Mondoid Reposts

[nasKo]

Posted Fri May 18, 2012  
 

0.2.0r
 
Once the game went into testing we discovered that a notable size of the test group had much worse performance than the previous version. Due to the fact that the game already ran sub-optimally on many people's machines this meant something had to be done.
 
We managed to make fundamental changes to the rendering engine to optimize it, to the point that some people even report better performance than in 0.1.5d (though this will vary from PC to PC) and certainly means that more people will be able to play on high than in previous versions of 0.2.0. However as people are no doubt aware there is a weird glitch that causes the music to loop if the game ever pauses or the player transverses between map cells. Now with the new graphic engine this has a further symptom in that it causes severe graphical corruption on the screen rendering the game unplayable.
 
There's obviously something really amiss going on under the bonnet somewhere that has so far been impossible to track down (hence why the music looping bug has stuck around for numerous versions) so this is something we need to fix and are looking into it around the clock.
 
The up-side is this will definitely be, by far, the fastest performing version of the game since 0.2.0a and for a few of you, possibly faster than 0.1.5d was... and that's hopefully something that justifies the extra delay.

[nasKo]

Posted Fri May 25, 2012
 

Hi all,
 
Good news: The ‘R’ build has been optimized to the nines, uses way less memory and runs loads faster than any of its 0.2.0 brethren. This is really looking to become much more stable and much more universal piece of code for everyone that plays the game.
 
Bad news: The graphical corruption bug explained above is still haunting us, and there’s no way we can release until we’ve vanquished it. As such, we still can’t give an ETA on when we’ll have driven a stake through its fat, black heart.
 
In the background work continues on art stuff (new locations, and female versions of the new animation set) and extra dialogue for further down the line. 
 
Don’t worry, hang on, and we’ll all get there in the end…

[nasKo]

Posted Thu May 31, 2012
 

Update:

The cause has been found and we're working on a fix. This won't be a five minute job because we have to fix it in a way that doesn't invalidate the speed gains, and there's a couple of odds and ends that need doing that couldn't be done with the corruption but thankfully we're finally on the home stretch.

[nasKo]

Posted Wed Jun 06, 2012

 

Update to previous updates:

 

Looks like we've axed that main problem and found a fix. We’re now onto the aforementioned ‘odds and ends that need doing that couldn't be done with the corruption’ – predominantly an issue with NPC animation and save corruption. Once we’ve addressed these we’ll create an internal test build, and then fingers crossed we’ll be at the tail-end of the eternal wait for R. Cheers all.

[nasKo]

Posted Tue Jun 12, 2012

 

The R build is now with testers after a few necessary path-finding fixes. We’re waiting for full feedback, but the initial sounds that we’re hearing are positive. Looks like there’ll be a little ‘tidy up’ work to do, but it’s full steam ahead.

 

Time for a clyde, I think

[nasKo]

Posted Wed Jun 20, 2012

 

 

We’ve tidied up the problems that were flagged up by internal testers (stuff like save corruption, missing sprites, lighting on characters and broken windows) and have re-uploaded the R build so they can check that our fixes haven’t caused issues elsewhere. Fingers crossed they won’t find too much, and we can let R loose into the wilds.

[nasKo]

Posted Mon Jun 25, 2012
 

 

Current status is that we’re cleaning up the last few game-breaker bugs flagged up by the second round of testing, implementing some fixes to the reloading system and fixing the new melee weapons like the frying pan and shovel. When that’s done we’ll have our release candidate.

Apologies that these final stages are a longer process than you, or we, anticipated. You’ve heard it said a few times before, but we’re almost there.

[nasKo]

Posted Thu Jun 28, 2012

Okay, so we’ve had a fun few days. We were building a release candidate when we discovered that the new blood system was causing late-game memory errors – so we ripped it out and put the old one back in.

 
On top of that the rabbit-hole on a music bug proved deeper than expected – so we’ll unfortunately be muting in the R release.
 
We’ve made you guys wait long enough, so we’ll fix it afterwards – as well as, obviously, working on the reintegration of fire and rain. And everything else that crops up.
 
Shouldn’t be long

[nasKo]

Posted Tue Aug 14, 2012

Quick update on RC3 (née RC2.5): we've got fire in and we've rewritten the code that plays music - thus nixing the loop bug. The tutorial mode is currently being fixed, and we're pretty much there with that too.
Today we've also been prodding some LUA issues - which have been resolved. There's a few more  bug fixes to sort, and we need to address the pausing on some machines, but we're well on our way to RC3. 
 
And we're currently looking to get FEMALES IN. Yay!

[nasKo]

Posted Wed Aug 15, 2012

Bit more of an in-depth 'where we're at' post:

• Since we're most of the way there, we're going straight for RC 3 and skipping RC 2.6, but will make sure all the fixes in 2.6 are in 3.
• Fire is in and working as it was before it was removed. Still needs save testing.
• Rain not in yet but will likely be a quick job when the time comes.
• Music in and working perfectly.
• Lua integration fixed completely. Overloaded methods now work properly.
• Female characters more or less in, we just need to do a massive export of all the characters, pieces, anims before we can get them in properly. (exporting = few hours tying up the PC unfortunately. Need to come up with a system that allows the PC to be worked on while it's happening since at the moment every 10 seconds a new window pops to front of screen making simultaneous working hernia inducing)
• Tutorial playable up to Raider. Only issue is the scripted 'fire' command is not working so the K&B showdown scene is a bit weird as he doesn't shoot his shotgun. Other additions needed is making NPC / zombies not spawn during tutorial again to avoid any unintended interference.
• Some UI fixes, like sorting out the choose story page, still needs doing.
• Still need to add character to character creation screen, and add a female option to it.
• New tutorial system in but need the steps of the tutorial adding:
  
  
  We may leave this till after RC 3 it depends I guess.
• After this we're going to spend some time scouting the forums and watching youtube videos and cleaning up a few of the bigger issues we notice. to make sure RC3 has no glaring bugs that have made 2.5 an issue.

[nasKo]

Posted Thu Aug 30, 2012

There's a bit of a status update in the blog I just posted:

http://projectzomboid.com/blog/index.php/2012/08/video-exclusive-knox-county-ladyfolk-bear-shotguns/
 
Pertinent bit reading as follows:
 
"The fact that we’ve finally got this video to show off is an indication that the major blockage holding up the RC3 build has been bypassed – the stuttering appears to have been broken with help of oftentime PZ hero Caspian Prince (@puppygames)."
 
"There are still a few jobs to do on the code (nixing the ‘pick up through walls’ bug, some graphical glitch fixes and creating builds for each platform) so it doesn’t look like it’ll coincide with the grand Steam Greenlight opening – which is annoying. Then again, the wheels are in motion and there’s very little left on the ‘to do’ list. When the update lands fire will be reintegrated, the tutorial will be playable, music will be fixed, zombies will swarm in a more deadly fashion and, of course, there’ll be womenfolk."

[nasKo]

Posted Tue Sep 04, 2012
 

Hey everyone, a quick update on the state of the build.

When we turned to clearing up the gameplay bugs before release we began to think that it might be better in terms of everyone’s enjoyment to make sure we've tackled all the big issues in one go – to make sure RC3 is the defacto build for people to go to, instead of dribbling out several builds with issues that stop people having fun with them.
 
