Mondoid Reposts

nasKo · June 3, 2014

Firstly, I’m really sorry Mathas – faithfully plugging away at your Mondoid commentary despite me giving you practically nothing to work with these past few weeks. If I could press the ‘Like’ button multiple times on your videos, I would. Yep. If this opening sentence didn’t give it away, it’s Binky again *cue audience groans*

This is a bit of a problematic Mondoid to write because Build 27 is in closed testing and until we’ve had a bit more feedback it’s tricky to stamp a date on when we’ll be ready to release it. I can point you to the thread with what’s coming up in it (here), but you probably read that last week.

I can tell you about the re-introduction of dragging corpses but you already know about that because we did a video about it aaaaages ago despite us not being able to roll it out into an official build because of [insert technical reason]. But it’s in Build 27, so that’s nice isn’t it?

Source: http://www.dazzledotdalmatians.com/puppies

You’ve seen the stuff about the zoning (for wildlife distribution) because I foolishly mentioned that two weeks ago thinking that two weeks from then (which is now), I’d be doing a Mondoid about the release of Build 27 and so it wouldn’t matter.

I could show you some pictures from the new parts of the map, but that’d spoil things a bit given how close we are to giving it to you.

You know what the worst thing is? Kirrus tells me that 714 of you actually clicked that little button to subscribe to this guff (you too can subscribe here!). So to all of you, please don’t unsubscribe on the basis of this Mondoid. I suppose at least I’m helping lower expectations so that when Will writes another of his brillopops Mondoids where he has actual content (woo!) to talk about, it’ll seem mind-blowingly stupendous by comparison.

Source: http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/dogs/images/35485597/title/puppy-wallpaper/puppies

But the good thing is, Build 27 is terribly close (I’m repeating myself already – curse you Romain and your, “test going well…” contribution to this week’s Mondoid. Seriously, that’s pretty much all I could get out of him. It’s almost like he’s really busy or something) which should (all being well) lead to a tremendously exciting Mondoid next week (or possibly the week after that. Probably not but, well, hey you gotta keep some mystery about this stuff otherwise there’d be no fun*)

* “fun” is a subjective term and The Indie Stone cannot be held responsible if the build ends up being a day or two later than intended and you do not find the wait particularly exciting.

nasKo · June 9, 2014

Hello, Mash here! It’s a quick Mondoid this week just to catch you up on some news, if you haven’t checked in since last Monday!

First: build 27 is now up on Steam! (don’t fret Desura users–the update is coming, but we have to make sure it’s ultra-stable first). This is an official build and should update automatically, so if you haven’t been playing the betas you can look forward to (among other things) animal trapping, a map expansion (including a mall), and a server browser for finding fellow survivors to MP with!

And speaking of multiplayer, now is a good time to get friends/family/neighbours/strangers-on-the-street in on the Project Zomboid action with the new 4-Pack on Steam! Look at it, all shiny and new… the “Add to Cart” button beckons to you: long had you heard the heady tales of PZ from LPers and streamers, epic tales of bravery and survival, but you had been hesitant… but like Odysseus who could not quell his curiosity and had to hear the beautiful siren song with his own ears, you have yearned to experience it for yourself. You stare at the button. “Click me,” its siren call intones, “click me!” If only you had crafted earplugs from beeswax…! But you have not, and are powerless to resist the sirens’ commands even as it leads you to your DOOM (in the game). O tread carefully! Will your avatar forever frolic in the fields of Elysium after much pain and sacrifice, or will it wallow in the darkest depths of Hades after a death of cowardice and shame? Or will it, to the defiance of both the immortal gods and mortal men, wander forever upon the earth as an empty vessel?

Also, don’t forget: if you never want to be caught unawares about a Project Zomboid build update again, you can subscribe to our email list!

nasKo · June 16, 2014

Hey Mondoid people. Hope this finds you well, and not locked in a Mall side-room with about a hundred deceased shoppers making their presence known on the other side of a wooden door. Zombie spawn’s pretty nasty round there, huh?

A smidge of Build news first, as Hotfix 2 to Build 27 has recently been uploaded onto the IWBUMS beta branch on Steam. Once we’re happy it’s fully functional it’ll get a wider release, so if you get a surprise update you’ll know where it came from.

Another task this week has been providing our sound expert NJ with a new wishlist for fresh PZ noises. As he scurried away with a list that included new death noises, river burbles, hammering, sawing, and the noises of trapped and dying animals (!) we grabbed him and made him answer a few questions. And made him release a video. It’s quite… elucidating… we’re sure you’ll agree.

Hi NJ! Can you introduce yourself? Who are you and what’s your story?

My name is Nathaniel-Jorden Apostol, I am 32 years of age and I live in the UK. I’ve been writing and performing music for over 15 years and I’ve always been a huge video game nerd.

I decided after years of teaching music and working in musical instrument retail, that I wanted to take my sound design and composition and focus it on to my main passion, game audio!

So, I took a degree in experimental music practice which is a very unique course that helped me shape the way I think about sound as a whole. That might be to blame for some of the methods I used on Zomboid!

Well, that sounds like an invitation to show your… lovely… video of Zomboid sounds being recorded. Enjoy Mondoiders!

Well, that was just lovely – I’m sure we all agree. How did you get involved with Zomboid in the first place?

Whilst I was showing another project I was working on at Birmingham’s game show ‘Rezzed’ I took the time to check out some other games, and Project Zomboid really caught my eye.

Seeing that it was still in development, I did what most audio enthusiasts do and thought ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if’ and ‘just imagine if that was’. I talked to the team, and I said ‘You have to let me make you some sounds for the game!’.

After some emailing back and forth I made some sounds doing what I do, and now they’re in the game.

What’s your day job? Is it sound-orientated as well?

My day job for the past two years has been with White Paper Games, making our debut puzzle adventure game ‘Ether One’. My main role is sound design and composition, however I also did a lot of voice acting and script writing for the game as well as directing the other voice actors.

Being a small indie team we all had to learn to handle multiple jobs around the studio so that we could create a better experience for our players. I love what I do so much and see each new challenge as a way to expand my skill set.

What other PZ sounds did you record that aren’t featured in the video you made for us?

There was actually a really nice sound of a knife being pulled out of a zombie and the blood splattering out (if you could call that nice?). And also some footstep sounds for when the player foolishly attempts to run away!

Now, there was one other… some might say extreme… methodology that you used to obtain some of the female zombie noises. Could you elucidate the masses on that one please?

So the video I made only showed a couple of the methods I used. Elspeth (the female zombie actress) knows me very well and was very trusting and brave.

She knows how I work and think, and I told her I didn’t want to make something that people had heard before. We decided that if a zombie was dead then it should not sound like something living and breathing with ease. What the video didn’t show was me putting Elspeth in to a sleeper hold.

(She was fully consenting and was in control of when I started and stopped at all times).

This isn’t something that is safe to do or recommended so that’s why it doesn’t feature in the video. But it did create a sound of uneasiness in the female zombies.

Also we used different items to block the sound coming out of her mouth, like bread to give a different tone that she couldn’t make normally. So it maybe sounded like a chunk of human flesh, or a wounded zombie.

I just didn’t want to do anything I’d seen done before. That’s why I also chose to add the layer of vomiting under the zombie death sounds. People who haven’t seen this wouldn’t have known what that sound was (and it’s only faint in most) but I wanted to add something truly grim to the undead horde.

In Ether One there is a moving mechanical chair at the beginning that just sounds like a hydraulic system but is actually 50% noises from torture scenes in films. Again no one would know but it has a personality of its own.

The sounds you make seem to be recorded in a somewhat off-the-cuff and home-brew fashion. Do you think hugely expensive sound-proofed studios and recording equipment are vital to stuff like this, or can a sound recorded while your fingers are down your throat above a kitchen sink be just as effective?

I don’t think many indie studios have the luxury or budget for using a big studio these days. And I don’t claim to have the best gear in the field of audio engineering, but I do have the inclination to be different and daring with my approach. Whilst working on Ether One I chose home recording for the soundtrack over the studio space we did have available because it was actually quieter and more controlled from home, the same goes with the sounds for Project Zomboid.

Having said that, when I was recording the vomiting session, I was so caught up with trying to prepare myself for doing the act itself that I didn’t put the microphone I was using close enough and the sound wasn’t quite what I wanted. Only one sound was good enough to use, so I had to do it again afterwards to get what I wanted. That wasn’t a fun day for me!

What’s your favourite PZ sound you recorded for us?

Probably the head smashing sound when the zombie goes down for good. It’s very satisfying.

So what’s next on the list? What have you been tasked with recording, and what do you think the game needs personally?

I think the game needs a little more audio feedback. When the player is bleeding out, or if they’re in danger of getting too tired or hungry. Helping in these areas will do a lot of good. Also a little more ambience around the world can go a long way.

I know you’ve only recently received the list, but off the top of your head how do you think you’ll go about recording some of these new requests? (Please don’t do anything that will endanger your health any more than is necessary!)

I only use bizarre methods when the sound itself is something that is open to interpretation. Where possible I like to record pure sounds. Footsteps from feet and doors from doors, but if you ask me for the sound of a nuke going off then I may have to get creative again. Don’t worry I won’t endanger the planet with my methods!

What other games have you worked on, so we can give them a shameless plug?

As mentioned before: ‘ETHER ONE’ a first person adventure puzzle game exploring the fragility of human memories. It’s on Steam now! Go and buy it!

There’s also a few iOS games, a silly little one called ‘Cotton Pops’ and one in the pipe line that I can’t talk to much about but involves pigeons attacking your car and pooping on it while you try to fend them of.

Oh God NJ, we won’t ask how you’re getting sounds for that one.

Also: ‘Splash the Cash’ a Caribbean-style HD slot machine game which is available to play in most gambling shops around Europe. And ‘Betfred Roulette’

So, you’re the one to blame for the UK’s new gambling crisis? Tch. Finally, pancakes or waffles?

I guess I’d have to say waffles, because you could squish them down to look like pancakes if you wanted to. Best of both worlds!

——————————————————————————————————————————

And we have some breaking news! PZ coder Romain is now engaged (yup, he’s off the market, ladies) to his lovely girlfriend Céline! Go and congratulate him!

Until next Mondoid!

nasKo · June 23, 2014

Hello everyone, we’ve had a rather wonderful weekend of Steam saleage, and are feeling in very high spirits. We’ve also concocted a plan for our advance to the ever elusive 1.0 and graduation from Early Access, as well as beyond, which we would like to share with you all!

Fear Not, For It Is Not The End

Firstly we need to stress that any talk of 1.0 is not talk of us hanging up our Zomboid boots. This needs to be stressed with underlines and bold, so I will go back and do that right now.

Now there is part of us that always gets a bit confused when some people complain about ‘how long the game is in alpha’ as if perpetual updates were a bad thing, however it does feel at this point that PZ being an alpha in-development game is becoming increasingly a burden on the game in terms of popular opinion, and we’re eager to free it from those shackles.

It’s also about drawing a line under our promises when we started PZ. Right now there are several things outstanding that underline Project Zomboid’s incomplete state:

1) NPCS

2) Vehicles

3) Map Completion

These are the things that we promised going into the game that have not yet been fulfilled. There is also one gaping hole in the survivalist gameplay which needs to be addressed:

4) Hunting

NPCs

Yeah, they are coming. Lemmy has made some awesome progress this weekend in particular, and while they aren’t imminent we feel very confident in their recent progress and Lemmy has ceased waking up in cold sweats about them. Due to the evolution of the game the old in-development NPC system needed a lot of ripping apart and transplanting / revising since the last batch of videos, and its been a very stressful and arduous task.

However things are running at full steam again, and we are currently planning a way to deal with releasing NPCs in stages, starting with Kate and Baldspot, then a release of sandbox NPCs with a smattering of meta-game / group mechanics, followed by a fully functional release, and finally multiplayer support. Holding back it all until completion is starting to feel like a bottleneck and while we may get a few who don’t read the Mondoids throwing their shoulders up and ‘is this it?’ at the early release stages, if it gets NPCs out there sooner and eases development it’ll be worth it.

