[Zaumby Thursday]

Zaumby Thursday

Hey all, here again for the March Thursdoid. Lots of stuff from lots of different areas of the game this time, we do hope you enjoy.

STRIKE A POSE

We’ve mentioned the fact that Build 42 will have a variety of readable materials that you can loot and inspect, but we hadn’t shown them off in-game as quite frankly they didn’t look great. They were crammed inside our existing Survival Guide UI, and it really wasn’t going to bat for us.

We didn’t really want to create a load of individual images that wouldn’t be readily translatable into other languages either, and become a massive timesink for our art department who are already pumping out loads of vital stuff elsewhere. So, clever Aiteron got onto the case

 

 

 

 

So what is this?

Well, it’s a secondary UI API system – and with it both ourselves and modders can create readable text UIs in easier and more flexible ways, and what’s more reuse templates for them too.

 

Techie bit: currently, 4 Java elements have been added: Base, Text, Texture, TextEntry, and then based on these we’ve built a more complex UI in lua that’s easily manipulated by us and modders to play around with position, rotation angle, scale, color, animations, text settings, etc.

 

Alongside this a new RichText system has been added, meaning the media templates can be changed completely in translation files (including size, position of elements and other settings) so we can make great media for our whole international audience.

Video for modders who might be interested here.

 

How are we using it?

For Build 42 we are using this to create two flavours of lootable reading material, although not all of it will be available in the game we moment we go into unstable beta.

• Newspapers and Community News pamphlets, to help with world-building and to fully flesh out the timeline of the Knox Event.
• Local business flyers, house listing advertisements, restaurant menus and the like. These will all be locations that will be useful to your survival story – and reading the flyer will automatically reveal their location on the player map. In this way we will direct new players to helpful looting areas, and some of the community’s favourite safehouse locations.

 

 

What’s making it extra cool?

This has been cooking for a while, but we were increasingly unhappy with aspects of the way things looked. We were using in-game isometric screenshots, and they didn’t feel quite right for our in-game newspapers as such.

 

We’re delighted to say, then, that community heroes unconid and Welias have agreed to come on board and help us out with this.

 

Both have been entertaining PZ players with their brilliantly made posed still images and videos using PZ models and imagery, and they seemed amazingly well suited to bringing life to the characters of the Knox Event in readable media.

 

Likewise, we will also easily be able to do fun stuff with, say Nolan of Nolan’s Used Cars, by easily placing his cowboy hat zombie at the location of the car lot that the flyer has revealed on your map.

 

GRASSED ME RIGHT UP

Something in PZ that’s needed improvement for the absolute longest time, is one of the things that you see the most.

We’ve been unhappy with the way that grass looks for a long while, and it became more unsightly with the advent of Build 41’s 3D models.

 

Build 42 is now blessed with a depth buffer. This means that we can reduce the player’s clipping with the scenery, we can show doors swinging open and closed, and (during our unstable beta) we will also be able to show seated characters on furniture in all four directions so players won’t have to use mods to access the sedentary animations for the directions that don’t clip.

 

It’s also great for grass and general undergrowth too, so alongside updating the existing grass sprites to feel more detailed and natural – we’ve also added support for depth maps so large blades and clumps of grass will intersect your character as you walk, crouch, etc as if they were 3D geometry.

 

 

As you can see, this makes the character feel much more grounded. It also has various impacts on the gameplay: crawling zombies are slightly harder to detect, falling objects get a little more lost in the grass etc.

 

With the increased wilderness gameplay that 42 will bring for many players, in terms of hunting and settlement building, players will be surrounded by grass and wilderness a lot more – so we’re really pleased to have got this in, and looking so good.

 

In the world beyond Build 42 we also intend to build on this, tying our grass and scrubland to our seasonal and erosion systems – helping you to get a better sense of the months and years as they pass.

 

In the meantime here’s another nice Before and After of the general grass sprite improvements:

 

 

SOUND UNDERGROUND

Now that 42 is delving underground, and indeed much higher into the sky, we need some improved soundscapes to deal with it.

 

Recently the team at Formosa have been working on what happens with your speakers once you start delving underground. As such they’ve kindly supplied two videos showing their work: the March Ridge bunker we saw last time, and a new spooky Ekron industrial lower floor.

What can you hear that’s different here?

 

Ground level and outdoor sounds gradually dip away the lower you go, and once you’re in an underground area various appropriate one-shot noises can be found – like distant mice, cans falling and rolling in somewhere in the gloom etc.

 

As far as the roomtones go there’s also water dripping layers to give it more of an abandoned feel too, where appropriate, and likewise gunshot noises and the like have been played with to sound more appropriate in an enclosed underground space.

 

 

 

 

 

FENCING

A key part of zombie fiction that Project Zomboid hasn’t catered for yet are attracted hordes trapped up against long wire fences – as seen with the fences that surround the prison in The Walking Dead.

 

Previously our pathfinding hasn’t catered for this, and players have felt a sense of security while behind our sturdy wire fences.

Now, things will change a bit.

 

BUT FIRST: some traditional caveats.

 

This feature will be a sandbox option, and it will also only come into play with large hordes – and over a long period of time.

 

This video is WIP, and the effect is sped up, and we can work on the crowding/banging visuals too.

 

The point of this is that we want a gradual build up of a huge horde, so players get the feeling that they are safe – for now. The fence will only hold for so long up against so many zombies, and eventually it might give way.

 

In terms of pathfinding, with lone or few zombies, the change to zombie senses also leads to more Romero-like zombies, with some not being intelligent enough to go around and obstacle, and choose to slam into a fence in their efforts to get to a player instead.

 

 

GUN CHANGES

Fenris’ extensive upgrades to PZ’s guns continue, this month with changes of note like the following:

 

• Wind, fog and rain, as well as general lighting conditions now have an effect on hit and critical chances. Some of these can be offset by traits or skill levels.
• Ranged shots at targets hidden by dense fog or darkness can be challenging or impossible.
• Maximum firing range has been increased and is no longer affected by skill level (chances of hitting targets at range still is).
• Distance to target has a greater effect on penalties caused by panic, drunkenness, player movement, weather, etc.
• Most penalties are significantly reduced at close ranges.
• Sound radius is increased overall, but with a sandbox option to modify higher or lower. Sound range is reduced when firing indoors.
• Sighting systems have an ideal range they were designed for: a minimum effective range, and a maximum. Outside of this range they are less effective. If the target is close enough that just pointing without aiming would give a higher chance then the sights are ignored (eg a x8 scope on a target 2 tiles away).
• Panic previously didn’t actually affect hit chances (just critical and damage). This has been corrected. Remain calm, don’t panic, you’ll be fine.
• Hit chances and critical chances are now calculated in the same way (with exceptions): if something (like panic) effects hit chance, it also effects critical.
• Hit chances are generally increased allowing lower levels to make a successful shot under the right situation. However, avoiding negative conditions is vital, especially panic.
• Ammo weights have been corrected and rebalanced. Mounted flashlights are functional and highly advised for low-light shooting.

 

The above video shows Fenris’ experimentation and how he’s polishing guns – the graph shows the hit and critical chances across the various tile distances, updated in realtime, and overlays range circles showing the point blank, optimal targeting ranges (for the given sights), and maximum firing ranges. The chances of a hit can be seen rising and falling with movement, and after each shot

 

ARMOR

This month we’ve also had focus on improving our late-game B42 armour system. As with the weapon crafting, the intent was to make something that wasn’t referential to zombie media or other games, but instead something that seemed natural for the time and circumstances.

 

We don’t want crafted armour to look too anachronistic or “knightly” – looking like they should be part of a renaissance fair. We don’t want to be too goofy, although there are a few more ‘fun’ options in there, and we don’t want anything that doesn’t look like it belongs in the Zomboid setting. Importantly armour should work like real armour, and operate within the bounds of PZ logic itself.

As such a few categories that will come as part of B42 are:

 

Metal

While avoiding overt medievalisms, clearly 42’s crafting update and blacksmith skills necessitate metal armour: plates, leather, straps, buckles and all.

Inspirations here include Ned Kelly and his gang, while (although we always say we won’t take inspiration from other games) the way Rust implements its metal armours is very much along our line of thinking – though clearly we’ll make our own way with it.

 

Please note: there won’t be any historical armour and weapon museums in b42, or suits of armour on display in mansions. With this sort of high-end crafted stuff, we wants players to have to go out into the world and engage with the new crafting system – and not beeline for a spot on the map to enjoy them.

 

Apocalyptic Vibe

We had to ensure that the armour was believable and feasible, while keeping a procedural approach – like our approach of the “lego weapons” in which existing items are adapted and melded.

 

Then, for a more distinct look, we thought of tinges of punk rock and heavy metal imagery, with apocalyptic media such as Escape From New York serving as inspiration. From this we now have armour that can, for example, be crafted out of tyres.

 

Natural Ingredients

One important aspect of the new armour content was that it had to support the new crafting system, as well as survival gameplay on a forest map free of civilization.

 

Although we deliberately didn’t make it too odious to progress from dirt and sticks to solving the riddle of steel, there’s still a lot of middle ground between the two.

 

Leather is an obvious candidate, and is something we have already made some pieces for. However throughout history people have used all sorts of other materials for armor as well, and we are exploring some interesting ideas based on real world examples. We don’t want to go out on a ‘limb’ and ‘branch far’ with this, but knock on ‘wood’ it will work out okay.

 

A Sporting Chance

Given that the game is set in 1993 Kentucky, there’s all sorts of armour already available in the form of lootable Sportsball Gear!

 

All sorts of pads, guards, and paddings, including two items that should make players very happy: The Athletic Cup and the Ice Hockey Neck Guards.

As well, some of those items of Sports gear, like the weapons crafting, can be modified to make badass, cool, post apocalyptic armor, which brings us to….

 

Spikes

And you and the zombies can be spiky too now.

 

 

EXPLORING UP HIGH

Finally, we’re also in the process of testing Skyscrapers for playability and performance. Turns out 32 floors of zombies, all spawning at the same rate of zombies creates a LOT of zombies. So we need to get to balancing things out a bit.

 

 

 

Thanks all. Sadly not too much from the new crafting in motion this time. Please be assured, though, that there’s a lot of work going on there, but some aspects aren’t ready for show, and others are waiting for a core code update to hook things into and as such aren’t filmable.

There’s a bit of a logjam building of stuff that can be pumped out, so we hope it’ll be a flood of cool stuff next time round. This is such a core aspect of gameplay, which could bring huge improvements across the board, so it’s also needing the most consideration and care to not get wrong.

A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here

[Leapdoid]

Hey all, a good mix of things this ‘doid.

 

Fun gameplay stuff, and a chunk of info we wanted to flag for modder-awareness and the more tech-minded amongst you. (Feel free to skip that bit to get to the more enticing gun stuff from Fenris that’s become its first application.)

 

Onwards, then.

HUNKER INNA BUNKER

Permanent underground structures are being added to the internal build’s map for testing.

 

As discussed before some basement locations will be randomised to add surprise flavour to your looting, but there’ll be plenty of ever-present locations that will likely be survivor favourites for taking over and making your own.

 

Here’s a fun example, which also very clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of B42’s tech upgrade that governs the realistic spread of light. It really is very dark down there, and with that very claustrophobic and scary…

 

 

Another aspect of the underground structures is sound, and now we’ve got more and more of these in the test build our sound team will be working to cut out wildlife sounds, add muffle, echo, drips and such. Likewise, meanwhile, another focus is adjusting the noise of ‘street level’ activity when you climb higher in buildings.

 

It’s also worth mentioning that in 42, or at least certainly its unstable release, you will not be able to tunnel or break down the external walls of underground structures. This is something it would be healthy for the engine to be able to do (although we’d never have Minecraft-style insta-tunnels in vanilla, clearly) but is probably a can of worms best opened later down the line.

 

CRAFTING

In amongst the feverish connecting of code wires from others on the crafting team, Turbo has been working on the new interface that will allow for hand-crafting items on in-game surfaces.

 

We’ve got something ready to go into the internal build, but in its current WIP form still needs some polish – and probably isn’t quite ready to show off before its rough edges have been smoothed out.

 

In essence though, this work has been to cater for crafting items that aren’t as straightforward as ripping clothing to make bandages or opening a can of beans (which will always be feasible just in your hands) but don’t necessarily need a specialized workstation either.

 

Activities like preparing a sandwich or making a nailed baseball bat logically require a handy surface to perform the work. The way it’s being implemented – any logical surface will do (tables, counters etc) but this sort of crafting will no longer be possible while standing in the middle of the street with zombies approaching.

 

In terms of changes in player habits and behaviour going from 41 to 42, this will probably be the one that’s felt most keenly. There’s a lot of muscle memory we’ll be scrubbing out here, after all. However we are doing our utmost to keep it logical, and to keep it real.

 

The current challenge has been to devise an interface that accomplishes all the tasks necessary: providing a handy way of browsing or looking up the recipes, allowing for crafting of multiple objects, allowing the use of tools to modify the quality or success chances of the crafting, and giving access to all the functionality provided in the crafting update.

 

We’re not there yet on this surface level, but functionally on the code level it’s all there and working and ready to be integrated into the game. Next steps will be to make the UI as clean and convenient as can be, improving and iterating as we go, as it’s such a core aspect of 42.

 

(Just to reiterate, however, simple crafts like ripping bandages and so on will still be craftable in the way they are in 41: right clicking the item and clicking the relevant right click menu option. This is still the most immediate and convenient way for a player to do these split second crafts in the midst of action.)

 

Meanwhile, of course, the results of all this new crafting continue to get pumped through from the art department, prepped and laid into the code. Here’s a few that popped through recently.

 

MULTIPLAYER

We haven’t heard from the MP bods in a little while so let’s go over to Andrei for a little while:

“We are very busy on the Multiplayer side of things. When Build 41 MP was first released we had three coders on our team, and now due to the success of 41 we have five.

 

As many will be aware we have been focused on anti-cheat functionality for the last several months which is now being finalized: preventing cheating with inventory and items by moving their processing from clients to the server.

 

Clearly simultaneous to this we have also been working on the integration of new 42-specific gameplay – most notably adding support for animals into MP.

 

We have also been moving the team onto the fixes, feature requests and changes we have heard from the community.

 

Some highlights of this are as follows, but please note that our list is long and not everything will be mentioned! If you’ve felt it or found it annoying in your MP play then it is probably on our list:

 

• Privacy and Anti-Cheat work. We are improving our anti-cheat functionality, and adding various new mechanisms.
• Improving synchronization of characters between clients. We are debugging and fixing issues where zombies appear unexpectedly for the player, or players teleport instead of walking.
• PVP animations and logging. Current hit reactions in PVP lead to unfair and unfun behaviours, likewise there are issues with disconnecting during PVP. We are planning to fix this and extend PVP logging.
• Safehouses. As players will be aware, there are various issues related to exploits and safehouse raids that we need to fix. We also have a lot of things in mind for nice-to-have improvements that we hope to share with you in future blogs.

 

Thanks to Andrei for his thoughts and, again, to underline – this isn’t the only stuff that’s on their ‘to do’ list. It is, however, what’s in their sights over the month ahead.

 

While we are talking MP, however, it would be remiss to not mention another side project that’s gone into the game recently.

This is disguise option for multiplayer which, if enabled by the server admin, will allow players to disguise their username by wearing a combination of lower and upper face coverings, or indeed full face coverings.

 

The hope is that these will create some interesting dynamics for RP and PVP servers, and indeed for general banditry purposes.

 

(Clearly there’s also a few failsafes having to be built into this! Admins will be able to can also disguise themselves too if enabled and will always see right through disguises, there’s an option to disable disguises inside safehouses, and the system can be disabled entirely on servers that don’t want anonymity to be a feature).

 

OTHER FUN STUFF

Okay, before we get to some of the more in-depth stuff some quickfire smaller nuggets of interesting things that have gone into the game recently.

We are making some character traits have more direct gameplay implications – with a case-in-point being character builds with vision-related issues. Likewise, helmets and headgear that limit what your player can see will get similar, but not identical, effects.