As such in recent days we've fixed various annoying bugs like the zombification after eating rotten food – while being able to select containers through walls or once you’ve died is also a thing of the past.
 
Today’s primary job, among others, is to finally squash the zombie spawning bugs – which are probably one of the biggest factors that’s destroying people's fun on 2.5. Also on the menu are bugs related to levelling up and making electricity outage work properly. (Stockpile those batteries!)
 
So – good progress, and an ever more diminished task list. We’ll update you as we go.

[nasKo]

Posted Mon Sep 10, 2012

Just a quick update on current goings on:

• Now we have Mr RobertJohnson on the case, things are moving a lot faster. Hurrah for him! It also affords us to bump up the schedule for the new UI which was originally probably going to be a month or two away, and now (at least the inventory stuff) is looking more like a few days to a week (**NOT LEGALLY BINDING **). We could possibly get a build out sooner if we didn't do that, but to be honest there are so many bugs with the existing system at the moment we would need to fix which would be largely wasted time fixing stuff that's soon to be replaced. And wasted time is the last thing we need at the moment. While I'm working on that Robert is fixing a lot of bugs and also making changes to systems to make them more interesting (you will finally be able to overdose, for example!) so big progress is happening.

• Our philosophy with this build is it's gotta be close to as right as possible. No more broken builds or excuses. I'm sure there will be a couple of hotfix patches after, but after the whole 'best playing old version' philosophy of the last few patches we need to ensure that the next one is the defacto version everyone wants to play. It's heart breaking to see people going back to Q for one reason or another and we need to fix that. This is why we're mostly unapologetic in any delays this time around since another slightly broken and buggy build will not suffice and an 'It's ready when it's ready' attitude is needed to get the quality of the next build as high as possible.

• Things are looking very good for Greenlight! Both the votes we have received and the progress on the build now I'm not a one man code army. We've never felt more upbeat about PZ or its future.

• Stuff like graphical glitches are 100% sorted. No more flashes or graphical glitches at all, hurrah! However we'll need to do some closed testing on low spec machines to make sure this hasn't caused any performance drop before we can rest easy on that.

[nasKo]

Posted Mon Sep 17, 2012
 

Time for a quick status update!
 
While Lemmy has been working to complete the UI transformation, RobertJohnson has been jumping on all those bugs that got brushed aside so many times and made a real impact in his first month working on the team.
 
Now almost all the red bugs from the megabug thread are fixed, Robert is working on implementing the various commands using the new context menus.
 
For Lemmy, the UI overhaul is going very well, with the introduction of context menus whether equipping a primary weapon, dumping items in a container, eating some food, barricading a door, ripping bandages, even walking to a location (to make one handed playing much easier), you're never more than two clicks from interacting with anything in the game. 
 
There's still a few more commands to add, and now most of the megabug reds are fixed, Robert is currently busy completing those while Lemmy completes building the new crafting window and various other fixes here and there to make the UI as slick and easy to use as possible. 
 
Meanwhile Andy and Mash continue with Project Real-Estate, although it's not likely to be in RC3, what's going on in that Dropbox folder is very exciting and we can look forward to a lot more of Knox County to explore in the future! I haven't been entirely twiddling my thumbs either and have been writing a few things to feed to the RingoD scripting machine that'll remain secret for now.
 
And finally, just to keep everyone in the loop, these are the bug-fixes that RJ has pounced upon and fixed in his own words. On top of this there’s some neat gameplay tweaks too, but we’ll keep that secret for now too
 
- When you eat rotten food it infect you, and you'll die zombified. Fixed (now you just have sickness)
- If you were sick while disconnecting (saving game), by loading you'll have the sickness moodle, but sickness (fake infection lvl), never goes up. Fixed
- At the saving, if you were Fake infected (sickness), at the loading you'll be really Infected (zombie infection). Fixed
- Get zombified don't show the end game screen ("You survived for..."). Fixed
- Sometimes you can play as a Zombie. Fixed (but I liked this glitch )
- As a zombie you can interract with item (beds, etc.). Fixed
- You can switch lights on after 30 days (when the power goes out). Fixed
- Lights still turned on after 30 days. Fixed
- Windows maxHealth does not saved properly. Fixed
- You can still choose other skills when you have selected one (and the number of skill points went negative). Fixed
- You can leave the level up screen if you still have skills points (you can store them). Fixed
- When you drink Water Pot it's replace by an Empty bottle of water. Fixed
- The right quick drag arrow in the player's inventory is on the left. Fixed
- Water recipients/pill boxes are refilled every time you load your game, as long as there was water on them when you saved. Fixed
- Thirst is not affected by gameTime speed. Fixed 
- Endless acceleration if you die while holding "enter". Fixed
- Moving by using right click allow you to run very fast. Fixed
- Fast forward didn't affect thirst. Fixed
- Health regen problem. Fixed (If you eated food in fast forward, it was staying for a very long time + Health regen now take the gametime speed in calcul)
- Placing a flashlight in the crafting window crashes the game. Fixed
- Trying to craft a tasty soup (soup with 3 ingredients) crashes the game. Fixed
- You can reduce boredom by shouting ("Q" key pressed). Fixed
- Pain is never reduced (except by painkiller). Fixed (now if you're full health, Pain start reduce)
- Condition of items are not saved. Fixed
- You can run for a long time in full speed while keep "Enter" press. Fixed
- Character creation screen: sometimes, pressing backspace or delete crashes the game. Fixed
- Objects are no more outlined on mouse over when reloading. Fixed
- Landing on a solid item (like tree) when moving between cell causes 'lost in the woods' problem. Fixed

[nasKo]

Mondoid Sep 24, 2012
 
Hello! Here's your Monday status update - slightly copied and pasted from the front page blog, but here nonetheless.

 
Work on RC3 continues apace. This includes something rather unexpected. While Lemmy and RobertJohnson/Romain were busying themselves with the code it became increasingly evident that memory was again becoming more and more of an issue. Memory demands were dangerously high, and it was looking increasingly likely that people with lower-end systems would suffer come release. Cometh the hour, then cometh the streaming…
 

 
Through this new system we’ve saved 400 meg of memory demands, because we no longer need the entire 300×300 map loaded up. It’s something of a relief to have working, in all honesty, and we feel like we’ve dodged something of a bullet.
 
In terms of the update proper Chris is currently Chris is fixing a few issues so that Knox County will react cogently to the new streaming system, while Romain is rejigging NPC interaction to use the new context menus – as well as mopping up a few remaining issues in the game. Will and RingoD are conjuring up some fun new NPC encounters, while Mash and Andy continue in their quest to expand the borders of Muldraugh for a future update.
 
More as it happens. The head of steam we built up post-Greenlight hasn't faded yet

[nasKo]

Posted Tue Oct 02, 2012

Quick RC3 round robin update - cultivated from the front page blog.

It’s been a week of many and varied tasks for everyone on the team, so we thought we’d round them up in something of a cover-all blog – and knuckle down into more depth and explanatory videos later on this/next week.
 
First up is map streaming – which is looking to be entirely amazing, but is also the necessary cause behind the renewed delay to RC3. As we explained last Monday, the memory demands of Project Zomboid had crept up to worrisome levels – had we released in its former state many existing players would’ve had major problems getting it to run. As such some extensive surgery had to be performed. If you haven’t already checked out the results (with a hidden 400MB of memory saved) then see the above post.
 
