of PZ players.
Crowd Rendering is a collective term that involves a number of techniques that take advantage of the large numbers of crowds to make the process much more efficient.
To know where to aim, however, it’s a big help to have intimate knowledge of just how the PZ engine is performing, and where the hot-spots are. Toward this end, we are adding a Performance Analyzer module to AnimZed, and will direct our efforts to wherever it takes us.
OTHER STUFF
- The new Kentucky-themed soundtrack from our music maestro Zach Beever is now entirely in-game for build 41, working with the sadistic music director and has drama calculations tweaked too. The 36 new tracks span 2hr:41m in all, and also come with the gift of a new ‘level up’ noise, for those fed up with the singing lady.
- Muzzle flash.
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- Survivor Zeds have been added to the roads of the area. They’ll spawn with a bunch of other zombies, but will always carry a good rucksack filled with survival goodies and an annotated map to lead you on elsewhere.
- Stas’ improved controller work is going to be left until Build 42 so the current gamepad support has been improved to cater with the new movement and combat. L3 (pressing the left stick) toggles sneaking. Right-trigger while moving makes the player run, similar to the gas pedal in a vehicle. Right shoulder button is reload firearm. Left shoulder button is rack firearm.
- New Blood layer system so clothing closest to wounds gets stained with blood first, before progressively making blood marks on the next item of clothing. So a t-shirt gets a blood stain first, before then starting to make a mark on the sweater that covers it. Quick video of this in testing seen here.
- A big bugbear in the current internal build has been that the player could drop-dead from bleeding from non-consequential areas – like a gash in your feet. Now all injuries have their own bleeding modifier, so a neck wound has far worse bleeding implications than, for example, your leg.
- A speed modifier has been added to different body parts – so that injuries on some body parts have a greater impact on your walk and run speeds than others. So, for example, an injury on your upper leg will have less of an impact on speed than one directly on your foot.
- A ‘player appearance’ tab has been added to the in-game health/skills panel. Here you will be able to make whatever in-game appearance customisations to your survivor that are available to you – dependent on you having the relevant scissors, combs etc. in your inventory.
- The character customization screen has been receiving some polish– improving suggested player and profession clothing load-outs, making coloration choices less garish and polishing the idles of the character model that you’re dressing up. After much internal discussion on what to give away to players in terms of profession costumes, Martin has been creating some additional branded t-shirts to go with various professions in the game.
We also decided not to keep this rotational disaster in-game, but the modders amongst you will be able to revive it if needs be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8_-XVSGpSs
This is the eighth Steam round-up of development news for Project Zomboid, but weekly Thursdoid blogs are posted both on our website and on the Steam discussion boards.
A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info.The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
