trombonaught

Do you wish we had real voiceover for the in-game radio broadcasts? Me too! All the interesting stuff happens in the first week while we're busy fighting for our lives, but who has time to sit down and read it?
 
To help you out, I'm recording one of the most lore-heavy channels for you to listen to while you play. LBMW has 38 broadcasts, and I'm using a voice modulator to record them all for you myself.
 
I've got the first few finished and I'm releasing a new one every week. Here's the first to get you started. Hope you enjoy!
 

Do you wish we had real voiceover for the in-game radio broadcasts? Me too! All the interesting stuff happens in the first week while we're busy fighting for our lives, but who has time to sit down and read it?
 
To help you out, I'm recording one of the most lore-heavy channels for you to listen to while you play. LBMW has 38 broadcasts, and I'm using a voice modulator to record them all for you myself.
 
I've got the first few finished and I'm releasing a new one every week. Here's the first to get you started. Hope you enjoy!
 

Hitting zombies with musical instruments should make noise

Another video for my horror survival game One Wicked Night. Survive the monsters and save your friends in a procedurally generated mansion, now with... toilets?
 

Fire is unbalanced in the game because it's objectively the best way to deal with a horde. Sure, it takes a while for the Zs to burn and they can burn down buildings, but you can always drag them out to a field or just keep them focused on you while you run around them. 
 
In George Romero movies, zombies avoid fire. Or at least they do in Dawn of the Dead. This makes them substantially harder to deal with, in media or in this game. The campfire trick to kill a horde is cheesy but it would literally work in something like The Walking Dead (maybe it'd have to be a big bonfire, but still). This is aggravated by the depiction of mega hordes in TWD or in the World War Z novel, where one molotov actually probably would destroy thousands upon thousands of zombies. Project Zomboid aims for realism but there isn't any realistic resolution to fire's unbalanced nature in game because the lack of fire as a weapon in zombie media is itself unrealistic.
 
This would make fire bombs and other engineer bombs more useful because they cover a wider area. A firebomb covers a 12x12 area so thrown into a dense horde, it can still dispatch 144 zombies (not sure if it's actually one Z per tile). Other zombies would move away from them, when possible, and try to path around them to get to you. If you set a building on fire, they just move around the tiles that are on fire, but won't preemptively flee the building. They can still get trapped because they're dumb.
 
Could lead to some interesting scenarios. If the only way to you is blocked by a wall of fire, zombies will just wait patiently on the other side until it dies out. Would look eerie.
 
In a desperate play, you could maybe wave a torch in front of you to cut a path through a horde. Might be OP but balanced by a chance of sudden wind/rain extinguishing it, and zombies reach for your rear once you pass them so you can't slow down. And it has a low lifetime and you cannot switch to another torch without putting down the first torch.
 
Zombies that are already on fire wouldn't have an aversion to fire and act as zombies do now.
 
Some people wouldn't like it because it makes zombies a bit smarter so it should be a toggleable option, like zombies knowing how to use doors.

Hey all, I'm trying to get a look at how the spear checks and functions work. Does anyone know what classes I should be looking in? I've been running laps through HandWeapon, IsoGameCharacter, IsoPlayer etc but can't find it for the life of me. I'm specifically looking for how the sprint charge and head stab are determined and handled.
 
I'm a Java & decompiling noob so I'm not sure how to just follow the usages when I see stuff that looks related.
 
Any tips much appreciated.
 
Edit: Nevermind, found it! Was right in front of me the whole time (SwipeStatePlayer and IsoPlayer if you're looking).

Hi,
I think a big part of the community including myself doesn't really enjoy how zombie respawns work atm and turn them off completely. Currently, no matter how you change your sandbox settings, zombies will over the course of time always end up populating an area again to where it's as populated as it was when you first cleared it. 
 
I think the problem most players have with that is, that it feels like progress is getting erased. On the other hand I think turning of respawns completely makes it not as exciting. Even a seemingly quiet and empty city should keep you on edge not knowing if there's a zombie thats wandered in is waiting in a blindspot. With respawns off it doesn't feel like the zombie migration that's currently in the game does a good job with that.
 
My idea:
Add another modifier in the sandbox setting that allows you to set a % that is a cap on how many repawned zombies can spawn. So setting it to 0.1 means you'll only ever get up to 10% of the previous population in that zone.
That way you can't just rush mindlessly rush through a previously cleared area, but you also don't come back to McCoy a month later having to clear it all over again.
 
 
 

hello,
is there a way to listen to a radio stream (irl radio) in PZ, is there a mod for that?
I mean: with mpd, audacious or any other audio player BUT listening from PZ radios in game

Inverse difficulty curve? Doing better the longer you play is the norm in games. Without cheesing the zombie stats or adding special zombies, there’s not much more to be milked from them and that’s antithetical to our vision for the game.