With this development Chris is now working on zombie spawning within the streamed world – he’s developing a system that will allow for accurate calculation of whether areas are accessible to zombies or not. In the background, meanwhile, he’s also working on getting rain switched back on – and also helped Andy and Mash with some tools to speed up map production for future updates. This is something that our modding community will be hugely excited to see – and will of course be made available to everyone in due course. We’ll release a more in-depth commentary on it later on – but this is what the new building design tool looks like:
 

 
Andy and Mash themselves, meanwhile, are busying themselves with new maps – and are in fact almost good to go with two new cells for Muldraugh. So, that essentially means that after RC3 we’ll be able to triple the size of the current zombie-populated map. One of them requires an increased density of buildings, however, which is where the aforementioned new map design tools are coming in more than useful.
 
Will and RingoD, meanwhile, have been conjuring up meetings with NPCs to add a little more variety to the current “Hey!”, “Screw you!” confrontations after RC3. When you meet fellow survivors we hope to provide some far more evocative and interesting situations – and we’ve already got a good few hundred variations on central themes in the can. Here’s a quick grab from one of Will’s writing docs.
 

 
Finally Romain, the wonderful amazing and (quite probably) beautiful new addition to the PZ team, has been busying himself with some amazing new systems that will add to the realism of Knox County. We won’t spoil anything – but some of this involves two new moodles, the placement of the moon and accurate temperature charts of real world Muldraugh. There’s plenty more besides too.
 
As ever, apologies for stretching patience once again – but once we nail RC3 and the streaming system we’ve got a hell of a lot of content waiting to fall into the readied code. We hope that the internal creative surge we’ve got going on is at least evident to the world at large, and honestly can’t wait for you to sample it. More updates as they happen.

[nasKo]

Mondoid Oct 08, 2012
 

 

Hello! Here's your Monday update, with a bunch more information in a blog that's super-soon to go up on the front page.
 
Right now we’re building in more NPC stuff to help them cope with a streaming world, and optimizing the PZ mainframe to reduce load times – aiming for it to only take a few seconds to get from the menu and into the game.
 
Chris is also working on an automatic no-render system so that buildings auto-hide when the player walks behind them - instead of relying on the zones defined in the editor. There’s also some exciting stuff happening with map creation tools, which is in turn helping Binky and Mash put the finishing touches on the new areas of Muldraugh that’ll be merged with the game soon after RC3. The remarkable EasyPickins is creating some brilliant stuff for us when it comes to mapping tools which will help modders hugely when they are publicly released.
 
So full steam ahead, and a cool interview with RobertJohnson/Romain on the front page with new info, screenshots etc. We're planning on showing a bit more of the PZ World and Building editors later this week


Oh, and Chris is also working on this which is rather nice:

https://twitter.com/lemmy101/status/256406825598062593

[nasKo]

Mondoid Oct 15, 2012
 

It's Monday!
 
Coding work this week has been directed at the game’s front-end. To this end Lemmy has created lovely new UI menu that’ll let you select maps to spawn on, whether official or user-created, and also boot up your game from a range of savegames. (All save-on-quits, natch). He’s also hugely revamped the username/key input box to make booting up less of a headache. For a sneak peek at the system, Mash’s new menu artwork and some heftily reduced load times – check out this vid. 
 

 
The arty-types themselves, meanwhile, have been busying themselves with new Muldraugh mappage. This is content that will be a part of the RC3 build release if both code and art are ready to go at the same time – which is currently looking likely.
 
For more info check out the front page bloggage:
http://projectzomboid.com/blog/index.php/2012/10/knox-gets-real-spotlight-on-binky/
 
Fanks all

[nasKo]

Mondoid Oct 22, 2012

 

If it’s Monday, then it must be time to open the curtains, take down the barricade and worriedly scan the horizon. Yes, survivors of Muldraugh – it’s time for an update on The Indie Stone’s slow, yet relentless and inevitable, march to the front door of your safe house.

 

This week we’re chatting with Chris ‘Lemmy’ Simpson about all manner of mischief – including streaming, NPCs and how to care for whippet puppies. Before he gets his moment in the sun, however, we should say that things are still coming together. It’s likely, for example, that the code and map deliveries will coincide for the update – although we still need to play with item distribution, create a new tutorial house and get RingoD transplanting the action into K&B’s new home.

 

We know that people are chomping at the bit for the new update, and we know that reading about the new stuff we’re introducing is a bit of a tease when people have gone without for so long. We’re aware that stuff like the improved NPCS sound a bit feature-creepy, but assure you that the work spent in fiddling around with them is a necessity brought on by the necessity of introducing map streaming. There’s a lot of necessary stuff going down, basically.

In terms of polish, too, at the moment we’re systematically going through the game and trying to fix and polish as many of PZ’s gaping holes as possible. NPCs and the UI were two of the biggest holes that needed quickly barricading shut ASAP. Lemmy will explain a little bit more about all this, and our plans for thicker and faster future updates, after we plaster a picture of his big stupid face all over your computer screen.

 

First things first, how’s Cally the Wonder-Dog?

 

She’s doing great! Though she’s teething so is leaving nice sharp presents for us to stand on along with nice soft smelly squishy presents – though she’s finally getting the hang of doing the latter outside. That’s a clever nickname you came up with for her there, because we certainly do wonder about her.

 

Huzzah! So, anyway, how has the recently-added map streaming changed the game, and the way you code it?

 

Well the main difference is obviously there’s a lack of any loading screens when walking around the map. The impact this has is on the immersion – you never see that black border and you’re never aware of, say, being in the ‘top left corner’ of here or the ‘bottom end’ of there. It’s just one big seamless world. From a coding perspective it’s saved a ton of memory since we’ve been able to go back to only having the 0.1.5d map-size loaded into memory. That memory save is what made the streaming a necessity – many people would have struggled with the code in its former state. It’s also brought a few challenges with it – but they’ve been welcome ones really. We now need to think about how to deal with NPCs in a more meaningful way, for instance.

 

So what are you currently doing with those hardy Muldraugh NPC-types?

 

This has been the subject of many a four-way Skype design chat, and even more latte-supping with Binky. Will (who is the one asking these questions, but never mind let’s not confuse things) has written a mountain of NPC chat that’s yet to go into the game, and we want to use that to its fullest. The thing is, with streaming potentially making the ultimate persistence of the NPCs more difficult, we had to rethink how they work on a fundamental level.

 

As such, we’ve been looking at quick design ways to get most ‘bang for your buck’ with NPCs. Trying to make them the HAL 9000 of zombie survival seems to be a fool’s errand, especially when one day in the far-flung future only 1/1000th of the map will be loaded into memory. So right now I’m working on a ‘meta-game’ that extends across the entire map that has virtual survivor groups moving between buildings, looting and surviving according to statistics that’ll let us trigger infinitely more interesting NPC encounters. I’m also implementing more information to the player on NPC survivors, including traits in the form of ‘observations’ and a few more group commands for them.

 

Here’s a screenshot from the current build, where I’m printing out a debug overview of the world with survivor groups (red = aggressive, green = friendly, white = mixed) to see how the survivors get on. With the new meta-game survivor groups can now last for weeks, even months, without dying.

