Dead of Night / Kitchen Sink Drama - Thursdoid double post

[Batsphinx]

Sorry for not reposting last week everyone!

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Dead of Night 12/04/18

Hey all, Thursday blessings be upon us all.

IWBUMS Vehicles Beta

Last week we moved our vehicles build into the more established public IWBUMS beta slot, and asked for feedback from survivors who hadn’t taken them for a spin yet. What we’ve heard on this issue has been pretty positive (and most of the bugs flushed out in the process have been minor in the scheme of things) so good steps have been made toward the public release.

The primary thing that we’d like to address before releasing properly is the fact that in the current build connecting to a distant server can result in slow map/chunk loading – an issue we’ll have networking guru Bitbaboon Steve investigating tomorrow.

In the mean-time bug-fixing and polish continues, including nips and tucks to a few longstanding features so that we have as clean a build as possible for the public release – and the inevitable bug report deluge that will come with the seismically wider audience. To this end we just released public IWBUMS beta build 39.45.

Amongst many other things this build will increase the number of different places you’ll find car keys, improve how car fade-out works, stopped ‘fake dead’ zombies being able to bite you through vehicles, fixed receiving broadcasts giving you XP, increased loot spawn chances of items like shovels and cigarettes, provided sandbox options for how much gas is found in vehicle tanks and fixed/updated the burnt out car wrecks.

Animation update                 

Vehicles, and the engine changes made to accommodate them, are the second biggest change PZ’s seen since its inception – with the animations and character models update that BitBaboon Mark is currently working with being the biggest.

You might recall a bug that we spotlit in this video – that when a character was loaded up from a save he/she would appear as an uncomfortable-looking ball. This was because there was no weapon profile attached, and therefore had no idle or walk anims to fall back on.

To fix this issue, and to improve the animations build as a whole, Mark has now made this process data-driven. He’s implemented a substate system and layers to the impending animation code that allows for many continuous ‘states’ to be blended together based on a character’s situation.

“Imagine a character that has a lightly damaged leg and badly damaged head,” explains Mark. “This system would calculate based on these parameters: blend together a walk animation, a bit of a left leg limping animation, and on top of that also blend in the holding head animation.”

“This allows us to have an (overall) small and more polished set of animations – which can produce a huge range of results based around the character’s situation. In addition to the code under the hood, the data is also being modularised along with in-game tools and our AnimZed editor – so that we can validate and implement easily.”

In addition, it shouldn’t go unmentioned that this opens up the animation system to extreme moddability since the state system can be modified in a text file and use common export formats for animations and models.

Gamepad improvements

With his initial work on the new chat system and java upgrade complete and waiting for thorough testing, General Arcade’s Stas is now starting work on improving gamepad controller support for a later version – as there are many players who like to veer away from keyboard control, or are ardent split-screen players.

First on the menu will be the ability to select your pad and test it’s working from PZ options screens, then the ability to adjust button bindings and a ‘general info’ tab to guide players with more specialist set-ups.

Weather/Seasons Improvement

Turbo’s work on giving a greater feeling of seasonal change to PZ, and a system that provides more realistic seasonal weather variation continues. With the caveat that the visual intensity of these features still requires some balance, here’s a time-lapse of some WIP summer weather starting on the 4^th July.

Then here’s a far faster timelapse of wintry scenes. Here you can see EP’s existing fractal snow now synced with the climate system’s snowfall values and associated strength. Snow also melts away based on temperatures above zero and sunlight factor. We’d like to improve the overall checker-board way in which snow appears/disappears, but then again this is also less jarring when seen in-game and not with time sped up significantly.

Kitchen Sink Drama - 19/04/18

Much of life is currently delicately adding polish to the IWBUMS beta vehicle build in preparation for its public release, to the extent that some of the vehicles devs are now working on aspects of it that’ll be going into the first patch – for fear of adding unexpected gremlins with larger scale changes.

With this in mind then – the headlines are:

• We’ve just released vehicles IWBUMS beta 39.49.  It’s one of the last beta releases we anticipate putting out before the full Build 39 release, if not the last, so it’s fairly fix-centric. One aspect worthy of mention though (as it’s a frequent forum request) is the ability to use a Generator when not in direct proximity of a building. We’ve done this so gas pumps can now be powered, and fuel can now be obtained after the electricity cut-off for all your vehicular needs.

• Also in IWBUMS 39.49: we’ve been balancing car damage, increasing bumpiness when you drive over forest and farmland tiles and finessed our map chunk loading system a bit to hopefully improve MP streaming a little – if you have feedback from when you play on a distant server with a high ping we’d love to hear it. Also: many and various fixes covering many different aspects of the game.

• Turbo is currently working on a new weather/climate/seasons system for the game, and yesterday delivered his first fully gameplay-integrated build into testing, along with all its climate-changing debug capabilities. While he waits for feedback his intention is to start adding the new/improved sounds for his more varied weather effects and to stress the seasonal change (snow crunch instead of footsteps, different birdsong, more varied wind etc).

• Bitbaboon Mark continues his work with the animation system, ready for when we can swap development over into them when the dust has settled after vehicles. He has just “finished splitting the states into data sets”, essentially making all the animation sets compatible with the new data-driven system he described in last week’s blog. In the mean-time, on our side of the world, this week and next we’re doing an art pass over all Martin’s clothing and models so it’s ready for integration in terms of pure visuals – and we don’t have to mess around with colours that are a bit too garish etc once they’re in-game.

• Elsewhere: Stas is working on the improved gamepad support for the next version, larger-scale locations in Louisville are being mapped, Bitbaboon Steve is digging into MP connectivity and lag, and plans are being made for how we’re going to ‘refresh’ some of our more longstanding features in future builds – with farming being a prime contender in the next version where we’ll be revamping the weather and it’ll be a natural fit.

• We’d like to officially welcome Beard aboard the good ship Zomboid. This lovely chap is a new addition to our Tech Support task force, and will be appearing across our full range of forums for those of you needing advice on servers, running PZ and anywhere else you might run into problems. While undertaking his hazing ritual, we would only ask that you provide him with specs info on your machine and whether or not you’re running any mods.

[HerbivoreTheGoat]

Really looking forward to public vehicles and animations in the future! I don't claim to know a thing about game development so it may be hard to calculate, but when might you guess that vehicles and animations will both be public?

[Keshash]

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We’d like to officially welcome Beard aboard the good ship Zomboid. 

No worries. It's on the house