We’re not going to arbitrarily punish people for doing the sensible thing in this type of situation, even if it’s not necessarily the greatest gameplay experience. You can just not go out into the wilderness, if it matters.
 
Animals can be threats and sources of strife by themselves, as well as the desire to explore the crafting system. There’s nothing to address here.
 
This is end game content and fleshing out a barren skill and crafting system. Why would this only benefit MP?
 
I just don’t think there’s necessarily much we can do for people that play the game to death, learn all its intricacies, and exploit them. As you’re a long time player, all I can suggest is trusting that by giving you more to do, there’ll be more to play.

Maybe a better question is asking why you feel we’d make it easy and convenient just to shrug off modern society.

Regardless, I can’t say I ever felt killing zombies was mandatory in PZ and I feel people assuming that it actually is is the source of many people’s frustration with the game. 

Do we have a chance to wait for build 42 this year?

Big reveal with the debut of the president's voice!
 

One major issue with Vanilla game is you are forced to a specific gameplay style.
Once power goes out you essentially need to have a flashlight in one hand meele in the other. 
 
This not only limits weapon options it forces a specific gameplay style
 
Attachable light sources would make a big difference and bring back some freedom to the player.
 
For example a Belt lantern or Military Pocket Light  which gives you access to your 2nd hand. 
The Belt lantern can also be placed on the ground for added 360 lighting 
 
Another option could be Road flares that last 4 hours ( Realistically they would only last 30 minutes but gameplay wise it needs to be much longer to be useful ) 

We're finally getting that Project Zomboid Fallout Server SS13 style.

Just going to throw this out there for food for thought:
When a crafting system says you need X, Y and Z for a recipe, the fun of crafting may be hunting
and gathering those resources so you can make the next best thing, but that system may not be
engaging enough for those truly interested in crafting.

By that I mean, lets picture crafting a backpack from scratch (both in game and in real life):
In a video game, a recipe or crafting screen may say you need a pouch, webbing/straps, some type
of chord, fasteners, maybe glue, etc. You have the recipe that shows you what you need, you get it
and then craft it and now you have a backpack.

The game may benefit from a crafting system that only has recipes AFTER you figure out how to craft
something through trial and error. Maybe you can make a backpack several different ways and different
fasteners or chords produce stronger backpacks, which you only find out through a hidden recipe style
crafting system. 

I realize if you told players to make a toaster, and they had no recipe on their crafting screen, that there
is the potential that they may NEVER figure out how to make one...because now we're talking about a
gap in knowledge of the actual player, not necessarily the character. As one player has maybe no idea
what components are in a toaster and therefor has no idea what to even start gathering. So there is a
fine balance between style #1: "here is a recipe now go gather materials and craft" and style #2: "the
recipe is unknown, and you have to do trial and error" before the recipe is discovered".

I'm willing to bet this deep into the crafting update, the devs have a good handle on what they are
looking to do with it. But thought i'd give some input.

Blablabla and more blablabla, date?

Muldraugh 10,000 years later... That would be epic!

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

Your corpse probably hasn't strayed too far.  Fire a shotgun and see who comes running!

It's not just knives, actually. You have a better chance to knockdown with any weapon when they're unaware.

Yeah, this is a bit of a problem atm. We're aware and work to improve targeting is already planned. Out of interest, have you tried stomping on them first? 

fix last problem with this little fellow

Wotcha survivors.
 
The general pattern for 42 dev is that we’ve got four main pillars of Build 42 – all of which are the ‘big stuff’ and the fundamental large-scale tech improvements.
 
These are: moving much of the MP system server-side to give servers more control and less hackability, introducing our deeper and more expansive crafting systems, bringing animal life to the Knox Event – and engine improvements to optimize, give far greater height/depth levels to our map, and to provide more realistic light and darkness for your survival adventures.
 
These are the things we need for release, while other things in development by our dev partners (or staff assigned to more general improvement) are seen as ‘nice-to-haves’ – and some may even fall into patches of 42 when things start to shake out a bit.  Going through the ‘pillar’ features though:
 
The lengthy first stage of the MP work (transferring player inventories to the server) is now over, and transplanted very neatly over into the internal test build – so now our MP coders are delving deep into stage two. This will see all operations of player inventories (building, recipes, foraging etc) also move into server control, overview and deference. In terms of the deeper and more expansive crafting – as we mentioned last week the code systems this is all based on has now been merged into the internal test build and as such much of the last week or two has been centred around fixing the longstanding recipes and functions that the new stuff has broken. We’re pretty much back at a standard of ‘operational’ on this, or will be after a commit being made tomorrow, and this too has been a process that was a little smoother than expected. That all said, obviously that has been the focus post-merge, so while progress has been made since its integration, the majority of work has been bug fixing and not much to report otherwise. The team are starting to discuss the next step post merge, and looking forward to it immensely! Animal and animal husbandry meanwhile (or at least the cows, pigs and sheep – chickens are still a little haphazard) are approaching a stage where they’re fun to play around with for extended periods in SP. Following on from the merge of the music system detailed below into the internal test build, they also now moo, oink and baa which has given them a lot of extra life also!  
 