 

 

 

When people play the update, what will they notice as being different about fellow survivors?

 

NPC meetings should be infinitely more interesting. Instead of running around from one vague X, Y coordinate to another – and telling you to ‘fuck off’ – they could be say… running to their safehouse and invite you to come along. Alternatively they may be ambushing you at your safehouse to steal your stuff, or perhaps be in the middle of an altercation with one of their teammates.

NPC meetings will still be driven by a sandbox environment, but will be more like story points when you meet them. Also they’ll be massively more useful since you can tell them (or they might decide independently) to go on looting missions. You’ll be able to ask them to go get food, and then see them wander off for a day or so. They may come back, they turn into a shambling corpse somewhere, they may bring those supplies – and if they do return they might’ve taken a bite in the process.

 

Here’s the unfinished ‘send characters on looting mission’ selection screen, where you can choose (by observing the character’s personalities and traits) who to send to get supplies (or die horribly in the attempt).

 

 

And here’s the WIP character info screen. Please note a stupid illiterate programmer wrote those descriptions as placeholders, and not our resident writer…:

 

 

So, if an NPCs is capable of bringing in more food than he/she can eat, then they could well suddenly prove to be an asset and not a liability. Finding tough, survivable NPCs will be a big help to surviving longer. Since the NPCs will have such relevance now – you’ll be able to check a character sheet of sorts which will describe observations that you’ve picked up from them. In fact Will has just sent these over, so you can have a sneak peek.

 

 

Lastly, to make survival harder and to make NPCs ever more necessary we’re going to be a lot stricter with item distribution. You can expect it to be a lot tougher to scavenge food and resources to survive – since the high loot area will be mid-town where all the zombies are. So a lone wolf without good survivalist skills will find it tough, so might need to look to others for support.

 

Sweet. We’ll probably expand on all that the NPC stuff when Will (who’s me) gets his slot in the spotlight next week. Is there anything else you’ve added that would interest the PZ community?

 

Well primarily all the new NPC stuff, from the UI to the meta-game, is completely written in Lua. As such it’s fully moddable, expandable or even replaceable.

 

Speaking of which you were posting enthusiastically on the forums about the work of one EasyPickins. Who is he, what’s he done and what does it mean for the PZ community?

 

We approached EasyPickins a month or so ago because, quite frankly, even with his awesome awesome improvements to TileZed, our map production was just way too slow. We came with a few ideas and some rough prototypes we’d put together and he quickly transformed them into WorldEd (which he’d actually been working on for the existing map system), and made some exciting improvements to TileZed on top of what we’ve already shown off in our recent video.

 

He’s also made TileZed about a hundred times more polished and nicer to use. He’s made a mechanism for converting a big BMP (say 3000×3000 for 10×10 cells) into grass, trees, sand, gravel and so it’s all blended together with intermediate tiles, and then spits it out 0_0 to 9_9.tmx. So then you’re ready to start creating buildings with BuildingEd, and to simply drag them into place in WorldEd or TileZed. A click of ‘Export’ will then create files to simply drag into a new Maps folder, meaning that your new map will be selectable as a new game along in the new front-end.

EasyPickins has been astoundingly fast, and everything he produces is really polished and professional. He’s continuing working with us and we’re very excited at what the future will bring with map production speeds to both us and the modders.

 

Over on the Desura boards you recently explained why we couldn’t release early versions of what we’re currently working on. You used quite a good Scrapheap Challenge analogy. Could you possibly cut and paste that here for a wider audience?

 

“If anyone’s seen Scrapheap Challenge or a 3 day time-limit DIY show or something. That’s alpha funded dev. You have a pile of garbage for weeks, then it all comes together within the last few minutes. We can’t just arbitrarily ‘release something’.”

 

It’s completely understandable, but frustrating to read ‘just release it damn it!’ when what you’ve currently got is a version of the game where all the zombies are zipping around at 1000mph (Romaaaain!) or there’s only food getting spawned in the map (meeeeeeee!). You just know that releasing what you’ve got in front of you is the worst thing you could possibly do!

 

We’ve often ended up releasing earlier than we planned to just because we were worried it’d been too long, and we reached a point where we felt we could ‘just release something damnit!’ and thought, well our community want it, we’ll give it to them. Sadly this has resulted in a lot of our community still playing an older release of the game, and people elsewhere who perhaps weren’t aware of their ‘test release status’ who assume Zomboid is shoddy buggy stuff.

 

This is the last thing the game, or the community need. So all of us made a pact this time that the next version of the game would be ‘right’. A few quick patch bugs aside, we’re just going to remain steadfast and release the best version of Zomboid there has been since day one. And also, finally, get those poor (yet awesome) souls at Desura an auto-updating version of the game.

 

What’s it like working with our new recruit Romain? What’s he beavering away on? Will all his work be present when we update?

 

Romain has been great! After getting the new weather system in, he’s currently implementing farming, after which he’ll be looking to implement the campfire stuff (since, as the Starks say, ‘Winter is Coming’). It’s such a massive relief to me to know that if I’m ever stuck guts-deep in something that the game’s code isn’t at a standstill, and that someone is still getting stuff in there. I’m sure people have noticed a sharp drop in the number of stressed coding tweets since he joined! I’m sure farming will be in the next update. We’ll see about campfires after that.

 

Something else that it sounds Romain has brought to the Indie Stone’s table is a potential new approach to bug-fix builds. Could you elaborate?

 

It’s the system Romain uses where he works, and basically involves maintaining two concurrent builds of the game. There’s one that’s frozen from the last update, and one development build that new features are implemented into. This means that if a bug is reported, we can fix it in the development build and them merge the changes across to the frozen build. Once we’ve fixed enough, we can simply release that frozen build as a bug fix release – without people needing to wait for the development work to get to completion. It should have a dramatic effect on both our ability to approach bigger development tasks freely, as well as our ability to quickly fix problems with the game after an update – and to speed up the frequency of the updates.

 

Anything else that you’d like to mention?

 

XCOM!

 

Can we have a photo of Cally the Wonder Dog please?

Yes!

 

Oh, and while we’re at it here’s a quick screen of the new map cultivated from Binky’s work-station. We’ll be back mid-week with the next instalment of Community of the Dead. Thanks all!

 

[nasKo]

Mondoid Oct 29, 2012
 

Greetings gentle survivor. This week we’re going to have a cup of tea, a Nice biscuit (note to non-UK readers, there is actually a sort of biscuit called a ‘Nice’ biscuit) and a cosy fireside chat with our writer Will. He’s the one who puts the cuss-words into the dirty-bird mouths of Muldraugh survivors, and he wants to share his thoughts on RC3 with y’all.

 

Let’s update you on what’s happening elsewhere first though. Last week we caught up with Lemmy and his work on the NPC survivor ‘metagame’ – and that’s taken up most of this week too. We’ve now got a good lump of code that transforms walky-talky NPC groups into ‘meta groups’ when they wander away from your direct vicinity, still retaining the same goals and paths but in disembodied form. This is still very much the focus of his work – but NPC raids, item distribution and optimizating the game whenever he sees an opportunity are also in his PZ-style line of sight cone.

 

Map-wise Binky is still deeply buried in the lay-out of the map cells, dropping placeholders into areas to make sure everything looks okay and will play well – before diving in with a hammer and chisel to make new buildings permanent. His most exciting moment this week came with the selection and construction of Kate and Baldspot’s new tutorial home. It looks like this!

