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V for Victor (and Vehicles)


nasKo

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Hello everyone! Welcome to this week’s Mondoid. It’ll be a relatively short one this week, yet we got some cool things in the pipe to show non-the-less.

Vehicles

A big milestone today as vehicles officially went into closed testing, which is a big step toward getting them out there to you all. They aren’t completely finished yet–There will undoubtedly be bugs to fix reported by our testers, and at the moment there is only a test model, a blue pickup-truck with an oddly placed wheel on the bumper, in the game. The cool vehicle models Martin has been pumping out still need to be implemented, and on a cosmetic level some additional work needs doing on the lighting to make them appear less uniformly lit and a bit more metallic in appearance, we may bump up their size a little too, but they are getting close and all the heavy lifting has been done.

Feedback so far shows that the streaming seems to work extremely well, and the vehicles controls and handles surprisingly well considering the isometric perspective. You use a radial menu to start the car, rolling down windows, turn on the heater, change seats, or play with the car radio.  It’s also extremely fun running over zombies–as you can imagine!

We’ll save on the videos until we get more cars implemented and feel an IWBUMS is more imminent (also, as cool as it looks already it’s a bit odd to see neighbourhoods of blue pickup trucks!) but here are a few pics to whet your appetite.

svRxQCO-1.jpg

ProjectZomboid32111.png

l9KWq2R.jpg

Thanks again to General Arcade for their amazing and tireless work getting the system working over the net, and getting through the remaining technical roadblocks that complicated and delayed their completion, and of course to EasyPickins who put a monumental amount of work into the vehicles prior to that, alongside his day to day work on PZ updates.

RJ has spawned

That’s right, always a productive one, our very own Romain has gone and co-created a tiny person, whom he has dubbed Victor, who was born literally yesterday. He is very cute, and as per his contract with TIS we have given RJ two weeks to get him up to speed on java so he can be put to work in the TIS code mines. Here is a picture of him alongside the Eternal Leader Spiffo:

spiffovic-683x1024.jpg

Will, usual Mondoid writer, father and sentimental one of the bunch is away at GDC advancing the cause of The Indie Stone in the U.S, but if he was here I’m sure it’d he’d say much more eloquently that we’re ecstatically happy for RJ, Celine and their new son, it’s wonderful to see the Zomboid family grow, and we wish Victor every future success against the zombie hordes.

That’ll be all for this week, see you all next week after we see how the closed testing goes!

This week’s image is by us. 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 blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right hereOur Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.

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WOOOOOOOOOOOW VICTOR IS
 
* A  D   O    R      A         B            L                E                               *

 

Also the vehicles look amazing will the car bumper thingies be stained in blood when you run over zombies?

Edited by zoeyflower
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Congratz to RJ!

 

1 hour ago, Zorak said:

I would not be suprised if we see vehicles before animations :-S

 

Ok this has me put everything upside down for me right now.

 

Weren't the animations suppose to come so we could get vehicles?

 

If we get Vehicles first, isnt that more load into the animation update (aka more delayed)?

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Congrats on the baby RJ! 

 

I hope that we are able to customize vehicles. Ideally, I would love a Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead level of vehicle building/customization, but since that is obviously not going to happen, some heavy customization options like being able to put things on vehicles like a chain link fence or sheet metal would be awesome too. I want to be able to put a plow on the front of a truck and drive it through tons of abandoned cars in Louisville.

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If it wasn't Will behind the keyboard, I guess that was Andy. Hey mate, that was a nice Mondoid there, you can be proud ^^

 

And RJ, well... now I know why you refused that beer 9 months ago. Congrats, fellow croissants eater, may your offspring live long and prosperous. (And if you need a break, that beer offer still stands... you bloody ghost!)

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3 hours ago, dannyisdude said:

Congrats on the baby RJ! 

 

I hope that we are able to customize vehicles. Ideally, I would love a Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead level of vehicle building/customization, but since that is obviously not going to happen, some heavy customization options like being able to put things on vehicles like a chain link fence or sheet metal would be awesome too. I want to be able to put a plow on the front of a truck and drive it through tons of abandoned cars in Louisville.