 

(PLEASE NOTE: effect seen in the following video is WIP. It was an internal video, but is too fun not to share)

 

 

The Event Zone’s Wild West tourist attraction is now in testing and open for business – now featuring a new game item that is the wooden coffin.

 

 

Our good friend Ash from TEA has been working with us to integrate Bink into PZ, which is some cool middleware that grown-up games use to play videos, cut-scenes and the like.

 

We’re primarily getting it integrated for some cosmetic changes you’ll discover when you boot up the game that’ll be seen at a later date, but it also means that we can now show tutorial videos and such in-game.

 

In future it also makes moving images on TV screens, cinema screens etc. a possibility – although that’ll be a luxury that comes about long after 42 unstable.

 

 

Finally, in the Fun Stuff section – Fox’s 4K-ification mission continues. In fact, it’s nearly done and higher-resolution UIs for 4K players will shortly become available in the internal test build.

 

With higher resolutions, meanwhile comes higher resolution screen furniture. So bid a hearty hello to some of your new, newly detailed, moodles. Friendly folk, aren’t they?

 

PROF’S PROC-GEN

ProfMobius, he of Minecraft heritage who we brought on board towards the end of last year, has been working on the procedurally generated wilderness to exist outside the map borders to allow for a not quite infinite but huge world outside the main map.

 

Currently he’s working on automatic blending between hand crafted content such as the edge of the map with the generated wilderness biomes, to allow for a smooth and seamless transition between them without visible borders.

 

This will also be invaluable for modders, as currently it’s a rather difficult task to blend the edges of a modded map with the vanilla map, which often results in an ugly sudden border of trees or vegetation changes as you transition.

 

The new system will blend in the procedural elements gradually into the vegetation that exists on a modded map, so the border will be less jarring.

He’s also looking into generating roads so they continue from the borders of the main map, which will massively expand the canvas for modders to position their modded maps – what with them now being able to space them out amongst a huge game world instead of overwriting or extending the main map which will vastly reduce the potential for conflicts.

Definitions for biomes, as well as template for road styles will be creatable in lua, allowing for easy modding to provide more diverse and new biomes with different vegetation, different road styles, and ultimately modders will also have access to the building stamping functionality provided by the basement system and could well extend that to place buildings in the world too.

 

The full wilderness map will have a different set of biomes to choose from, allowing less realistic but more varied biomes to be feasible: travelling an hour down the road to get from a desert to a tundra, for example.

 

For obvious reason, however, the extension of the main game map borders will be restricted to sensible Kentucky biomes, but may be able to include stuff like farmland as well as forests and plains.

 

With this system in place, and the huge swaths of wilderness with convenient road networks to utilize, it’s our hope that a heavily map-modded game could have a truly huge gameplay area 100s of times bigger than currently, with potentially miles of wilderness between major locations added by modders

IMGUI DEBUGGING

Okay – this is the technical bit for modders I warned you about. There’s some fun gun-related stuff afterwards if you make it through.

Finally, we expect this to be more of interest to modders than general players, but it will also impact the ease of future development of the game so is good news all around.

 

For the ease of integration of various aspects of Build 43 we took some time to implement a debug gui library known as imgui into the game which replaces our somewhat time- consuming lua based debug interfaces. We realised that it would likely benefit Build 42 content too, and as such it became part of its glorious whole – and indeed started giving us results the very next day.

 

Imgui is, essentially, the industry standard for providing powerful easy-to-implement debugging uis into game engines and it’s already paying dividends.

If you are bored at this point it’s fine to skip to the guns.

First of all, before anyone gets excited about this being used for mod UIs for gameplay, we’re strictly only allowing this to be enabled when debug is activated in the game.

 

This is because the way imgui needs to be rendered is extremely detrimental to our rendering multithreading since it doesn’t support it on opengl, as well as this the entire point of the system is to provide extremely quick to implement debugging UI that favours ease of implementation over performance.

 

As such we need to put our foot down on restricting the new UI to debugging otherwise we’d quickly see our performance gains eaten up dramatically by modded games. We do plan a big UI overhaul in future but want to use UI middleware suited for actual end user gameplay, with all the performance, swishes, fades, pulses and slickness the UI finally deserved. ImGui is not that.

 

In debug mode, the game can now run with more a ‘development IDE’ feel, with various inspectors and dockable windows to examine the bowels of the game and the game viewport as a dockable and resizable window. For example you can inspect all the game UI elements active to allow for easier UI work and debugging within the game, and you can inspect variables on a plotted graph to help balance values over time. Otherwise you can inspect in-game textures and other assets, and numerous other helpful things which should really aid in demystifying the game’s innards for our modding community.

 

 

Modders will be able to dive in and look into the guts of lua and java at runtime to inspect anything they like: navigating through characters, items, or anything else to inspect them.

 

Imgui also contains a fully functional text editor. We plan for this to be completely integrated for lua editing within the game itself, as well as a more robust debugger to replace the slightly ropey F11 one we currently have, however this is also a challenge due to the way lua executes so will come later.

 

In the meantime, for a nice Build 43 behind the scenes, here is the in-game AI behaviour editing UI with breakpoints, stepping and watch window:

In terms of more imminent usage for game-improvement, meanwhile, let’s move over to Fenris at the gun range.

 

GUN IMPROVEMENTS

From the second imgui was made available Fenris, he of ORGM mod vintage, leapt at the opportunity to use its features to do some intensive firearms work: making them more useful at lower skill levels without breaking balance, while also providing for more tweaks for accuracy based on the player’s actions.

 

Here he is on the firing range, with imgui active.

 

 

Here, the graph shows a new AimingDelay mechanic (the blue line) first initially dropping after the player starts to stablise their aim, then rising with each shot – then overlaid with the recoil delay and animation states. We see him taking timed shots and waiting briefly so his aim stabilises again. The effect can then be seen across the different skill levels, and how the rate of fire changes.

 

Fenris’ work on improvement here is extensive, but aspects of his commits to the game these past two weeks have included:

 

• Rebalance of how hit chances and recoil are calculated, and general RoF with firearms.
• Improved the target highlighting which was previously misleading, with the colour shifting to green shades with lower hit chances than expected. This is now corrected to go green closer to 80%. Previously only aiming & reloading skills, the distance to target and how long ago you stopped moving had an effect on the highlight.
• Now Strength helps with recoil, Dexterous and All-Thumbs impact on shouldering the weapon, and Eagle-Eyed and Shortsighted can change the optimal sight range.
• Rates of Fire have been increased to more realistic expectations, but it now takes a bit of time to stabilize your aim when initially shouldering the weapon or after each shot. This time is reduced by aiming skill and various traits and conditions. Firing as fast as possible is less accurate then taking your time and lining up the shot. The lighting of the target square is also now taken into account.

 

FINALLY

We saw this pop up on the YouTubes and thought it was a great run-down on what we’ve been working on. Our thanks to CosmiicSteem for the vid!

 

This week’s foggy safehouse from Rick Grimes, though presumably not the real one. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

[Hmm, Upgradez]

On 1/27/2024 at 4:29 PM, gabriel rodrigues brandao said:

Question.

 

Can a ask a think 2 questions about Two radom Little Thigs?

https://dontasktoask.com/

[Hmm, Upgradez]

It’s been a really big week for us, as we merged the second-to-last element of Build 42 into the main codebase across the rest of the team – which is the long awaited tech upgrade which brings a whole host of improvements to the engine.

 

It’s currently being tested and the feedback has been super positive so far. This said, it’s also brought over lots of small bugs, visual glitches, and issues with new depth map clipping items incorrectly. Nothing over-dramatic, but enough stuff to keep testers and coders alike fully occupied.

This is where a lot of our brains have been at recently, so we thought we’d give you an update on the engine as it now stands while testers run around kicking its tires – alongside some videos they have made along the way.

 

Likewise, we also have some examples of some of its new capabilities that we will be able to explore in future – perhaps during the Unstable beta, perhaps beyond.

 

So, a run-down of what this tech upgrade brings into the game:

 

OPTIMIZATION

We’ve made huge optimizations to the rendering of the map that should have a huge impact for most lower-midrange and upwards systems. We are now easily able to get a solid framerate even on 4K, or on furthest zoom. The difference in performance is honestly surprising, and extremely satisfying.

 

For full disclosure, however, we’ve discovered that a few of the absolutely lowest end systems capable of running our game are still adversely affected. This is because the solution for such large FPS optimization comes at the expense of GPU memory usage for the caching textures used. Cards with extremely low dedicated GPU memory may run into problems.

 

We’re investigating and trying to optimize this further to make sure as many systems as possible can benefit, and worst case scenario these optimizations will be disabled on systems where they would do more harm than good.

 

However, it’s still entirely possible that we’ll be able to resolve this completely and provide a large boost to even the most potato systems. More likely, we’ll provide some kind of automatic detection to provide as large a portion of the optimizations as possible for a GPU’s available memory. This will be our next task post visual-bug clear out.

 

Generally we estimate that a huge majority of our playerbase will benefit greatly from the optimizations. Since most of the optimization frustrations we hear come from players who feel their machine should be able to run PZ at a solid framerate, we feel this work will ease the vast majority of performance sadness we see in the community.

 

VIEW CONE

Another improvement born out of necessity is an improved and smoother viewing cone. Due to the optimizations, it was no longer feasible to alter the lighting of tiles frequently enough to allow for the smooth light changes required for our tile based viewing cone.

 

As such we needed to implement a completely separate and newly-coded viewing cone that didn’t rely on tile lighting – which truth be told we were never a huge fan of anyway.

 

Now we have a much more accurate, smooth and fancy viewing cone – and now we have extra hands on it internally feedback is being collated so that we can provide plenty of requested options to allow you to tweak it this way and that. (Making it more or less visible probably being the primary one.)

 

 

 

LIGHT PROPAGATION

The new lighting system is now in full testing, and seems to be working pretty well so far.

 

This new propagation system allows for much prettier and more convincing lighting of the world, especially now we have basements which would have been extremely unsatisfying with our existing 41 lighting.

 

41’s system basically had an ‘ambient light’ level that permeated the entirety of the world depending on the time of the day. Then on top of that indoors would get a reduction in ambient light to make them slightly darker than outside.

 

The new system propagates light from light sources such as bulbs, or the sun, across tiles to simulate reflective light. It’s not something cutting-edge that you’d expect from the Unreal Engine, or something, but for our purposes it’s extremely effective. It allows for light from a window to creep across the room, allows for rooms with no natural lighting to be in complete darkness even during the day, allows more immersive coloured lighting, and all manner of other things not previously possible in PZ.

 

Most importantly of all, it fixes the room lighting issues that plague b41 when room layouts are changed with sledgehammers leaving strange lighting artifacts on the floor, since all lighting is calculated purely based on the geometry of the rooms now.

 

With this will now come gameplay balance – there’s debate on the team as to whether the player character should have a little more clarity in the darkness, some internal spots are a little more inky-blue than black, and new gameplay elements like not being able to read in the dark will need finetuning to the new visual.

 

Also seen in the following video, for extra immersion, doors are now fully animated – as discussed last time. This makes a huge difference to the feel of interacting with them during gameplay.

 

 

 

 

OVERGROUND UNDERGROUND

We’re still in the process of adding basement spots around the map – whether random or permanent. However, as discussed previously, the new upgraded engine allows support for levels from -32 to +32.

 

This allows for both much more convincingly tall skyscrapers for city locations, as well as for basements and potentially sprawling underground complexes. The mapping and modding is gonna be wild.

 

Part of this is also strapping in engine capabilities to help us in future – and as such please take the following as an EXAMPLE video of what we can now do in PZ.

 

Our coders and mappers have enough on their plates at the moment, and as such this is not a confirmed feature for when 42 goes Unstable.

It will, however, be feasible within the engine which is why we’ve chosen to show it.

 

Essentially, EP has been working on some extra physics engine functionality to allow for the physics to exist on floors other than the ground floor – as well as providing new physics shapes that in future will allow for this. This work was also a necessary foothold for other physics-based features we have brewing for future versions.

 

 

Please note also, just to quell any mapper fears again, these extensive engine and map data structure changes will not make existing map mods invalid. All maps will need to be reexported in the new versions of the tools when we release them, most likely around the time we put out the Unstable beta, but they won’t need to be redone from scratch.

MEANWHILE…

We’re waiting on a big commit to fill in some of the gaps in the crafting system process itself, so in the mean-time lets focus on some of the fun stuff that’ll be coming out the other end: weapons.

 

Clearly we already have the more ‘normal’ and traditional blacksmithed weapons for B42 already, and likewise the more ancient-styled stone axes and such. With these we’re avoiding anything specific to any period or culture, going for real life examples that were common across history and geography, and that could pass as something reasonably iron age, medieval, or post-apocalypse. We have consulted an expert in these matters regarding the designs and selection, and we’re also providing them with further weapon designs as we make them for feedback.

 

But, as we stretch out into our apocalypse we also wanted something a little more… apocalypse-y.

As such, currently what’s being wrapped up are post-apocalypse improvised weapons. These include classic examples like the “nail-spiked weapons”, but also weapons that have been constructed with welding and metalshop tools.

 

With these designs a conscious decision has been made to not think about weapons from other games or zombie media, and instead research was conducted regarding real life improvised /crafted weapons. This included stuff like police collections of seized weapons and trench warfare, with additional inspiration from weapons in Max Mad-style post-apocalypse media.

 

We also took on something of a procedural approach, where we looked at the weapons and items that existed (or could exist) in the game, and imagined them being combined like Lego bricks to create weapons. Granted in many cases we just re-invented the wheel, but that helped keep things grounded, realistic, and consistent with the rest of the game.

 

Although we tried to make these weapons realistic and believable, we have allowed for a couple of weapons to be slightly (reasonably) zany. We’re allowed to have a little fun, after all, and all those weapons will also have realistic drawbacks when wielded.

 

Simultaneous to this, we are also adding some broken versions of existing Zomboid weapons. Some of these broken weapons and their parts will be used in crafting other weapons, but these fragments also exist for gory consequences when weapons break when bashing a zombie with them.

I don’t quite know why we’re using this strange moustachioed gentleman to demonstrate these today, but lets have a proper look at him in any case. Curious chap.

 

BACK TO ANIMS-LAND

Finally, a big welcome to Nick from our colleagues at TEA Games who has joined us to help us implement something we call PenguinTech – after the time Zac got two million on-screen dancing penguins into a Wii game.

 

Originally slated for B41 this will, in essence, be a clever way of optimizing our zombie hordes – pooling what states they are in, and then sharing a smaller pool of zombie skeletons for the same anims. With this, fingers crossed, we’ll get better performance when there’s a horde on-screen and in turn we can be less dainty with their application in your survival.

 

A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

[Zleigh Ride]

Happy winter religious festival if you celebrate it, or if you have it in a month’s time, or just if you think it’s nice because you get a few days off while your neighbours drown in eggnog!
 

Here’s the December news round.
 

CRAFTING TEAM UPDATE

With the last Thurzdoid some people arrived at the mistaken impression that in normal b42 play, the iron ore deposits would exist on the map and be the primary source of metal for crafting. While we’re not ruling this out in the long term, and it’ll certainly be the only source of metal to be found within the wilderness map (more on this later), the primary logical source of metal would always initially be found within the now abandoned civilized world itself.
 

 

For several builds now, players have been able to dismantle various metal furniture and other objects in the world, including wrecked vehicles, to get metal bars, sheets and scrap. This still exists in build 42, and should serve as the primary source of metal–in various sorts and sizes–for crafting.
 

This also includes taking apart railroad tracks, which is fortunate in that you can use a piece of the track to construct a makeshift anvil.

On the subject of “modern metalworking”, here are some new workstations, a standing bandsaw, drill press, and arch furnace.
 

The bandsaw currently can be used to cut metal pieces into smaller metal pieces, which can save you some wear and tear on your hacksaw, and the drill press can be used to put holes into metal, such as fabricating tools such as header tools for making nails or a drawplate for making wire, among other uses. The arc furnace can be used for melting down assorted items to cast various metal ingots and bars. Now this isn’t the extend of the uses of these workstations, or the end of what we’re adding in this vein.
 

