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Here In My Car


nasKo

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veh-712x459.png

Hey everyone! Welcome to Mondoid. This week, and we’ll cut straight to the chase with some video goodness! (Remember: work in progress, some bugs visible! More work in implementation and visuals to come!)

So, what are we looking at? Physics-enhanced vehicles in Project Zomboid, both online and off, and some hefty improvements on map streaming and object processing to handle it all. You enter a car with ‘E’, control with WSAD and have various vehicley-options open to you through a radial menu when you’re in the driver’s seat.

We’ve had the vehicles branch on the boil for a while (alongside the usual anims branch, standard build branches and a few others) but this year’s work in melding of EP’s car physics and framework with General Arcade’s special sauce has seen great things occurring. Progress has been good this past week too (as you can hopefully tell from comparing this video with one recorded five or six days ago) and we’re really excited about how the vehicles look and feel to drive. There have already been tests in multiplayer that went very well, with the new map streaming changes working niftily and boding well for future optimization.

So what’s still to be done amidst the general bug fixing? Well, in amongst others and the tidying up of zombie collision visuals – the following:

  • Firstly, and most importantly, we need to make sure that we’re not introducing a new breed of indestructo-tanks to Project Zomboid. We have to make sure that survival times aren’t hugely extended by cars, and that their use carries as many negatives as positives for the players. Also we need to figure out a good balance between zombie squashing fun and the realism Zomboid tends toward, avoiding the vehicles being too OP and sturdy against groups of zombies, while still providing the satisfaction of mowing down zombies in bigger vehicles.
  • There’s an issue to resolve with how cars are drawn into the scene, sometimes resulting in weird draw sorting bugs with ground grass or zombies drawn in front of the car when they should be blocked by it. This is due to the fact that currently 3D models are drawn at the same time as the tile they are ‘stood’ on. This doesn’t cater for larger 3D objects very well, so we’ll need to think on how to handle this and make sure they all occlude each other correctly.
  • The current sounds of the vehicles are 100% placeholder, and we’ll be working on these before release.
  • More cars! This video is fairly packed with ‘speciality’ vehicles, and Martin is currently in the process of making more vehicles to provide more variety and/or Kentucky normality.
  • Balancing: Each vehicle type needs balancing not only on their rarity, but in terms of handling, top speed, and all the other factors to make them feel different to drive. Right now, apart from their size and wheel positions, they are all functionally identical.
  • Wrecks and pile-ups: At the moment all cars spawn in parked locations, neatly parked in car parks or outside homes. We need to add wrecks, abandoned vehicles, pile ups and other more apocalyptic set ups of cars while also keeping in-touch with what Will’s set up in the PZ lore.

OTHER STUFF

  • RingoD has patched up the faults in the TIS-curated community map Bedford Falls that were introduced through the 2x revolution. It should now be fully playable and can return to general PZ MP server use. Download here.
  • Turbo has updated his modding and dev tool ItemZed, along with some fresh easier-to-read instructions that explain how you too can play around with recipes, items, looting locations and lots lots more.
  • Mapper Cardenaglo’s crazy/awesome Gaia is out in its first form. Do check it out!

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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10 minutes ago, nasKo said:

Firstly, and most importantly, we need to make sure that we’re not introducing a new breed of indestructo-tanks to Project Zomboid. We have to make sure that survival times aren’t hugely extended by cars, and that their use carries as many negatives as positives for the players. Also we need to figure out a good balance between zombie squashing fun and the realism Zomboid tends toward, avoiding the vehicles being too OP and sturdy against groups of zombies, while still providing the satisfaction of mowing down zombies in bigger vehicles.


Glad to see this after the video. Was worried about how over powered they looked and the hits/wrecks they could handle. Happy to see you all plan on toning it back quite a bit :)

Regardless, they look awesome :D

Will the controls work more like the multiplayer car mod (RC type controls) or like the single player version (where it works the same type of way you move your character)?
 

