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In My Garage


nasKo

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Hello all. It’s been a good week at PZ towers following the overwhelmingly positive feedback, and excellent pointers from the community, over our vehicles testing video last week. It feels really good to have one of our key 1.0 features being fed into the cannon, especially given the extended wait for the animations that they’ve been brewing alongside.

In terms of the vehicles branch, this week has seen a lot of effort being put into getting the build seen in last week’s video prepped for internal stress testing and bug hunting. Initial testing found a degree of stuttering cropping up on the long drive between West Point and Muldraugh, for example, that’s now hopefully been fixed – while it’s also clear that driving through densely forested areas also ramps up the memory usage due to the number of nearby physics-enhanced tree objects.

The focus of General Arcade’s Yuri when approaching our own EP’s work on vehicles and in-game physics has been in the communication between in-game threads, and in expanding the margins of the map area that’s streamed in around the player to avoid those big black areas of nothingness that can sometimes appear when your survivor outruns the PZ mainframe.

Another change, meanwhile, has been in moving away from this ‘streamed-in area’ being related to player position – and instead shifted to being proportioned according to player speed. As such, this helps to load chunks in time when player is moving around faster than they usually do. In terms of smooth running it has also become clear that applying this approach to the player as well as the vehicles will improve everyone’s experience – so that’s another current focus of Yuri’s work for the test build.

Martin, meanwhile, keeps the vehicle model pipeline open and makes regular deliveries like this one that appeared this morning. Hopefully next week we’ll be able to have a few more vids/reports from them in motion.

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Meanwhile alongside anims work and ongoing map expansion we have RJ back from paternity leave so he’s going great guns to clear as much of the bug tracker backlog (lovingly curated by Butter Bot) as he can, while also feeding extra ‘loot maps’ into the mainframe in preparation for the public release of Build 37.

Turbo too is buried in the main game and streamlining and the way we universally have devices coded- so that’s radios, walkie-talkies, TVs, handheld games, forthcoming tape recorder, forthcoming VHS and the like. He’s implementing a universal module system that’ll govern power usage, transmissions, media reading/writing, storage, audio settings and the like for everything we have in-game, and for everything we add in future.

 This week’s featured image from Guenni. 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. Also, please be reminded that the great PZ statistical surveys remains open.

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14 minutes ago, nolanri said:

it should be interesting using cars to block off zombies.   

 

I've mentioned this already in another thread. There needs to be some mechanic in place to take care of this. E.g. if zombies can't get past vehicles, there is nothing hindering me from building a car wall around my house and then calling it a day.

 

 

Also the news update makes it appear to me as if cars are really good to go as of now. Is this just a false impression a la animation updates or can we really expect cars "in the sooner future"?

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5 minutes ago, Coton said:

And again a lot of nothing, i don't know where is the point too post things like this... 

Just put the image on Facebook or Twitter, you don't need a devblog for this, or maybe explain me

Not every dev blog is going to be sexy. Development is therefore accurately portrayed.

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1 minute ago, Lexx2k said:

 

I've mentioned this already in another thread. There needs to be some mechanic in place to take care of this. E.g. if zombies can't get past vehicles, there is nothing hindering me from building a car wall around my house and then calling it a day.

 

 

Also the news update makes it appear to me as if cars are really good to go as of now. Is this just a false impression a la animation updates or can we really expect cars "in the sooner future"?

 

Well this problem already kind of exists. There are some fenced off areas you can climb into with stairs that zombies cannot destroy.  It would likely be a lot harder to build a car wall around your base than going to one of these fenced off areas. Also it would be very hard for you to get in and out without messing up your car wall.  way more troublesome than the simple sheet rope option you can do at these fenced off areas. 

 

But still for realism sake, blocking things with cars should be an option that has usefulness.  But also need to balance realism with Gameplay as always.   Perhaps when zombies bang on vehicles, the vehicles could move ever so slightly so that if they are banging on them for long enough they would eventually move enough to create space in-between.

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45 minutes ago, nolanri said:

 

Well this problem already kind of exists. There are some fenced off areas you can climb into with stairs that zombies cannot destroy.  It would likely be a lot harder to build a car wall around your base than going to one of these fenced off areas. Also it would be very hard for you to get in and out without messing up your car wall.  way more troublesome than the simple sheet rope option you can do at these fenced off areas.

Well yeah, that's a problem too, as well as unlimited roof camping. Doesn't mean there have to be more such things in the game. :>

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To sort of add on to the vehicle blocking discussion, I hope that they'll be able to break windows and go through, rather than an arcadey 'vehicle is punched several dozen times and explodes' ala GTAIII. I suppose that's why the windows are modelled opaque, so you can see at a glance whether its been rolled down or smashed through.

