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nasKo

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Evenin’ all. Here’s the latest from the Knox Event.

CURRENT VEHICLES BETA

We have just released public vehicles build 39. It’s another fairly weighty changelist, but the highlight of it is that the many, varied and major FPS optimizations we discussed last weekhave arrived. We’d love to hear about any changes you notice in performance. Likewise, however, we will need to hear of any bugs this has introduced. We’ve eradicated most of the gremlins backstage (like checkerboard lighting updates, flickering UIs windows, invisible ground objects etc) but there may well be other curiosities that our in-house testers haven’t found. Please let us know in the build release thread.

Something we are aware of is that in this version there’s more work to do with the UI. We’ve made significant optimizations by sacrificing UI FPS for the sake of the FPS of the overall game, which is clearly of a greater priority. On top of this, some of the windows may appear more transparent than usual. We’ll look to improve smoothness and responsiveness in future builds, but we hope any additional bugs or annoyances will pale compared to the significant FPS improvements. Elsewhere in the vehicles beta, meanwhile:

  • In preparation for the full release of the vehicles we’ve also added some tutorial windows that appear when new players first boot the game up. If there are any salient details we’ve missed here then please let us know! We’ve also made it so that vehicles are automatically enabled in all games, unless deselected in Sandbox options.

car-tutorials-768x444.jpg

  • For MP we have raised the speed limit we previously imposed when map loading was far more of an issue. The default is now an in-game 80mph, although this can now also be played around with in your Server Options.
  • Car spawn zones have been added to the small settlement south of Riverside. Various unclear aspects of in-game text and UI icons have been improved. Car damage at low speeds has been nerfed. Radio transmission ranges have been increased to cater for the extended map.
  • In terms of fixed bugs, there are a few, but the biggest irritations hopefully salved include: miniature MP vehicle sizes gone, reversed textures and backwards writing on some vehicles fixed and the much-reported self-duplicating cars on servers addressed. Likewise various background memory leaks and the like have been knocked out of the build, and your FPS no longer holds as much sway over your steering.

Beyond immediate bug fixing from community reports the coming week’s focus will be on wider player-built gates to let players store their vehicles more safely, addressing the teleportation issues that can occur when passengers sit in a lag-impacted vehicle and implementing the final sounds for our ‘normal’ and ‘small’ car types.

BUILDS BEYOND VEHICLES

While the majority of the team work on the vehicles build – Stas (chat upgrade), Mark (animations) and Turbo (fog, snow and new climate/weather system) continue to work away in the background.

Turbo tends to sit away from the main team (his speciality being over-arching systems that we can tie into the main game like his existing seasonal changes and radio systems) and he’s currently working on an improved dynamic weather system that he hopes will make his existing seasons feel more real, and give a greater sense of day-to-day variety.

This will also mean that different weather effects will move over the map in real-time. Here, for example, is a debug thunderstorm moving over the south of the current map – between March Ridge and West Point.

This all generated by a system of simulated cold and warm fronts of varying strengths. An in-game change from Warm to Cold, for example, will result in a day with rain in the morning getting heavier as the day goes on, with the possibility of a tropical storm in summer, or a blizzard in winter. The intensity of the rain, and thunder, meanwhile is all dependent on the simulated front strength.

Turbo-graph1.jpg

When mixed in with the new fog that’ll see misty mornings slowly clearing in the sunshine this should give a far greater feeling of variety as each day passes. What’s more, as a part of this weather upgrade Turbo is also looking at improving our current use of shaders to increase the feeling of seasonal change in PZ – giving it a subtle yet tangible feeling of it being either a warm and vibrant day of summer, or a pale and hazy day in winter.

Alongside this Turbo intends to improve the SFX to reflect seasonal change better too – removing birdsong from winter, introducing snow crunch etc. When this ready, in the world beyond vehicles, we will also need to rebalance our farming system too in terms of the change in daily/seasonal rainfall – itself a fairly old system that could do with some TLC.

This week’s bannister-less deathtrap from актёрище. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. 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 open for chat and hijinks too. Oh, and check out the findings of the latest great loot survey from ShylokVakarian. Fanks!

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10 minutes ago, Kuren said:


My guess would be we get interiors as well as visuals for opening doors and trunks when animations are added.

 

This is correct. The way 3D models in the game currently work forbid characters to interact with vehicles so as of now interiors are pointless cause you'd have no driver in the car which would be more distracting/disturbing than opaque windows. Once animation build is integrated,  which overhauls how 3D models work within the scene, we'll have the ability to place a character inside a car and thus interiors (which are already modelled) will be added along with transparent windows.

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1 hour ago, Keshash said:

Also, it would be pretty cool if there were radio broadcasts about incoming storms.

At least in the early days ;)

 

 

Or maybe there could be a meteorologist who bunkers down with their satellite screens and delivers post-apocalypse weather reports while dealing with the occassional zombie attack live on-air... 