Edited by Kuren
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HOLY MOLY

i need dis in my life ;__;
of course the devs already thought about what i'm about to say, but there's no mention in this mondoid so i'll suggest it anyway:
i'd love to have the chance of wounds (even fatal ones) if/when the player crashes against something. this way people will actually end up wounded pretty often and meds will finally have a real usage even in single player.

also, any tips on what the other functions in the radial menu might be? i hope there is something about storage capacity.

also i guess there is already an option for multiple player to jump in the same car, since the mondoid specifies "  when you’re in the driver’s seat. "

anyway amazing, we should show some love to easy pickins and the guys from general arcade <3

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real cool video guys :):):)

 

like it a lot..

 

quick point about OP: maybe it would make sense to make it very unlikly to kill a "not crawler zombie" with a car but make them INTO CRAWLERS after hitting them...

 

you most likly will brake it's legs and hips when you hit them with a car, with some additional injuries with the "flying over the front/to the side" but not Zombie-killing head-wounds (other than from the fall on the head or the hit with the frontwindow if they fly into the front row through the window)... as everyone HATES crawlers, it might be a way to use this that Zombies you drive over will BE crawlers now 

 

guess people will think a little before they create hordes of crawlers at there front door :D

Edited by King-Salomon
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Watching that car crash at the end of the video makes me wonder if at some point we'll be able crash through walls as opposed to merely into them. Granted, such an action would be noisy and would likely disable the car, but it would give us another means of entering locked buildings. Ram-raiding the gun shop, anyone?

Edited by Octopus
Grammer
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one other point: the "radial menue" is a complete other UI type than before... do you guys are thinking about changing the other UIs to the same style?

 

I like the UI for the Radio/TV etc so it would be sad if they would be changed.. on the other hand, to have a different UI style for every feature might be a little problem...

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18 minutes ago, Octopus said:

Watching that car crash at the end of the video makes me wonder if at some point we'll be able crash through walls as opposed to merely into them. Granted, such an action would be noisy and would likely disable the car, but it would give us another means of entering locked buildings. Ram-raiding the gun shop, anyone?

 

With my limited knowledge I think realistic collisions with objects will not be possible because objects (besides players and zombies and cars) are not 3D but 2D sprites and animating 2D sprites is a pain... They would have to basically separately draw each frame of animation for collapsing walls or lamps or fences or other stuff.

Edited by Geras
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3 minutes ago, Geras said:

 

With my limited knowledge I think realistic collisions with objects will not be possible because objects (besides players and zombies and cars) are not 3D but 2D sprites and animating 2D sprites is a pain... They would have to basically separately draw each frame of animation for collapsing walls or lamps or fences or other stuff.

Or go the EZ way and just remove that part of wall as you would with sledgehammer :)

 

Anyway great video.

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1 minute ago, Zorak said:

Or go the EZ way and just remove that part of wall as you would with sledgehammer :)

 

Anyway great video.

 

Yeah, that's a way out, that's why I said realistic collisions :)

Edited by Geras
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23 minutes ago, Zorak said:

Or go the EZ way and just remove that part of wall as you would with sledgehammer :)

 

not sure if they should do this - other than with glas-fronts it would be VERY tough to drive through a housewall ..

 

ok... the USAs are building everything with wood instead with stone/congrete ... hmm... hard for a european to not forget it.. hmm... 

 

so it may be an idea but I would like it better if you could only drive through a shop-wall with lots and lots of windows

 

EDIT: more realistical a problem... I am courios how the "problem" with collisions with "minor obstructions" like postbox, streetsighn, trashbin" might be solved... I have not tried but I GUESS they are not destructible at all atm are they?

Edited by King-Salomon
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for vehicle types: not sure, but it SHOULD be possible to get an information about what kind of cars are registered in the real towns from the local administration - like %-rate of pickups, how many busses, how many uitility cars, how many police cars, hospital cars, school busses etc

 

so you could balance the "special cars" with the "normal" cars with real numbers - but wouldn't help with balancing the car-stats...