 

 

Without wanting to add too much drama to our cosy Monday development post, Mash had some trauma while she was on holiday in Mexico. She got bitten by a Sea lion. (We know!). Formerly, when pressed, she used to say that the most incredible thing she’d ever been attacked by was birds – on two separate occasions. Now, however, she can add Mexican marine mammals to the list. She’s back now in any case – safe, sound and starting preliminary work on a brand new map cell for later on down the line.

 

Finally Romain has been balancing his seasons, researching agriculture for the implementation of farming and streamlining the UI. For example, to barricade a window, you don’t need to have all the items equipped if everything is in already in your inventory. ‘Barricade’ will pop up as a UI option, items (hammer, plank) will be auto-equipped and a nailing you will go…

 

Anyway, here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. It’s… well… it’s me…

 

 

Why is that picture of you dressed as Batman?

 

I lead a double life. Sometimes I write for games, like Project Zomboid, and sometimes I write about the games themselves. Sometimes, when you go to write about said games there’s a Batman costume there. I don’t know why, but that photo really was from a special moment in my life.

 

Well, okay. So what are you up to at the moment in terms of Zomboid and RC3?

 

While Andy and Mash busy themselves with the new map and Chris and Romain tackle Java coding that’s beyond my ken, right now I’m sketching out the NPC dialogue that’ll crop up whenever you send a follower (or a few of them) off on a looting mission. It’s probably one of the biggest jobs I’ve had so far, since we need player requests that are Friendly, Neutral and Aggressive – and responses from NPCs that reflect their mood state too. On top of that we need streamlined ways for your chosen foragers to report how they got on, who died and who was injured. In the fullness of time we’ll also have cool stuff like your followers recognising former comrades, who’ve turned into zombies on away missions, banging on the door. There’s an epic amount of material to cover!

 

Will the new NPC trait system have any effect on your writing?

 

Yep, certainly. The traits will be really useful ways to label the various different NPCs and their individual characters – so I’ll be able to create some custom dialogue for more cowardly or foolhardy followers to mutter at opportune moments. A lot of this will be written and implemented post-RC3, but for this build something I will be doing is using followers flagged with more ‘negative’ traits to respond to you in a more desperate fashion when they’re sent off to loot supplies – and to whinge more when they return with flesh wounds.

 

The major feedback I get from Lemmy, Binky and Mash is that I need to inject NPCs with a much greater sense of doom – which is tricky to balance with the more functional ‘go here!’, ‘yes boss!’ dialogue. With the new traits, however, I can present a certain slice of the Muldraugh community as maudlin, suicidal and desperate people – meaning that the tragedy quota will always be topped up.

 

I’ve also written a few scenarios where you’ll meet people who’ve taken overdoses, or have quite simply lost the plot as the zombie apocalypse has developed. They won’t be people who can join you, but they will give a stronger flavour of the breakdown in society. You’ll be able to steal their stuff, or just put them out of their misery – if you so choose.

 

Any other scenarios you’d care to share?

 

Well, we’re trying to engineer a few ways to meet other survivors – other than just bumping into them while you’re exploring the town. As such I’m creating a few meetings with NPCs who’ll want to trade supplies (for example, a character who wants to swap a weapon for a certain number of bottles of booze) – so simple fetch quests, with the possibility of grouping to follow.

 

When can we expect all this?

 

The joys of Lua and the new UI system mean that everything I’m doing is quick and easy to code into the game. As such, there’s no reason to suppose that what I’ve already written won’t be packed in RC3. What I will say, however, is that I’m even keener to get my hands on the new code than the PZ community!

 

I’m desperate to see my stuff in the game – to find out what works, and what doesn’t. As such, beyond RC3, I think people can expect to see a lot of editing and fine-tuning in the dialogue systems while we try to strike the right balance between chit-chat and ominous silence. Everyone’s feedback will be more than appreciated at that point.

 

What’s happening with Kate and Baldspot these days?

 

The Kate and Baldspot tutorial storyline is currently scripted quite a bit beyond what people first played in the demo – there’s a new character that joins proceedings, and a fair degree of medical activity. It’s all been in the can, and ready for distribution in the code, for a really long time – but we need RC3 finalised before it can be put into action.

 

My current working relationship with RingoD is that I do my scribbles, then fire it all over to him for processing. Once the game build has stabilised, however, we’ll be able to work together a lot more closely when creating new PZ Stories and developing the one we already have. I already know the two new characters we’ll be introducing next, but I’ll keep them under wraps until we’ve actually got to the stage when they’re in active development.

 

As well as character dialogue, there’s a more general world story going on. Will you also expand on stuff like the radio broadcast in the tutorial?

 

Right back at the very start I wrote out emergency radio broadcasts that would splutter into action as every in-game day went passed. A small slice of this is what ended up in the demo. I definitely want to get that into future builds to expand on what’s happening in the world beyond Muldraugh – and also maybe to flag up game-changing stuff like the water and electricity supplies running out. Again, that’s something that’ll be going into the game beyond RC3.

 

So what other stuff are you up to other than PZ?

 

Like I said before with the Batman stuff – unlike Lemmy, Andy and Mash I don’t work full-time on Zomboid. I still do a lot of writing about games for websites, and recently won a Games Media Award for a website called Hookshot Inc. I occasionally do a smidge of writing for other games that are in development too, but nothing I’ve worked on recently has been announced yet – so I’d better keep schtum on them!

[nasKo]

Mondoid Nov 05, 2012 (Note: Due to a later website redesign the display of the list is kind of effed on the blog post)

 

Good afternoon, good evening or good night to you, hearty and healthy Muldraugh Survivor! We’re here with a few slices of development news. Huzzah!

There’s still some NPC work to be done, dialogue to be bound into the game and some front-end work that’ll be needed before we can release RC3, but this week we’re really chuffed to be able to show you a video of what’s been worked on over the past few days from the cumulative efforts of Lemmy and Binky. We’ll let the video do the talking – which also showcases some of the new map (still WIP), as well as some of Romain’s fine weather work.

 

 

This gameplay vid shows some of the various changes we’ve decided to make to combat and zombie-kind in RC3 so that fighting is more fluid and danger is rebalanced. Here’s a grab-bag of what’s been done:

• There’s a new downward floor swing/stab and shoot. Your chosen weapons and skills will now combine for a critical hit chance (a solid head shot, essentially) – this will be doubled when a zombie is down on the floor as they won’t be moving and melee attacks can be given some extra gravitational welly.
• Without a chopping weapon like an axe it’s now very difficult as a starting non-combat character to flat out kill a zombie that’s still on its feet. The focus for survival will be to get them on the floor to deliver some ‘fatal’ blows to the head. Getting one zombie down and gifted with a leaky brain will be relatively easy (though not without risk) but multiple zombies will cause issues.
  These new mechanisms would probably prove frustrating in the current test build, with its massively mobile and unpredictable hordes, but should work absolutely fine in RC3. Zombie populations now make more sense depending on where they’re located – in this video the character is travelling deeper and deeper into town, which is a better area for loot but simultaneously more densely populated with deadheads. As such, with the new combat we’re driving up the danger of looting missions, while keeping lone straggler confrontations as more of an inconvenience – as long as if you’re careful. (And, in case you’re wondering, there will still be occasional Sadistic AI driven migrations to keep you on your toes!)
• We’ve changed ‘aim’ so that it triggers when you’re holding the left mouse button (we’ve made sure that it won’t detect clicks on the UI, or swing your weapon when opening doors) and it already feels a lot better. It essentially means that you’ll have far better strafe mobility, and that you’ll only needing to worry about the mouse and WASD.
• If people are still in love with the old ‘hold shift’ routine, however, then they’ll be able to toggle it in the options menu. While we’re on that subject, we’ve also made ‘mouse only’ play possible once again, and it’s now much easier. Clearly, however, implementing strafing when people play with the mouse alone will be a difficult design challenge for us in future – if, indeed, it’s possible at all.
• Zombies are now far more likely to spread out when they approach you, meaning that they’ll be less of a shuffling death-train and more of an all-encompassing circle of soon-to-be screwed-ness.
• You can now step over zombies, so if you’ve knocked them onto their back then your chances of escape aren’t quite as slim. Then again, zombies can step over those self-same downed zombies – so they’ve simultaneously become a little more dangerous when they’re in crowds.
• In earlier versions of the game you could only shove when were holding a weapon. This wasn’t ideal, so now you can shove away with your raw bleeding arms to your heart’s content.

That’s the meat of the Monday update then, but be assured that dialogue, map-work, RingoD’s scripting, tile creation and whatnot are also ongoing. We’ll be back very soon with a chat with the amazing Mash ‘Marina’ Potato to talk Sea-Lion bites, trait icons, inappropriately placed riding stables and sombrero-wearing Guinea Pigs. There’ll also be a Community of the Dead post to reveal the winners of our Halloween costume competition.

 

Exciting times! We can’t wait for you to (finally) sink your teeth into what we’re working on. Sorry, as ever, for being coy – but as you can see in the video things are really coming together at the moment.

 

Love you lots x The Indie Stone x

[nasKo]

Mondoid Nov 12, 2012

 

Hello! It’s just another Muldraugh Monday so here’s your latest dollop of Zomboid related development news, alongside the last of the current run of developer interviews. This time it’s Mash in the limelight – and alongside some serious Sea Lion and Guinea Pig chit-chat we cover the new trait icons, menu art and mappage of the upcoming RC3 build.

 

The rest of the team have been super-busy too, though. Binky fr’instance, has been working on some of the animations currently missing from the game – a notable one being leaping through windows, or hanging off them. Whether they’ll be part of RC3 remains to be seen – but there are a couple of other new animations ready to be fed into the current build that we should be able to show off very soon. We’ll keep schtum on what they are for now so we can surprise you with the video.

 

Romain’s farming system has also been receiving a lot of love amidst the design of the new map. As well as his own work topping and tailing the gameplay, Will has been helping with anglification of its descriptions and Mash has helping to extending it out into the natural world around Muldraugh. These icons are an example of her toil.

 

 

NPC work, meanwhile, continues apace. Will and RingoD are still conspiring to create in-game dialogue (most recently the words that spill out when you vocally assign a building to be your safehouse in front of your NPC followers). On top of refining the off-screen NPC meta-game and helping Andy integrate animations, Lemmy has done a lot of NPC combat work.

 

They’ve been fixed up to remove ‘standing still and getting munched’ stupidity, and can now handle crowds of zombies without dying. Now we know that they’re capable in a fight the next job will be to dial back their effectiveness according to their skill and personality trait modifiers. A team of 4, or so, NPCs can now pretty much tear through zombies – which means we can now cruelly make them less effective and balance them nicely. It’s also good to know that when Kate finally becomes mobile in the Tutorial story she’ll be able to hold her own!

 

Anyway, without further ado… here’s our very own Marina Siu-Chong to fill you in on what else she’s up to in the realm of Zomboid RC3.

 

 

Hello Mash! How on earth did you get bitten by a sea lion? Was it scary?

 

Hello Will! There I was, strolling down the street, minding my own business… nah, I got it in Mexico, while on a snorkelling tour near a sea lion colony. I was too near, as it turned out. It hurt a bit when it happened, but I continued snorkelling and didn’t realize I was bleeding until I got back on the boat. Totally worth it to swim with sea lions, though!

 

So, what are you up to at the moment on PZ?

 

I’m currently switching between working on new environment tiles and creating trait icons for the NPCs.

 

The trait icons are being used to quickly summarize traits, so people can remember what a NPC in their party is like with a glance (the icons will update as new information becomes available and experiences happen). As they need to appear next to names, the icons are just 18×18 pixels, which is a challenge for readability… but that challenge is part of what I love about pixelling!

Since you can’t pack in too much information in such a small area, the icons are consequently pretty abstract in some cases. Here are two of them as an example:

 

You can use a brain to indicate ‘intelligence’ pretty easily, but a concept like ‘resilience’ is tougher. We’ll see how people respond to them, and make changes where necessary.

 

People have seen a glimpse of the new menu art in the new front-end video. What can you tell people about it? How did you draw it, and why have you created a new one?

 

While we all liked the atmosphere of the old title screen, it was always intended to be a placeholder. Since we’ve had this long period without an update, I thought it would be a good time to have a new title screen; with the upcoming release being a new beginning, and all that. We wanted a picture that would emphasize the more emotional aspects of PZ, and I went for a quiet moment between Bob and Kate. It was painted digitally in Photoshop.

 

How do you work the map design with Andy? Do you do different sections?

 

Andy (aka Binky) creates the landscape and gives me the layout, and I make the buildings, create new tiles if necessary, and add the detail. We generally work on different sections at the same time, but there will be some crossover where I create a lot that he’ll place on his map, and vice versa.

 

What is the ‘Inappropriately Placed Riding Stable’ that keeps appearing in Dropbox? That always confuses me.

THAT is why I have Andy give me the layout! In one of the maps I was working on, there was a big empty field, so I put a farmhouse-like building there. Then, I thought, “why not have a small barn?” It kind of turned into a stable. Then I put a big fence around it and turned it into a riding farm. Then Andy asked me, “Why is there a riding farm in the middle of a residential area?” And I said: “…” So it’s saved it out as a separate lot for later inclusion now.

 

Where did Spiffo come from, and why is he the heart of The Indie Stone?

 

He’s otherwise known as Mr. Spiffo, and he’s from PAWS. The first Indie Stone game. PAWS was a 2D multiplayer battle game in which adorable woodland creatures played tag and threw acorns at each other. It was quite a different game from PZ!

 

 

The game was loosely set in the English countryside, so we had animals that were endemic to England, like hedgehogs and red squirrels… but I wanted a Canadian character in there too, so we added a raccoon. Mr. Spiffo (a temporary name that stuck, much like ‘Project Zomboid’) soon became the favourite with his sly looks and attitude, and became wildly overpowered (he could steal items, dig, climb, had a tail spin attack, and in the least biologically realistic feature of all, could use his tail to glide across the screen).

 

There’s a few references to other games that Lemmy, Binky, and I have worked on together scattered in PZ (some might recognize the character on the cover of the inventory magazine), but Spiffo is the most overt one. When I was creating tiles for a fastfood restaurant chain, I wanted something that could have a cute mascot, and suddenly thought “Spiffo’s”!