Finally, in terms of the tech upgrade we’re mainly at the bug fixing and further optimization phase with the chunked rendering and variable height systems, but it’ll likely be the sort of thing that’ll spit out bugs and countless ‘betcha didn’t think of this scenario?’ gotchas for some time to come, so its not clear when it’ll be merged into main. As said last week, it should be mostly smooth when the time comes though.

OTHER STUFF
Next up, some of the other items being conjured up for 42 either with our development partners, or the smaller cool stuff that our own devs have been working on in the background.
 
On top of the below we’re almost wrapped on stuff like fishing, work on the farming revamp continues and is having new crop assets built for it, and clearly the map expansion continues apace and will likely be a part of a/the 42 release also. 

 
AWESOME ADAPTIVE MUSIC SYSTEM
First up for discussion is 42’s new adaptive music system – a long term plan that’s now coming to a fairly awesome fruition.
As long term players will know, our OST came from the musical brain, delicate ear and dainty fingers of Zach Beever – one of the most important people we came across in the earliest days of Project Zomboid and whose work many of you have heard over thousands of hours of play.
 
What Formosa (formerly Noiseworks) have been up to more recently is taking the original arrangements and stems that Zach has provided to create variations of our beloved soundtrack that have variations of different intensities. The composers who have ably taken on this task are Armin Haas and Matthias Wolf – both of whom appear to have nailed it.
 
Players have experienced the first stage of this system in build 41, with action music which is specifically when players are in combat with the undead.
 
For 42, this music has then been worked into a new adaptive exploration soundtrack. Based on in-game events, a music intensity parameter is adjusted and the soundtrack adjusts accordingly as well. The aim is to have the exploration music reflect the more exciting times as well as calm moments in the game in a better and more organised way.
 
The best way to explain this is in the following prototype video. As ever this is WIP! We’ve also cropped it slightly oddly to hide some of the debug magic that lays bare some of the magic, so please forgive the character not being centred on the screen!
 
Sound up plz! (obv!)
 
 
We’re only working of a very basic set of events at the moment – coming across new houses, opening doors, vaulting fences and the like.
We will be adding lots of different game events that will have big and small impacts on the intensity parameter – the discover of ‘special’ buildings, finding useful loot, noticing a survivor zed etc etc. 
 
The system will undergo lots of further fine-tuning, and will be adjusted further from the version seen above that went into testing only yesterday.
Also happening this week in Sound World has been the recording sessions we’ve had arranged to create ‘body noise’ puffs, pants and pains that we want to play on top of your character’s on-screen manoeuvres.
 
We’ve also used this opportunity to record many and various experimental dialogue lines that could potentially be played (very, very muffled) over our TV and radio shows in a Simlish kinda way – and likewise automated announcements that may well still be playing in locations such as malls and key Louisville locations even after public zombification has occurred. We’ll have more on this in the next blog, most likely.
 
 
UNDER THE STARS
A few notes on outdoor sleeping. First off in 42, sleeping bags and tents (when packed) can be attached to appropriate backpacks. It looks quite nice and fun, especially when attached to a survivor zed.
 
 
Next up, we’ve made some general improvements to outdoor sleeping. As such tents are now both containers and beds. They are not good beds, mind – and using a sleeping bag by itself certainly isn’t either.
 
You can put a mattress or an un-packed sleeping bag into a tent to make it a better bed. You can also use a pillow to modestly increase the quality of a tent bed, including reducing the chance and severity of neck pain. This applies to all other bed as well, including car seats. You’re protected from the rain when sleeping in a tent, and the tents look a lot nicer than they used to as well.  
 
GOING UNDERGROUND
Given as 42 will increase our height limit (and more particularly our depth limit) our artists and mappers are currently working on new visuals that will better suit locations beneath the ground of the Knox exclusion zone.
 
Here’s a fun example of the sorts of decoration that we hope will give added flavour to your new life underground, and hopefully bring along some Resi vibes with it.
 
 
 
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 is from D4CR33P3R on Steam. That’s all for this week,

Hello man its your thread neighbour from below, thought it would be rude not to check in. Good stuff, left a comment on the channel, love the thumbnails too.

TileSetZ

From a simple texture, generate all tiles you need for your Project Zomboid Map.

Walls, Doors Frames, WIndows Frames, Floor, Walls Roofs..

You only need ONE texture and a simple click

https://github.com/Unjammer/TileSetZ


 
v0.0.3: Updated to add "Street Curb Blend" v0.0.2: App ported to fw4.7.2, more convenient. v0.0.1alpha : first public release, fill free to report bugs or any comments =)
Release Link and source on GitHub