There is a massive body of code and behaviour scripts and in entirety the is still a bunch to be done before it all works in harmony, truth be told months and months still likely remain before the entire system is ready for release. But it is relatively trivial for us to pluck the still flaky chunks out to stablise it for a Kate/Baldspot release, and a phased release of NPCs where the behaviours and meta-events can then slot in in subsequent updates.

That said we’ve still got some work to bring Kate and Bob up to speed and finish off a few things, so don’t take that as ‘KATE AND BOB TOMORROWS’!

VEHICLES

These are on their way too. EasyPickins has taken up the work while Lemmy cracks on with NPCs. They will use bullet physics which means a few challenges for the map streaming, in constructing a physics world along with the PZ game world, and there may be some multiplayer challenges to meet, but it’s on its way! More details when we have them.

Oh and what’s this?

HUNTING

Since he’s done such an awesome job with trapping, fishing and the like, Romain will head up the hunting development. Finally you’ll be able to wander around the countryside trying to shoot rabbits with a shotgun. Hurrah! This will round off the survivalist gameplay and make the game feel much more complete as a survival sim.

MAP

Right now there are a bunch of areas of the map that are highly undeveloped. Big rectangular chunks of forest, road layouts with no buildings, and of course no lovely Louisville. In line with our plans to stride toward the 1.0 line, Mash, Binky and RingoD will all join forces to really put the map expansion into overdrive. Louisville, or at least the part on the Kentucky side of the river, Brandenburg, and of course Fort Knox will all be on the agenda, though the latter may need to wait for NPCs to drop so we can get the military in there.

AND BEYOND!

At this point, after sufficient bug releases and polish, we will be at a place we’d be comfortable calling it PZ 1.0. However, as we underlined above, that is not the end of the road. There is so so much more that can be done with the game, and we see no reason to stop until, to be frank about it, the amount it costs to support development outweighs the amount of money it makes (and even then you can be sure we’d find it difficult to let go)

If there’s a feature you’ve been hoping for that isn’t on the 1.0 list, then you can probably expect that feature as a free DLC styley update on the ‘completed’ game. Nothing will really change in terms of updates, at least for a long while after the 1.0, but we can sit back and feel proud that we delivered everything we initially set out to do and everything from that point on is a lovely bonus. We’re very excited to see where it goes!

So that’s the situation, hope you’ve enjoyed reading, and now back to trying to make those damn NPCs understand that smashing a window right next to an open door is just not cool.

nasKo · July 1, 2014

Hello again.

As per the last Mondoid, we’re hard at work plugging away at all the things we said we’d be plugging away at last time so this Mondoid is just going to be a bit of us reporting in, with a little bit of new stuff to prevent Mathas from having to talk for ten minutes about puppies again.

So first, new thing!

Woop! Yep, you can now burn all those zombie corpses you’ve been stacking and thus re-create “the pit” from “The Last Man on Earth” / “I Am Legend” (the book, let’s not mention the film) except with additional accidentally setting yourself on fire.

All this moving and burning of corpses is paving the way for disease and other unpleasantness as a result of having rotting corpses decorating the inside of your safehouse – something we’ve wanted to deal with for a long time but would have been horribly punishing without a mechanic for removing / destroying bodies. But now we have that, we can have the other. HOORAY!

The Reporting In Bit

The game world, so far, consists of Muldraugh, West-Point, and a bit to the north containing a bunch of stuff including a (really, really big) mall and the amusingly-named “Knob Creek” *muffled laughter*. It’s pretty big, so far as hand-made game maps go BUT NOT BIG ENOUGH. To put everything into perspective, this image shows the areas mentioned above and then I’ve indicated the areas currently in progress.

http://projectzomboid.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/MapCompletion.png

Wowzers. Quite big, eh? So don’t be expecting this map expansion like, tomorrow, or anything since as you can see we’re talking about doubling the size of what’s there currently. And it’s not just bigger in area – that bit to the north? You know what’s up there, don’t you? Yep. A city. Which means that whooooole area is jam-packed with high-density buildings. So we’re talking twice the area but significantly more than twice the number of buildings (and… well, flupping loads of zombies too).
So, yeah…

Short Mondoid this week and I’ve tried to be fairly vague with the map stuff to avoid spoilers, but that’s where we are at the moment. Hope this was enough for you, Mathas <3

*Featured image credit: Steam user "D_loaded", link to source.

nasKo · July 7, 2014

Howdy all, it’s Mondoid time again! This week we’re all at the grindstone trying to get those last missing promised gameplay features into the game, as detailed here.

That’s not to say we don’t have some juicy info about what’s coming. This week its from Romain, who has been revamping the ranged weapon systems to reintroduce aiming skills.

In Romain’s own words (with a few edits!):

Weapon Changes
The ranged weapon have receive a bunch of fixes/changes, I tried to stick to the reality, even if I’ve never fired a gun.. Meh.

First thing, bullets don’t really pierce zombies now, meaning if you shoot a zombie, and there’s a zombie behind him, he won’t die, but he could take slight damage from rests of bullets (even being knocked back/down and become a crawler, yay for crawlers!).

So by knowing this, you already know the shotgun has been really nerfed!

The range of weapon has been slightly nerfed, as well as their angle too (mostly for the pistol), that means you will need to be at the right place to aim for a shot. No more 45° kill with a pistol.

Guns have now a critical chance (modified by aiming skill, but more on that below), understand it as a “head shot”.
For example a pistol can have a great chance of critical, while the shotgun will just blow up a zombie's chest (in a bloody glory moment !).

Weapon also have a recoil delay, meaning you can’t fire like an assault rifle with the shotgun.

It will mean no more taking a 300 strong zombies horde with 3 shotgun shells.
So by now, I’m sure you understood that the shotgun is a good weapon to start, and the pistol will be more deadly at end level, because it has a larger capacity, less recoil, makes less noise and way better range/critical chance than the shotgun.

Take your time
Second thing I’ve changed, is the physical aiming and panic influence over guns, you’ll now need to aim for a little moment to shoot accurately. If you run then shoot, your shot will likely be far away from your target, but again, aiming skill decrease this malus.

Panic!
Yes, Panic can reduce the hit chance/damage done, panic usually mean trembling hands, so it’ll take a good skill to bypass that and make a true shot while you’re surrounded by zombies, again, it depend on weapon, a pistol will require concentration, while a shotgun will almost always hit his target(s).

Just stand still, breathe, take your time, and blow that head up. Please.

The glorious aiming skill
While making my changes to weapons, I saw that the aiming skill barely modified the hit chance, damage and stuff, well, that’s the past.

Aiming skill will now influence a LOT of things! Here’s a list :

Hit chance! Like really? It require skill to aim correctly? Jeeze Devs nowaday…
Critical chance! Yup, it’s not a FPS where “aim for head = head shot”, we’re in isometric world, so I can add a skill modifier to this (remind you of Fallout?)
Range ! Range is now also influenced by aiming skill, at least for the pistol.
Angle! Well ok, that may sound weird, but because we’re in an isometric world, aiming can be hard, so now, with a better aiming skill, you won’t have to be at the perfect angle for a straight shot (again, specially for the pistol).
Rate of fire! Well, I’m still trying to know how the great shooter can shoot faster than others (maybe it’s a combination of aiming + strength ?)

It’ll mean that you can avoid being violently murdered by a guy with a pistol if he can’t really aim with it, you could try to run toward him with an axe and take him down before he gets you, and with a bit of luck you may get an axe to his head!

WAIT RJ, YOU TOLD ME THERE’S A NEW WEAPON, GIMME MY AK47
Ah. Assault Rifle ? No way. Well, not now!
So, let’s do a little run down of the current ranged weapons:

Shotgun have small range, big angle, low critical chance.
Pistol have better range, small angle, big critical chance (specially at high level).
IT’S A BOLT ACTION RIFLE ! Huge distance, huge critical chance, long recoil time, small clip, so yup, it’ll need a lot of practices (understand aiming skill) to master that gun, but I swear with it, you can take down lot of danger from a long range !
Oh also, we won’t have new model/animation for it now, I’ll re-use the shotgun one, but I’m sure Andy will be on it soon, aye Andy ?

And for the future ?
I definitely want to see a bow in game, crafting weapon, silent, powerful, arrow piercing.. And require tons of skills to be mastered.

Also bear in mind that all these numbers will be balanced. You don’t know it, but Chris has a rule for my stuff: take all calculations I do and multiply them by 20, because I suck at balancing things

I may do an explanation video of it, with different weapons/aiming skill to show you the difference between a Daryl and.. Well, me for example (oh wait, I had a pistol air gun in my childhood.. I’m sure I’m a beast with weapons!)

REMEMBER, YOU CAN NOW SUBSCRIBE with several options to receive either release notification e-mails, unstable test release notifications, and even receive Mondoids right to your e-mail every week!

Follow this link to sign up:
http://projectzomboid.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1

nasKo · July 14, 2014

Yaaaaay! It’s Monday again! It’s probably going to be another fairly short and sweet “wot we’re up to” blog post this week, but there is a video. Not exactly the most tremendously exciting video you’ve ever seen, but a video none-the-less.

NPCs
This continues to thunder ahead. While we are still not ready to tip our hand with the NPC development, they are getting more and more solid as time goes on. Lemmy has been busy with adding a ton of behaviors into the NPCs brains, layered on each other with quite intricate priorities and behaviour sub-trees that mean that, for example, if an NPC requires an item, they will not only check their own backpack, their safehouse, or look out for the object on looting missions, but will also consider any ingredients that can be used to craft said items.

Basically, NPCs have the power to be completely aware of all crafting recipes and can just ‘desire’ an item and make it so. They can use backpacks flawlessly now, and may even have partaken in a little tree chopping and log sawing! There’s plenty more but we’ll save that for a later date. That said Binky did take a little time out from the map making to help the NPC cause by coding up a little zombie avoidance system in C# that Lemmy will port into the game. Since we’re nice here is a lovely video!

It’s a little hard to see in the video, but in the top-left corner is a counter for the number of times our heroic little green dot has found itself within scratching range – the fact that this number stays at zero is, therefore, really promising and does not indicate a bug with the scratch detection. I know this for certain, because the first version of the avoidance code saw this number climb to about 1,000 in about a minute. So that code was swiftly burned and replaced.

As you might glean from seeing the dots move around, little green dot fella is trying its damnedest to reach its little blue dot goal. In an in-game scenario, where the NPC will be trying to get will change depending on many, many factors – so they won’t be prone to stubbornly trying to get somewhere ridiculous, such as the middle of about 200 zombies. Also, unlike this green dot, NPCs will be capable of engaging and killing zombies. So this video in many ways represents a “worst case scenario” especially since in this test-bed, zombies have perfect line-of-sight visibility and only stop chasing the green dot when they’re extremely far away.

Map Expansion
Development on the map is going at a nice pace, with the trio Mash, Binky and Ringo all working at it. Mash recently made a building that’s a little inhospitable due to the large number of infected types that congregated there in the early days of the outbreak. Binky also had to spend some time making sure there were exactly 18 of what he was making.

The Bit At The End Where We Plug Stuff
Firstly, the glorious Mighty Tactical Shooter is almost half-way to its Kickstarter goal, with 17 days remaining. There’s a demo on the Kickstarter page, so if you fancy finding out how a turn-based tactical arcade shooter actually plays you can find out there, and then consider pledging.

Secondly, huuuuuuuuge congratulations to our friends at Ironward on their Steam Early Access release of The Red Solstice. You can snap it up now at a whopping 40% off until the 24th July. So if real-time strategy RPGs are your thing, definitely check it out!

Don’t forget, you can get all our announcements and Mondoids in an e-mail lovingly deposited into your favourite e-mail client using this handy form!

nasKo · July 21, 2014

Yep, against our better judgement we decided that perhaps you’re all due a bit of a meatier update on the NPCs. Please read the following disclaimer before continuing:

NPC DEVELOPMENT IS STILL HEAVILY UNDERWAY. DON’T EXPECT AN NPC RELEASE IN THE NEXT COUPLE OF MONTHS AT LEAST. READY WHEN READY, ETC.

Are we clear? Then let’s progress!

Where have we been?

First a bit of background into what has been going on with NPC development. The bumps in the road, the detours and do-overs.