 

Will fell in love with him (I’m not exaggerating, he has said this on several occasions), and he’s become more and more intertwined with our company as a result.

 

What’s your artistic background? Do you have work online that other people could check out?

 

While I’ve always been interested in drawing, my official artistic background is relatively new. I went to university for sciences, graduated, and was working somewhat in that field as a scientific art editor, then as a project manager. However, I wasn’t happy with my job, and decided to back to school for art. Yup, I had my mid-life crisis in my twenties!

 

I had started getting a little interested in game development during my time at university, using AGS. While there I met lots of cool and encouraging people, but it was my buddy Buloght in particular who was the one who inspired my love for pixels and helped me get better at it. Who knew that I would be using it in my job in the future! You can find my art blog and games work here.

 

How are the Guinea Pigs?

 

Lola’s good, but Hugo continues packing on the grams.

 

Is there anything else the PZ community needs to know?

 

I bought a mini sombrero for Hugo in Mexico. A photo of him wearing it will be taken. It will be tweeted. You will follow @mashpotassium and not miss it!

[nasKo]

Mondoid Dec 03, 2012

 

Evening all. Here’s your Monday slice of blog love, but first a spot of housekeeping. The Indie Stone forums are in the process of switching hosts, so some users might experience unpleasant down-time over the next day or so. Don’t worry though, we still love you and are assured that all gremlins will be removed through the inevitable forward march of time.

 

That’s the boring stuff out of the way. There’s heaps of stuff to talk about this week – and there’ll likely be a few extra videos we were hoping to share today appearing soon too. For the past few days Lemmy and Binky have been fiddling with the way our sprite models are (in their words) ‘enshrunkulated’ – to make sure they’re as crisp as we can muster when RC3 is finally unleashed. Unfortunately they take forever to export and get in the game, meaning we haven’t been able to grab one of the planned videos today.

 

What we do have however (fanfare) is the first video appearance of Romain’s farming system – which is now a fully operational part of the Zomboid mainframe. Some aspects of it are still WIP, and some text will change, but it looks a little something like this:

 

 

Romain explains: “In this video, you see only a few aspects of farming. We’re starting with seven plants, three diseases and all my statistics and calculations are based on the climate of real world Muldraugh, Kentucky. Every plant has a health stat that determines your vegetable and seed harvest – if it’s sunny it’ll grow, but cold weather and over-watering will see it drop. The healthier your plants – the more your farming XP will rise, and then the more bounteous your future plants will be”

 

Other risks to your crop will be extreme temperatures, sowing seeds at the wrong time of year, idiot zombies trampling your fields or (of course) callous NPCs stealing your freshly grown produce. “I forgot to show off the fertilizer in the video” adds Romain. “And it’s worth bearing in mind that in future we will be introducing gameplay like making compost, foraging wild berries and mushrooms and allowing friendly NPCs to look after your crops in your absence. I’ve also pretty much got tents and campfires integrated with the main game too.”

 

Possibly the biggest notch we’ve carved into the RC3 bedpost this week, meanwhile, is the integration of nearby NPC behaviour with the statistical metagame that tracks them as they explore the wider map. Alongside map streaming (that made it necessary in the first place) this was one of the biggest jobs that needed doing for the update – and finally lets us tie a lot of the fun stuff we’ve been concocting together. Lemmy describes the system in detail on the forums but we should have a video to show it all off in the not-to-distant future.

 

Mash and Binky, meanwhile, have continued beavering away on the new maps – with Binks also investing time into mixing things up in terms of zombie and NPC appearances. There’s beards in there, spectacles and different haircuts – meaning that we’ve got more than 300,000 frames of animation floating around now. That decision to stop hand-drawing sprites seems to have been a good one!

 

There’s other stuff to share, but it’ll all be best explained with accompanying videos. So we’ll be chiming in as and when they happen. Until then, fair Zomboidateers!

[nasKo]

Mondoid...from...some monday in November I assume. 2012

 

 

Evening all. Another hectic week at the Zomboid Ranch – albeit one that was spent largely working on stuff we told you about last week. Binky has been obsessed with what he calls ‘enshrinkulation’ – the process by which sprites are crisply represented in the Zomboid engine. You can read into the process over on his blog.

 

Chris, meanwhile, has been continuing his work on NPC behaviours in the up-close and meta-game. Will has been scribbling their dialogue. Then, Romain has been doing final farming tests and Mash has been continuing work on the new maps – with locations that look a bit like this.

 

 

We’ll do those promised vids as soon as the fruits of Binky’s enshrinkulation are in the game. Until then, though, we thought it might be an idea to have a chat with your good selves about the map proper. The uber-map that covers our chosen slice of Kentucky.

 

In this bright new age of map streaming we thought it high time that we met up with you to discuss Muldraugh, and beyond. The map in the current RC2 public test builds is comprised of two 300×300 cells, not including incidental connecting cells – one of which contains the town, and another with a farm. The map we’re currently constructing for RC3 though? Well that’s a 15 by 15 grid of these cells – so 225 of them in all. Cripes, but that sounds a lot doesn’t it? How on earth will we fill it all in?

 

“At the moment, there are around four cells that myself and Mash have finished our specific building placements on” explained Andy ‘Binky’ Hodgetts when I msn-ed him this morning for Monday blog content. “That’s twice as large as RC2 already, albeit with more a lot more content since the farm cell was just one building with a well and some fields. The big difference is that in a huge chunk of the over-arching map we’ve actually now pre-designed all the currently unfilled cells – so instead of just being filled with random trees there are roads and paths, and that sort of thing. So if you wanted to, you could wander off and find spaces where we’ll be building new map content in future updates. We’re already amassing quite a catalogue of buildings still not present in the world.”

 

In fact, it looks just a little bit like this:

 

 

“The new map is designed from a sort of satellite perspective,” continues Binky. “The layout is done first, and then it’s chopped up into cells and then filled with content. So all the cells fit together seamlessly, and you can wander around with the map streaming. In the future, it’ll just be a case of filling the spaces we’ve already laid out. We know what goes in the gaps – we just need to put the stuff in there! Eventually, we hope to expand the world even further taking us to other towns nearby. ”

 

As such when you spawn in the new map you’ll only hit entirely random wilderness after walking seven or eight cells in any direction – so seven or eight times the width of the RC2 map. There won’t be much to see outside of the Muldraugh we’ve designed so far – but it will be there.

 

Is that a little… too big? “Nah. Big is good.” types Binky, presumably one-handedly while he gurgles his morning latte. “Big means more stuff that you’re unlikely to find, more of a feeling of isolation when you trek off to the middle of no-where to camp out in the wilderness.”

 

Not everyone realises it, meanwhile, but we’re also using the real-world town of Muldraugh in Kentucky as our model. What was once randomly selected on Google Earth due to its proximity to Fort Knox and Will’s love of Goldfinger, is now something like our actual design target.

 

“We’ve been reeeeasonably faithful to Muldraugh.” Explains Binks. “We’ve taken some liberties with it, and obviously Zomboid is an isometric game so we’re confined somewhat by the shapes of things. Then again, while we haven’t gone so nuts as to do a 1:1 correlation of buildings – the layout is roughly accurate. We’ve made sure that there’s the same sorts of buildings present. People could, for example, find it on Google maps and recognise certain features and also, if they wished, have a scroll around and make some fairly accurate predictions about things to come.”