Speaking of other workstations, here are some of the new agricultural stations in b42, herb and crop drying racks, stone quern, and mill, as well as some new crops: Barley, Flax, Hemp (industrial), Hops, Rye, Sugar Beets, Sunflowers, and Tobacco. This gives us a great foundation of resources for textiles, cordage, brewing and oils. We have more crops coming, including some winter crops, garden vegetables, hot peppers, and some pretty herbs.

Moving on to things relevant for the wilderness, here is an example of a campsite made using primitive tier resources. It includes a small worksurface boulder and tree stump, which are naturally spawning workstations that can be used for some basic crafts, including some bootstrapping crafts for getting crafting up and started. Here’s also an example of a small cabin that could be built in the wilderness.
 

Moving on to the blacksmithing and crafted weapon related matters, as some crafted items consist of handles and heads, some that can be sharp,
 

Appropriate items will track those conditions as such:
 

There are some other new and very interesting statistics that will be associated with tool and weapon parts, but we’ll discuss this later once its implemented. The goal of these will be to provide much more variety to items, and much greater reward from higher skill crafting, and looting of rarer items.

Aside from being used as part of the “guts and bolts” of the crafting system, this also allows for a more interesting procedural weapon upkeep and breakage system.
 

The upkeep stuff is intended to be warm and immersive, but without an excessive amount of micromanagement. With the examples like the hatchet and spear, you can use the classic items like Duct Tape, Wood Glue, or Zip-Ties to repair the handle, or carve a new one and replace it.
 

Sharpness affects weapon damage and criticals. Weapons at 0 sharpness can still be used to kill, but are less effective, will take longer to chop down a door or a tree, and will accumulate damage faster. Sharpness can be restored using a Whetstone, but is temporarily capped by the weapons Head Condition (or general condition for items like knives). Minor head damage can be repaired with a Whetstone, greater damage with a Grindstone, and a broken blade can be used to make a smaller blade or other item.
 

With the procedural damage system, Sharpness, Handle Condition, and Head Condition all are affected by usage and combat, with Sharpness generally draining the fastest, followed by Handle Condition. When Handle or Head Condition hits 0, the fun stuff can happen with Procedural Weapon Breakage. With the Hatchet, when the Handle Condition reaches 0, the handle breaks, and the Head goes flying.
 

With a larger Axe or other weapon, you may end with with a usable crude wooden club in your hands. Spears basically work the same way, but leave you with a broken stick in your hands and can leave the Spear head embedded in a zombie. When Head Condition reaches 0, the Handle still breaks, but a broken Head is left on the ground or in a zombie, which may be salavged to make something new. Broken Handles can generally be carved to make smaller handles or other wooden objects.
 

This procedural weapon crafting and breaking also serves to give us the bits and pieces to make some nice post apocalyptic makeshift weapons.

Speaking of crafted weapons, Spears are being heavily rethought, reworked, and rebalanced. This is a case where the weapon part and breakage stuff really helps to make Spears more cool and spear-like. You will be able to make simple wooden spears from appropriate items, such as Brooms or Hockey Sticks, as well as Long Sticks, and a Wooden Spear can be Fire Hardened for greater durability and a minor boost to performance . Here’s also some crafted blades and the spears and knives made from them:
 

THE PROFESSOR’S PROC-GEN LABORATORY

Last time we introduced you to our latest recruit, former legendary modder and Minecraft dev ProfMobius.
 

We wanted to get him settled into Zomboid in an area he felt comfortable within, and it made sense for him to perform a trick he last played for Mojang. As such, his first port of call is to look into a wilderness procedural generation system.
 

Please note this isn’t full procedural generation and not intended to create random towns and cities, and at least for now, is purely to provide random wilderness. This will serve two important purposes for Build 42.
 

1) It will allow for the current borders of the premade map to cease to have a black impassible border, and will instead allow players to be able to explore outside the confines of the map a very, very large (though probably not infinite) distance.
 

This will allow players to establish themselves a greater distance away from the premade map and will expand the scope of wilderness based gameplay, as well as locations for settlements that can exist considerable distances away from the existing towns within the game.
 

2) The second purpose will be to allow for servers optionally to be able to generate a complete wilderness map with no towns, roads or other signs of civilization.
 

Not only will this be a good testbed for ensuring that none of our primitive and medieval crafting trees rely upon anything a player would need to loot, but will provide a basis for vanilla and especially modded multiplayer servers to focus entirely around crafting and community building, rather than looting and zombies.
 

The random map generation will have large biomes (all will be sensible for a Kentucky climate environment for the vanilla map border generation, but we may be able to be more imaginative and less realistic on the complete random map generation, and discussions are still happening about this) to add variety and things to discover.
 

While we will not be looking to generate fully random maps with buildings, towns, roads etc at this point, it’s important to point out that the random basement system implemented into Build 42 has required the ability for binary exported buildings from our building editor to be able to be ‘injected’ or ‘stamped’ into the game world at run-time, and this functionality will be accessible to modders.
 

We fully expect modders to have all the power they need to be able to expand the wilderness map with random towns and road networks. It may be something we’d consider exploring at some point once the main map is complete, but until then it’s not something we want to distract from the hand-crafted game world. While we believe random maps would be a cool addition for those who have played the game so much the existing map and popular modded maps no longer feel fresh, we would prefer new players always had the traditional handcrafted map in their first throes of survival.
 

Here’s a quick rough cut of something created with the earliest draft of ProfMobius’ world generation tool – hopefully the start of something cool

 

 

 

MANY YEARS LATER
Just to underline our continued dedication to handcrafted mapping, we have a backlog of many and varied Challenge maps and spin-off maps waiting in the wings for main game inclusion. The one now stumbling and blinking into the stark and glaring light of day is Xeonyx’s Many Years Later.

Given the sparsity of ‘normal’ looting spots this is due to be another of our testbeds for our revamped post-apocalyptic crafting, but it’s pretty fun in terms of just how full of despair it feels.

 

The recent addition of rats and wildlife also really set it off now. Here’s a quick vid from recent explorations:

 

 

CHRISTMAS ANIMALS

 

Finally, Amz, our video producer and the most ‘Christmas tree must be up the day after Halloween’ Christmassy person in any room that’s ever existed has put together this amazing John Lewis’esque video! We all love it and hope you will too!

 

Enjoy!

 

 

Oh, and in weird bug news we had a problem with infinitely spawning chickens. Things swiftly got out of hand.

 

Oh the Humanitz!

We’d like to point people in the direction of a friend of TIS’s new zombie survival game that’s carving out a slightly different area of the zombie survival niche, a bit more actiony and aiming for something in-between State of Decay and Zomboid in the Venn diagram of zombie survival.
 

If you have place in your heart for another great zombie game, especially one that’s plenty of fun to play in co-op, make sure to check out HumanitZ on Steam!

[Stale zombies]

Thanks again!
One of the things we need to do is have the MP guys look into zombie culling once the recent performance overhaul can be merged. We've made sure that they'll be aware of your investigation into this, also.

[One Door OpenZ]

Yip yip, hello. Let’s dive in.

 

SWING BOTH WAYS

Another exciting addition to the build 42 tech upgrade branch has just dropped.

 

The tech upgrade branch is what contains our optimizations, improved view cone, basement/skyscraper technology and now… an immersive improvement that we’ve wanted for a long time, that could potentially lead to many cool additional gameplay opportunities that weren’t possible before.

 

 

That’s right, kids, doors have now entered the third dimension.

Where before doors would just flip instantly on the tile the moment they are opened or closed, now they are animated and use the tech branch’s depth buffer.

 

This is obviously a huge improvement for immersion, but could potentially lead to cool new mechanics in future (note, certainly not b42’s initial release) like opening doors at different speeds, doors being left slightly open, peeking, bashing open, one-way fire doors and such.

 

While easy to overlook, our doors are pretty much unchanged since the 0.1.5d days yet also one of the most fundamental things about PZ gameplay – so getting some visual niceness, and some future gameplay opportunities, feels like a win.

 

So let’s have a quick noisy vid in which doors open and slam shut in unison.

 

 

(In future we clearly also already have the tech to have doors and visibly opening and closing on vehicles too, it’s already in the code and used by many mods, however in the main game it’s always been the plan to couple this to in-car character animations, visible interiors and such.)

 

CRAFTING STUFF

We’re operating in various different areas with crafting, but the one that’s becoming most interesting and fleshed out with recipes and new items is definitely blacksmithing which has come a long way in the last month.

 

So let’s head over to Blair to have a chat about the ways in which you’ll be getting to grips with the creation of some of these beauties.

“For blacksmithing in build b42 we have the tiers, workstations, and materials worked out; now most of the crafting recipes have been made as well, and it’s a case where content is being added almost daily as the art assets are completed.”

“Most items that one could reasonably expect to be blacksmithed can be blacksmithed, and in most cases the resultant item is a more rugged, crafted version than the default version of the item that you may be used to.”

 

“In many cases there are multiple tiers of items, requiring better skills, stations and materials to produce, where it serves the game. Weapons are an example of where this extra attention is being put into the system, where there are distinct tiers of the basic types, that differ in both appearance and performance.”

 

“A lot of work still needs to be done with balancing, as well as getting the fun stuff like animations of the character performing the actions, with fire and smoke. Our artists are hard at work making the assets for all the new items needed for this, but otherwise blacksmithing could be considered ‘mostly done’; you could say that all of the design hurdles have been crossed, and we have solved the ‘Riddle of Steel’.”

“One conceit of b42 crafting is that you should be able to start on a theoretical all forest map; this isn’t a concrete thing that we’re testing yet, but we’re providing foundation for it. Steel production from nothing being one of them.”

“Although iron ore outcroppings are more commonplace in games than in real life Kentucky, we have tiles of them, for use for our own forest maps, and maps of modders.“

 

(ALERT ALERT: we are aware this is quite game-y, and may well refine in future. For now, however, it works for our purposes.)

“Once you have smashed them into iron ore, you can dig a charcoal pit, and build a primitive forge and furnace, and use the charcoal to extract an iron bloom from iron ore.“

 

“With a stone hammer and some crude wooden tongs (which won’t survive the process) workable iron is beaten out of the iron bloom, and that iron can be used to produce simple iron implements such as tongs, smithing hammers, nails, and basic masonry tools.”

“Eventually you can work your way up to building a proper come kiln, for both making charcoal, and also coke out of the charcoal for steel production, as well as a smelting furnace, and then an intermediary forge and a grindstone. With this you can produce medium-quality iron implements, that benefit from proper hardening and quenching, as well as higher carbon content.”

 

“From there one would work there way up to a blast furnace, for producing steel, and then, with the steel, cast and harden a proper blacksmithing anvil and make an advanced forge, and eventually a metalworking bench for making high quality, precision tools and items.”

Elsewhere, meanwhile, we have been going through the game and converting existing systems to the new fluid mechanics that come as a part of the crafting system.

 

A good example of this, as it clearly shows in the end product, are our hair dyes – even if they are relatively cosmetic as far as the game-proper goes.

 

In the following video, then, you see the dyes being transferred to (and used from) any fluid container – whether bottles, cans or buckets. Here too you can see them being mixed, and the resulting new colour being applied to the character’s hair. (Elements of this still WIP)

 

 

GAS 2 GONE

We’ve given you more sandbox power over how much gasoline is stored beneath Knox gas stations, as previous work in the area didn’t go far enough. You’ll have options to select whether gas pumps are infinite, what their minimum and maximum potential amounts of stored gasoline is, and indeed what the chances are of it spawning completely empty (see image below).

 

We have also made these a little more user-friendly with better right click feedback on power, required containers, admin info on fuel remaining etc. We’ve also added a more visible fuel caps on our car models, and indeed a fuel-side indicator icon on your vehicle’s dashboard.

 

VOICE SETS

After the successful integration of the body noises, “hey!”s and “psst!”s of a real actor and a real actress – we made the call to widen the net a little and get a variety of different people to record specific voice/noise sets for the game.

 

There will now be four male and four female voices that you can choose at character creation stage, which will also mean that in MP those around you will likely have slightly different puffs, pants and combat exertions.

 

Likewise having a more particular sound to your voice and character will likely be good for your own personal RP reasons.

(Please note here, again, that exertion noise frequency hasn’t been 100% balanced yet.)

 

 

 

ANIMALS

It’s relatively easy to slot in new animals to RJ’s system, the modding scene will likely be fairly extravagant, so while fixing bugs with our chickens, cows, sheep and pigs – he’s also slipped in some raccoons and wild turkeys to roam alongside the deer.

 

 

4K PZ

Fox’s up-rezzing (and slight tidy-up) of all the game’s many windows, icons, menus and general game furniture continues. In fact, we’re now at a point in which many aspects of the game can be played at 4k without the need for squinting and a magnifying glass.

 

Folk with higher-res screens have long-suffered with Zomboid, so we’re excited to finally put this issue to bed – as can be seen in the following 4K video.

 

Please note, however, that some windows here still feel a little crowded – we probably need to loosen up the crafting window that could use a bit more padding, the tabs feel a little close together etc.

 

 

MAP NICETIES

The map expansion, and elevation/lowering, continues apace. Something else we are bringing to your exploration is a little more colour and character to the places you are surviving within – as such there’ll be more variety of things left on whiteboards and chalkboards in schools, universities and laboratories for example.

 

Meanwhile, there’s clearly elements of signage Americana we can use for our game too. Case in point, being a wide range of different signs outside our churches.

We’ve also got an, as yet unnamed, Wild West tourist attraction going into the game – which could also potentially be a good place to find some of the crafting gear that’ll be new to 42. Maybe a couple of cowboy actor zeds shambling about as well, for good measure.

 

 

DRESS UP BOX

We generally don’t populate the map with Mad Max lookin’ zeds, but people certainly seem to like having a little more freedom in terms of the threads you choose to go a hunting and a’ looting in.

 

As a side project from his crafting duties, then, Blair has worked with animator Martin to improve the clipping issues folk often come up against with certain combinations of clothing. This issue was becoming more and more apparent with the crafted straps and metal shin guards being developed in the blacksmithing aspect of 42, so needed nipping in the bud.

 

Essentially, now clothing items and body locations can have set definitions – which then instruct the game to use alternate clothing models in particular circumstances. So a different arm guard model, for example, will be automatically used if the character is wearing a bulky jacket. We feel that this will have massive potential for modding.

 

On top of this we have also made it so accoutrements like limb armour (shin pads, for example) can go on either limb; you can wear just one, or a pair, or a mismatched pair. This said, so it’s not too annoying, they’ll appear as matched pairs in loot or on zeds.

 

Finally, while not entirely linked to this endeavour but still in the same ballpark, helmets/headgear/masks all now affect your vision cone and your hearing (modestly) which we’ve added as a balancing measure for when crafted helmets are in the game.

Oh, and the above also means we can have (American) Football Shoulder Pads in-game too, so expect some varsity jock zombies wearing those around campus also.

 

Here’s a somewhat silly, but fun, screenie showing a little bit more of what this system can create – including a bunch of the new items that will be craftable with the new blacksmith/forge systems.

 

NEW HIRES / RETURNING FACES

We’ve expanded a lot over the past year, and we had called time on anyone else for fear of things running away with themselves.

 

Clearly Soul Filcher joined recently, and unmentioned in this blog we’ve got Fenris in the guts of our Discord integration, Patrick with his (very encouraging) experimentation with ragdolls, and there’s a hugely experienced guy called Matt who we haven’t announced before who’s putting in foundations for future engine improvements. After all this we mentally shut the door on likely changes and additions, until…

 

Zac, the coding maestro behind 41’s animation systems, made his return to work after a long period away this month – and is now working the kinks out of issues we’ve had since he was last with us with character rotation and movement.

 

Here’s a link to show his WIP improvement – though it might not be super-perceptible in vid-form. When this is all sorted the in-game character should feel more responsive, and also give us more flexibility when improving on the general animation suite.

 

He also brings alongside him a lovely guy from Tea Games called Ash, who’s helping integrate the video play middleware Bink into the game which will (among other things) help us mix some improvements into our title screen, and to provide combat video examples in our tutorial windows and such.

 

THE PROF

The other guy, meanwhile, who’s burst onto or internal development scene is someone we know as ‘The Prof’.