About a year ago was the last time we had any significant progress reports on the NPCs. It’s been tough, simply because the NPCs, or rather the sheer ambition of what we want to achieve with them, is by no means a simple task. You could argue that what we are attempting to accomplish is something that’s very rarely seen in games, if seen at all. We know we have the capability, and we won’t compromise on what we want to achieve, and with that comes a cost. That cost is a quite gargantuan development time, with delays and frustrations both to our customers and to ourselves in the meantime. But the key point is that once we finally get over that development time, what we will have should breathe not only new life into Zomboid, but potentially give the game orders of magnitude more longevity and gameplay potential.

However its not always been plain sailing. One detour we felt we had to make was a rather major one, in which once upon a time there were three types character in the world. Players, survivors (NPCs) and zombies. This, a decision made extremely early on in Zomboid’s development when it would be difficult to foresee the direction the game would ultimately go in, turned out to be a bad move that would only become apparent years later.

Each of these three types had their own distinct code, with some inherited behaviour between them. However this caused severe problems when you consider the NPC codebase and the actively developed main codebase used for releases were two separate branches, diverged a long time previously. As development on the main branch continued, a whole ton of extra functionality had been added to the main game, and notably to the players themselves, and the survivors, separate, had become seriously out of date.

While efforts to cross merge across the codebases were made somewhat regularly, especially when NPC development had to be sidelined for any amount of time, it became increasingly difficult to keep the survivors up to date and in check since code added to players would need replicating. As well as this, with multiplayer an intended goal, developed in down time moments on a third branch (we do not have the luxury of single minded focused and uninterrupted development on one feature as such a small team) it meant that the NPC codebase had more and more difficulty staying relevant. Multiplayer turned out to be a much more achievable short term goal than we originally estimated, and there were reasons to release that first that go beyond this. Namely that to retroactively add multiplayer once NPCs were in would have been a complete brain melter and a truly terrifying prospect.

As such it was decided that a new approach was needed, and that being that there would be no distinction between players and survivors. NPCs would literally be players that had AI brains controlling their movement through the same mechanisms the player controls them, and with added code that allowed them to despawn into the meta-game and reassemble into flesh and blood as they approached an actual human controlled NPC. This would mean that from that point, any future development on players (say adding sneak mechanics, or more obviously the network code for transmitting players positions from server to clients) would come for free with the NPCs without any additional work. Hindsight is 20/20 and this is how it should have been from the start. Sometimes though these things don’t become apparent when you have 1000 other things to consider.

So some time was spent essentially transplanting code from the NPC branch into a new branch taken from the actively developed version of the game, and reorganizing it so that it would use player objects instead of the ill-advised survivor objects of the ‘shotgun spamming mentalist NPC’ days. This took some time, and while a lot could be directly transferred with modifications, other bits needed to be recoded to fit within the modern code-base. This meant a lot of time spent with little tangible to show. But is now more or less complete, and the results have been wonderful.

Where are we at?

Some of you may have read, or at least tried to read, Lemmy’s AI post that featured on Gamasutra last week. It may give an insight into the sorts of things we’re fiddling with at the moment. Along with Binky’s video last week of the NPC’s zombie avoidance system. We’ve still got a lot of work to finish in getting all the metaverse scenes into the new NPC branch, but have made massive strides in the ‘Real’ NPCs that have far surpassed our expectations.

There are still plenty of glitches, and missing behaviours that need implementing, as well as human / human combat which needs a lot of work (we’re wanting to do cover points and all sorts of sexy goodness for this) but hopefully these videos will be encouraging (I should point out these videos are actually just shy of a month old, and pre-date Binky’s zombie avoidance, as well as various other more recent additions but we’re not really in a place to post videos from newer builds due to some heavy development on key systems) and that due to being over cautious in their safehouse, NPCs may be prone to walking backwards in places that its perhaps less than appropriate. These videos also focus purely on the actual NPC behaviours in the flesh and no NPC interactions or meta-game story events:

Other features currently in development include a trading system (think Steam trading but with Zomboid inventory items instead of games, snow globes and trading cards) that will likely be available for multi-player much earlier than a public NPC build.

Oh there is also this:

Where are we going?

So the things we’re currently working on before we feel we could even think about a release:

Kate and Baldspot - Getting the tutorial back in is a priority to us, however due to the increased fidelity of the game since the last time Kate and Bob existed, as well as the current lack of solid NPC vs Player/NPC combat code, means currently a Kate and Bob story would be difficult to pull off. We need to replace Kate getting dragged by Bob (with some resemblance to him pulling her along the floor by her hair) into something more believably animated, and we need to make sure Mr Collins knows how to deal with Bob once he goes off the rails of the tutorial scripting. There are a whole other bunch of things that need to be addressed before we could release even up to where we got to in the story with the last release.

Metaverse Event Scripting - While we have a good amount of scenes reintegrated, looting parties and various encounters and other events that will make the NPCs exciting and interesting beyond being zombie fodder. There are far more required before the NPCs could provide the kind of emergent stories detailed last year in the Tales of the Metaverse blogpost, and Will has written so many of these that we need to get more in to make the NPCs live up to their potential. While we are prepared to release the NPCs before they reach this level of emergent story telling, we would not be comfortable releasing them as they are now, even with the work completed to make them behave properly, as it would be seriously underselling our promised, and we want the first NPC release to have sufficient bang for your buck to satisfy those who have waited so long. After such a wait, it becomes self defeating to rush something out that would disappoint after all the hype.

NPC vs Player/NPC combat - With NPC vs zombies sorted, we still have a fair chunk of work left to make character vs character combat solid, and this isn’t something we can compromise on.

Trading - As stated above, we need to get a trading system in there for the first release of the NPCs, as this is a really clear advantage to having them in the game world.

In Summary

There is always the risk that we’re reigniting the hype train, but please try and keep that all in check, as we’re still not as close to an NPC release as we perhaps intended to be before doing any kind of NPC released post. However progress has been great in the last month or two, and we’re all feeling massively positive about the results that we’ll have by the time we do release, and we figured it’d been long enough that people are perhaps due something meaty when it comes to NPC information. We know it’s been a hard wait, but in the meantime there will be a lot of cool stuff to keep you going. Multiplayer signs and support for writing notes in multiplayer, many new craftable furniture options, an a significant map update in the works (though this again is likely not imminent), and vehicles (again no ETA on that), there will be no shortage of other features to keep people busy until NPCs finally drop. Oh it will be a good day, and its coming. It just pays to remember that every moment they are not being released will only make the results better and more worthy of the wait.

Thanks everyone for your support, and we’re really excited about the future of Zomboid, and always touched to see such support and love on both our own and our Steam forums.

REMEMBER, YOU CAN NOW SUBSCRIBE with several options to receive either release notification e-mails, unstable test release notifications, and even receive Mondoids right to your e-mail every week!

Click here to sign up!

nasKo · July 28, 2014

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

DA DA DAAAAA DA DADDLE DA DAAAAA!

It’s SUPROMAIN!

Mais oui! Bienvenue à lundoid, this week featuring a whole new never-before-seen concept in internet thingummywhatsits. Not content with mere words lovingly typed by hand and transmitted via cable, satellite, and the deepest corners of our hearts to your PC, laptop, phone, or whatever the hell you choose to read this guff on we have instead upgraded – yes, upgraded to 21st century audio. And not just any audio, no the sweetest sexist audio imaginable. Hearts will flutter. Knees will tremble. Romain has the mic!

Viewer discretion advised: The following video contains sexy French accent

In other news, Lemmy is still hard at work on the NPCs and, specifically, NPC inter-relations. Basically, what this means is that NPCs will have the ability to form friendships and rivalries based upon their traits and in-game events. In other words, get a bunch of NPCs in a group and their relationships will be dynamic. As they learn more about one another, they may start to distrust one-another, or conversely, a bond between them may form. If you brutally murder an NPC, therefore, there may be consequences – their friends will not be super-keen on you from that point on, but their enemies may look kindly upon you. And so forth.

The remainder of this blog post is the full transcript of the above video, just in case English is not your first language and you’d like something to copy and paste into Google translate.

Video Transcript

“Project Zomboid: Upcoming Build 28″

Hello everyone, I’m Robert Johnson French coder of Project Zomboid. Welcome to this first upcoming version video, and apologies for my outrageous French accent.

This is our first build video for a while, so let us know if you liked it – and feel free to give us pointers on how we can improve them.

This video covers some of the major changes in Build 28, and the full patch note is linked in the description bellow.

Firearms overhaul

A primary thing that’s changing are Zomboid’s guns.

Video = Player shooting at things randomly.

Firearms have been nerfed to bring the game closer to reality. This means no more bullet piercing for the shotgun, and no more 100% accuracy.

Shooting is based a lot more on your aiming skill, and each weapon now has base stats like hit chance, damage and head shot chance. Each stat is then influenced by aiming skill.

So let’s lift the lid on one of our two new weapons: the Hunting Rifle.

Hunting rifle video

This rifle is being used by a good marksman, next up is how it works when you have an aiming skill of zero.

Video = Player shooting at zombie for like 20-30s with the hunting rifle.

As you can see, lot’s of non-exploded brains there. With a low aim skill I also need to stand still for some time to aim correctly.

So this is now a player with an aiming skill of five.

Video = Player shooting at zombie for like 20-30s with the hunting rifle.

Hooray! Dead zombies!

Video = Player shooting with all weapon during the next text.

All this means that the shotgun will be perfect for begginer marksmen, as they have small range but huge damage. After you’ve gained some experience though, you’ll probably move onto using the pistol – with its better range, but poorer damage. Finally, there’s the rifle huge range and huge damage, but with a long recoil and reload.

Video = Player showing some weapon upgrades in inventory, mount/unmount some.

You can also now modify weapons with various upgrades.

These can be mounted as scope, sling, stock, canon or clip – and you’ll need a screwdriver to attach them.

With this you can increase damage, range, weight or recoil delay. Each can be found directly mounted on the rifle, or alone in a gunstore.

Video = Black screen + Title “Other stuff!”
Video = Black screen + Title “Burn zombies !”

Onto other areas and, very excitingly, in build 28 You can now also burn the zombies corpse with a lighter or matches and some petrol.

Video = Player burning some zombies.

Yaaay.

Video = Black screen + Title “Loot and zombies respawn”

We’ve added some tools to help server owners.

Video = Player doing stuff (looting, killing zombies, classic playthrough)

Server owners can now setup a loot respawn, and dabble in zombie respawn management.

If a zone is unseen for a few hours, then the next time a player sees the area will respawn some zombies and some loot inside the containers.

This is a very experimental and optional system, and we would love feedback on it once Build 28 is released.

Video = Black screen + Title “Leave messages!”

You can now leaves notes for other players in MP.

Video = Show how the notes works.

If you have a sheet of paper and a pencil, you’ll be able to write abnote for your friends – or perhaps your enemies.

You can also lock the note, so you’ll be the only one who can modify it.

Video = Black screen + Title “Painting and crafting”

Multiple new crafting and paintable signs have been added to the game.

Video = Player building new stuff, painting sign.

You can now craft a bed, bookcase, shelves and do other home improvements.

You can also paint signs on walls, or create wooden signs, to indicate a safe house, a danger, or a direction.

Video = Black screen + Title “The End” ?

There’s a lot of other tweaks and additions in Build 28, and more stuff being added to the list all the time. Be sure to check the upcoming version post and subscribe to our newsletter to be sure you won’t miss anything!