 

Any word on how keys will be acquired?

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Maybe vehicles can work as cupboards? We already saw the animation of a zombie going though a window, crawling a bit in the board and falling into the floor, so that could work.

 

Also for the love of god give us something a bit more indepth about the animations, what does "animation work" even mean by now, we already saw the exporting/importing animations for like 2 months and nothing came out of it, we saw the LUA change replacing the old system with the new system, the replacement of the "bit", "scratch" old system and the smoothing of transition while player rotates. 

 

Why not explain what is going to happen first? The animations or vehicle (no ETA) because they cannot co-exist, they must merge sooner or later and all the testing that goes into the vehicles is going to be null when the animations kicks in (in my opinion), are they begin merged together? is that the animation work we hear about? 

 

I cant get hyped about vehicles because of this reason, i just see this feature as Animations 2.0 because this is exactly how the animation hype started out.

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11 minutes ago, Blasted_Taco said:

I cant get hyped about vehicles because of this reason, i just see this feature as Animations 2.0 because this is exactly how the animation hype started out.

Yeah, that's what I mean. Right now the vehicle stuff sounds absolutely fantastic, but on the other side it could as well mean we still got a year to go till something new is in our hands. :>

Edited by Lexx2k
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31 minutes ago, Blasted_Taco said:

Maybe vehicles can work as cupboards? We already saw the animation of a zombie going though a window, crawling a bit in the board and falling into the floor, so that could work.

 

Also for the love of god give us something a bit more indepth about the animations, what does "animation work" even mean by now, we already saw the exporting/importing animations for like 2 months and nothing came out of it, we saw the LUA change replacing the old system with the new system, the replacement of the "bit", "scratch" old system and the smoothing of transition while player rotates. 

 

Why not explain what is going to happen first? The animations or vehicle (no ETA) because they cannot co-exist, they must merge sooner or later and all the testing that goes into the vehicles is going to be null when the animations kicks in (in my opinion), are they begin merged together? is that the animation work we hear about? 

 

I cant get hyped about vehicles because of this reason, i just see this feature as Animations 2.0 because this is exactly how the animation hype started out.

 

Then don't get hyped. Please, for the love of all that is good in this world, stop even trying to get  hyped up about things.

 

Hype is bad. Expecting things to come imminently and desperately waiting for them does no favors.

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8 minutes ago, Butter Bot said:

 

Then don't get hyped. Please, for the love of all that is good in this world, stop even trying to get  hyped up about things.

 

Hype is bad. Expecting things to come imminently and desperately waiting for them does no favors.

 

Yes. There's nothing game developers hate more than people being hyped about their work.

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4 minutes ago, Octopus said:

 

Yes. There's nothing game developers hate more than people being hyped about their work.

Marketers hate him! Scienmagists on the Internet have found a revolutionary new way to avoid disappointment that is helping gamers of all ages tough the wait out! CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

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Just now, trombonaught said:

Bump on this. People can move CRAZY fast right now, but it is necessary given the size of the map. Hoping for a huge sprint nerf when vehicles hit the game.

I thought movement speed's pretty realistic right now, but we'll see, as it becomes nesc. May spread out the map a lil, but it's based on a real-world location, so only somuch can do.

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Just now, trombonaught said:

Bump on this. People can move CRAZY fast right now, but it is necessary given the size of the map. Hoping for a huge sprint nerf when vehicles hit the game.

Which indirectly will lead to slower zombies. Which I hope will lead to hordes being more dangerous with bigger numbers. also better combat pls.

 

Currently I can run around with an axe or baseball bat and fight 40+ zeds at once.

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2 hours ago, Lexx2k said:

Yeah, that's what I mean. Right now the vehicle stuff sounds absolutely fantastic, but on the other side it could as well mean we still got a year to go till something new is in our hands. :>

The upside to this is it gives me more time with my Indestructo-Trombo-Tower-3000-Zed-Proof-SuperFortress. I love my MP base in the GoodOldDayzPvE server, but I imagine vehicles and animations will each require server wipes D:  D:  D:

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2 minutes ago, kirrus said:

I thought movement speed's pretty realistic right now, but we'll see, as it becomes nesc. May spread out the map a lil, but it's based on a real-world location, so only somuch can do.

I think the speed is close to realistic for a full on sprint, but I know no man or woman that can sprint for miles.

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