Jump to content

PZ Upcoming Features forum section


GHawkins

Recommended Posts

Let me start by stating that the "problem" I will be addressing in this post is not one I necessarily share, though it is something I ran in to when recently returning to the game after quite a long hiatus. I'd say that this suggestion is more for the benefit of others.

 

The thing in question is that, aside from the wiki (which can be barebones on some articles), Project Zomboid lacks a centralized section with a list of its features, implemented and under development. Although the weekly mondoids do a very good job of bringing development updates and news to the player base, their "all-news-we-have" structure can make it very hard to track down a mondoid where a specific piece of information was mentioned. 

 

This can be especially confusing to new players who have either recently purchased the game or are considering doing so, since, although the forums are loaded with references to "animation update", "NPC update" and "vehicle update", only the latter has been mentioned in-depth in the last few mondoids. It'd be a shame when this category of (potential) players is put off the game by the perceived lack of information regarding upcoming or implemented features, even though the information is readily available if one knows where to look and has the patience to do so.

 

My suggestion is therefore that a new forum section is created, with a title something akin to "PZ Features", where a new topic is created for the largest new/old game systems as they are announced and developed. There can be a topic for the NPC update, one for the Animation update, one for the Vehicle update, but also one for the already implemented Erosion system, and so on.

 

The idea is that in these topics, a few quick details about the feature are described so that anyone who has not read the mondoid that originally mentioned the feature can still read up on it without having to search through the mondoid archive.

 

So, for example;

 

Title: Space Exploration

 

Developers: John Doe, Jane Doe

Status: In Development, awaiting implementation of vehicle update.

Summary: The space exploration feature will see zombies to expand through the solar system, allowing the player to craft their own spacecraft and fight the undead on the surface of the moon, or any other planet in the solar system.

 

 

[Insert all other information, videos or images based on the information provided in weekly mondoids, irrelevant of the date they were posted, so a complete guide/description/status update is created on the feature]

 

I hope this will make it easier for all potential, new and old players to stay updated on everything the game has to offer at the moment, or will offer in the future.

 

*edit: Noticed the way I structured a sentence made it seem like no information has been provided about NPC or animations. Fixed that.

 

*edit2: I am also very well aware that the Build Status Article on the project zomboid website essentially does a bit of what I just described. My suggestion is intended to go further by making all mondoid information readily available, which will allow a person to understand the full picture or circumstances behind any potential delays.

Edited by GHawkins
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, xXSly_WolfyXx said:

Sounds like it would be a very nice thing to have, Sadly I doubt they would want to do this for various reasons. All other attempts to get the devs to do some sort of road map like thing have been shut down as far as I know.

 

You should not compare this to a roadmap for the development off Project Zomboid. The section I propose should only contain features and information related to these features that has been publicly mentioned in the mondoids and is thus already available to those that seek it out.

 

To illustrate;

V for Victor and Vehicles

Here in my car

In my garage

Under the hood

Spiffin'

 

All of these mondoids contain information on the vehicles (I think I missed one...). If a person would want to know all there is to know about the vehicles, he or she would have to search through the mondoid archive and find all of these. Although all these mondoid titles relate to vehicles in some way, (and they are luckily very recent so they are all done in a row) other subjects in these mondoids aren't always obvious. For example, under the hood primarily deals with vehicles, but also features an update on the new animations. A player looking for information on the vehicles will find it in under the hood, but a player looking for the animations might not immediately look in a mondoid that appears to primarily contain information about vehicles.

 

My suggestion is simply a quality of life improvement for those seeking information about the game, for those who want to build their hype to a bit higher levels (me). Not to force the developers to commit to a roadmap or anything.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, GHawkins said:

Title: Space Exploration

 

Developers: John Doe, Jane Doe

Status: In Development, awaiting implementation of vehicle update.

Summary: The space exploration feature will see zombies to expand through the solar system, allowing the player to craft their own spacecraft and fight the undead on the surface of the moon, or any other planet in the solar system.

This is pretty much what would be on a roadmap though, Just saying ;) But I do see where you are coming from for the whole quality of life aspect and completely agree.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A roadmap would be more like;

 

April 2017: Release of vehicles update.

May 2017: Release of animation update.

June 2017: Release of Space exploration.

 

A feature documentation, which simply lists the already available information in a single spot so that a person does not have to search all over, is very different from a roadmap in that it states information already available, not introduces new information or lay anything out that isn't written down elsewhere.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Such a thing would just trigger people and turn into a fight like all the attempts to do similar things in the past.

 

And tha's assuming it really is relevant to the purchase of the game . . . We want people to buy the game because it's good now, not because it'll one distant day have the things they care about.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As someone who purchased the game in 2013, when the original Baldspot and Kate tutorial was still a thing (pillow :( ), I completely understand. I purchased the game as it was back then and could not have imagined that it would've gotten this far when I put it in my desura shopping card. I only later found out about all the other planned features.

 

The idea is simply a source of knowledge for the game, upcoming and present. Perhaps I should flesh out the example so that there's no mistaking of how I envision what I suggested. Notice that it contains no new information that could not be found in the mondoids, it just puts it all together on one page. (And please ignore any formatting errors, I just copy+pasted from the mondoid to slap this example together. Links are bound to not work.)

 

Title: Usable Vehicles

 

Developers: EasyPickins, General Arcade

Status: In development

Summary:  The introduction of various kinds of 3d vehicles in the game, both static (abandoned, broken, crashed) and usable.