Thanks everyone and have a safe day, I hope I wasn’t too French for your delicate tastes. Au revoir!

nasKo · August 4, 2014

<CTRL-C – CTRL-V>

[NEW STUFF]

Weapon overhaull (more things in the info post will come).
Multiple text lines editor.
You can now write a note and read them (more of a multiplayer thing), you can lock them so they'll be editable only by you.
Semi-3D Sound ! Sound will now go left to right, fade away, etc..
Burn zombie corpses ! It'll need some petrol and a lighter/matches.
Windows can now perma lock if you try to open them for too long.
Bandages will now be removed after a certain amount of time.
Disabled the corpse decay.
Added experimental population management: after an area is abandoned by the player, new zombies will migraite slowly from this point. I'll need feedback on it.
[MP] Added experimental loot respawn, you have to setup the serverOption "HoursForLootRespawn", if you set it as 48, it mean the zone will have to be unseen for 48 in game hour before loot respawning, same as zombies respawn, I'd LOVE to have feedback on it
I'm also working on (idk if it'll be done for this build tho..) the ability to paint letters/text on wall.
New crafting : Bookcase, shelves, bed...
Map fixes (no more falling through Mall stairs, etc...).
Weapon upgrades (fully moddable), they'll come alone at the gunstore, or directly mounted on some weapons, you need a screwdriver to put them in/out.
Firearm need to be held with 2 hands (except pistol).
[MP] You will be now instant disconnect if trying to join a server with a different build version than yours.
Added paintable signs (skull, arrows..) over wall or post sign (new crafting) for every in game painting color (you need a paint brushe and the color you want).
Zombeis who die by fire will now continue to burn/spread fire after their death.
[MP] If you have a dice you can now do /roll 6 (number up to 100) to roll a random number, this will be shown to every near players. Picture
[MP] If you have a card deck you can now do /card to draw a random card, this will be shown to every near players. Picture
The zombie migration have also a server option : HoursForZombiesRespawn, same as the one for loot respawn.
[MP] Chat is now locally logged : you can press up or down while in the chat text entry to review your last entered message (saving the 20 last messages), then you can enter them again or modify them.
Some new items :
- Thread
- Needle
- Tarp
- ...
Tent will now require a tarp (instead of the sheets) to be crafted.
You can now craft a mattress with some sheet, pillow, thread and a needle.
Another server option for the loot respawn : MaxItemsForLootRespawn = 4 // For the loot respawn, if a container have more items than this number, it won't respawn loot (use it to limit respawn in safe house for example..)
You can now type admin commands directly in the console, no need to log as admin, for example do a : additem "rj" "Base.Axe" directly in the console to add this user an Axe, more admin commands are coming (probably for this build, will do it while testing), like broadcasting message and.. Well.. Idk yet (I'll update the "how to administrate your server" post today)
You can now add game meat (I mean rabbit, birds, squirrel.. from trapping) inside soup and stew.
Loot respawn can't happen in a zone where the player have built (or barricaded) stuff (to avoid spawning in/near safe house).
This is for Serrate Bloodrage (aka combat-medic badass ) : You can now make your own bread ! Make a bread dough from flour, yeast, salt and a bit of water, cook it : become a true French today.
Cleaned the server console a bit (less messages).

[bUGFIX]

Fixed some incorrect map zone.
Fixed some incorrect loot distribution.
Fixed tent/campfire couldn't be build on tall grass.
Fixed some world filler.
Map exported with multiple fixes from Mash.
Zombies can't jump over closed/barricaded windows anymore.
Hammer will now correctly be equipped (if required) before crafting something.

[bALANCE]

Increased the difficulty to open windows when you're not strong.
Increase a bit the spawn of twine (specially inside the sewing shop).
Bait for trapping will now use only 5 hunger reduction from the food you use as bait, also fixed minors things on trapping.
Lowered a lot the time required to cook bacons.

<Announces the fact that we’ve just released this on the IWBUMS branch for testing. And reminds everyone that THERE MAY BE BUGS so please only partake in testing if you’re okay with the potential for bugs. Make sure to tell everyone that for more information on the IWBUMS branch they should read here:

http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/4183-iwbums-the-i-will-backup-my-save-branch/

Mention that of particular interest is how people get on with the new aiming system>

<POSTS>

nasKo · August 11, 2014

Erosion Integration

Hello all, so this week we have an announcement to make that we’re sure a few people suspected might happen one day or another. At the moment the PZ team is working with modder extrordinaire TurboTuTone to bring the incredible Erosion mod into the base game!

To those who are not aware of it, the mod is incredible, and simulates the wear and tear of the world over time, with cracks appearing in walls and floors. Grass, vines and trees growing over urban areas as nature reclaims the planet. It also will bring seasons into the game, with snow in the winter, brown trees and grass in autumn, and flowers blooming in summer.

In the process we will be expanding the system, and TurboTuTone has already been working on some awesome new stuff such as soil moisture maps, with Mash drawing new trees, bushes and grasses for the various seasons and map areas!

Here are a few screenshots, please note these are WIP:

The winter will also be getting some love, though we have no screenshots of those yet! Mash intends to do extra stuff such as leaves on the floor for autumn, and grass coming through cracks in concrete and all other good stuff!

So a big big thanks to TurboTuTone for allowing us and helping us bring a more evolving dynamic world to Project Zomboid, and we can’t wait to see what he does in future!

Build 28

As you may be aware, last week we released a test build of 28 onto the password protected Steam branch I Will Backup My Save, which can be found by following the instructions here.

Easy and Romain have been hammering away at a bunch of fixes to the most commonly encountered issues in the test build, and we’re planning on shipping it out to official soon. There may be another hotfix to the IWBUMS branch before that happened, but fingers crossed it won’t be long now!

Work on the map, vehicles and NPCs continues apace, nothing specific to report except as to say they are going very well!

Later folks! <3

Be sure to check the upcoming version post and subscribe to our newsletter to be sure you won’t miss anything!

nasKo · August 18, 2014

Mashie Birthdays and Retuuurn of the Will

Hello everyone for another one of those not much gamey stuff to talk about Mondoids. Just a few quick updates on what is going on.

Happy Birthday Mash!

It’s Mash’s buuuurthday today, so why not send all your birthday love to her on the twitter and forums! Cause she’s awesome, and has crappy date-blind idiot guys as team-mates we want to make sure she gets extra birthday love this year! <3<3<3

Return of the Will

Okay, Will hasn’t really been anywhere, but due to the delayed and very mountainous amount of development for the NPCs we had a huge backlog of Will’s work that had yet to make it into the game, with Lemmy pulling his hair out and up to his neck in the various code challenges along the way and resulting in Will essentially twiddling his thumbs waiting for Lemmy to get everything into the game, Will has in the meantime been keeping himself busy writing for the awesome Alien: Isolation by Creative Assembly. SPOILER: It’s awesome. This results in the rather boast-worthy situation that the Project Zomboid writer and (we finally figured out all our company titles) Indie Stone’s creative director has been writing lines of dialogue for Sigourney Weaver and others from the original Alien cast. How cool is that?

Now Will’s work on Alien: Isolation has wrapped up, it’s turned out to be spectacularly convenient timing, considering the NPC development has now FINALLY started to reach the point where Lemmy has (yes, I know) rejigged the NPC codebase, rewritten all the things that needed rewriting, and is craving new words and situations for those NPCs to get themselves into. This is really exciting and we are currently all talking about a whole bunch of new situations that can arise from NPC groups. Our ultimate dream of an infinite procedurally generated Walking Dead plotline generator (hopefully with no walking through woods shouting ‘Sophia!’) are that much closer. As we’ve said in the recent NPC mondoid, this doesn’t mean that they are imminent, but there’s some reeeeally exciting stuff on the horizon and we’d like to think that the NPCs will truly be the legacy of this game, if we’re lucky enough for it to have a legacy at all.

To get back into the swing of things, Will is starting work on a new revamped canon and back-story for the game (largely to fit with the expanded world), radio broadcasts, and world building that will help drive the overarching story of the apocalypse.

Animaniac

After moving into our new office, we had a surprise reconnection with an old friend, a guy both Binky and Lemmy worked with in our old commercial games industry days happened to be contracting at a company in the same building. And what does he do? He’s an animator! What does this mean? It means in September, when he’s free, we will be working with him to finally start getting a ton of new animations into the game. This is extremely exciting, because while Binky has the anim skillz, not only is his time split between so many things, but by his own admission he’s never going to produce the results that a full time professional 3D animator would, or as fast for that matter. We’re anticipating getting a whole host of new character animations into the game very quickly. From sneaking, pressing against walls, crouching, more zombie walks, hostage taking, looting, backpack manipulation, we’ll suddenly be getting pretty much full time animation support at least for a few months following September. Let’s put it this way. We sent him a list with some 40-50 animations and his response was pretty much a shrug and ‘yeah that sounds cool, bring it on!’

A complication here is it will be impossible to get all these anims working on the 2D models, as it would drive the memory usage up by many gigabytes, however we will make sure the game continues to be playable with 2D characters without those extra animations. We’re resigned to the fact that there are too many people who cannot run the game with 3D models for us to justify dropping support, but I’m afraid we cannot provide the animation variety to those people that we’d like.

However those who can run the 3D models will find the animations flooding in for the latter part of the year, and it should have dramatic ramifications on what is possible for the combat system, and stealth gameplay, and we can finally start ironing out the slightly flakey combat system and make character control and gameplay a lot more intuative, varied, fluid and just plain sexy. It’s all super exciting!

That’s about it really. Romain is taking a well earnt break in Venice this week, and EasyP is continuing on the vehicles, which are coming along very nicely, as well as his usual bug massacring. We’ll probably be due another IWBUMS release very soon.

Love you all,

The Indie Stone

nasKo · August 25, 2014

(blog header art by Terry Green)

Good evening from a rain-soaked England, and welcome to the fourth ‘Ask Project Zomboid Developers The Indie Stone Anything!’. And what does that boil down to if you only use the first letter of every word?

Audience: “APZDTISA!”

God bless you all!

Right, some housekeeping before we get to developer answers from the Zomboid community. First off, if you haven’t seen the announcement about the current status of our in-game server listplease have a read.

Second off, check out Blindcoder’s amazing new map function: you can see inside houses!

Third off, because we had so many awesome questions we’re going to break with tradition and split this

APZDTISA into two separate Mondoids (we know!). So if you don’t see your much-liked question appear below, we don’t hate you – it might just be waiting till next week for its time to shine. Or, we might hate you. That’s just the risk you run round here.

With that in mind: on…. with… the… SHOW!

Will the new canon be very different from the existing one? Where do you plan to take it?
WILL: It’s different, but not wildly different. I still want the area around the ‘Knox Event’ to be an exclusion zone at first, so you survivors can listen in on news reports as the world begins to fall apart – and then goes ominously silent. As far as the official canon goes, players won’t ever actually know what happened – there’ll be plenty of rumours and opinions shared by the survivors you meet but you’ll never come across a laboratory with a broken vial on the floor and the words ‘Oh no! I dropped the vial!’ written on the wall in scientist blood.

Will water become passable/swimmable at some point and how would zombies interact with it, submerging like in some Romero lore or avoid it.
BINKY: It’s difficult to answer that since it would need various additions/changes from the engine itself. I can say that ideally the water would be swimmable to some degree but I wouldn’t want to confirm that at this stage.

When will things like backpacks, raincoats, hats etc be visible on the character? (theres only so many times that purple sweater can look good)
BINKY: Yes, more clothing – backpacks, props, stuff like that. Yes, definitely.

Will the mod community be able to mod NPCs? And will NPCs be procedurally/randomly generated, or will they be true “characters” with their own preset background story and behavior? Or a combination of both?

LEMMY: The mod community will be able to mod the NPCs behaviour in the meta game completely. That is overarching decisions they make, their opinions of other people, and the things that happen to them, the things they choose to do in situations etc. All this is completely open and editable with XML.

In the first release, at least, it would not be possible to mod combat behaviours, what order they explore rooms when looting, how they interact with their inventory, or other lower level functionality without decompiling. We have a plan however to open even this up in time using lua constructed behaviours and leaf nodes.

Regarding whether NPCs will be procedurally/randomly generated, or will be true characters. They will be both. You may walk up to a random house that’s never been visited before and meet a random NPC group with a random brother and sister, or a group of random thugs, or a group of friends, or whatever. They are totally random.

On the other hand, if you were to go to Bob and Kate’s house then they would be there too, with the AI taking control of Bob and all the player choices available. Depending on how far away the player was, and how much time has passed since the start of the game, the player may find them listening to the radio in that very safehouse bedroom, or if it took weeks to get there, you see Kate running down the road with another group and wonder ‘what the hell happened there?’.

We all understand by now that there are certain ways to avoid your character getting bored in the game, be it cutting a tree, do inventory management or read a book. But what about actual players? Aside from the much anticipated NPCs and “The Governor”, do you plan to implement anything else that will keep the actual player entertained throughout the ‘Sims’ stage, when we manage to build a good safehouse and only have to care about our crops and water barrels?