 

Thomas ‘ProfMobius’ Guimbretiere comes to us by way of Minecraft, and some players might already be familiar with his mods and work over in block-land. He started modding Minecraft something like 13/14 years ago and co-produced MCP, the predecessor of Forge, before later authoring important mods like Waila, Jabba and Opis.

 

He was then hired by Mojang themselves for work on Minecraft Java (ooh, Java) and went on to work on oceans, corals, new villager AI, village construction and a full rework of the game’s world generation. All of which is, clearly, hugely relevant to our interests.

 

Since his Mojang days, he’s been working on the backend of Razzleberries (https://razzleberri.es/) but now he’s in the iron grip of Spiffo. To begin, to we’ll be easing him in on something he’s familiar with that we’ll probably cover next time. There’s plenty of fun stuff planned beyond that too though.

 

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

For all you Americans, Amz has made you a Thanksgiving vid. It’s got some WIP raccoons in it and everything.

Though, thinking about it, maybe we should have gone with the turkeys. Anyway…

 

 

Many thanks also to everyone kindly voting for us in the Steam Awards. We really appreciate your support and associated reviews, but also if you are in two minds about whether or not to click for us – please consider the likes of No Man’s Sky or Deep Rock Galactic which are both amazing. It’ll still be a while till 42 is in public beta, and we’d be more comfortable with the nomination-love once it’s out, all-singing and all-dancing.

———————-

This week’s misty mess from CAPSens Crim. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

[Stale zombies]

Ace, ty. We'll put it in front of the MP team.

[Integration of AI like CHATGPT in the interaction of NPCs with the player.]

2 hours ago, Bluxzx said:

This text was also generated by ChatGPT.

Yeah we could tell lol

[Cellar Door-doid]

 

Evening all, here we all are again. Let’s take a stroll through the development Event zone.

Crafting Overhaul Recap

Now the vast infrastructure overhaul of the crafting systems has been merged and opened up to the rest of the gang, we’ve had a crack team of coders working solidly on implementing the various new post-apocalyptic profession tech trees, workstations and recipes that will provide for a vast amount of options for crafting and building in B42.

 

As a summary for anyone who isn’t up to date on our overall goals, the crafting overhaul is intended to provide the following things to Zomboid:

 

Give Zomboid a more feature rich end-game.

At present, long time players of the game often find they run out of objectives once they get a well-stocked and secure safehouse. We want to provide many more objectives a settled survivor can undertake to improve their safehouse, or indeed a community of players.

More things to build. More opportunities to craft. More ways to be creative.

 

Provide a way for servers to be able to run indefinitely without the need to wipe or respawn loot.

At present the gameplay loop relies so much on looting the map for items that servers run into problems when most urban locations are looted. These either cause servers to rely on unrealistic loot respawning, or to frequently wipe the server.

We want servers to be able to run well into the ‘Alexandria years’ and for players to experience life much further within the post-apocalypse in an interesting way that feels and plays different to the early chaos.

 

Provide believable post-apocalypse professions that would emerge in a post-technical post-apocalyptic society.

If it’s been 30 years since the apocalypse, making a new character who is a burger flipper ceases to make much sense.

As time ticks by from the initial infection, we will retire pre-apocalypse professions and introduce post-apocalypse professions that mirror pre-modern professions such as blacksmithing, tailoring, butchering and so on. We are also tying these skills into relevant modern day professions where applicable.

 

Provide more community cooperation in multiplayer (and NPCs in B43 and beyond) with different interacting professions that can contribute to a community – as well as provide much more extensive crafting and building, encouraging trade and other interesting player interactions.

We want to give players more interesting choices of professions and activities to contribute to a survivor community, and allow for players to cut more unique and interesting niches for themselves within a survivor group or community.

 

Part of this is reshaping how the skill and XP system work to both make individuals less capable of mastering everything, while making their initial potential a lot higher without grinding if they spec into a particular skill heavily.

 

Simultaneously, meanwhile, we still need to be providing sandbox options to allow solo players to master more skills and professions so as not to cut solo players from all the new content and things to do.

 

Provide a framework for players who want to focus more on community building and player interactions than zombie survival, so that they can optionally run servers with a more traditional wilderness map based survival game or extensive tech mods.

While zombie apocalypse will always be our core focus for the vanilla game, we want Zomboid to provide a breadth of survival mechanics and content that, especially with mods, make a solid foundation for many other varied survival experiences outside the looting and zombie gameplay.

 

This includes making provisions for the full range of possibilities in terms of tech and progression modpacks and overhauls that will add mountains of new ways for the community to play the game.

 

Our tech tree is built from the ground up with the assumption that it is taking place on a wilderness map without any civilization – to ensure that there are no holes.

 

In normal gameplay, close to the apocalypse, it’s expected that players would be able to skip huge portions of this tree by using scavenged technology and supplies from the crumbling modern world. However, with the correct knowledge and skills, players will be empowered to fill any gap if that loot and technology is not available to them.

 

Let the modders be all they can be.

Finally, we also believe that the crafting systems themselves are solid and foundational enough for the amazing modders in our community to run absolutely fucking wild with – and we honestly cannot wait to see what they come up with.

 

Recap over

Now we’ve recapped our general goals with the crafting overhaul, we’ll introduce you to some of the work on three of the profession trees that we’ve been in the guts of this month.

 

Blacksmithing

One of the new post-apocalypse professions that will be available for players, blacksmithing will allow for the comprehensive working of metal to provide players the ability to craft many items that are unattainable outside looting in the current build of the game.

 

The initial work has been based around providing the ability for someone living in the wild to be able to work with metal using a primitive furnace and forge made using rocks and clay, along with higher tiers being producible later on as players progress.

 

Of course there will also be modern equivalents of these workstations available within the world map for players to exploit too, but as stated earlier we are filling out the crafting tech tree always from the very bottom, with the assumption that players do not have access to any looted supplies whatsoever.

Please note that we are currently exploring a new design for building mechanics, in our attempt to get away from using right click menus for everything. We are hoping for a nicer building interface since we’ll have a huge number of extra building projects for the player and just cramming them all into right click menus will get more and more cumbersome as time goes on.

With these facilities simple iron implements can be produced, such as nails, as well as the tools required to build the next tier. Additionally it can be used for simple assembly and maintenance tasks.

This second tier is approximately “Medieval-ish”, the furnaces are built using stonemasonry, consisting of dressed stone blocks and cement; there is a proper blacksmith’s anvil; and also a quenching bucket.

With this more complex and durable tools can be crafted, as well as a higher level of maintenance.

And yup, want to be the most popular person on a server? Crank out sledgehammers for your friends!

Finally in this area, for steel production we need to make coke, produced from charcoal.

This dome kiln can be used to produce both coke, and also charcoal from wood.

 

Wood charcoal is important for this branch of crafting. The heat it produces is good for working metal, but it’s also carbon and had effects on ferrous metal being forged. It will be able to be produced through other means than just the dome kiln, but can be produced more efficiently in higher quantities when using one.

 

Pottery / Stoneworking

We featured some of the possibilities with pottery in a previous Thursdoid however a big benefit of working with clay (as well as stone) is for additional options for building.

 

PLEASE NOTE: there’s anims, tile artwork, SFX and lots of other polish missing at present.

 

 

As well as stone or clay full-size walls, the extended building options from these systems will allow for paths, roofs and decorative elements allowing for player built communities to really feel like a settlement and provide options for security to keep the zeds at bay.

 

This will of course be a balancing concern for us, but we feel with sufficient effort and skill a survivor should be able to (very ultimately) erect walls that zombies do not simply attempt to walk through and bash their heads on until they fall over.

Brewer

The last profession we’ll cover today is the Brewer, who has numerous valuable things to bring to the table. While at present alcoholic drinks may not have too much direct impact on gameplay, we will be providing more benefits and downsides to the partaking in alcohol.

 

After all, we imagine it would be a likely bit of escapism for many a zombie apocalypse survivor, and there’d be more value still added later down the line once the NPCs and the accompanying psychological overhaul we have planned at the same time.

 

In the first instance of this, however, the Brewer profession also allows for the creation of a rather vital way of preserving food.

 

 

CAN BE HAPPY UNDERGROUND

Last ‘doid we showed you building developments high upwards into the sky, this time we’re going deeper underground as there’s too much panic in this town.

 

For those unaware, Build 42 will come with two sorts of below ground floor. First off we’ll have the Permanent ones that will always be attached to locations on the map. These will generally be familiar locations, places of interest, businesses and secret military complexes.

 

Today however, we’ll be looking at our Randomized ones. We currently have 119 of these designed: some empty and desolate, some full of loot beyond your wildest dreams, and some that make you seriously question the mental state of the previous occupant. Here’s a fuzzed-up image to whet your whistle.

These will be basements, bunkers, panic rooms and Waynes World sets that you will be delighted to discover spawning on your regular looting sorties – and they will appear within whatever houses could potentially fit them in and still look natural. The frequency of their appearances will also be governed by a Sandbox option.

 

We’ll also have a long list of designated spots within buildings on the map where a random basement will fit, these spots will be assigned and a random compatible basement will be placed in the world on world creation.

 

Here’s a quick video to show some of our favourites off but first a few familiar words of caution!

 

This is WIP, stair placement within buildings will improve, and likewise the steps will look more natural in the way that they appear within the house. We may also look at hatches etc as time goes on.

 

MODDING

Lovely Aiteron’s mission of tidying up, reorganising and adding new utility to our front-end UI continues. Notably he’s currently improving the Mod Manager which, as an ex-modder himself, he is ideally suited to do.

 

Here’s a quick video showing his changes.

 

 

So what’s seen here? Well, amongst other things, the following:

• Mod and map order. You will now be able to change the load order of enabled mods and maps, which also comes with an auto-sort for available mods.
• Share your presets. You will now be able to share your preset of mods (with specific mods, and the load order) and your friends and/or players on your server will be able to take it and use it themselves. If some mods are missing, then the game will flag it and show links to the ones that are uninstalled.
• We have added special version tags that will be required for mod compatibility for B42. This is due to the massive changes to the game likely invalidating a large number of mods, and the potential for serious bugs if people attempt to run with those designed for B41. Hopefully in this way things will be clearer through the B42 Unstable process, and sailing can be as smooth as we can all muster it.
• The game’s use of ModIDs has been altered to be appended by the workshop ID of each mod. This adjustment is aimed at resolving server issues that result in file mismatch errors when users attempt to connect, due to various mod versions sharing the same ModID. This happens on the Steam Workshop a fair bit due to re-uploads and modpacks. Now, with the workshop number attached to the ModID, only the “correct” version of a mod will be loaded by clients connecting to servers. We’re hoping that this will then lessen frustrations with said cursed file mismatch errors whenever you’re in an area of mod self-conflict.
• We are also working on a new modding API and new modding guide for 42. It’s currently unclear whether it’d be released alongside a 42 Unstable. It’s certainly in the works though.

LOOTED HOMES

An area of the game we need to improve is the feeling that ‘something happened here’. We have burned down houses, survivor homes and our costume zeds – but we don’t have much that says people who were panicked were once here.

 

As such now we will be including a random chance for homes, stores and businesses to have been looted – with items strewn over the floor, general detritus and litter, and sometimes graffiti on the walls too.

 

(There’s no graffiti that says ‘Hit them in the head!’ just yet, but we are a video game so give us time on that one I’m sure it will happen eventually.)

 

 

 

FUN NEW ITEMS

At the same time as the big ticket new systems, our coders and art team like to dripfeed fun smaller stuff into the test build. Recent additions have been:

 

The Military Manpack Radio. Works when worn on the back, in addition to other radio usages.

New fluid containers that use the revamped crafting systems that deal with liquids – so for example the canteens use the new tech where they’re a single script item definition with procedural textures and icons, similar to how clothing items work.

Backpack sprayers that are fluid containers, that should prove useful for farming. (And also get us thinking about flamethrowers, once we have the time to get back into the fire rework.)

OTHER STUFF

• The Sound team hit an impressive milestone the other week, with them hitting the total of 50 music tracks that have been re-written so that they work within 42’s new and awesome dynamic music system. Our thanks, as ever, to the fabulous team at Formosa and everything they do for the game.
• Taking over a building, but still a clean-freak even though the world’s gone to shit and appearances no longer matter? Well worry no more, as 42 will allow you to wash away and scrub the grime and graffiti to make your safehouse look and feel spotless. Until the blood starts to drip again, clearly.

 

 

HAPPY HALLOWEEN WOOOO

In keeping with all the other game studios and publishers providing ‘faintly spooky content’ at this time of year, please take this offering of deer skellingtons and a baby deer skellington.

 

We trust that you are now suitably unsettled, and please note that it took about a minute to get our pre-existing animal skellingtons into motion. We haven’t spent all month on the skellingtons.

 

 

 

We’ll see you back here next month (details on the temporarily monthly Thursdoids here) for more cool stuff.

Thanks again all x

A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here

[Discord Ban Appeals]

If you want to appeal your Discord ban, you can do so on the following Discord server:

https://discord.gg/nmnX9chhFh

Message the ModMail bot to create a ticket for your ban appeal and follow its instructions.
 

[Sky High]

Sky High

So… hmm, where were we?

 

Okay so, recent weeks have seen two mega-merges into our trunk internal testing build.

 

The first was latest from our MP team, to top up the central development branch with their latest from their ongoing server work to flag up any unexpected issues and to get a few gameplay systems back online in MP.

 

The second was the guts of the long-awaited crafting revamp from Turbo, which means that the functionality for all our primary crafting stations is now in – and it’s a matter of banging heads together and integrating everything we’ve had stacked up for it.

 

To this end we’re pleased to announce that we’ve hired yet another stalwart individual from the modding community to aid us in this quest.

We were thinking about the different modders who could give our crafting team a little extra grunt, we have so many amazing ones after all, but the offerings of Soul Filcher stood out as being produce of exactly the sort of brain we needed.

We’re really happy to have Soul officially on the team, and while his initial introductory task has been some tidy-up work and minor improvements on our many and varied different traits he should be diving into the new crafting stations with the others in the weeks ahead. 

 

SKY HIGH

The engine upgrade is now in a phase of finding all the edge case issues where something doesn’t render correctly due to the new caching rendering method.

 

Alongside this, very excitingly, the map team are working on larger buildings and basements to be slotted into the game map.

EP tested out the first building to use the increased floor limits, a literal 32 floor skyscraper which looks super impressive to see in-game. This, as yet unnamed, skyscraper also allowed us to get a fun new animation into the mix as well…

PLEASE NOTE: Impact with pavement is WIP. There’ll be far more crunchy SFX, far less blending issues with the character standing back up, and also more blood obviously. Screaming too.

 

 

Elsewhere we are making the most of the improvements to how sprites are cached and handled. This now allows, for example, sprites to be combined with overlays into a single cached texture.

 

With this we can create nicer, and more accurate, highlighting and borders when they are selected and moused over. As seen here:

 

 

Increasingly with the engine upgrade it’s become ever more clear that with it we’ll be able to polish up more oddities and visual quirks of Zomboid in the long term.

 

If you’re interested, this is made evident by the testing tools that we’ve added to Zomboid’s debug menus that put the new tile depth system through its paces.

 

 

In this video you will see a large debug 3d cylinder that can be moved around to test how it interacts with the map environment.

This now interacts with walls and other objects as if they were bona fide 3D geometry within the iso scene, which was impossible up till now. Previously it would have inserted itself in its entirety between tiles laid on top of each other.

 

This will allow us to increasingly have a more believably 3D looking world despite using 2D tiles, getting rid of a lot of unsightly glitches and potentially opening up other gameplay avenues in the further future.

 

To be clear, this vid shows the sort of stuff that we’re now able to finally nix – although whether that will happen prior to 42 going unstable or later on is still an open question.

 

Oh and here’s another player/zed falling vid as we love it so much…

 

 

OH, RATS

We’ve shown rats in blogs before, but previously they didn’t have many rules or conditions attached.

 

Now, as we close out what has internally been dubbed as ‘rat week’ we can say that rats will procedurally spawn as the world is explored – and they will also appear in special randomized ‘rat stories’. They can randomly spawn with trash, trash containers, and corpses.