 

V for Victor (and Vehicles); February 27, 2017

Spoiler

 

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-1-300x169.jpg

ProjectZomboid32111-300x169.png

l9KWq2R.jpg

 

 

 

Here In My Car; March 6, 2017

Spoiler

 

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.

 

 

 

In My Garage; March 13, 2017

Spoiler

 

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.

Martin-small-car.jpg

 

 

 

Under the Hood; March 20, 2017
 

Spoiler

 

The vehicles branch has a lot of momentum at present, so right now there’s currently a lot being done behind the scenes to pave the way for cars, emergency vehicles and the like.

 

In the run-up to vehicles and anims we are taking the opportunity to fix as many of the longstanding bugs that’ve built up as we possibly can – including some long-term UI/moodle ones that’ve been a pain to those who play in split-screen for a fair old while. This bug tracker purge is ongoing, and if you want to help out with a report then the tracker lives here.

This week we finalized the in-house document that we’ll be putting in place to ensure that vehicles are a health hazard as much as a survival asset, that we’ll detail as stuff is built into the game. In the interim, though, what’s been done this past week to ease in and facilitate EasyPickins’ and General Arcade’s long-promised physics-enhanced vehicles into a new test build, and beyond?

Engine smoothening. One of General Arcade’s primary vehicles branch entanglements has been in improving PZ’s capabilities in terms of map streaming and pop-up – but another issue we’ve butted up against frequently in the past is stuttering caused by Java’s resident gremlin ‘the garbage collector’. As such this week TIS have successfully spelunked into the deepest depths of PZ’s code to optimize affairs, which will have an impact game-wide and also make prolonged vehicle travel through busy/forested areas a far smoother ride.

Road decorating. When the a vehicles test build is released there won’t be a car on every drive (although vehicle proliferation will be a sandbox option) and as such we’ll be adding reasoning to the radio/TV lore and we also intend to have build-ups of destroyed vehicles on roads – especially towards the edge of the current map. It’s possible we’ll face engine limitations, but what we’re aiming for is a feeling of failed escapes from the Exclusion Zone when the sickness first descended on the area.

policewreck.jpg

Anims Compatibility Ensuring. Given the recent surge in activity that vehicles work finally coming to the boil has wrought, and the possibility that this will see them going into the full game prior to anims, a focus this week has been in ensuring that vehicles and anims systems will play nicely together. The main difference between the two branches is that the animation build effectively removes a system that’s been in the game since 3D models were first introduced: the fact that every frame renders the 3D characters into 2D sprites that draw in place.

Now, in the anims branch, isometric projection draws the characters in-place at the right place in the screen. This is a major optimization that removes the requirement of off-screen FBOs that are unavailable on some older cards, as well as optimizing the draw speed and makes the root motion (as well as interactions between multiple characters) work properly since the models and game world share the same coordinate space. As such, right now we’re sucking the vehicle juice out of their branch and redistributing it into our anims work – to make sure it all gels together when the time comes. There will be other things that need fixing up, but this is the main issue to resolve between the vehicles and anims branches and greatly benefit both in the end product.

Map Expansion. We generally don’t talk about map expansion until it’s ready to hit, but the next area will make full advantage of players being able to naturally spread out from their traditional urban starting points. There’ll also be vehicle-based locations we haven’t been able to feature before.

nolans.png

 

 

 

Spiffin’; March 27, 2017

 

Spoiler

 

Work on the internal test branch for cars continues, alongside Build 37 and its general bug purge, while Martin continues to pump out vehicle models and their destroyed counterparts.

Community feedback on the initial cars vid was extremely positive, but some people felt they ‘popped out’ from the environment a little – it’s something we’re aware of and as such he’s also experimenting with a texture to make general cars look a little more weathered, as well as muting the general colours we use a little so they fit more snugly into the PZ map tiles. The reds, greens and blues we initially used were very pure. So, behold: cars that will (hopefully) fit in with the PZ world a little better once they’re up and running in the test build.

grimier-cars-300x92.jpg

Something else that’s a part of our vehicles build, meanwhile, is some work EasyPickins put in on zombie pathfinding that we haven’t mentioned so far. Clearly, having a bunch of movable objects on the game map adds complications (and exploits) when we have a bunch of zombies traipsing after you and providing a mounting threat.

As such in the vehicles branch we currently have some new pathfinding work that you can see in an early test screen while we still had the blue trucks with the wonky wheel.

Right now the path-finding seems okay, but the actual following needs some polish (there’s a few zeds getting stuck on things) but it’s a fantastic system to take into the internal testing stage of affairs. Our thanks to Tim for all the work he put into it.

 

Edited by GHawkins
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, GHawkins said:

Title: Space Exploration

 

Developers: John Doe, Jane Doe

Status: In Development, awaiting implementation of vehicle update.

Summary: The space exploration feature will see zombies to expand through the solar system, allowing the player to craft their own spacecraft and fight the undead on the surface of the moon, or any other planet in the solar system.

 

that sounds sick, like some kinda korean or japanese take on romeros zombie flicks

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, zoeyflower said:

that sounds sick, like some kinda korean or japanese take on romeros zombie flicks

Indeed, but there's one more issue though:

Quote

[...] and fight the undead on the surface of the moon, or any other planet in the solar system.

Moon is not a planet :D.

 

About the original thread though, except for Wiki, there are actually two places where you can see the upcoming features: Status and Build History as well as Commonly Suggested Suggestions thread which have Soon/In Progress/Added marked in the Tentative Yes's for upcoming features, although since the thread evolved much, the title might be misleading a bit.

Edited by Faalagorn
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...