ROMAIN: Zombie migration is already in there to help that, but we definitely need to add more end game content – more complex crafting (perhaps even a few things that could require more than 1 player/NPC), electrical generators and repairs, more skills to develop etc.

Is an overhaul of the health and medicine system in the cards for pre-1.0 release?
ROMAIN: Yup, it’ll probably not be for build 29, but probably for build 30. Many things are planned for this – more wound types (burns, bullet strikes, heavy bleeding, bone breaking etc), and many new ways to treat them like alcohol-doused bandages and splints. There’ll also be a new doctor skill that will let you search for medicinal plants and craft new medicines with them (it’ll be less efficient than the current medicines in-gane, but would be used to deal with food poisoning, as a painkiller etc.)

Will we ever see animals roaming around?
BINKY: Again, ideally yes. We posted a work-in-progress pic of a rabbit aaaaaaages ago for example, but there hasn’t been time as of yet to finish that off and get it in the game.

What animations are being worked on? I think top priority should be something like crouching and searching around in the backpack when doing backpack inventory management, hugging the walls and maybe a longer walking and sprinting animation?
BINKY: Er, you’ve kind of answered your own question thereI agree. Plus the aforementioned combat anim expansion. Whenever we look at expanding the animations we generally prioritise things which have clear gameplay ramifications. Crouching, sneaking, peeking round corners, etc certainly fall under this category. So does expanding the combat anim range. Inventory searching is more of a cosmetic animation but I agree it would be nice to see.

The old NPC system had a three tier “emotion” scale which would allow the player to choose how he acted. Will this system be returning with the new NPCs? How will it work?
LEMMY: No this system is not coming back. We’ve instead introduced actual conceptual choices that can either be picked by a player, or picked by an NPC in a similar situation. These won’t necessarily be dialogue options but are in many cases when that is what the choice boils down to. These won’t be liberally used but will be in situations where important decisions are to be made that may impact things heavily. Do you order the execution of the guy you just mugged? What will the witnesses think about that? Will they comply? It all comes down to their personalities, how much you’ve learnt of their personalities, and what you can surmise about their characters and relationships.

Can we have a chainsaw? Pretty please? lol I PROMISE to use it responsibly! (that’s a fib, I’m sorry. I’ll probably run amok with it, tearing through zombies and doors alike)
LEMMY: Just remember this is Zomboid. You want to carry a heavy, extremely loud, finite fuel weapon? You want to cut your own arm off or get eaten by a horde? It’s time to pick! I’m sure we’ll want to look into adding chainsaws at some point because, well its obvious, but their usefulness will be questionable.

BINKY: I’d also like to add this.

RJ specifically for you: How have your pole dancing skills increased since Rezzed? What have you been doing to really up your game?
ROMAIN: First thing, I’ve bought a new pole for my home. It’s quite amazing, after a few miserable falls, I’ve noe pretty much mastered it. I mean, it’s not on-board a monorail shuttle, but it does the trick. I’ll do a bonus video soon to show some of my new pole dance skills very soon, I just need to find the correct underwear.

Cake or Pie?
MASH: The real question is: Pancakes or Waffles?

nasKo · September 2, 2014

(header artwork by Terry Green)

Here’s a second helping of APZDTISA – or Ask Project Zomboid Developers The Indie Stone Anything – to titillate and/or delight. Thank you so much for everyone’s questions there really were some crackers in there, thus the need to spread it over two Mondoids!

When in multiplayer and in melee combat with another player can the other player or yourself be knocked down and then pummeled until they die or will it remain a swing fest?
BINKY: We’d prefer it to be done in the way which is the most satisfying to play. We will be expanding the range of combat animations which will open up some possibilities for the way combat works generally. For example getting a greater sensation of impact, and providing for exhausting but adrenaline-fuelled pummeling. Stuff like that would be awesome.

Will bladed weapons, or weapons in general, ever get stuck inside a zombie I just downed?
BINKY: That would be cool. But I couldn’t confirm either way at this stage. It certainly sounds like the sort of thing we’d be tempted to try out though.
Are there currently any feasible plans to release the expanded modding tools (particularly a model/skin editor) to the community in the near future?
BINKY: Well, modding the 3D characters is as easy now as swapping a texture. More fundamental changes however, actual mesh alterations, would be a bit finicky as our tool-chain stands right now. Not impossible, but a pain in the arse. If we can find some way to make this more straight-forward for modding, we will do that.

Once PZ is completed, would you ever consider bringing it to consoles as a downloadable game?
LEMMY: We’re asked this a lot, and the answer is that we’d love to do this. However we made the game in Java so as to make it cross platform on desktop machines, so it would essentially need a full rewrite to appear on consoles. If this were to happen it would be too much work for our team, so we would require outside help from a publisher, or be able to pay an external company of some kind. The likelihood of that depends entirely on how PZ goes in future, so we’ll see!

Will there be a possibility to craft crude tools like a wooden hammer or some kind of essentials at a greatly reduced effectiveness?
LEMMY: This is definitely planned, however at the moment having to locate specific items, as well as get backups, by looting is a large part of the gameplay and to allow crafting of these would make looting a lot less interesting as well as drag a lot of late game stuff too early and eat up a large part of the progression in the game. We do agree it’s needed but it’s trying to find a way to do it that feels fair but not too OP. (Another possibility is that with the introduction of NPCs it will stir up the gameplay enough that craftable tools feel less OP anyway.)

We’ve got so many different ways to acquire food now, but we currently lack any method of preserving it, so we risk losing out on excess food supplies if we farm, fish, or hunt too much. What plans do you have for food preservation, to prevent such quandaries? And what plans do you have to make use of food that has rotted? A compost heap would be awesome.
ROMAIN: A good chef can already use some part of the rotten food, for preservation, I need to make some research, but jar, cans or even salt could be a good way to preserve food a bit. I guess I need to ask my grandmother how she preserves her delicious tomatoes and other vegetables.

Are there any plans for nighttime downtime in multiplayer? In a normal game your character would ‘sleep’ but in multiplayer there’s not much to do other than hide in a closet and take a break from the game.
ROMAIN: Sleeping is planned as a server option, just like Minecraft. When everyone sleeps time will go faster – just as in single player. So that would be the plan for a small co-op server, but taking a nap is also planned on bigger multiplayer servers.

Are there any plans to overhaul the fatigue system to account for long-term fatigue, rather than just immediate fatigue?
ROMAIN: A fatigue overhaul isn’t on my list right now, but it’s definitely been at the back of my mind for a while now. The build-up of fatigue over long period would be a good addition. We will need to add sleeping/naps in multiplayer first though, so players can have a rest, eat food and drink coffee – which would then have an impact on the fatigue.

How ‘real like’ will the NPC’s be, for example will they even have different personalities, if you will, and will they react differently?
LEMMY: Very much so, this is pretty much the key mechanic of the NPCs. They have a set of character traits, of which their traits all tend to bleed into each other. A character may be aggressive, cruel and devious and all these traits would both affect any choices they make at any point, as well as affect their opinions and relationships with other NPCs. So an aggressive, cruel and devious person may be an extremely dangerous and explosive elements to add to your safehouse.

Of course every NPC’s list of traits are in a random order too. This determines how obvious those traits are from your first impression, or having to know the person well before it becomes apparent. So some traits may be buried deep in the NPC’s psyche, while still affecting their decisions and opinions, others are unlikely to know about it before it’s too late.

How will we get to see the seasons? For example in winter, will the tiles slowly turn white via a shader / overlay texture, will there be actual winter animations, will the clothing and other visuals on people turn into a snowy texture?
As it currently stands, the snow will appear at some point overnight, but we’ll look into adding some snowing animations (similar to the rain) It would look a bit strange if tiles just turned white, and since all the tiles are 2D-based, adding snow incrementally would require sprites for each stage which would require a lot of time for little payoff.

Do you plan on overhauling the wilderness? I don’t care if the world is flat but I would enjoy some big trxees with canopies that we can walk under. For too long we have been slowed down by trees.
There is a wilderness overhaul planned, however tree canopies present some technical problems involving how “floors” disappear and how to do this without making the trees look terrible. So, it would be nice to have, but it’s lower down the priority list than other aspects of map development.

How big do you plan the main map to become?
Pretty big! You can read more about it here.

Thanks for all the spiffin’ questions, and a special thank you to Brybry for reporting some nasty MP security bugs! Normal Mondoid services shall recommence next week ; )

nasKo · September 8, 2014

With the release of Build 28.3 comes the inevitable: the dramatic climb towards Build 29! Lovely Romain ‘RJ’ Dron has just posted up primary details of what’s currently in the can on the forum, but because we love to add to his workload we pressed him for a few added Mondoid explanations.

Item #1: The New Scavenge Skill
“My first idea was to help people playing in multiplayer to survive when all houses had been looted, but it turned out to be something great for people playing solo who want to head out into the forest. Scavenging basically lets you plunder the woods for mighty loot like branches, stones, berries, mushrooms and delicious insects. Then, from these, you’ll be able to craft new stuff that’ll go all the way from stone axes – to really strong log walls.”

“Scavenging won’t be unlimited, and it definitely won’t be overpowered. It’s basically there to help you in your first days, or maybe months. Once you’ve looted a forest zone, you’ll have to move on to another to do further scavenging – and wait for the previous one to replenish. Seeing as it’s a new skill, too, better scavengers will be able to get better loot and in greater quantities. Are you ready to eat a handful of bugs? I’m not…”

Item #2: Melee Skills Revamp
“I’ve also been working on a little melee skills revamp, which will provide new skills to help you face the horde (and/or dragons). Blunt and blade will each have three subsidiary skills – Accuracy, Guard and Maintenance. Accuracy will influence hit chance and damage, Guard will help you avoid scratches while you’re wielding the weapon and Maintenance will reduce the rate at which your weapon loses condition. And nope, Spiffo plushies aren’t weapons.”

Item #3: Other stuff
Thanks Romain! Now another interesting item of note, for this easily scared survivor at least, is that your character’s panic levels will decrease faster if you have survived for a while. This means that, as a lot of players have indicated to us in the past, your character will get used to the threat of zombies and behave as such – but will still get those moments of jump scare dread.

Oh and, last but not least, we’ve got the first batch of NJ’s new sounds going into the build. At the time of writing there are 74 new sound effects in-game. There are ambient sounds – distant screams, dogs barking and owls hooting at night. There are cool new crafting noises of logs being sawn, duct tape being stretched and food being chopped. There are new foot-step sounds. There are… well we’ll keep the rest as surprises for you to listen out for.

As work progresses RJ [God, how many people do stuff on this game that are called ‘Something-J?] will be building another extraordinarily French video to show off and explain the new Build, and then the usual parade of internal testing, IWBUMS testing and full release can take place.

In the background, meanwhile, the tricky Steamworks integration is still being worked on – alongside Will’s work on initial radio/TV broadcasts, erosion integration and everything else we’ve been yabbering about recently. Oh, and we’re meeting with our Animator friend tomorrow too, so hopefully the pipeline to the new animations will be connected fairly soon™. It’s all go, basically.

Thanks all. Be excellent to each other.

nasKo · September 15, 2014

Kate Winslet once famously asked Leonardo Di Caprio “Do a build update video of me, like one of your French girls” in the celebrated 1997 movie ‘Titanic’. With this in mind, then, the highlight of today’s Mondoid is some giddy Gallic build commentary.

Build 29
Build 29 is deep inside the internal testing process. New sounds are being balanced, forests are being foraged ruthlessly and melee skill points are popping into character stats like nothing that’s ever come before.
While applying hot-fixes alongside fellow coder EasyPickins and eradicating bugs [not the edible kind] coder Romain ‘RJ’ Dron found the time to create another of his Upcoming Build videos. If you compare and contrast it with the last one then you’ll notice that he’s stuck a few points into his Video Editing skills as well. Stick around till the end for a very important French lesson.

You can find the full patch notes for Build 29 here. Its IWBUMS branch isn’t super-imminent, but keep an eye on our twitter for any and all updates.