 

 

As the days of the apocalypse tick by we will slowly approach the “Maximum Rat Index” –  which is currently two months on default non-Sandbox settings – which is the point at which rats will have the highest chance of spawning and a higher chance of appearing in greater numbers.

 

In buildings with rat problems we will also be working with the sound team over at Formosa to make sure we have fun stuff like noises for rats in ceilings, rats in the walls, rats gnawing on flesh, rats scuttling over different floor surfaces etc.

 

We’ll keep a lid on the majority of our special randomized rat stories, but expect some gross supplies and destroyed loot. That said, are you familiar with the concept of a rat king crown? Google it if not!

Oh, and would you like something to wash down with that bleach?

 

MAP LATEST

Lots of fun stuff going into the map expansion, not least the 32 level skyscrapers we have going into Louisville.

 

Our plan is to have a few of these pepper the urban landscape, where appropriate, for 42 – and then to come back for more fully-fledged urban replanning later down the line.

 

If you take in all the new basements required for the new build, and the new swathes of land to the west of Muld that are being finalized, there’s a lot of ground to cover for the map team – even if so much of it already in the can. We want everything to be good quality, and don’t want any aspects rushed.

 

With that in mind, let’s have another more detailed look at Xeonyx’s ‘scraper showcased in the first video. What a beaut!

Elsewhere, what better place to explore in an update where lighting and lightsources are going to be far more than an issue – than Ayrton’s spooky abandoned orphanage in a forest?

 

All the cool kids will want to hang out there, we’re sure.

 

Finally, for a map expansion we need signs for homes and businesses. So expect all sorts of new fun stuff, alongside adverts and map-reveal flyers for them on the radio and in peoples’ homes.

 

 

IT’S A GAS, GAS, GAS

Alongside other new clothing, bags, holsters, and functional gear in 42, we’re also adding fully featured military webbing and SCBA gear.

The webbing provides two hotbar slots that can be used to attach walkie talkies, special new angle headed clip-on flashlights, and appropriate knives. The SCBA gear, meanwhile, provides one. Military webbing also serves as a wearable container that is superior to wearing fanny packs.

Some of this coolness can be seen in the following video – alongside the shemagh scarves that will allow British fans of a certain age cosplay as Simon Reeve.

 

 

As seen in the next video, SCBA gear is also functional in that, when it has an attached tank with oxygen remaining and is turned on, it will protect the wearer from inhaled atmospheric hazards. This also applies to the Hazmat suits.

 

 

We have also made Gasmasks functional, although they require filters that are drained by exposure to airborne contaminants, and have added Halfmask Respirators that use different filters that are consumed at a faster rate.

 

Some other, appropriate, masks will now also provide mild protection from corpse sickness. However, your character will remove and replace their mask when eating, drinking, smoking, taking pills, and such.

 

Engineer characters, and characters that learn the recipes, can also craft improvised gasmask filters, as well as recharge gasmask and respirator filters. All of these new items spawn in appropriate locations, vehicles, and on appropriate zombies.

4K REVOLUTION

One of the primary complaints we get about PZ, and a rightful one, is our lack of support for higher resolution monitors.

 

There have always been workarounds, but they haven’t been effective enough -and on a 4K screen the resolution makes our UI look to be a size that only a furrow-browed ant could use.

 

Well come 42 unstable (hopefully – it’s a big task) our local hero Fox will have climbed Resize Mountain – and up-rezzed our entire UI to make it far more amenable to those lucky folks with super-snazzy monitors. So good news for many, we hope.

 

HOLSTERS

In 42 not only are we adding visible holsters, in multiple colours, but also special shoulder and ankle holsters.

 

Shoulder holsters will conceal the holster and handgun when garments like jackets are worn over them, and also can store two pistol magazines as a container. Ankle holsters can only hold the m36 Revolver currently, and the holster and firearm will be concealed by long pants, skirts or dresses.

 

You’ll be able to find them on both existing, and new, zombie costume types – and we strongly suggest seeking out a plainclothes police detective zombie. (Might be tricky though).

 

 

OTHER STUFF

• Following the successful integration of the effort and body noises from real actor people in a real recording studio into the game we’ve decided to get a load more done (three new men, three new ladies) so we get a range of different-sounding people – which in turn will make for more interesting character creation, and for more variety when players stand and fight around each other in MP.

 

• For the longest time, since forever in fact, alcoholic intake hasn’t had enough impact on the player – outside of some fun stuff when drink-driving. We haven’t gone as far as implementing a whole new animation set, but as a fun little side project you might find a few extra complications next time you’re utterly shit-faced.

 

FINALLY

A MASSIVE thanks to everyone who bought a Steadfast Spiffo from Makeship!

 

We sold 2000 more plushies than the first run of Spiffos due to your amazing charitable instincts – and we raised over 73,000 US dollars for Cancer Council Queensland in memory of our friend Vicki Ann Woods!

 

Thank you so much for helping us with this, and we hope you enjoy your Steadfast Spiffo when he arrives on your doorstep later this year.

We’ll see you back here next month (details on the temporarily monthly Thursdoids here) for more cool stuff. Thanks again all x

A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here

[NEW CHARITY SPIFFO!]

 

The Indie Stone are pleased to announce another crowd-sourced Spiffo plushie through our friends over at Makeship – this time raising money for a cause that’s dear to all our hearts.

 

First off, let’s meet the raccoon himself.

 

INTRODUCING… STEADFAST SPIFFO!

They came for him… they still come… but he will NEVER yield.

 

He is: Steadfast Spiffo.

 

Spiffo is BACK, with maxed out levels of adorability. With his roomy camping backpack filled with useful survival supplies, sturdy axe, and many utility belts, he’s prepared for anything… and for a limited time, can be added to inventories as YOUR companion in the apocalypse!

Face down the odds. Fight the fight. Survive against the horde – all accompanied by a plushably grizzled hug-raccoon!

 

Interested in putting down money for Steadfast Spiffo? Then visit the crowdfunding page over on Makeship!

 

We’ve timed it so (hopefully) orders will be ready to make for amazing Christmas presents.

 

FUNDRAISING

All money raised by the Indie Stone from Steadfast Spiffo will go to the Queensland Cancer Council, an Australian cancer charity that brought help and solace to a good friend of ours during very difficult times.

 

 

Vicki Ann Woods was the partner of Zac Congo, one of the principal architects of the animation system that made Build 41 (and PZ) the success it is today. Even during a long illness, her love and moral support became a part of what the game has now become.

 

Sometimes (not always, but sometimes) we get people asking how they can further support Project Zomboid. They say that they paid some money long ago, but have so many hours of gameplay that they want to add a little more. We always tell them not to be daft, and just tell some friends or leave a nice review.

 

Well, for the next 21 days we have a different answer: please buy this Spiffo!

 

Buying this Spiffo helps support people like Vicki, and like Zac, during their times of greatest need – and to aid research that will help all of us and our families worldwide.

 

Thank you x

 

(And here’s that link again if you need it)

[BagZ of fun]

On 7/29/2023 at 10:31 AM, Nilth said:

I know it's unfair, but I wonder where the game would be now without all this effort (development time) put into multiplayer.

An entirely different team is working on Multiplayer.

[BagZ of fun]

 

Let’s have a dig into what’s happening in everyone’s favourite apocalypse. (Although other apocalypses are available.

 

First off a quick check-in with three of the four main pillars of Build 42 – the pillars in question being crafting system revamp, MP improvement, the depth/performance/lighting tech upgrade, and finally animals – which will have to wait till next time as RJ is only very recently back from his summer hols.

 

Turbo has been finalizing his machine and crafting station systems for a check-in next week, after we decided on some ways to maximise their utility for both our own devs and modders and give them as broad and solid a foundation as we can. The results are exciting and the design process for machines and the numerous crafting stations continues to expand these systems over the new tech tree and across existing devices over the entire PZ map. (Stuff like gas stations, wells, water pumps etc will also eventually be tied to the new system – but maybe not in the initial release.)

 

Next up: tech upgrade. Lots of stuff going on in codeland for this – but the topline additions have been improvements to the new visibility polygon, and continued work on the tile depth addition that will remove annoying character/wall clipping and ultimately make proper addition of lying and sitting down in all four directions feasible for mainline addition. (As well as the rendering optimizations it will entail obv.)

 

Alongside this the continued whackamole of things broken by the foundational changes made by the engine upgrades – stuff like (to grab a few random examples) doors not shaking when thumped, muzzleflash not showing, railings not being cutaway properly, rendering of zeds on hidden floors not working and many/varied other important stuff.

 

Finally, we now have four coders and two MP-devoted testers beavering away on our multiplayer – two coders devoted to the ongoing mission to bring all player inventory operations server-side, and another two knuckling down on general MP bugs and required polish. Over the past two weeks the guys have also been hooking up ‘new for 42’ systems, like the revamped fishing, to the netcode – and looking ahead to properly wiring up the animals too.

 

SOUNDSCAPE IMPROVEMENTS

Last week our Formosa UK’s primary PZ-dedicated chaps, Michael and Matteo, took the opportunity to do a full new mixing session for the game while they were both on the same island – said island being Great Britain.

 

A proportion of this was done with MP in mind, and especially gunshots, but seeing as multiplayer is currently broken/WIP in our dev build they instead hooked up an in-game barbecue to a long sequence of gunshots and worked around it like that. (Enterprising chaps, these two.)

We’re still waiting on some improved occlusion settings for indoor/outdoor, and the like, and some tweaks to player related sounds – but otherwise the following has been tweaked and added.

 

• Re-balanced all the firearms so they make sense in relation to each other
• Changed the firearm inside/outside setup for general improvements
• Rebalanced the ambience setup (from beds, to fog, to rain, wind etc) to make it all more coherent
• Re-worked some mixer setup/routing for reverb – which has made for a very pleasant upgrade, especially with birdsong.
• Brought backsome volume/filter changes on the camera zoom, but still subtle.
• Improvements to zombie voices so when you get bitten to death by a dozen zombies the mix doesn’t wig out anymore.
• Zombie vocals, music and animal noises now play more nicely over the music – so it all cuts through a bit better.

 

 

We are also super-pleased with the new player effort / sneeze / “hey!” sounds – and have also realised that we’re missing a trick not having a range of different voices beyond the current two male/female versions. This would especially sound a bit weird in MP, so we are looking into recording a wider range of actors and actresses for this.

 

OTHER NEW STUFF

As ever we have a wide range of smaller additions going into the game from other team members while the pedestal pieces are under construction.

Recently these have included:

 

New containers! Pic-a-nic Basket, Garden Basket, Fishing Basket, Musical Instrument Cases, an improvised Sheet Sling Bag, new Sheriff and SWAT versions of the duffel bag, protective cases, rifle cases and ALICE Belt and Suspender webbing – green and camo version.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Continued farming revamp improvements. Working on the systems for fertilizers, compost, and pests. Optimizing, rebalancing, constituting, simplifying and working out what other new crops we will require – then pestering the art department for them. Making the scarecrows actually spawn in scarecrow-y outfits.

 

Wallpapering. And we’re also coding in the oft-requested ability to fully wash grime from walls.

 

 

New tools. New gizmos for managing our script assets; which upon release with B42 will provide ways to make modders lives easier, such as a utility which exports item display names from their scripts to create new translation files for those items if they don’t already have one. Likewise we’ve built an internal tool to help our sound team notice events that haven’t been hooked up, or are new additions that haven’t had a sound built for them yet.

 

Zoning. One of the more onerous of mapping tasks is underway for the map expansion – essentially tagging the whole map so the game knows what should be happening where, and what should be spawning where.

 

In this image light greeny-blue is crop fields, light green is forest, dark green is deep forest, blue is for navigation, purple-ish is for town areas and the blue squares are the new animal zones. Meanwhile the tiny pink dots are parking stalls for spawning vehicles of all sorts, and the yellow is for generic vegetation. Other colours designate different events, to special outfit zombie types etc.

 

Hiring. The success of B41 has meant we’ve been able to cast our net further, and higher, for additions to the PZ team to work on what the game will become in the mid-far future. We won’t shine any spotlights on anyone until they’re bedded down, and there’s something to show, but we are putting a lot of work into ensuring PZ stays fun, relevant and ever-evolving in the years to come.

 

A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

Are you a Spiffo admirer who missed out on the recent plushie Makeship campaign? Watch the wires next week…

[Knox Event: 30 Years On]

Today marks a day in history.

 

It is EXACTLY thirty years since the Knox Event broke out on 6^th July 1993. Our thoughts are with everyone impacted on this sad anniversary.

To commemorate this we are allowing everyone to relive the experience IN REAL TIME on the Twitters.

 

Please follow @TheKnoxEvent to experience a textual timeline of what manifested three decades ago, albeit (one would hope) with a little less inevitable death than the real thing.

 

TECH UPGRADE

Okay so this week one of the four pillars of the next main PZ build is going back into the spotlight. We’ve seen good progress backstage in crafting, MP improvement and animals/wildlife – but it’s the engine upgrades that’ve given us something cool and visual to show off this week.

 

The tech improvements will be supplying basements, the 32 floor limit and new light propagation system – but clearly a primary focus of it all has been with performance. Using 8×8 tile chunks, in the tech branch we are caching areas of the map to speed up drawing the scene dramatically.

The benefit of this is obvious when it comes to FPS, with our own machine averaging over 300 FPS when zoomed out to maximum. (In the end product, once in the game proper, your mileage may differ for better or worse.)

 

The downside to this, however, is that the upgrades involved meant we would be unable to change the lighting on tiles in front of the player – which has always been used to represent the viewing arc and line of sight as the character turns or moves.

 

With the changes in the tech branch doing this would always invalidate the cached chunks in every frame, thereby rendering the optimizations ineffective.

 

To replace this in early B42, as a stopgap, we had a much more naïve and simpler viewing cone that was drawn over the screen which also allowed you to see what parts of the screen were outside the character’s viewing arc. You can see it on the old Light Propagation Demo we posted in the initial 42 Techdoid a while back.

 

 

However, this was never ideal. With this it was impossible to tell if an obstacle in the world is blocking your view, as it would just blindly extend to the edge of the screen with no concern for obstacles in the world.

 

As such, EP has been working on a new system that gives all the same information as our old system but without the extreme FPS consequences of it – and also far slicker and more accurate than our old tile system. What he’s done is pretty cool!

 

 

As you can see, there’s now much more precise and smooth LOS information than the old tile system ever could muster.

 

We’re now experimenting with different levels of visibility and blur on the effect to make sure it is a) visible enough to convey the line of sight information to the player, but b) not overbearing enough to distract the player as it moves around in real-time.

 

Where we’ve got it right now in this second video is still super cool (note the effect when doors and curtains are opened and closed) but it’s possibly a little too transparent on these lighter tiles.

 

 

We’ll continue tweaking until we find something that works best as a default, but as ever we’ll do our utmost to provide settings that will let you adjust it to whatever you’re most comfortable with.

 

MAPPAGE

It’s been a big week for the map and art team, as the B42 map expansion has just gone into its first round of testing. It covers a pretty huge area, as is shown in this handily obscured image.

 

Clearly the Louisville expansion in 41 was very built up, and here there’s a lot of grass and wilderness, but that covered 56 cells – and what you’re looking at here is 430.

 

Our testers are having a wild old time checking out its many and varied secrets and hideaways, and logging all the map errors they find for future fixing.

 

As we’ve discussed previously, a lot of the existing map will be getting a spruce-up too – not least with buildings that make the most of the new height limit.

 

SANDBOX SETTING SPREE

Over our lengthy development, and unending devotion to sandbox settings, things in our front-end have become a little messy. As such Aiteron is currently improving and redesigning our Main Menu UI.

 

PLEASE NOTE: No design here is final, this is very much a work in progress we want feedback on from players and modders.

 

First off are changes to the sandbox settings themselves. The layout’s been redone,  and an ‘advanced’ tick box has been added that switches over to deeper settings and selections. We’ve also mixed in a search and separation of settings by category on the right.

 

 

Next up, an in-depth set of improvement for the mod UI. Here you’ll find a search function, category filtering, and the ability to add mods as ‘favorites’. There are also added presets for mods, which can then be shared with friends using ‘Share’ and ‘Add’ buttons.