Armored version for each car model would be great ! It slows you down, more fuel consumption etc but you can go throgh any horde without much worries :D Ofc only high lvl engeneer can upgrade cars like that ;-)

 

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It'd be neat to see the horde strategies with this. I remember reading in Max Brooks's Zombie Survival Guide that you could lead zombies with a pickup truck and have people in the back shooting. Of course, ramming zombies probably messes up your engine. On another note, how loud are the cars (in comparison to other noises in game [noise maker, shotgun, pistol, shouting])? Will some cars be quieter than others? Otherwise, congrats on the child RJ!

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Congrats on the baby! Could this be like MP back in the day? Randomly I woke up one Monday and saw multiplayer videos out of nowhere. :P Animations teased first, vehicles released before them. Who knows, but crazy progress on vehicles. Man. Also, the little features of TVs menus and the oven dials play a big part in this since you already have code in place to use for the car radio, heater, (filling fuel?) etc... I'm always a firm believer that small features go a long way into changing a game dramatically when all put in place with other systems.

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1 hour ago, Crazy ManMan said:

Will cars have realistic physics? that is to say will runing into zombies cause them to stall out, etc? Most video games cars are basically invinsible but real vehicles gnerally can not just ram into anything and keep going, not without modifying them first anyway.

 

With animations, most likely the most realistic animations you'll get in an Isometric game when you're running them over. Which should be pretty decent.

I doubt we'll have proper physics ever from the limitation of the engine, though who knows? At the very least, judging from how good the animations are, vehicles should have great animations for running over zeds. 

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Congratulations RJ! I am very happy for you!

 

To the rest of this mondoid: those are some amazing news TIS! I am really really psyched about the stuff that has already arrived in the game (like metalworking - really cool!) and that will come in the future! Keep on that amazing work!

 

greetings,

styx

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19 hours ago, Zorak said:

Armored version for each car model would be great ! It slows you down, more fuel consumption etc but you can go throgh any horde without much worries :D Ofc only high lvl engeneer can upgrade cars like that ;-)

 

I was thinking less, "extra model for each car", but rather models that can be attached to the car. So we can put whatever we want onto maybe different slots or something over each window. For example -

Front of Vehicle slot can have - plow, chain link fence, spikes, sheet metal, makeshift metal grate

One Slot Over Each Window can have - sheet metal, chain link fence, makeshift metal grate

Each Wheel can have - different types of tires (snow, offroad, road, etc.)

One Slot Over Each Wheel can have - sheet metal covering wheel

Pickup Bed can have - makeshift sheet metal sides, bed cap

And more customization options like these. I would love to be able to fully customize and fortify vehicles in any way I want. This could allow you to essentially build different vehicles for different purposes. This is why I love C:DDA's vehicle system; it lets you build whatever the hell you could possibly want.

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7 hours ago, Crazy ManMan said:

Physics might not have been the best word, more like realistic durability/use. In most games you can smash into trees, street lights, people, fire hydrants, etc with no problems and just keep driving, but in real life just hitting one of those things once can disable your car pretty easily. I am wonding if they were planning on having realistic vehicle damage in that sense.


I've been hoping this is the case for such a long time. I personally hope hitting a few or a couple zombies knocks your car out of commission just like it would in real life. I think we all agree that the detail put into Project Zomboid is what makes it great and that the more realistic the detail the better. I can only hope vehicles follow the same suit.

Also, I love every time something adds to the list of "this is how you died" lol

Edit: I also just got my car hit in a parking lot, and while the damage wasn't insanely bad, it was certainly enough to stop me from driving safely with it. It's amazing how fragile cars actually are.

Edited by Kuren
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If the vehivles are about to get damages from hitting stuff, I'd suggest that the damages should be not really bad if you hit zombies, and more important if you hit something hard... walls fences, etc...  And maybe a variable about the speed we hit something.. driving slowly in the zombies should not really cause any big damages, in my opinion. It would be really silly to change vehicles or to perform mechanics skills on vehicles only after a few zombies hitting.. (Or imagine if the vehicles blows up only after few minor colisions with zombies.. LOL) If they plan to add some storage in the vehicles, I wonder IF when a vehicle start to catch in fire for a prolongated period of time and expload... (or just en up all burned) if the potential items in the storage space would be lost?

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