Vehicular Fun
This week the mighty EasyPickins showed us a little something vehicle related, and it wasgood. We’ll hold off on any videos for now (mainly because of sound license issues) but the work he’s done on them is something to behold. There are a few technical issues still to resolve, particularly on how multiplayer streaming of cells will deal with high vehicle speeds, so its hard to say when they will be ready. But when they do! Head lamps, suspension, turning wheels, skids and all that physics fun. We’re very very excited! And hopefully we’ll be able to share soon!

Something else
As well as all the usual fun and games of our forums, certain members of our moderating team wanted to abuse their position of privilege by asking for the Mondoidation of the ‘Colour Me Stupid!’ game. It has nothing to do with zombies, but because it’s almost always hilarious we felt it necessary to comply.

Subscribe!
Don’t forget that you can beat the Monday blues by subscribing to our Mondoid mailing list, and get email alerts for all our stable and IWBUMS releases at the same time. Just point your internet in this direction.

nasKo · September 22, 2014

It’s been a busy week, what with last Monday’s $2.5 billion sale of The Indie Stone to Sony. We’ve spent most of that time chasing each other through the skies in golden helicopters, but recently landed just in time for a Monday release of… Build 29 on the IWBUMS branch! Woo! [Love you forever btw Notch <3]

Build 29 IWBUMS release!

For the uninitiated, IWBUMS (the ‘I Will Back-Up My Save’ branch) is our experimental build released for final bug-chasing and testing. For the full scoop on how you can get it fed into your Steam Library go here.

Amidst the tweaks and fixes of Build 29 there’s some cool new stuff. The awesome SFX of Mister NJ Apostol, Romain’s sprightly new forest foraging, some survivalist crafting and the all-new melee skills of blunt and blade. Oh, and updated translation stuff. Finally, controversially, watermelon consumption is no longer fatal. Full changelist here!

Creating a Knox Event Mythos

Ever since Will returned from his writing duties on Alien: Isolation he’s been focussed on creating a back story for your doomed travails in and around West Point and Muldraugh. Much of this has been in fleshing out and locking down our earlier thoughts on what this zombification disease is (and whether it is rooted in science or religion), why it’s happened and how it all panned out.

You’ll likely never know the truth, as per the laws of proper zombie fiction, but the clues will be out there amongst misinformation and speculation. Will has written TV and radio reports that can be played during your opening days – which will then gradually turn to static, one by one.

We already have four TV channels and three radio stations fully scripted – which will have something new to hear after every 12 hours passes in-game. These include news stations, call-in radio talk shows and a TV shopping channel. Occasional NPC dialogue and parts of the Kate and Baldspot storyline will also, clearly play into the wider back story.

We want to have five channels/stations on each medium before they go into the game, but already have good feedback from a few select community people who’ve been exposed to Will’s mega-spreadsheet. Some elements of it still might change however, as we’ve sent our super-secret lore document to two scientists who specialise in applicable disease outbreaks (we know!) who’ve kindly agreed to be consultants on the game.

Quite how close we can stay to real world disease when dealing with the affairs of the undead isn’t yet clear, but we’re doing our utmost to keep in shouting distance of it.

Build 30 Medical sneaky-peek

We’ll hold off from going into precise detail as to what will be in the next Zomboid build, buthere’s something that’ll give you a fair idea of what’s next on the menu. Yup, Medical overhaul is on the cards. (Please note we expected a more exciting screenshot than that, but it seems we’ve lost Romain for the evening before getting a tasty screenshot. Damn youuuuu RJ!! Keep an eye out on our twitter feed and we’ll throw that out to you when we get it!)

All the other usual stuff

As always there’s tons of other stuff going on in the background – Steam integration things, NPCs, exciting musical developments, vehicles, fresh animations and all that jazz. Next Mondoid we’ll, most likely, be talking to you about TurboTuTone’s fine work on getting Erosion into the main game.

Kirrus’ Newsletter bit

Be sure to check the upcoming version post and subscribe to our newsletter to be sure you won’t miss anything! That’s it for now. Thanks so much for living and dying in our game! Love y’all.

nasKo · September 29, 2014

Hi everyone! We’ve got quite an interesting Mondoid this week as we chat with modder extraordinaire TurboTuTone about how he’s collaborating with TIS, and Mash specifically, in taking the basics of his Erosion mod and making our little patch of Kentucky more seasonal and overgrown place than ever before.

Before we get to that though, a few items of Zomboidy housekeeping!

1) The second Build 29 Hotfix is now live on the IWBUMS branch – to see the patchnotes click through to here, while if you’re unaware of IWBUMS and what it means to you then have a look here.

2) If you’re in need of some visual feedback and would like to see our own ‘Captain Andy’ (aka Binky Hodgetts) fielding some excellent questions from Adam Straughan and some queries collated from our lovely PZ subreddit, then have a look here.

3) The Public Server List is back in-game for the time-being, after some sterling team effort from Romain, Kirrus and Brybry. We can pull it back down if/when we hit any bumps in the road, but for now finding MP games will be a smidge easier again. Please note, however, that we need to do a little extra work before Nitrado servers are visible – bear with us on that one.

4) Oh and, before we get into the matter at hand, a quick thank you to Mathas and Dean Cuttyfor taking the time out of their YT schedules to create a new Steam gameplay trailer for us. Much appreciated guys!

With that all in mind, then, what of our collaboration with the awesome TurboTuTone on Erosion?

Hello Mr TurboTuTone! What’s your real name, where do you come from and what do you do in life?

Hello there! My name is Kees Bekkema and I’m from the Netherlands. I’m unemployed, so in the event of a zombie apocalypse hitting I, sadly, get no extra traits. I spend my days modding and coding, mostly.

So how did you discover Project Zomboid? What has your relationship been with it?

The game had been on my radar for a while prior to buying. I think a friend tipped me towards it, and I liked the Romero style zombie lore and old school isometrics. I remember at some point playing a test or demo version, and that made me purchase it on Desura for what… £5 at the time? Considering the revenue in terms of fun it’s been one of the best game investments I have made I must add! [Ed> Thanks Turbo, the cheque’s in the post.]

It took a little longer to get more involved with the community and everything surrounding the game. That started to happen when I looked into modding.

For the unitiated, can you explain what the Erosion mod is? How did it come about?
Simply put, Erosion ages the map by showing the gradual reclamation of nature and the deterioration of roads and buildings. Additionally, since so many objects in the game are nature based, it also adopts some mechanics for seasonal change.

The mod came about pretty much by accident. I was getting myself acquainted with modding to see if I could add a craftable bed to help me in a save game. Through an unexpected process of exploration and experimentation, however, I ended up with a prototype of Erosion.

That early version was rather bare, and placed objects at random with no patterns or growth stages. I decided to give it a go and show it on the forums, just to see what would happen, and I was surprised when it gathered quite an interest and a lot of positive replies. The support from the community has been great ever since in terms of suggestions, feedback and information – all of which has been very energizing as I improve it.

So now Erosion is becoming a part of the main game, how will things change?
Well it currently looks like this:

The most obvious changes are the sprites. As you may know, Thuztor did a wonderful job at creating sprites for the mod, but sadly he had to discontinue his work due to a new job.

As such this integration has a completely new batch of sprites was required due to mechanics changes.
I’ve had the pleasure to work with The Indie Stone’s MashPotato on this, and I must say she’s done an absolutely amazing job at creating the aesthetics. I’ve actually done a little count and as of right now she’s added 760 (!) new sprites, covering what must be 75-100 new object types. To give an impression of how these objects work here’s a screenshot:

The above image shows a river birch – all plant life Mash has created is authentic and common to Kentucky. Not only does the tree have four stages of growth to go through, but each stage has several different seasonal states.

Something else that’s new is that all the objects change seasonal state individually. When the season changes from Summer into Fall, for example, you’ll start seeing a few trees turn yellowish. Then, gradually, more and more will turn.

A lot of smaller plants also have a bloom period set depending on their type, and again within that set period individual plants will pop their flowers at their own pace

.
Formerly, the Erosion mod had a very simple system based on static months (so all of a sudden ALL sprites would swap to Spring on the 1st of March) the new system can be best explained by looking at an exciting graph.

The graphic above depicts Output values of the Season System for one year, and each grey column in the background signifies one day. Below, you can see where we can input values required for the graphs creation: the latitude for daylight hours, temperature information, monthly rainfall and numbers of seeds.

Then, finally, in the bottom part of the graphic itself you can see horizontal coloured bars that represent the seasons that have been created, and their duration and strength.

Seasons will change: one year you’ll be presented with a harsh long winter, another year it might be rather mild and short. The strength of summer and winter also influence the mean temperature (green line), which is a guiding value used to generate the actual per day temperature data (red line) which gradually changes between warmer and colder periods.

Also in that bottom area of the graphic are rainy periods, which coincide with cold snaps – as it usually gets a bit colder when raining. When it’s winter and the temperature is below zero it’ll snow instead.
Finally (!) the flora of the natural world is now affected by soil type. As such, as you move around the map the compositions of nature will change. One moment you could be standing in a region dominated by oak trees with certain types of bushes and plants, and as you move this will slowly fade into other varieties. Some compositions are also rarer than others, and all of this will have an impact on the current map’s wilderness.

Holy crap. As the lowly writer I genuinely had no idea there was that much going in! What needs to be done to get this into the game, or the IWBUMS test branch?

Well I guess the final working process, in short, would be something like this: finish up loose ends of the mod, fix and revamp some stuff, add some new bits and pieces, getting it into the full game and then testing and bug fixing.

We’re approaching the point at which we can actually integrate it, but there’s still stuff to do – for example EasyPickins is currently overhauling the way chunks are handled in MP to combat some issues with Erosion stuff getting synced correctly. So, while it may seem rather functional right now, there’s still some time we need to invest before it can really be considered finished.

Finally, what’s next?
I have no idea really! I’ll see when time comes, so not much to put here sadly. But instead of wasting the space reserved for this question I’ll just whack my keyboard for random characters to fill it up: “asdgfdisbfs http://www.twitch.tv/sirtwiggy ashfoahfosah”

Go check him out! Lots of streaming of both Project Zomboid and Erosion, he has also been testing most versions of the mod including the current integration version.

Thanks for you time Turbo! Say bye to the Mondoiders!
Byeee!

nasKo · October 6, 2014

After surprise news that Alien: Isolation, the game Will’s being penning words for for a long while now, will unlock on Steam a day earlier than we expected, and the Mondoid still remaining unwritten, we hit a bit of a dilemma. The solution we figured was to write a really quick Mondoid but try and cram enough info into it that we don’t look like we’re being lazy. Perhaps with a self-referential joke about being lazy in the opening paragraph to distract everyone and kind of disarm the situation.

20 minutes? Did it really take me 13 minutes to write this paragraph? HURRY UP.

HOTFIX 3
We’ve just released hotfix #3 for build 29 on IWBUMS! Wooooo.
It looks a little something like this:

[bUG FIX]

Fixed some missing zones for foraging.
Fixed non trapping xp point in MP.
Fixed no rain when building a wooden floor and standing on it (it now need a roof).
Fixed server pause causing lag on player join.

The last one in particular may make a huge difference in the lag people experience on public servers. On a server with 64 slots with people coming in and out all the time this may have accounted for a lot of the lag experienced.
You can read how to get in on the IWBUMS build to try out build 29 by clicking here.

We planned to roll this out today, but we chickened out in the end and bumped the official release until tomorrow, because we were concerned about anything breaking the current build of the game considering…

40% SALE
We’re currently in the midst of a 40% off sale on Steam! Click here to buy it, if for some unfathomable reason you’re reading a Mondoid without already owning the game.

MINIMUM PRICE PROMISE
We also wrote this little thing, that explains exactly why 40% is all you’re ever going to get until the game goes to 1.0, or at the very least goes up in price post-NPCs and Vehicles (if indeed the price increase happened before the 1.0) – In short, it’s very important to us to reward the early adopters of our game, and not undercut them with sales while the game is still in Early Access.

‘FIX THE LATE GAME BY KILLING PEOPLE BEFORE THEY GET THERE’
Another big thing we’re focusing on at the moment is fixing the late game, where many experienced players start to find the game becomes too easy once they have a good stockpile of stuff and a secure safehouse. This isn’t in the spirit of the game we originally envisioned, and as more ‘long term survival features’ have gone into the game they have created a late game that was never intended to truly exist. We’ve come up with various solutions, and this is going to be an ongoing focus for some of the team while the big 1.0 features are completed. You can read all about it here.