 

Aiteron has also improved the mod info panel – where you’ll be able to find out more about the mod contents, and quickly go to the other mods it requires or the relevant website.

 

He has also made sure to add a parameter for incompatible mods, which will specify exactly which mods your chosen mod won’t play nicely with.

Finally, but perhaps most importantly, there’s a raft of new info for modders themselves and an expanded functionality for mod.info. There’s options been added for modVersion, author, category, icon, incompatibility and, soon, more besides.

 

Next up Aiteron will be looking into mod changelog functionalities, and a way to determine mod order – which he intends to govern the manual or semi-automatic order of mods being loaded.

 

Here’s what it currently looks like REMEMBER WIP etc! Feedback required!

 

 

GRUNTING

The first results of our recording sessions are now properly in-game: the grunts, groans and wheezes of your survivor are now in-game. What’s more they add a LOT to the experience, and we’ve got some really positive thoughts coming through from our internal testers.

 

We’ve made some videos for you to demonstrate but before viewing (and listening) please be advised of the following:

 

Currently the exertion noises play too much – especially during extended combat. We definitely need to tone things down or it’s going to get a little too ‘top tier ladies tennis match’. As such we will likely be tying exertion sounds to the exertion levels themselves, which will also be tied into our ‘heavy breathing’ noises after heavy periods of activity.

 

So, with that in mind…

 

 

 

BUGS

Look, an aphid. Aint it sweet.

A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

[Snack Attack]

Haylo, here’s another dev-log sent down from the mothership.

 

Few different things form different areas this time around, starting off with an example system update from one of the four main pillars of Build 42 – which are the crafting improvements, and the sorts of places they could take the game to.

 

CRAFTY BUSINESS

For the past few weeks Turbo’s focus has been on making the new machine scripting system more versatile and easy to use.

 

As well as creating the crafting stations and machines required for the crafting tree we’re working on (potters wheels, anvils, woodwork benches and such) our ultimate goal is to allow all machines and appliances on the map utilize this system to unify how machines work within the game.

 

This overall goal won’t be present in its entirety for a first release of B42, but the framework will have been installed that allows for them not only to share the same UI systems to keep them consistent, but also allow for them to be connected together, and allow them to have more complexity of interior parts that could be salvaged and co-opted for other uses. From fire alarms, to clocks, to ovens, to microwaves.

 

The ramifications of this system will be huge both for the game and for modders, allowing for the machine UI and functionality to be both scriptable with lua and with the object scripting. It will then provide powerful and easy-to-use tools for devs and modders to create interesting machines quickly, cater for slots to place items, and allow for items to interact with these machines in a diverse way with a consistent UI.

 

Instead of needing to build a bespoke scripted UI, and the complex interactions between the player, machines will be able to be added with minimal code for functionality, and provide higher level details on what goes into them and what comes out. Likewise there’ll be stardardised knobs and buttons that this backend will allow to be attached for player interaction.

 

In order to test the versatility of how this system could be applied to vanilla objects within the game (and how far we could push it) we wanted to apply it all to a system that wasn’t strictly a crafting station like the more standard one we showed off a month or so ago with some post-apocalyptic pottery.

 

As such, Turbo put together a test case that could have some fun utilization within a multiplayer settlement in the post-apocalypse – and indeed is pretty cool on your general solo survival adventure too.

 

There will probably be those out there looking at this at face value, perhaps even getting annoyed and asking ‘nggggh, why vending machines?’. (Hello, to those out there!)

 

However, the important aspect to take away from this video are the many unique interactions, systems and features that have been built into the vending machine using this same framework.

 

What we see here allows for a unique key to unlock the machine, allows it to be stocked with different items (which could be very useful for players on a multiplayer server wanting to run a shop, for example), allows it to take in money and deposit an item from its internal inventory, allows for buttons on the machine to pick particular products, and finally allows for a custom user interface for a particular machine that’s FAR easier to create than it is with B41’s currently somewhat unwieldly UI system.

 

That the new crafting / machine framework is flexible enough to be able to accurately create a vending machine is a huge deal to us, and in time to modders and the overall good health of the game as we continue to grow and expand.

 

Ultimately this framework will be expanded across all machines across the PZ map, as well as those that are craftable through the crafting tree. In turn, this will allow us to open up a ton of interesting crafting and engineering opportunities, as well as open up more and more of the existing machines and gadgets strewn around the PZ map.

 

As said before though, this is probably a longer term goal, and our focus right now is squarely on the new post-apoc crafting tech tree. This is all, however, our first (big) step towards the longer term goal of unifying how these things work across the entirety of Project Zomboid.

 

This will then free ourselves, and modders, to have as many possibilities as possible for machinery, and ensure a consistent framework to allow anything created in the game to interoperate with each other, power, liquids and item input/output. Beyond this it will minimize mod conflicts, and overall allow PZ to become a powerful framework for modders to add in all sorts of crazy fun stuff in future.

 

SOWING DISCORD

Fenris has been working on updating and improving Discord integration, which will allow for powerful features to help roleplay servers and servers running gameplay events, as well as general integration features.

 

Currently, chat within Discord rooms should be transmittable into the game chat and vice versa – but the code used is somewhat outdated and it doesn’t work brilliantly. Some may say: not at all. Server owners choose not to use it. With 42, however, everything will be polished and sparkly new.

What’s more server operators will be able to allow discord commands to trigger lua code on the server, for example to begin a timed event and trigger changes in gameplay. Likewise this will also allow for custom lua to trigger messages sent to different discord channels on the discord server.

Another feature we intend to include will allow for admin controlled radio / tv scripts to be executable from multi-line text from the discord server, to avoid admins having to quickly type out multiple pre-written text lines manually in the heat of gameplay.

 

This is all very limited and walled off, and the game side lua will require custom code to allow for these Discord interactions, so there won’t be any security risks associated with this discord interoperability.

 

For planned roleplay events or custom server game mode events, though, this should provide many cool tools for server operators to play with.

 

ELSEWHERE

Other mentionable work on the mighty PZ that’s happened this week has been:

 

• Aiteron has been making improvements to our sandbox menu, mod menu general mod settings. Our sandbox settings panels had become so vast and unwieldy that they needed a redesign – now with an added search function, simplification in some areas to make things less impenetrable to noobs, and some ‘advanced settings’ for the long-term survivors amongst us. We will also be improving the server settings interface, simplifying the addition of mods, unifying settings, making it easier to add modded sandbox settings etc.
• Blair reports in for the blog with the ‘unsexy’ work of remaking farming interactions and its associated UI. He’s currently working out what information you receive, and where, and also at which farming skill level. He’s also sorting out some of the wonkiness you saw in the animations you saw in the last Thursdoid we did.
• We’re approaching a new merge from the map team into the internal testing build, probably taking place tomorrow, so our testers can gambol through even more new buildings and locations. Here’s a quick video of some of the existing fun places they’ve come across.

 

 

• New masks. New hats.

A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

[Church on Zunday]

 

A lot of stuff in a WIP state at the moment, so not too many big flashy shiny things in the blog this time round. Hopefully enough to whet your whistle though.

 

In terms of work on the four central pillars of 42, the next big thing happening will be the next merge-in of the crafting revamp to the central trunk build. This will primarily be the crafting station code, which has had a bit of rewiring – and now will also allow for benches/machines etc to (optionally) have ‘parts’ items that degrade on use and can be viewed/added/removed via a maintenance tab.

 

Meanwhile, RJ is working on integrating his deer tracking with the foraging/search mode integrated into Build 41, while in our tech upgrade ‘optimization / lighting / more depth & height’ branch we continue to play a bit of whack-a-mole with issues that have arisen with such foundational changes. So, this week, as an example that’s been stuff like: savefile thumbnail creation being borked, zombies spawning on water, the tops of tall tiles showing through the floor above etc.

 

Finally, in the realms of MP and the continuing mission to bring inventories etc. server-side the gang have been working on getting trapping and nu-fishing working with the new systems, and solving various issues that occur with new object creation also.

 

FARMZ

Let’s pop quickly back into the revamped farming, which this week has had some ease-of-use controls added in to make things less of a click-through-UI nightmare and bring a touch of extra Stardewwy-ness.

 

This video shows various elements of fun stuff – but primarily that by taking a farming tool into your primary, pressing RMB and aiming, and then pressing ‘E’ will have you go about the farming action. Likewise with sowing seeds, and harvesting.

 

CAVEAT: Please note that these controls aren’t final, and also that there’s a fair amount of animation polish required to make it all look super-smooth.

 

 

Also, here’s a quick timelapse of them plants a growin’.

 

 

OTHER STUFF

• As previously mentioned, alongside readable newspapers and newsletters, players will now be able to pick up flyers that advertises places of interest on the Knox Event map – and then also reveal that location on the player’s own personal map. This week we’ve really been knuckling down on this, as we’ve realized it’s a great tool to direct new players towards buildings favoured by many in the community for their safehouses. Anyone able to name the following locations from the real estate advertising?

• As well as expanding the current map, we’re also giving existing areas of the map a loving glow-up. Take this amazing improvement from Ayrton as an awesome example.

• Clearly any new build will also be coming with new clothing, hats and whatnot. Martin’s also pumping out loads of new fun stuff for you to loot, wear, and also for those tricksy zombies to wear too.

Finally, we spotted this out on the wires. How good does this make our lore look and sound?! Maybe AI doesn’t provide a terrifying nightmarish future after all! (Or if it does, it at least it will make the chaos look and sound really good on YouTube!)

This week’s survivalist from SerØ. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

[Mizter McGregor's Garden]

Mizter McGregor's Garden

Last time round we checked in with some of the main pillars of Build 42 – those things being the crafting and crafting systems update, the tech upgrade, animals/migration and MP.

 

As such, for today’s blog we’ll be dipping into some of the stuff that wider members of the team have been working on for more general improvement elsewhere in the game.

 

FARMING

First off, let’s darken Blair’s door – and watch him lean over a fence with a piece of straw in his mouth while he outlines what he’ll imminently be merging into our internal branch for our testers to play around with.

Currently I’m working on smoothing out the interface and interactions for the revamped farming. One important part of the interface, and player feedback, are the new plant sprites Mash has produced to represent plant states.

Previously, our far more limited number of plants had sprites for their individual growth stages, as well as some generic sprites to represent trampled plants.

 

Now, for every single growth stage and for every plant, we have 600 additional sprites to represent what’s now grown to 15 crops and 8 herbs. These cover states of:

 

• Unhealthy – due to disease, lack of water, or general low health.
• In the process of dying – due to these aforementioned reasons.
• Completely dead.
• Dead-but-also-trampled/crushed. These are for plants that have been crushed by zombie hordes, vehicles etc, and also for dead plants that are degrading over time.

With the farming rework we are adding growing seasons (which can also be disabled in the sandbox settings).

 

With these most plants will have a planting season, with optimal months that produce additional yields. Plants that are planted out of season will be destined to wither away and die. This means, that aside from some winter crops, winter farming will be no more.

 

Growing seasons are learnable knowledge. A farmer character starts knowing all of them; a character with the gardener trait will know most of them; and they can also be learned from reading seed packets and special farming handbooks.

 

CHEEKY RABBITS

Last time we properly met the Knox Event’s deer population and their migration habits, and now it’s time to introduce some smaller varmints – who are tied to the same system, but will move around according to a different ruleset.

 

WIP vid. Kitten behaviour will probably get more realistic / change. (‘Kitten’ is the correct word for baby rabbit – we don’t know that either.

 

 

 

Also we had a bug this week with the carrots.

 

 

Also also, with animals comes poop:

 

MAPPING

Now ably assisted by our newest friend Dirk the map team carry on a-pace with the huge map expansion that (most likely) will land alongside 42, or be a part of its beta updates.

 

After a brief spot of begging we managed to bag a little taster of one of its more epic locations… as ever big thanks to Amz for the vid.

 

 

AND FINALLY

Elsewhere Fenris has been chewing on a key accessibility issue that we’ve been wanting to get fixed up since forever – namely the ability to remap mouse buttons (including extra buttons on fancy mouses) to different actions, by making mouse buttons and keys work exactly the same within the bind menu.

 

Ooh, and also look! Area-specific vehicle spawns in action…

 

This week’s misty hunt from Felkhan. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

[Mod Spotlight: Clear Cove]

[late repost]

 

Welcome, assorted survivors! In this mod blog, we’re looking at map called Clear Cove by Dr. Hollandaise!

 

Clear Cove is a medium-sized map with five towns to discover, and features many buildings contributed by various members of the PZ community.

 

 

Mountport is the seaside town where the player starts, its main attraction being a lighthouse, which is surely a fun place to turn into a base!

Boscage is the industrial town filled with sawmills and timber yards. Starford is the largest city on Clear Cove, Southbrook is a cosy little farming town, and Littlehope is the rougher part of the map. Across Clear Cove, you’ll find a new branch of the Havisham hotel, a docks with a crane, a large StarEPlex cinema, a prison, a military base, a hidden bunker, and more besides.

 

We docked in Mountport, navigated through the seaside fog, and ascended the winding lighthouse stairs where we found Dr. Hollandaise tinkering away with some blueprints. The doctor agreed to take a few moments of rest to answer our questions about the map.

 

DR. HOLLANDAISE

 

Who are you in real life? Tell us a little about yourself.

“I’m Dr. Hollandaise, surgeon by day, breakfast cook by night! Just kidding, not that interesting. I’m from the East Coast, and I’ve been a gamer pretty much my whole life. Working on games has been my childhood dream, and somehow I managed to get there as a marketer! I get to do the fun part of talking about games without having to do any of the hard work of making them.”

 

“Deep inside, I’ve always been a creator, and making stuff for people to enjoy is my trip. I’ve made mini games, mods and game-modes here and there, but Clear Cove is definitely the big one.”

 

How did you first discover Project Zomboid? Why do you like it?

“I first discovered PZ years ago, before it even had a Steam page! I think Lemmy was posting about it on a forum. There was a tutorial where you have to smother your dying wife with a pillow. I played it a little bit, then left it alone for many years. Then during COVID, while stuck at home, I rediscovered PZ with its multiplayer and its mods. I dove in head-first, and three years later, I’ve played a few thousand hours!”

 

“I love the amount of detail and mechanics there are – the car system, crafting, fishing, cooking, metalworking, building… so many things to do. The feel is on point, the jump scares are actually scary, the map is vast and expansive. Once you get bored of single-player, you hop on multiplayer servers and suddenly it’s a whole new experience. I love it!”

 

 

How did you get into mapping for PZ?

“I got into mapping because I was hosting my own servers and wanted something original and new for my server. After a few hundred hours, you get your first few steps down to a T: find a weapon, then a backpack, a car, some tools and food, build a safehouse. As you know the base map so well, the sense of exploration is unfortunately gone. I wanted to remedy that, for myself and for others, so I created a brand-new map that is fully standalone, in which people could have an entire run in, but would have to actually explore and discover and try to find things rather than always know exactly where to go next.”

 

“That was my goal with Clear Cove, and that’s why the in-game map doesn’t show you all locations, and why the workshop screenshot of the zoomed-out map is blurred except for the main towns.”

 

Tell us about Clear Cove. What sort of locations can players expect to find, and which might make a good base? What sort of player will most enjoy the map?

“Clear Cove is big enough that if you’re playing solo you won’t get bored any time soon, but small enough that if you’re playing multiplayer you’ll almost always bump into people (and also still big enough to be able to avoid them and hide, if you want to.)”

 

“Besides the five main towns, there are lots of points of interests: multiple road stops, some seaside mansions, cabins in the wood, a small forest community, a creepy cult place, industrial docks, a military base… and more!”

“Despite intentionally hiding places from the player, I put hints just about everywhere to them. If you’re driving around and see a random trail going into the woods… there’s probably a reason! If you see a weird marker somewhere, someone must have put that there for a reason. Some things are completely hidden (like the bunker) but I’m sure someone will find them!”

 

“I designed and balanced the map to be as close to vanilla as possible so that anyone can enjoy it, new and old players alike. I think old players specifically will enjoy discovering a new map – you really get that sense of exploration like you did when you first played PZ. I’ve also seen the map used on roleplay servers too and it works really well because of its size.”