 

With map streaming and the potential for epic strolls through the wilderness, then, we’re making sure that we’re giving Project Zomboid room to breathe. Future updates will see us building new areas by hand and adding them to the map, rather than just haphazardly bolting them onto the side. We’ve given ourselves a massive canvas, and will be building forever outwards – although of course when we release all our modding tools there’ll be absolutely nothing to stop PZ survivors from adding their own creations to the sprawling map too. Death will always be inevitable, of course, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to find somewhere interesting to actually perish…

[nasKo]

Mondoid from...some time in December 2012

 

Hey survivors. Monday always used to be the most depressing day of the week, what with the walking dead getting in the way of your commute to the office and the destruction of society as you know it. That’s why we chose this day to deposit fresh Project Zomboid news just outside your safehouse, knock on the door three times in sharp succession and run away.

 

Binky’s Enshrinkulator (see here for technical deets) is about 95% complete, and as I type is in testing to make sure the files it spits out are all present and correct. Lemmy’s putting together a LUA script to test it, and then we can see whether everything’s correct in-game and that we don’t have floating baseball bats and pairs of glasses everywhere – before finally getting a few of those promised RC3 videos direct to your screen.

 

Elsewhere Mash continues to beaver away at map tiles for future map expansion, and Romain has been developing the front-end UI (story screen, map selection etc.), putting camping and farming’s through their final test and experimenting with easy ways to create walls, doors, fences and traps into Lua. Lemmy’s work on NPCs meanwhile, very much the most vital remaining cog required in the RC3 machine, continues apace. Indeed, once it’s done we’ll hopefully be at the tipping point at which all of the content RingoD discusses below can be plugged into place.

So, without much further ado, here’s Newcastle’s finest: Mister Paul Ring.

 

 

Hey RingoD – why doncha introduce yourself a bit, and tell us how you got involved with Zomboid?

 

I first got involved with PZ after I first decided to make YouTube videos after being told about it by a friend at work. After seeing the planned features and Paul Soares Jr’s first test drive I just knew I wanted to start making Lets Plays of the game. After my first couple of videos I started getting some comments off Lemmy, Binky and Nickenstein thanking me for them, and saying it was great to hear someone with a similar accent to theirs making videos of their game!

 

Well this was news to me. I didn’t have a clue at the time that they were even from the UK, nevermind just down the road. After a few more messages backwards and forwards, we met for drinks and nerdy chats, and became fast friends. A few months later Lemmy realised the scale of what was to come with the amount of scripting that would be needed for the story modes and various NPC stuff and, after conferring with the rest of the gang, asked if i would like to join the PZ team, I obviously instantly said yes.

 

What sort of scenarios and dialogue has Will been sending over that are destined to be a part of RC3?

 

One of the major scenarios, if you like, is the expansion of the Kate and Baldspot story mode, giving Bob more quests to help his beloved Kate to get back on her feet and also introducing more characters from Knox County. It still needs to be ported over to the new map, and Kate needs a couple of new animations before it will be complete, but story mode should be back in. Certainly to the point it was at in 0.1.5d, and perhaps beyond.

 

The other exciting things Will has been sending over have been various NPC encounters to go along side the new map streaming mechanic. In RC3 you’re going to have the chance to come across NPC’s in many different ways, which can then play out in different ways with reams of potential different dialogue. As well as that I’m scripting up all of the group dialogue stuff for arranging a looting party, with all the various random chit chat for NPCs seeing zombies, fighting zombies, being bitten, being healed and other various chit chat.

 

 

What do you have to do to the raw copy that’s sent over?

 

I get all of Will’s brilliant dialogue in a screenplay format, telling me the nature of the scene and the nature of the player and the NPCs involved – then the character lines themselves. I then wrap all of these up in Lemmy’s scripting language, the same one we first saw in 0.1.5, and make sure they all connect up where they should. I also add in any extra actions that need to be performed and can be handled by the scripting language.

 

Everything is then passed on to Lemmy who creates the more complicated parts of the scenes around the dialogue using the Sadastic AI director and LUA. The scripting up of the story mode is a bit more involved, as I also script up all of the mission pop-ups and stuff outside of pure dialogue. I believe that stuff like tool tips will also be making an appearance in the next update.

 

What’s your favourite exchanges that have come over so far? What do you think people will enjoy the most when it’s finally in-game?

 

Wow, what a question. I could honestly spend all day answering this one. For starters there’s a brilliant random scene that has the chance to play out in a Spiffo’s Restaurant, but I’m not saying any more on that! I don’t want to spoil the surprise too much! There’s also a possible psychopath you can walk in on, or is he just a friendly guy you met at a bad time?

 

There really is so many more great scenarios I could talk about but I know, as a player, it’s going to be better for everyone to experience them first hand than read them here. I have to say though, most of my favourite bits of dialogue so far have been some of the random one line comments – some of which are great tongue-in-cheek movie quotes.

 

I think the thing people will enjoy the most isn’t just going to be having functioning and capable NPCs, but also how much more alive and real they feel – what with all the dialogue they can spout given various different situations. There’s already dialogue for different personality types going in, with tons more to be added in the future.

 

How much content would you say you’ve processed so far?

 

We have 15 different NPC-meeting scenarios – where you could, say, meet an NPC outsidem inside, in the dark or in the rain. Many of these then have branching NPC dialogue depending on your actions.  Conversations hinge on whether characters are friendly, neutral or aggressive – but increasingly Will is also creating even more work for himself by providing different dialogue according to whether they have largely ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ traits. I lose count of how many variations there could be. There’s also random dialogue for player characters or groups when put into seven or eight different situations – including when you ask to group, which again has all those different random dialogue options. All these are ready to go and be dropped into the code, so if they’re not in RC3 – then they’ll certainly be a part of a build that comes quickly after.

 

Then of course, there’s what I’m working on now – the NPC looting missions that Lemmy is currently working on. Those have twenty possible openings for dialogue as each one proceeds, code-wise, so the possible variations are going to be HUGE. So far I’ve done the full set of dialogue for the friendly (positive trait) characters, and am in the middle of all the others right now.

 

 

You’ve also got your YouTube channel that introduced you to us all, of course. What are your plans for that?

 

I love making videos for my channel. It’s something I would never have done if it hadn’t been for PZ. I’ve started to upload videos more often recently, and have started doing videos for various other games – even if I tend to try and stick to indie titles. I’ve just uploaded my first VLog last week where I talk to my subscribers about my thoughts and plans for it all. My ultimate aim is to be the premium YT channel for Project Zomboid videos, and to try and get there I‘ve decided to try and upload 2 PZ videos every week, with uploads for other great indie games i’m currently playing and enjoying coming in between. Hopefully I can get at least 7 videos a week out – people seem to like my content and constantly ask me for more. Maybe if I can get as popular with PZ as Yogscast got with Minecraft I’ll be able to do 7 a day

 

Do you reckon that your involvement makes Project Zomboid the most Geordie zombie game of all time?

 

Definitely the most Geordie zombie game of all time, and in my eyes certainly the best! I say most Geordie ‘zombie’ game as I seem to remember the original Driver game being made in Newcastle, and even better, you could get a special cheat code that let you drive around a section of Newcastle City Centre itself. That was probably the true greatest Geordie game of all time.