That’s about it. It’s almost time for Alien: Isolation so please go away. Love you!

Be sure to check the upcoming version post and subscribe to our newsletter to be sure you won’t miss anything! That’s it for now. Thanks so much for living and dying in our game! Love y’all.

10 minutes…

nasKo · October 13, 2014

Hey survivors, bit of a general update-y Mondoid today – running simultaneously to Build 29 being pushed beyond the cosy confines of our IWBUMS test branch and out into the big wide world. So…

Build 29! Woo!
The latest version of PZ is now official! If you’ve been keeping clear of our test branch than now is the time to dive back into the Knox Event – new sounds, scavenging, melee revamp, bug fixes, translations. All that jazz, which can be looked at in greater depth right here. Once we’re sure there are no unexpected bumps in the build roll-out we’ll get in touch with Desura and get PZ updated over there as well.

Multiplayer Improvement
Since the inception of Zomboid online play, we’ve all seen increased lag as the number of players on a server begins to tot up. With the released version of Build 29, however, we think that Kirrus, RJ, BryBry and EasyP have made some significant improvements. It should be noted here, that we all deeply love BryBry. And so should you.

Servers were pausing for the briefest of moments when new players joined/left, which clearly became something of an exponential issue the busier the map became. We think we’ve nixed this, and internally have had a 29.3 server with 10 players and absolutely no lag. We need to get you guys and girls trying it out in the wild to make sure, but we’re certainly hoping that your online experience will be somewhat improved.

Radio: What’s New?
As discussed in a previous Mondoid, Will has been busy concocting radio and TV channels for you to listen into while you forage, fight and fend off the undead. There’ll two broadcasts from every radio station and TV channel to tune into every 24 hours, and a fixed narrative timeline for them all to follow.
At the moment portable radios have a news channel, a talk radio channel, a public broadcast station and (although Will is regretting it) a wavelength devoted to Country Music. Those watching TV, meanwhile, will have the option of tuning into News, News Commentary, a shopping channel, a kids channel, a ‘Life and Living’ survival channel and (of course) a cookery show.

We’ve also now had the feedback on our (forever secret!) outbreak lore from a top specialist in infectious diseases at a London university – who’s presumably a bit busy right now what with world events. As such the next step will be to feed his tweaks and suggestions into the body of the radio and TV broadcasts, as well as write a few extra news channels to give you a true feeling of ‘channel hopping’ as you flick through coverage of the disaster.

When all that’s done, after a final polish, the spreadsheet will be passed over for integration into the game – hopefully to appear en masse in either the next build or the one after.

Future Builds
The basic plan is that Build 30 will feature the Medical revamp, while Build 31 will herald the start of ‘Operation: Fix Late Game By Killing You Before You Get There’. As a taster, here’s the WIP health screen with multiple wounds inflicted.

It’s also worth noting at this point that since we now have full time animator we’ll be looking to adding limps and assisted walking that will play heavily into the medical system – as well as putting an increasingly mobile Kate back into the game. In the background, meanwhile, work has begun on an extremely cool new map location (still some way off, so we won’t start hinting yet) while background work continues on all the other major systems required for 1.0.

Thanks for Mondoiding everyone!

nasKo · October 20, 2014

Hello Survivor! A Mondoid of dev-nuggets this week, but hopefully you’ll find them to be nuggets of gold rather than… other substances that are occasionally found in nugget-form.

There’s quite an important note for Linux PZ server hosts at the foot of this Mondoid too, by the way, so please scroll down immediately if you’ve just realised that we’re talking directly to you!

For everyone still on this paragraph though, let’s Mondoid!

BLINDCODER’S MARVELLOUS MAPPAGE

First off a super-quick mention, amidst sighs of adoration and love, for Blindcoder’s amazingPZ map. It’s pushed a remarkable 9.65 TB of data SO FAR this month, and he’s currently hard at work generating build 29′s map. It’s on track to be released later this week. Thanks Blindcoder, TIS and the community all thank you for your travails!

LOVELY MARTIN

As you might recall, a while back a chance meeting in the new office building reunited Lemmy and Binky with a long-lost colleague from their distant AAA past. Martin the lovely Animation Man is currently on-board with the PZ team, and has now gone over all the current anims in the game on a polish/tweak run.

His task right now is on the stealth anims. These include movements like sneaking along walls, crouch sneak movement (instead of just aiming weapon/walking), peeking around corners and others of a crafty ilk.

This is all a part of our overall plan to make the looting game a lot more built around stealthing around the town and trying to avoid attention. We’ll show a few examples of his work and its integration, as well as badgering him for a bit of a Q and A in future Mondoids.

NPC MANEUVER TOOL

Binky’s been busy finished off a lovely tool to help toward NPC movement, to further make characters move in a believable way. It’s functionality that was once upon a time coded directly into the NPC build of the game, but this proved way too cumbersome to use and maintain. Now it will be a nice external tool that will allow us to create a library of maneuvers that a character can do to move from one location to another. These can then be pieced together, and chosen based on personality or possible military training of the NPC in question.

We did actually do a video long long ago of the results of the early in-game tool, which you can witness once again here. YES, we’re finally doing re-runs! Fear not though. we have a new video for you too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVMR4pcvtAA

FMOD SOUND SYSTEM

For the longest time our sounds have been put through OpenAL, which unfortunately led to a fair few incompatibilities on a lot of people’s systems in which they couldn’t get directional sound working properly. This has been a long-term irk that has rankled, and as such we’re looking to move to the much more AAA FMOD sound system. This is totally funky, and offers us a lot of extra things into the bargain that should make the sound in Project Zomboid a ton better. Here’s a little video of our experimentation:

It’s not ready to go yet, and we have to license the library before we’d be able to distribute it, but this will provide a much more immersive soundscape in Project Zomboid. It’ll make distant sounds much more realistic and atmospheric, provide reverb and other effects such as having the world geometry affect the attributes of the sound, as well as to provide much better supported 3D sound and more consistent volumes, and hordes will really sound like hordes with many many groaning voices creating a sea of unsettling sound as you approach a densely populated area. Helicopters will also be less likely to burst eardrums.

IMPORTANT THING TO READ FOR PZ SERVER HOSTS

There’s been a really nasty security bug announced in Java over the weekend, of note to server hosts.

Windows Server Hosts:

We’ve sent an update out via steam, please make sure you update and then restart the gameserver.

Linux Server Hosts:

An update has not yet been released by Debian or Ubuntu for all of the bugs.

Debian server hosts can check here to see when an update is released: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2014-6519

Ubuntu server hosts can check here: http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/cve/2014/CVE-2014-6519.html

Server hosts can update OS via the command “apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y”

Server hosts like Nitrado should already be aware of this, and will apply upgrades without prompting, only those hosting ProjectZomboid servers on VPSs or dedicate servers should upgrade.

This security vulnerability allows the remote modification of java code, those hosting Project Zomboid gameservers on Linux should watch the link for the OS they’re running, and apply the patches immediately. You should restart the gameserver after you’ve applied the patches in order to bring the patch into effect.

Everyone else:

Due to the nature of the way these bugs work, issues only mainly affect server hosts. We do recommend that you keep your computers patched anyway, but you don’t need to worry about Project Zomboid, this is preventative maintenance to make multi-player servers safer for everyone.

Today’s image courtesy of Coolflat Be sure to check the upcoming version post and subscribe to our newsletter to be sure you won’t miss anything! That’s it for now. Thanks so much for living and dying in our game! Love y’all.

nasKo · October 27, 2014

As work continues on the new medical system, vehicles, NPCs, project Nuke The End Game (not literally!), and all that other good stuff, we’ve also had the massive good fortune to bump into a couple of awesome developers who have each brought big things to the game to improve the overall playing experience. Sound and animation both having big impacts on the immersion of the game, and leading to new gameplay opportunities. So we’ve taken some time to chat with both Martin and NJ to find out a few tasty insights into the sound and animation in the game.

Sound Production

Especially with the new FMOD sound system being introduced in the near future, we want the sound in the game to be as immersive as possible. Thankfully we’ve had the help of sound maestro N.J Apostol, who has been producing some awesome effects for the game. Some in the game already, some are still to come. What’s most amazing of all is when we find out how these sounds were created! N.J explains.

Male Zombie Eating Flesh

[not linkable. original sound here:]http://projectzomboid.com/blog/2014/10/a-tale-of-two-i-cant-do-puns-send-help/]

“This sound is quite easy to recognize once you know, but is a bit of a spoiler so read at your own risk.

There is a layer of mouth chomping, and under that a layer of apples and tangerines being crushed and squished for the blood.

The sound of the flesh being torn is actually twigs bending and snapping.

After experimenting with chicken skin being ripped from the meat I decided I needed something more gritty. The skin actually sounded similar to the tangerines. I wanted the sound of sinew ripping from the bone so I chose the twigs.

All timed together to give the effect of biting in to the skin and then stripping it away with the teeth. ”

Alert Sound

[not linkable. original sound here:]http://projectzomboid.com/blog/2014/10/a-tale-of-two-i-cant-do-puns-send-help/]

“It took me a while to find an interesting sound that felt important but not too imposing.

It’s actually an effects pedal clicking, time stretched and reversed, and then with a timed delay to the animation. Is a simple sound but quite effective.

Then I added themed horror violin screeches to the ascending threat levels.

So the tension could be built upon with each new alert.“

Female Death Sound

[not linkable. original sound here:]http://projectzomboid.com/blog/2014/10/a-tale-of-two-i-cant-do-puns-send-help/]

“The sound of the female characters death was a fun one. I used an actress called Nicola Smith, we sat for an hour making all kinds of different screaming and choking noises. I was acting the male part and screaming with her as we recorded, and at several points it got so ridiculous that we broke out laughing. Those are always the funnest recording sessions. But the final result is a very chilling and blood curdling scream.

The eating sound was actually the most pleasurable to make because I got to fry up sausages and eat biscuits and chips to make it.”

We’ll continue to add other great sounds that N.J has produced, and as we move over to the new sound system we should hopefully get the maximum possible out of them to provide a vastly improved sound design to the game. Thank you NJ for the awesome support!

Animaniac!

We asked Martin, our new animator extraordinaire, a few questions about what he’s been up to as well as where he came from and what is to come. He may have even made a little video? Exciting times ahead!

Hello Martin! What’s your name, what’ve you done before and what’s your exciting X-Men style origin story?

My name’s Martin Greenall and I’ve been working as an animator, mainly in the games industry, for the last 11 years or so. I’ve been playing games since my brother bought a ZX Spectrum (an advantage of having an older brother!) but never thought I’d get to work in the games industry because, you know, who ever gets to do their dream job?

But after doing my art degree and then a masters in Computer Animation at Teesside University I finally got my big break and from there its been about riding the ups and downs of working in the games industry.

How did you get into cahoots with The Indie Stone?

Well I know Captain Binky and Lemmy from my first job in games industry where they were working as an artist and programmer respectively and we became friends as we used to mix socially after work.

After a couple of years I changed jobs and we lost touch but I would keep up on what they were doing through facebook, twitter, LinkedIn etc. (not cyber stalking, honest!) and recently, when they moved into the new offices, it happened to be the same building where I was doing some contract work at another company. I dropped them a line, they mentioned they were looking to get some animation work done and asked if I was available, which I was, and so here I am!

I understand that your first mission is to polish existing in-game animations. How does that process work?

We are using the Biped skeleton system in 3ds max to animate the 3d characters, so the current animations exist individually as a .bip file, a format native to Biped. I can load this file onto the character in 3ds max and start to edit the keyframes.

Some animations require more work doing to them than others. This is in part because of the time constraints on Captain Binky’s time, as you can see, he can clearly animate but just hasn’t had the time to devote to it and some are place holder animations, they function but aren’t necessarily “visually pleasing.”

This is standard practice within the games industry and gives the programmer something to work with but at some point, time and budget allowing, they need swapping out for proper animations.

What do you think people will notice in-game when they’re integrated? Or do you think that it’ll be a subtle change?

Well, as I was saying, some animations require more work doing to them than others. Some only require minor tweaks, others just need the posing and/or the timing tightening up or in some cases re-done from scratch.

