Hey all, here’s the highlights of the last four weeks of Project Zomboid development – compiled from the Thursday blogs that appear at http://www.projectzomboid.com/blog/ and on the PZ Steam boards.

First off here are a couple of gameplay videos. This first one is a demonstration of ‘zoned zombie outfits’ – which is essentially the system that ensures that firefighter zombies spawn in fire stations, chef zombies spawn in restaurant kitchens and the like. (Please note that there are a few individual animations in this vid we want to speed up, and in most cases already have done)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGdxNR-Rrng&feature=youtu.be

Next up, meanwhile, we’ve had some significant improvements and fixes made by Bitbaboon Mark to the core animation blending system in past weeks. He’s fixing a whole bunch of issues, snaps and glitches that have been vexxing us for a long time – digging deep into the code, and doing a total rewire where necessary.

In prior Thursday vids we cut around these uglinesses as much as possible, but they still reared their heads. Snaps between character animations, jarring moves when turning to certain compass directions while strafing, and various other ugly things that we just couldn’t account for were plaguing us – but have now finally been fixed, leading to a far smoother animation blending system.

Zac’s prepared a video demoing the new blending – although please note he’s running in debug, so this doesn’t represent gameplay.

https://youtu.be/QMYGUWlVyMI


Speaking of, please note, that we’ve decided to put the completion of the high-res model rendering work described in the last Spiffo update on ice for little longer, since there were still numerous issues with it that meant it wasn’t suitable to put into the main line – and also it kept getting further broken by the flurry of additions and changes from the team’s work described above.

We feel it would be best approached toward the end of Build 41 dev just before IWBUMS, at the point we could get extra resources on board to get it working right. As such all videos until then will use the traditional character resolution.

TORN CLOTHES AND BLOOD

Zac’s work on masking out different parts of clothing items has resulted in several extremely useful features. First, it now allows us to wear pieces of geometry clothing on top of other geometry clothing – as opposed to being a texture drawn over the character’s skin. This used to be impossible: the clothing worn underneath would always poke through the geometry of the clothing on top, especially when moving.

So now we can layer clothing appropriately, and also spray blood on individual layers and garments – instead of your survivor’s body as a whole.

Our old solution was to to draw underclothing as textures directly on the character model, which unfortunately led to the side effect of them looking like body paint and lacking the bulk of real clothing. Now we can easily turn off areas of the clothing that are covered, so we are provided with many more options.

https://youtu.be/0-DiI2trU7g


This also allows us much more visual indications of damage and clothing wear and tear (quite literally).

As well as putting a player’s newly scavenged/treasured Spiffo shirt at risk of damage, this will allow much more variety with zombies in particular. RJ has been adding code to implement this new system to further randomize zombie’s clothing conditions, and tie potential clothing damage into the various game systems for the player.

https://youtu.be/Y_YEw1zRy7c

SURVIVOR ZEDS

Our primary rule with Build 41 is that we’re updating animations to complement and add foundation to our existing gameplay, rather than get too excited and add in loads of new systems that could otherwise wait till a later version.

A good example of this is something that’s been in the game for a while, but have always been hidden slightly: our annotated survivor maps that show you the way to various hidden stashes.

Now though, to create a bit of a breadcrumb trail for players to follow, we have introduced ‘uniformed’ survivor zeds. They are the walking corpse of a survivor like yourself, who will not only carry some handy loot, but also potentially lead you to a place of interest.

They will always be rare and spawned in a big crowd of zombies, but also appear bloodied and messed up and wear a neat backpack. One of our prototype Survivor Zeds looks a little like this:

https://youtu.be/ukLzLSER28w

OTHER FUN STUFF

Over with General Arcade Yuri has been continuing his visual effect work – and has fine-tuned his water so that waves and ripples aren’t as small. When it was windy in-game this was fairly uncomfortable on the eyes of our internal testers, so they now look like this.

Right now he’s also addressing something that’s been an issue with cars since their introduction, but that we were waiting to address once the differently proportioned new character models were in-game. As such, say hello to the more sensibly-sized cars that Yuri’s currently updating the physics for:

GENERAL GAMEPLAY ADDITIONS

Here’s a quick run-down of other items of interest that have gone into the internal branch of Build 41 over the past month.

• Extended idle animations. Depending on your character moodles, pain or other variable, you’ll sometimes see you character scratching an arm, shivering, checking his weapon, wipe his legs to check for blood etc.
• New timed action animations, alongside fixes for the current timed actions: digging graves with a shovel, looting on the ground or in shelves, cleaning blood etc.
• New outfits are also being added along with their own zone - Gigamart employee for example, and branded logo-ed shirts for various locations.
• New animation variants for the player defending against zombie bites. Three new variations of zombies thumping on objects.
• We’ve gotten ChrisW’s Sims-style wall cutaway system into the main line, but there are still a few issues to work out before its 100% operational.
• Garage doors can now be opened. – huzzah. We will also be addressing the size of garages on the main map, and at the same time adding some more signage to the Exclusion Zone road network
• Support for characters to lower and raise hoods on hooded clothing, for example hoodies and certain coats, have been added alongside several new idle animations used when the character has injuries.
• Zach continues his great work adding more tools and features, this time to allow Martin and the other devs to quickly add and test new costume pieces through the AnimZed editor and preview them in game.
• We have added many clothing items such as a poncho, hoodies, scarfs, aprons and swimming outfits. RJ also now has hair and beard styles being associated with zone costumes (for e.g. so you don’t tend to get military zombies or cops with hippy hairstyles and big beards).
Oh, and just today we found a way to make PZ feel a little more American. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow1qUukvjK4 This is the third monthly Steam round-up of development news for Project Zomboid, but weekly Thursdoid blogs are posted both 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. Our thanks to our good friend Xeonyx for creating the header image using the internal anims build. That’s all for now, keep tabs on our website for more every week!