Edited by King-Salomon
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22 minutes ago, King-Salomon said:

 

not sure if they should do this - other than with glas-fronts it would be VERY tough to drive through a housewall ..

 

Breaking through a wall in a car is entirely doable, so long as you don't mind wrecking the car (and potentially killing yourself) in the process.

 

 

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7 minutes ago, Drama_Setter said:

Why not just release Animations in a separate branch,like, "IWBUMS Animation overhaul branch"

They done this with easy CO-OP

And first,WIP multiplayer too..

Nah,better freeze animatons before cars will come out.

Jeez,end my suffers.

Because they're not ready, duh.

And who says they're frozen, ya goose? :D

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Well, that's far more progress than I was expecting to see in such a short time; it's not far from being ''Grand Theft Zed: Knox County'' and I'm really liking the great variety of vehicles. But, there are a few important things I see conspicuously absent from the big list:

 

1- Trunks

 

Will we be able to load stuff on our car's trunks and/or backseats? Or find stuff on them beforehand? This might be one of the most important uses they will have.

 

 

2- Keys & Bypasses

 

Perhaps this is the best way to prevent them from being the ''Indestructanks of Zed Squashing'', make it so we have to either find their keys (if there's a car parked outside a house or office, it would make sense to have at least a 50/50 chance to find its keys on some drawer, on in the pockets of some Zed that might be there) or have the Electrical know-how to hot-wire them, but even then, these hot-wired cars would be a bit slower to start than the ones with keys.

 

 

3- Garages WITH WORKING SHUTTERS

 

This is probably the 2nd most important one. What's the point of getting a car if the Zeds are just gonna head-thump it into scrap metal every time you leave it outside your base? We need to have all those still non-functional shutters everywhere working. And also, as seen on 0:39 of the video, some the garages we have right know are a wee bit too small to fit the cars inside, and that could be a problem.

 

 

4- Sirens

 

Can the Police Cars/Ambulances have a siren function (like they did in State of Decay )? This one might sound cosmetic, but it could be very useful, specially how sound-sensible are PZ's Zed. This could make it worth to have either of them around to use them as lures-on-wheels to remove large quantities of Zeds from a location.

 

 

I think that would be all. I saw on the new dial that the cars already have radio, headlights and what might even be a SoD-esque Door-Hits-Zed function so things are looking pretty good. What does the big red hot H do btw?

 

And btw, I just LOVE that BGM that plays at the start of the video. It's hands down PZ's best music.

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, Octopus said:

Watching that car crash at the end of the video makes me wonder if at some point we'll be able crash through walls as opposed to merely into them.

 

Unless you are going full speed into a very flismy brick wall and you have a very durable car, most of the cases the car would get rekt before going though a brick wall (but i hope we can go though fences)

 

But it is possible to go though a brick wall with a car, however you probably wont be able to tell that story because you are going to be dead.

 

I really wasnt expecting the car on car collision, it looked quite nice too, which makes me think, is it physics based or just animation.

 

Speaking off...

1 hour ago, nasKo said:

Because they're not ready, duh.

And who says they're frozen, ya goose? :D

 

How is the animations and car branches going to work though?

I expected to see the animations in the vehicles video, but it seems its using the old framework, which means that they are not merged.

 

So is that going to be an extra load to add into the animation update? 

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29 minutes ago, Blake81 said:

3- Garages WITH WORKING SHUTTERS

 

This is probably the 2nd most important one. What's the point of getting a car if the Zeds are just gonna head-thump it into scrap metal every time you leave it outside your base? We need to have all those still non-functional shutters everywhere working. And also, as seen on 0:39 of the video, some the garages we have right know are a wee bit too small to fit the cars inside, and that could be a problem.

 

 

 

DEFINITELY agree, even if in the short term it's just a super large door we need to manually open and close (which is good for when the power goes out).

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