For example, the normal run and walk are perfectly fine and I’ve only done some minor tweaks to them in an attempt to minimise foot skate; that’s to say feet sliding.

You can never really eliminate feet sliding unless your game engine has some form of IK system and even then its not perfect. An IK system is not an option (or priority) in Project Zomboid so we can try to eliminate as much foot slide in the animations.

The movement animations for combat I have re-done from scratch, making them a bit more dynamic and distinct from the normal movement animations. In particular strafing left and right now have their own animations, originally it just one animation looped forward for right and reversed looped for left.

Overall I hope people will feel their characters are a bit more solid and grounded even if they can’t see much difference.

What’s next on the list, and how will you approach them?

Next on the list, is sneaky, stealth based movement. Talking with Lemmy and Captain Binky it was felt this would help give a greater impact on the players experience moving around the game world.

Currently its hard to distinguish between the different types of movement so I’ll need to change the posing and overall silhouette the player has during their time sneaking. Since we’re not making a Ninja or military style game there’s no better way than trying and acting out some of the movements involved. Luckily the Indie Stone offices have frosted glass and blinds!

Along with new, cover based movement the new sneaky animations will not only help distinguish movement, combat and stealth but also open up a new side to the game not only through how the player moves but also gameplay.

What animation are you most looking forward to that’s on the list? What will be trickiest to get right?

I don’t think there’s one particular animation I’m looking forward to, more a group of animations, and that’s to say the combat revamp animation set.

Whilst Lemmy and Captain Binky have briefly talked to me about what they’re hoping to achieve with the revamp we haven’t discussed the specifics yet but combat animations are always interesting to do.

Indeed, combat animations can be quite tricky to get right; mainly because you’re balancing what looks good and correct from a physical aspect but you’re juxtaposing it with what feels right when you’re playing the game. Add in the fact that combat is a core feature and something that will happen to some extent during a persons play time it’s definitely something you need to get right.

Once your work is complete – what’s the integration process?

Once the animations are signed off I’ll export them out of 3ds max into directX files (X files for short) which are then run through a tool designed by Captain Binky which makes them readable by the game code.

When the animations were initially created by Captain Binky it was with the old sprite system in mind so some of the animations are quite quick in their raw form and where slowed down game side. When I’ve revised the animations I’ve kept to about the same limits so they should fit in quite easily but any ones I’ve done from scratch, like the new strafing animations, will require some balancing and possibly new code to be written.

Balancing and codes tasks are handled by someone else but once the animations are in I’ll have a look and change anything that looks awkward, wrong or plainly just doesn’t work.

They say “an animation is never finished” and so whilst I’ll be cracking on with new animations, I’ll certainly keep revisiting old ones and updating any that don’t stand the test of time (schedule and budget allowing! ).

What’s a fascinating fact you can tell us about yourself? [doesn’t have to be fascinating]

Lulu (a famous British singer) once ruffled my hair when I went to see “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” at the Savoy theatre in London circa 1987. It’s made all the more poignant by the fact I no longer have any hair.

That bit at the end

Thanks muchly to both NJ and Martin for taking part in the Mondoid and of course for helping make Zomboid the game we all want it to be. We’re very excited at how much Zomboid will be improved by their work in future and how much more atmospheric and fluid to play the game can become. Big thanks and hugs, and that goes to everyone else who has contributed to the game or been part of the community.

Lots of love,

Indie Stone

nasKo · November 3, 2014

Hello, and welcome to your Build 30 announcement post! If we were a AAA game and important we’d have a cinematic trailer, a carefully choreographed gameplay trailer, a press release and busloads of journalists being ferried around the world, and wined and dined in the finest of fancy restaurants!
As it is, we have a list of stuff. And maybe some headlines marked up in bold or maybeunderlined. We’ll see how we go!

Build 29.4!
First off, we’re not quite done with Build 29. We’ve got a few final bug fixes sitting in the Indie Stone hot-fix cannon, and ready for deployment at some point this week. You can read the current fixes going into the mix here, but this list will grow somewhat after Romain and EasyPickins hoover up the remaining major culprits that have been flagged in our bugtracker. Keep an eye on the Build 29 Release thread for more details as they emerge.

Build 30 – Erosion!

Yes, that’s right! After collusion between much beloved mod-creator TurboTuTone and the similarly beloved Mash, not to mention some expert final coding from the ALSO beloved EasyPickins, we are now on the final straight when it comes to the integration of wilderness growth and seasonal change in Project Zomboid! For more details check out Turbo’s interview from a few Mondoids ago!

Build 30 – Medical Revamp!
This is a mighty hefty, so you’d be advised to click through to RJ’s Upcoming Build 30 notes. The basics, however, are a new Health interface and a myriad of new ways to injure yourself. Each new malady comes with its own potential treatments [well, most do...] whether you’ve scavenged supplies from Cortman Medical or crafted your own home-made remedy.

Infections, burns, fractures, lodged bullets, glass shards… it’s a whole new world of pain. What’s more it all comes with a First Aid skill that will help you level up as a Doctor, which will clearly make you the go-to guy or gal in Multiplayer.

Build 30 – Other Stuff!
Erosion and the Medical Overhaul are the primary attractions in Build 30, but there are few other things waiting in the wings that may well make an appearance too. We should have confirmation of them next Mondoid. Pretty much everything noted above is currently in-game, now the process of balancing, polishing and tying up loose ends begins. As ever though, no ETA!

Oh, and the TIS Halloween Costume Contest!
If you dressed up like a bloodied nightmare over this past weekend and feel like sharing your photo, why not join in on our contest for the chance to win a Steam copy of Alien: Isolation – or a game of similar value? Just click on through. Closing date is Tuesday afternoon UK-time.

Thanks everyone! See you next week!

Be sure to check the upcoming version post and subscribe to our newsletter to be sure you won’t miss anything! That’s it for now. Thanks so much for living and dying in our game! Love y’all.

nasKo · November 10, 2014

Ah hello, you catch us doing one of those ‘keeping the plates spinning’ Mondoids. Everything’s ticking along nicely, but unparalleled feelings of joy remain confined. Behold: development highlights.

29.4
Build 29 can super-soon be considered final – wrapped in a pretty pink bow, and adorned with a single rotten cherry etc. All we’re waiting on are a few logistical issues [ie. Team members not available to be at their keyboards simultaneously on this fair Mondoid] to release its fourth hotfix on Steam. As such, we’re looking at tomorrow (Tuesday) – and from that should be in a position to update Desura later in the week. As we said on Twitter a few days ago, we apologise for the hold-up in all this.

Build 30
The next build is the best we’ve done in a while, as we unveiled last week, with both the environmental degradation and seasonal change that come from the integration of TurboTuTone’s Erosion mod and our brand new Medical system. It’s currently fully playable (albeit with rough edges) but obstinately sat outside our internal testing group while EP and RJ tinker with its innards. We’ll update you as we go on this one, but can at least tell you about an extra cool thing that’s a part of it.

New Sandbox Options

New features in your game’s front-end will allow you to change the amount of erosion [read: environmental degradation] that is present at the start of your doomed travels – although what you see above will soon be changed so that you’re customizing the start date of the game rather than essentially fiddling with an erosion slider. Please also note that some terms used in this image are WIP.

RJ has also been adding several new options to further customize sandbox, such as changing the speed that characters level up, and adjusting how quickly basic needs like hunger and thirst increase. This will allow for a lot more difficulty customization: playing with rapidly increasing hunger and rare loot will keep even the most seasoned Zomboid players on their toes.

On top of this, we're also adding the option to save and load custom presets for sandbox options, to allow people to save their ideal setup, and even to share them with friends or online.

Ongoing map work
We generally like to keep map content under wraps for a while, but will let on that Mash has finished her as yet unrevealed ‘large structure’ that we consider at least on a par with the Mall in terms of coolness. It won’t be making an appearance just yet though, as we’re also introducing various other locations around the map including some denser residential districts than you’re currently used to.

It’s a big job, and still a way off – but we wanted to keep you in the loop on it all. Before Mash can start populating an area of the map with buildings and extra foliage, Andy [aka Binky, aka Captain Binky] must first provide the framework for her to build upon – and it’s this process they currently find themselves in, circling each other warily like caged beasts. Andy explains:

“As an overview, if you were to strip all the buildings and objects off the map what you're left with is a bunch of general terrain tiles and natural structures like trees and shrub areas. So what we have is two extremely large images - one representing terrain type (water, mud, sand, various grass types, various concrete types) and one representing foliage (various trees, shrubs, and the overlay grasses etc). Each pixel in each image encodes that tile type (so either the terrain type, or the foliage object depending on the image). We paint those maps in conventional 2D image software, and then process the files to produce Zomboid compatible map files. Once that's done, Mash can then add all the buildings, extra foliage, or tweak the stuff I generate.”

And it’s in this eternal dance of creation, that we will leave them until next time…

Background Stuff
As ever work continues on the final big two before 1.0 – vehicles and NPCs, but there’s plenty of irons in the fire elsewhere too. The new FMOD sound system is nearing completion, Animator Martin’s animation work continues apace and as mentioned above the next map update is coming along nicely. Beyond that, writer Will’s TV and Radio work ticklist just keeps on growing as he fleshes it all out – recently adding some commercial-ridden entertainment TV channels alongside his roster of alternatives. Work on this will probably continue until Build 30 is in public testing, so it can be considered for inclusion in Build 31.

That's all till next week!
Keep an eye on our Twitter for any news that appears off the electronic presses!

Today’s main image from lovely LeoIvanov! Be sure to check the upcoming version post and subscribe to our newsletter to be sure you won’t miss anything! That’s it for now. Thanks so much for living and dying in our game! Love y’all.

nasKo · November 17, 2014

So, the big news is that alongside Erosion Mod integration and the new health/medical system we’ve got a third prong to the Build 30 trident – the return of local split-screen co-op and fixed gamepad controls! More on this in but a few paragraphs’ time!

Current Build
After having it on the brew for what feels like an ice-age, we had a few last minute hang-ups with releasing 29.4 into the wild last week – rather predictably just after saying we’d likely release it on Tuesdoid and ‘all systems go yay’. It’s been in our public IWBUMS test group over the weekend, and showed no major signs of misbehaving – so now it’s released! We’re aware you heard the same thing last week, and apologise again for this, but as long as the wider Steam audience doesn’t flag anything then Build 29 can now be considered final and we can finally update Desura.

Build 30
Build 30 [current addition and changelist here] is in quite good nick – not yet in internal testing, but good enough that we allowed lovely Tooks to stream a playthrough over the weekend. You can have a peek at his two dabbles here and here. This, in turn, flagged up a load of now-fixed bugs, so pushing it into a state where a proper internal test build doesn’t feel far away at all.

Given the number of additions and complexity of what’s going into Build 30 we anticipate that its internal testing will be slightly longer than that experienced by its predecessors – but once it hits public IWBUMS testing it should’ve been worth the wait.

To keep your anticipating engines running RJ and EP are going to try to hook up another super-french preview video for you next Mondoid.

Split-Screen Co-Op and Gamepad Control: The Return
The redoubtable EasyPickins has been hard at work polishing and improving on the old model of split-screen that we first bundled into our Rezzed build all that time ago. What can you expect aside from four player split-screen play and improved controller support?

Tap ‘A’ on a controller and you’ll get some options that will let you: take over an existing on-screen player 1, add a new player via the character creation screen and (if previously created) add in an existing co-op character.
All co-op characters are now saved automatically, just as they are in SP. They appear in the game’s save directory in files called map_p1.bin, map_p2.bin etc
It is now possible to play split-screen MP online. The first player logs in to a server, then co-op players hit the A button once in-game just like in SP. Co-op players don’t need to log in, but we do have to juggle issues like MP co-op players having the same username – likewise we’ll have to work out what to do with in-game chat.
Sleeping in local co-op will now work in that players can go to sleep separately, but time will only speed up when you’re both asleep. This currently leads to hilarity [well, slight amusement] as the player snoozing first does so standing up.

That’s about it for this week. Keep your eyes locked onto the TIS twitter for build updates and testing news, and if you can’t then why not subscribe to our newsletter so that anything and everything exciting can be hand-delivered by an electric postman?

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