 

What were the inspirations behind Clear Cove (whether it’s other PZ maps, real life locations, etc.)? How long did your map take to make, in total? What was the most difficult part?

“My very first inspiration is the vanilla PZ map – nothing will ever beat that IMHO. Huge, sprawling, detailed, varied… I would look at how vanilla did things a lot when making my map, how neighborhoods looked, how fences were placed, how sidewalks were made, etc. All those small details nobody thinks about made me realise how much work went into the vanilla PZ map. As for the general layout of things, I actually zoomed in on rural Kentucky in Google Maps satellite view and pulled some inspiration from there!”

 

 

“The map took me about 150 hours over a month to make, but I had never made a map before, so that included learning. If I had to make my own buildings too, it would have probably taken twice that long. (To be honest, I did make another map called “Osteo Island” but that’s a horrible map no one should play! I leave it up as a daily reminder not to release things I’m not 100% confident in.)”

 

“The most difficult part was learning how to use the mapping tools I think, but DaddyDirkieDirk has a WONDERFUL tutorial series on Youtube that will guide you step-by-step. You’ll straight up know how to map for PZ after listening to the first few, it’s awesome. I love that guy!”

 

Your map uses some buildings made by the community. Can you tell us about some of these creations? Do you have a favourite?

“Credit where credit is due: ALL the buildings (except two or three small ones) were made by the community! I wanted to release a map within a reasonable timeframe and I knew that making my own buildings wasn’t going to cut it.”

 

“There are some incredible buildings made by the community and I was so thankful to be allowed to use them for Clear Cove and to showcase them to the world. The classic icon of Clear Cove, the lighthouse building, was made by Pe2h. It’s an awesome building! I also love the Havisham resort, a huge, detailed build by Ktorr2, and lots of buildings by lots of people on the PZ Mapping Discord!”

 

“If anyone in the community wants to help make buildings but never have before, the tool to make buildings for PZ is really like furnishing your home in The Sims. It’s very fun and if you’re feeling generous, you could share your buildings for other mappers to use in their maps!”

 

Tell us about releasing the map. How did the community react? Did they have any ideas? Also tell us about the fun trailers you made!

“I didn’t really make a fuss about the map while making it. I spent most of the time in the Unofficial PZ Mapping Discord’s voice chat talking to people while working on it. Sometimes I would join a voice chat on the official PZ Discord and stream my mapping, and people would jump in and be curious about what I was doing, it was cool!”

 

“When I did release it, a lot of people started playing it. It was on the front page of the workshop for a few days, and I was getting comments every day, it was kinda crazy! Streamers were checking it out, server owners asked me if they could use it on their server (which of course you can, you don’t have to ask!), it was awesome to see people enjoying all the hard work I put into it. Lots of people had bug reports and suggestions, which I incorporated into updates.”

 

 

“I’ve worked on a lot of trailers in my day job so I knew I had to do something fun for the map, so I made two! One is the more classic, action packed trailer, and the other is a funnier trailer meant to feel like a dystopian tourism advert for Clear Cove that obviously goes wrong, considering the brain munchers. I even got a professional voice actor for that one! The trailers were about 5 hours of work each, but I had a blast.”

 

Is there anyone else in the PZ community (or beyond) you would like to give a shout-out to? Which maps (or mods) by other users do you enjoy or find interesting?

“I don’t like “shout out” sections because I’m always anxious I forgot someone, so if I forget you, that’s just because I’m a scatterhead, not because I didn’t appreciate your help or presence!”

 

“Firstly, DaddyDirkieDirk. without whose tutorials I would have never even started. Then all the fine folks on the PZ Mapping Discord for sharing their buildings and answering my GAZILLION questions while I was developing the map. Everyone there is so cool and encouraging, we WANT people to make maps so no one is shot down even if all they ask is dumb questions (me). Anyone who makes buildings and shares them, you the goat!”

“I play with so many great mods I couldn’t name them all, but I’d like to give a shout out to Chuck (the guy that made the expanded helicopter events and another million mods) for always answering/helping out on the PZ. He’s a cool dude.”

 

“And of course The Indie Stone, for giving us these tools and supporting mods and the community so actively, you folks are awesome and you deserve all the success.”

 

What’s next in your mapping plans? What’s the dream?

“I’m currently waiting for the new update which will add basements and skyscrapers and all that cool stuff. I’m still internally debating whether I’m going to update Clear Cove to support those features, or just make a sequel to the map (Clearer Cove? Clearest Cove!?!) with all the new stuff, we’ll see!”

Thanks to Dr. Hollandaise for answering our questions! You can find the Clear Cove map here.

[Mod Spotlight: DaddyDirkieDirk's Tiles]

[late repost]

 

Hello there, exhausted survivors! Craft yourself a comfy chair and relax with this month’s mod blog, as we take a look at the tile pack of DaddyDirkieDirk.

 

Much like ThrottleKitty, Dirk is a big name among mappers, with countless popular community maps utilising his tiles in interesting and creative ways. If you’ve ever downloaded a map mod, chances are you’ve downloaded Dirk’s tiles alongside it.

 

While ThrottleKitty’s tiles lean towards industrial and apocalyptic, Dirk’s feature many new colourful items of furniture, graphics for stocked shelves and backroom items like stacked pallets, arcade machines, office and hospital equipment, and multiple new doors and windows that wouldn’t look out of place in a “lovely-doors-and-windows” catalogue!

 

The tiles work beautifully well with our art style, and many have a “homely” look that our survivors would surely stop and admire, if they’re not busy fighting off a ravenous, undead horde.

 

 

Dirk obviously puts a lot of time, effort, and love into their tiles, so we wanted to learn more about him. We found him lounging on a colourful couch in a living room filled with arcade machines, and he kindly answered a few questions for us!

 

DaddyDirkieDirk

 

Who are you in real life? Tell us a little about yourself.

“My real name is Diederik but most PZ people call me Dirk or Daddy. I have two kids, which inspired my nickname DaddyDirkieDirk. I have a background in game art and design, and currently work as a Quality Assurance Specialist for an AAA game studio in the Netherlands.”

 

How did you first discover Project Zomboid? Why do you like it?

“I discovered the game way back, but I only started playing on the 18^th of November 2019. I remember the date because that night my wife went into labour and my son was born the next day! I played it with my younger brother on that day with the pre-Build 41 multiplayer, and it was a blast. The appeal of the game is probably the option to do whatever I want inside a true open world zombie apocalypse. With all the planned content, I have a dream where one day I can be a shotgun wielding gunslinger on a horse dressed in chainmail fighting the hordes!”

Tell us about your tilesets. How many individual tiles are there? Can you talk us through your process of making a single tile? What references, if any, do you use when making your tiles?

“I honestly have no clue! Some tilesheets are longer, while others are not fully filled up (yet). I think I have about 80 tilesheets in my pack, but some of those tiles were also created by other people. Even if I assume only a bit over half of the tilesheets are used, that’s over 3000 tiles. (Most of my tile sheets are 1024×2048 pixels, which allows for 64 tiles per sheet.)”

 

“The idea for a tile usually comes from working on my map. There are a lot of vanilla tiles, but sometimes I have the need for something that’s different. Usually, I start with a rough shape simply with a colour difference for the top, left and right sides. I then drag in a ton of vanilla assets that are similar in shape or material. I use the vanilla materials as colour reference so I can make my colours match the vanilla ones. From there on its just getting the big shapes in first, and working towards the little details. I strongly recommend drawing things on different layers as doing so makes it a lot easier to change things later on. A lot of things I make are drawn from scratch, but I’m also quite keen on taking parts of vanilla assets and kit-bashing them together.”

 

 

How did you get into making tiles for PZ? Have you made artwork for other games before? Do you have any training in art/drawing etc.?

“I’ve always been intrigued by making my own world for games, so it was a natural step for me to go into map making, and creating tiles. I have a background in 3D game art but I never had the luck to put it into practice. Pixel art was something new for me, but with Covid happening, it was a nice refuge to be able to focus on something creative.”

 

 

Your tiles have that unique “PZ” look. Is that hard to achieve?

“Honestly it took me quite a long time to get the technique down. Having no experience in isometric pixel art meant it had quite the learning curve. In the beginning, I could take weeks for a single tile sheet. I think I spend a literal month on the arcade machines, as they were one of the first tile sheets that I made. Now with “years of knowledge” it is quite easy for me to make decent looking stuff. I have some videos on that as well on my Youtube channel.”

 

“A rule of thumb I use (which only applies after you’ve learned the basics) is to take a small time frame to get the idea on paper, no more than fifteen minutes. If you can’t get the basic idea of it right in that amount of time, it’s usually best to try a different angle. It’s better to try a couple of different things for a few minutes each to see what works instead of spending hours on something that won’t work at all.”

 

 

Your tiles are very varied, from containers and furniture to arcade machines and hospital equipment. Is there a specific type of tile you enjoy making the most?

“Personally, I am a big fan of my height illusion tiles, even though visually they are just edits of vanilla tiles. I like to push the boundaries of what we think is possible in Zomboid, and play around with that. Another thing that I am quite excited by is the new rust and metal scratch overlays that I made to be able to make rusty containers or metal sheet walls.”

 

Is there anyone in the PZ community (or beyond) you would like to give a shout-out to? Which mods or maps (or tilesets!) by other users do you enjoy or find interesting?

“This is going to be quite the list so please bear with me! Pertominus for his tile pack, in addition to being a great friend, Zlobenia for making amazing buildings and also being an amazing person, Gabester for setting up the unofficial PZ mapping Discord, Throttlekitty for the amazing tiles and help, Commander for being a great source of inspiration (and setting a high bar for mapping!), Fred Cooper for liking bunkers, Melo’s_Tiles for his creative outlook on tile making, Moeki for his amazing “Zomboid 2077” project, BigZombieMonkey for being adept at all the mapping branches, Alree for selflessly trying to make mapping easier, Azakaela for pushing the boundaries of mapping, PIN2 for working on the Fallout Zomboid map/mod, Zubludok, Spyjack, and Neuts for letting me use some of their tiles in my pack, and the devs for making the game. And finally, a quick shout out to my loving family and friends!”

 

What’s next in your tiling plans? What’s the dream?

“Currently tile making is a bit of a lower priority as most of my gaming time goes into working on my map Dirkerdam. After the map is done, I’ll probably take a break for a bit. The dream would be to make a living doing either tile making, or to become a professional level designer!”

Thanks to DaddyDirkieDirk for answering our questions! We may be hearing more from Dirk soon… You can find his tileset here.

[The Skillful HuntZman]

Hello all!

 

This week we’ll be checking in with three of the main four pillars of Build 42 – work on the fourth, the server-side player inventories and general MP improvement, has been fairly ‘business as usual’ the past month or so and there’s not much to talk about that’d be juicy for enough for public consumption.

 

Steady your loins, then, as first of all we jump into…

ANIMALS AND MIGRATION

RJ has been taking a holiday (American translation: vacation) from his work on domestic animals and husbandry, and has taken to the woodland and forests of the Knox Event.

 

Wild animals will be important to B42 for both reasons of ambiance and necessity – it will make your experience feel no end more engaging to see deer skittering through the treeline, but also will make hunting a viable survival technique – and one required for some of our advanced crafting recipes when society is long-gone.

 

 

 

What RJ has been working on, in particular, this week is the movement of animals over the map – their migration if you will. So if you could all also have a looksee at the following video too, then we can run into it in some more depth afterwards.

Also clearly: USUAL WIP CAVEATS APPLY. Things can and will change through development and testing.

 

 

So what are we seeing here?

 

Well basically throughout the day our deer will follow paths that our designers (and modders) can map out in our WorldEd tool – and in the vid you can see a virtual animal following a path.

 

Right now, one virtual animal is a group of animals that’s been defined in a lua file. Our current group, for example, consists of one buck, several doe and some fawns. Though clearly once they are fully implemented the variation will be greater, and also dependent on stuff like the time of year.

Once players get close to this coded ‘virtual animal’ these deer will then spawn into the world as real animals – and once you retreat away they’ll revert to their virtual status so the game can take over their movement and activities once more. If the group has become separated meanwhile, they’ll team back up again when their paths next cross.

 

In their virtual form the animals will move over the map, doing potential set activities at set different places. They are timetabled to have several ‘sleeping’ and ‘eating’ periods – currently sleeping for a period of half an hour at some point between 12pm and 4pm, eating at some point between 5am and 7am, and eating again for an hour at some point before 4pm and 6pm.

 

(Clearly, all this is easily changed at the dev-end – and can also be adjusted for whatever different animals we choose to add in future)  

 

To aid players who want to be hunters, deer will leave evidence and tracks of where they’ve been and what they’re doing. So there’ll be footprints (with a direction suggested), poop, and broken twigs and undergrowth – while flattened plants will indicate a sleeping spot, and grazed areas an eating spot.

 

The way in which we represent these visibly in-game is currently being worked out, but for now (and perhaps later on too) we will be providing for it in a dual use for eris’ super foraging mode that was introduced in B41.

 

A goal for the player, then, might be to follow tracks and work out the deer’s possible sleep or eating spot, mark them on their map, and then wait near those spots at the correct hours and hope that animals will stop by.

 

We’re also working out on ways for a Tracking skill to be integrated into this, though seeing as the design is still under discussion we’ll probably talk about that at a later date. Something else that we’re aware should be factored in is human smell and wind direction potentially spooking animals, as it would in real life, but we plan to add that layer in a bit further down the line.

 

RJ would also like to give out a call of Special Thanks to Inrictus for the time he’s spent teaching him how to be a proper huntsman!

Finally, here’s another quick video of a survivor setting up camp with our new tents and whatnot (no deer this time) to give a little flavour of what the surrounding gameplay will feel like too.

 

ENGINE UPGRADE

Operation Optimization is going very well, easily obtaining several hundred FPS on our dev hardware when zoomed out.

However at the moment we still need to look into optimizations for how our current fog and puddles work – both of these are intensive graphical operations that need updating frame by frame. Thus, at the moment, they invalidate our cached chunks and diminish some of the gains from the optimizations.

 

As such at a later date – either before a first public release, or very possibly in a follow up build to it – we in particular plan to revisit these systems to optimize them for our new rendering system. Particularly the fog system, in fact, since having a depth map will now provide opportunities to make our visual effects look much better since we will have a solid representation of surfaces and depth to allow us to much improve how it interacts with objects in the scene.

 

CRAFTING UPDATE

Now the crafting systems are all in place, we’re starting to fill out the tech tree of recipes and wanted to show what’s currently being implemented.

As a reminder to those who perhaps aren’t as interested in the long term crafting and survival systems we are implementing, these will be completely optional as to whether you want to engage with it.

 

If you’re more interested in evading zombie hordes in the centre of towns and cities then you’ll still be able to do that.

However, to address our game’s weaker late game, provide many roleplay opportunities, and provide depth of gameplay outside interactions with zombies – we’re going all out on making the crafting possibilities as exhaustive as possible. Likewise, we are building new and more powerful crafting systems that modders will really be able to get their teeth into.

 

Remember, our benchmark is that a group of players should be able to build a functioning village even if spawning on a wilderness map with no signs of civilization. We want to make sure every aspect of crafting is covered to give multiplayer communities the opportunity to build and thrive, and provide modders with the tools required to make cool as hell expansive tech mods as seen on Minecraft, allowing Zomboid to become a more diverse survival, crafting and automation game modding platform in future.

 

An example of this would be working with clay. Clay can be dug up near rivers, and will be used to make bricks, tiles, roofing, pottery, and a whole host of other items and tiles to place in the world.

 

Those living on a barren map wanting to build a secure home will be overjoyed to be able to use bricks and tiles to make a proper dwelling that’s sturdy enough to stop zombies from breaking in. Likewise even on a smaller-scale basis, this craft will prove vital when survivors don’t have access to modern cutlery or liquid storage.

 

So here’s a quick video (very WIP still, we have a lot of balance, UI and polish to apply yet) that will show off some of the crafting systems when working with clay.