 

Now I'm just thinking about general survivor stories making appearances on radio stations...

 

Now I'm thinking, what if there were AI chatbots on certain radio frequencies?!

 

Anyways, that weather work looks amazing and will really bring the world alive even more than the birdsong, erosion and current weather already have.

Edited by trombonaught
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44 minutes ago, trombonaught said:

At least in the early days ;)

 

 

Or maybe there could be a meteorologist who bunkers down with their satellite screens and delivers post-apocalypse weather reports while dealing with the occassional zombie attack live on-air... 

 

Now I'm just thinking about general survivor stories making appearances on radio stations...

 

Now I'm thinking, what if there were AI chatbots on certain radio frequencies?!

 

Anyways, that weather work looks amazing and will really bring the world alive even more than the birdsong, erosion and current weather already have.

For what it's worth, there is a meteorological detachment/unit actually based in the real Fort Knox.

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4 hours ago, Kim Jong Un said:

I would absolutely hate to have windows break for something entirely out of my control especially if it's unpreventable. 

 

3 hours ago, EnigmaGrey said:

I'd be totally fine with the world being washed away in a storm . . . so long as options are present in sandbox for anyone that'll proceed to complain.


While I'm usually all for more things that can kill you in PZ.. Something random like a super apocalyptic storm that wouldn't likely happen in Kentucky in the 90s isn't something I feel like most players would enjoy (even the ones that love the "this is how you die" outlook of PZ like me). Although it would be a cool extreme sandbox setting :)

I'm always for more harder and easier settings in sandbox and I'm always for more ways to die in PZ (and still want the breaking of windows to attract way more zombies as a simple nerf/buff so badly more than anything besides hunting lol) but I feel like the ways to die should be more realistic in the vanilla version of a zombie simulator game like PZ. Personally when I look at the Romero style zombie apocalypse, it's about real survival, especially in the winter (aka hard mode lol) and surviving the unexplained immortal walking undead along with that of course lol

 

That being said, I would be fine with a really rare chance of a super storm that would blast out your windows if they weren't boarded up (but it might be nice if there was some kind of radio warning, even if it's on a hidden military frequency).

 

Also, I feel like we all always forget that "Dragons" will change a lot of things and add a lot of chaos and ways to die that I can't wait for but that's the kind of unexpected/interactive fun you can defend against with skills and weapons :)

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12 hours ago, martingee said:

http://kyweathercenter.com/?p=1816

 

just saying...

 

Although the pictures weren't showing when I last looked.


The pictures wouldn't load like you said but I read the article :) I actually lived in Maryland at the time and also got hit by the Storm of the Century like Kentucky did. Same speeds of winds and same snowfall as described in the article. The blizzard itself was certainly crazy and the feet of snow with giant snowbanks/drifts were crippling to deal with afterwards. It was definitely good to have food stored up after hearing the weather reports. That being said, those winds weren't breaking windows let alone destroying doors. Your windows and doors would most likely be completely blocked by snow on a few or even all sides of your house though (depending on wind direction and how many doors/windows you had, etcetera).

The article you linked says 40mph+ winds so at most you'd be seeing some branches come down (possibly on your house if they're close enough) with the added weight of the snow. Bigger branches hanging above or next to your house could do damage but the wind would have to be going 50mph+ to do real damage to buildings on it's own.

Source: https://www.hwn.org/resources/bws.html

 

Spoiler

Force 7
Strength: Moderate Gale
Speed: 32-38 mph, 51-61 kph
Observations: Whole trees sway, large waves ("heaping sea")

Force 8
Strength: Fresh Gale
Speed: 39-46 mph, 62-74
Observations: Twigs break off trees, moderately high sea with blowing foam

Force 9
Strength: Strong Gale
Speed: 47-54 mph, 75-87 kph
Observations: Branches break off trees, shingles blown from roofs, high crested waves

 

Force 10
Strength: Whole Gale
Speed: 55-63 mph, 88-101 kph
Observations: Some trees blown down, damage to buildings, high churning white sea

 

It would actually be really cool to see the Storm of the Century in the game as part of the late game/hardcore mode imo :D Not sure how you could make the crippling feet of snow and snowbanks/drifts work gameplay wise (and it would still be nice for there to be a radio warning of some kind that you can find even if it's on a secret channel) but it would be cool to have a super blizzard show up months into the game in mid March as a event kind of like the helicopter is now. You could easily freeze to death or run out of food (especially if trapped by the snow) and with the upcoming weather stuff it would be pretty cool looking on it's extreme snow settings :)

Not sure if that would mess with the lore though as I remember it used to be in sandbox and considered semi-lore that the game took place in 1993 (the year of the storm) but the game by default starts you in July, after the storm had hit that year in March. Still would be cool to see such a historic blizzard and realistic extreme weather event that I lived through in the game though :)

 

Edited by Kuren
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