 

 

In future Thursdoids we’ll try to demo different diverse parts of the tech tree and their related professions as they implemented, as well as UI and quality of life improvements as we make them

SOME WELCOMES

The Indie Stone would like to extend an excited hello to two new fine folks this week – Egor who will be joining the MP team as they move ahead with their upgrades, and community fan favourite DaddyDirkieDirk.

 

Dirk has joined our art team to pump out ever more delectable tiles to give our map more life, and its deepest parts some more intriguing objects to perceive in the darkness – and if you are interested in his fantastic work as a modder then we ran a Mod Spotlight on him only last week.

Thanks all!

A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

[Name Changes and Account Issues]

8 hours ago, lazyseal said:

can you change my name to wakaquokka

 

thanks in advance

Done

[Bren After Reading]

 

 

Hey all, hope this finds you well.

Lots of work on the technical side of the four main pillars of 42 these past two weeks – all of which relatively dry, so let’s run through that briefly before checking out some of the other items rolling in.

 

Right now the foundational code to our in-depth crafting systems revamp are being brought into a position where the MP team can better get their hooks into it, while in our optimization/lighting/height channel we’ve been continuing to polish out cutaway issues, errors thrown and the way our isoregions system handles its newfound 32 potential storeys.

For our MP upgrade, meanwhile, work continues on getting the machinations of player inventories (building, recipes etc) over onto the server – while also improving the implementation of our (pretty much fully cooked at this point) new fishing minigames and systems. Domestic animals, meanwhile, are in bug fix mode – with additional attention being given to their pathfinding and around animal escapes.

 

While all this is ongoing other team members are beavering away raising the quality of the game in smaller-scale ways, so let’s look at a few of those fun nuggets now.

 

CURRENT AFFAIRZ

One way to give our towns and city more personality is to provide more written literature for you to loot and peruse – whether it’s a fully readable lore item, or simply an interestingly named (if non-readable) book found in a house you loot that might deepen your understanding of the life of the zombie you just bludgeoned downstairs.

 

 

Build 42 will feature a range of newspapers, each with a final three or four issues to pick up and read in a separate ‘written content UI’. They will contain news articles about the initial build-up to the Knox Event articles, everyday life articles, and even a few breadcrumbs as to what’s really been going in.

 

This will also include smaller scale publications: like ‘town news’ pamphlets for the smaller settlements that don’t quite warrant a full-scale newspaper. 

 

Beyond this we’ve also had a lovely man called Stuart taking all our teeny-tiny map logos and up-rezzing them into more suitable forms for both in-game and irl usage. Their first use within the game are ‘local business’ fliers that are also readable via the same ‘printed media’ UI.

 

 

Clearly there’s not much zed content that can be made from these, but their gameplay role is to mark up interesting locations (and sources of potentially helpful loot) on the in-game map – a function that we feel will be especially handy for new players.

 

We feel that finding a flier that’s a membership advertisement for, say, the West Maple Country Club and revealing it on the player’s map will give an interesting reason for new players to leave town and explore – and likewise a job advert for McCoy logging and a corresponding map reveal might flag a decent place to potentially find an axe.

 

There’s SO MUCH stuff on the PZ map, and we wanted a way to direct people to some of the locations we’re most proud of. Especially those lost in the vastness of Louisville.

 

PERSONAL READING

We also really want you to feel interested in the deceased people whose homes you are raiding, and perhaps even saddened by their demise. From this we’ve also added a LOT more texture to the names of some of the books, comics and magazines they’ve been reading – and indeed the photographs they’ve been tenderly keeping in an upstairs drawer.

 

The hope is that when the spawn tags on these 1500 different interestingly titled books/mags (non-readable) combine with the way we guide our RNG looted spawns work then neat little stories will form in your head about the sorts of folks that lived here up until recently – and perhaps who you just left dead on the kitchen floor.

 

Perhaps they were reading a book called “Long Term Illness Management” by Laura Paloma, which shines a light on the medication in the bathroom.

 

Perhaps their love of military history ties in with the guns, or maybe it’s satisfying to know the zombie in the garden used to read trashy thrillers.

 

Likewise finding photographs that aren’t simply called “photograph” in a cupboard won’t do much to you, but instead seeing “Photograph of a Smiling Family” or “Photograph of a Wedding Car Arriving at a Church” will hopefully do you some emotional damage. We’ve got about five hundred of these, and they’re already bringing some amazing (doomed) colour to the average loot run.

 

We’ve also got six new TV channels, a new radio station, and 75 new VHSs ready to mix into the game (all written by Pat_Bren, who’s also the architect of all the above alongside coder Blair Algol) so really feel that B42 will broaden the narrative possibilities of the game significantly – while also neatly tying into the gameplay in many instances.

Some other changes that are tied into the above:

 

• The books, magazines and comic books that now have individual titles, will also be persistent. Instead of disappearing after being read, there will be a cooldown period that dictates how much time must pass before the character’s moodles can benefit from re-reading said item.
• In conjunction with this revision of literature items, we’ve gone over the mechanics of the Illiterate traits. Illiterate characters are unable to read literature items, but in some cases, such as Comic Books, Catalogues, Photos, and “certain magazines”, they will be able to enjoy looking at the item instead of reading it. In build 42 Illiterate characters will also be unable to read or write player generated notes using sheets of paper or notebooks, write notes on maps (although they can still put symbols on them), read the text on the annotated map items, or understand the nutritional information on packaged food.
• We’ve done a common sense implementation of needing light to read. If there is insufficient light in a character’s square, and they don’t have an active light source, they will be unable to read (or “look at” for illiterate characters) printed matter, unable to read nutritional information on packaged food, and unable to open maps.

 

MEN WITH VEN

Part of the above has been in ensuring that the right newspapers and pamphlets spawn in their appropriate towns, and as such we’ve mixed in a new municipal region system that tells the game’s systems exactly what area of the map each location in the game is located within.

 

We’re also using this for some new vehicles owned by local businesses, that only ever spawn in their hometown and associated region.

 

It’s generally not a known gameplay function, but for many builds now we’ve had ‘profession’ vehicles on the map that are owned by carpenters, metalworkers and electricians – all of whom *do* leave tools in their vehicle overnight.

 

We’ve never flagged this up, however, which has been a missed opportunity – as for players searching for particular items these are very much mobile treasure boxes. Therefore Martin has created a variety of new vehicles for different businesses to better communicate what sort of special loot might be found inside.

 

We have vehicles for different utilities, nationwide businesses and local businesses – many will only spawn in one town, and some are unique in that only one instance of that vehicle will spawn in the world.

 

We know that PZ players love collecting vehicles, especially in multiplayer servers, so this should spice up the hunt for the vehicle collectors. This regional system, and unique vehicle system, is set up to be easily used by mods also.

 

GASP. WHEEZE. PANT.

Regular readers will know that we recently had our very own recording sessions in a studio with microphones, actors and everything.

 

We had various missions to accomplish with this – a primary one being to obtain recordings of a male survivor and a female survivor huffing, puffing, getting hurt, climbing over things, sneezing, coughing and even shouting “hey!”.

The first fruits of these can be heard below and (while subtle when added to the mix and heard in isolation from the way the game sounds currently) we believe that they’ll add a lot to your overall experience once they land in 42.

(PLEASE NOTE: This is a work in progress. Volume and balance levels are initial ones and will change, likewise some recordings sound better than others and we haven’t cherry-picked the ones that work best yet. We think that the exertion noises during heavy combat could certainly do with a boost.)

 

 

 

 

 

A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Project Zomboid strongly discourages the unlawful dissemination of classified military intelligence

 

[Crafting RamblZ]

 

Hey all! So we’re still not at the point of being able to show anything substantial from the crafting overhaul, however we thought we’d talk about a few topics that are relevant to our current work and give people a bit of insight into where we’re going, our ultimate goals and the design challenges we’re facing. This will be very much a stream of consciousness post, taken from a chat within the crafting team, so forgive if it lacks direction but we hope it’ll be interesting!

 

 

Inspiration

One of our biggest inspirations in terms of what we’d like to accomplish with Zomboid ultimately in terms of crafting freedom and possibility, is to provide similar creative and community experiences found playing the extensive tech progression modpacks for Minecraft. Several of the core crafting dev team have periodically dived into Minecraft modpacks for a good chunk of Zomboid’s development, and spend many hours grinding away decorating our bases, building wonderfully cool machines, laying down pipes, wires and conveyor belts and whatnot to double our ore output or finally get that new power system to power our base. The possibilities we could bring to zomboid have tickled at our brains for many years in this area, and we’re excited to be finally exploring them.

 

Obviously though, Zomboid is a post apocalypse survival game and it would be rather silly to say the least if some zombie apocalypse survivor was building a nuclear reactor or casting rituals to open portals, so this shouldn’t be taken as a literal 1 to 1 inspiration. What we’ve taken away from our experiences is more the overall spirit of building, of expanding, of obtaining materials, of navigating a very tall tech tree formed from the availability of resources, that will finally allow you to explore a new tree and open up new areas of gameplay to the player, rather than the literal experiences of making ore crushing machines, nuclear reactors or ender teleporters. As much as we feel Zomboid is an extremely deep game, it’s never hit the bar we’ve wanted in terms of this area of gameplay.

 

Mixed in with that is the heavy focus on roleplaying, especially with multiplayer or later with NPCs, our ultimate vision is somewhat parallel but different to the experiences in Minecraft, with more of a focus on realism and plausibility, as well as leveraging skills, professions and learning to make the experience more cooperative and interesting in a roleplay environment (though solo players need not worry, as NPCs will fill this gap too, and before them we’ll make sure to adequately provide sandbox options, and likely the builder main menu mode, to not lock this stuff out of the single player experience).

 

Extensivity vs Believability

As we stated a while back, our aim with the crafting overhaul is to provide a framework for us to expand the crafting possibilities within the game massively, to allow for a long post-apocalyptic settlement to create everything they need without relying on looting, to elevate the need for players to ever need to reset their worlds unless they want to, while crucially gating all these extra possibilities in a way that makes sense — so you don’t get the odd situation where your burger flipper has wacky esoteric crafting recipes involving bee’s wax or crushed limestone popping up in their crafting panel that seem odd or ridiculous within the context of a zombie survival story.

 

The best example of this would be for example using metalworking to make a spoon. If you’re a metal worker then you should be able to make a spoon. This is a thing that makes sense in terms of what someone with metalworking skills could produce should they wish to. But a spoon is a weird thing to see pop up as a crafting possibility in an urban environment filled with spoons.

 

We’re currently planning on how recipes and crafting possibilities will be presented to the player, how to lock them intelligently behind professions and traits, and more crucially nest them away sensibly within a better interface, while providing enough opportunities to learn them to the player so they don’t end up doing generator manual style hunts around the map for many hours. This is not yet set in stone but ideas are forming on a new interface for crafting and building that would provide this stuff to the player in a much more natural way, where we can provide a huge amount of options without drowning the player in recipes that seem completely useless or weird within their current situation.

 

 

Grind vs interesting multi-stage crafting

Another challenge we’re still nailing down is finding the best balance between extensive and interesting crafting of items, involving multiple stages, potentially multiple methods, multiple skills, maybe multiple characters, but not crossing that line where crafting becomes tedious or frustrating, or you get that sinking feeling looking at the steps you have to complete that disincentivises you from undergoing it. It’s a hard balance to hit, and in our first ‘more zomboid / realistic’ pass of the tech tree, we’ve probably gone a little far over the tedium line in our desire to honour zomboid’s realism.

 

We’re currently in the process of consolidating some of these steps, still retaining multi-profession or multi-skill or multi-step processes to keep crafting interesting, while removing a few steps that may make for frustrating or repetitive gameplay. It’s for this reason we’ve been a little sheepish about providing a look at our current crafting trees at this time, as we want to make sure we strike this balance first lest we worry people that crafting is going to be an unforgiving grind.

 

A portion of the crafting trees. Eek.

 

Learning/Skill Grind

Another area we’re looking into heavily is the process of learning new skills. While we want to retain the process of a player ‘doing’ stuff to level up in that skill, with the vastly expanded skill list that 42 will be introducing, we want to come up with other ways a player can level up that don’t involve building 1000 things after reading a skill book. For one – a skill book may not exist if you’re generations after the apocalypse, or if you’re playing on a blank wilderness map instead (something we’d really like to be a possibility, and our test case to make sure our crafting overhaul is comprehensive will be making sure the player literally cannot rely on looted items).

 

We’re still coming up with ideas of how to approach this, but certainly the idea of learning recipes for items or buildable tiles as well as gaining skill xp from observing other players craft them is something we’re exploring heavily. Again, NPCs will fill this gap for single player, and in the meantime we’ll ensure that builder mode and sandbox provide the tools necessary for solo players to get access to this content without other characters to learn from.

 

Another aspect of this is that with much more expanded profession and trait possibilities, we hope to provide much meatier skill bonuses from professions, allowing players to come into the game a lot more capable than before at these specific areas of the game, given that there will be many more they are not capable at.

 

In addition, we’re exploring the possibility of linking recipes and professions that share common skills or concepts together, allowing characters a head start at performing crafting when they have picked up relevant experience in similar areas elsewhere.

 

 

Modding

So here’s where we can have our cake and have eaten it. Making a nuclear reactor seems a very silly thing to have in zomboid, but where the modding scene is concerned, hopefully people can go wild here. If a wilderness map becomes a viable way to play, the game no longer reliant on looted items nor a zombie threat to make it interesting (particularly in a multiplayer setting), then modders aren’t really constrained by the zombie survival theme of the game any more, and could extend our tech tree way beyond what we provide to allow for a much more abstract ‘tech em up’ survival sim providing factorio and minecraft style experiences along with multiplayer or NPC driven roleplay. We’ve kept all the power of crafting within the familiar scripts and lua that people are used to, expanded with item properties and traits based on crafting skills, multi-tile constructions for crafting stations or machines, fluid, item or power transmission for doing logistical networks, and can only imagine the possibilities will balloon dramatically as soon as our incredible modders get their hands on it.

 

This is where we imagine zomboid could become an even more exciting modding platform, and in no way a small aspect of why we want this framework to exist in the game as we’d be extremely excited to see what modders will bring to the table (as we always are).

 

So what will you be crafting?

Lots of stuff. While it may not be relevant for a player running around in Muldraugh in the 1990s, and while a burger flipper may not have this knowledge, there’ll be professions that emerge in the years following the apocalypse to cover crafting the majority of non electrical items in the game currently (though with perhaps a more homemade aesthetic), tanning leather, making glue or soap, spinning wool, or making cloth to make clothing, dyes to dye that clothing, bowyers to make bows for the hunters, growing hemp to make ropes, glass-makers, stone masonry to finally make those zombie proof walls (again, we need to think further on the design here to not make this too OP), thatched roofs. Basically everything to make a thriving post-apocalypse town, provide much more opportunities for creative and aesthetic building mechanics, building paths, fences, walls, and the production of goods to keep that town ticking over and potentially trade with others.

 

In case anyone is not familiar with our plans regarding post-apocalypse professions, this is the concept that in the years after society collapses, we would slowly retire pre-apocalypse professions that have ceased to be relevant in the new world, and bring in new ones that represent professions one would like to have in a more savage and technically regressed post-apocalypse. Single player and multiplayer alike will allow for a player to start much further into the Knox timeline than ‘six months later’ and provide a vastly different experience, though those who want the current zomboid experience will not be impacted beyond a larger selection of crafting opportunities. Obviously we’d be looking to give the world a much more eroded aesthetic if you were playing 100 years after the Knox event, for those hoping for a more Last of Us style degradation of the world over longer time spans, but it’s unlikely we’ll address this before 42’s release as we have a lot on our plate already.

 

Hopefully this gives an insight into why this has taken so long to get the systems in place, and the design challenge of making all this work within the game.

 

It’s not clear whether we’ll have literally everything we’ve designed in come first unstable release of build 42, its very possible we’ll get the base stuff in there, and then fill it out over numerous releases during a long unstable b42 release cycle, as there will be a lot of tile and item artwork required, but we want to get the core systems in place and enough crafting potential to elevate the late game dramatically before we get it out there. We need to make sure the foundations are in place first however, as we’re walking into unfamiliar territory and are as always ever mindful not to disrupt the things that make zomboid what it is.

 

A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Title image taken from Abby on Steam