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nasKo

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As noted last week, we’ve been a little hamstrung by the Russian May holidays (over a week off, you lucky Russians!) and as such improvements and fixes to the client-side zombies we were testing last week will predominantly be on next week’s menu.
 

Client ownership should be the last largescale technical hurdle the guys face, and details on what’s being done and why can be found here.


As such, this week’s Thursdoid will be a Noiseworks SFX special – which will be of relief to those who aren’t interested in MP, but of irritation to those who are. Our apologies to anyone put out, but hopefully you’ll still share our enthusiasm for some of the cool stuff that’s being laid out below.
 

As we’ve mentioned before, Noiseworks are operating separately from the main team – with only occasional requests for us to put new hooks into the game where there weren’t any previously. None of this is slowing anything else down, so don’t fret on that account. Our thanks to Michael and Matteo from Noiseworks for their help with this week’s blog.


FOOTSTEPS

Right now in the game versions you’re playing there are around 72 different sounds available for an individual footstep.

When the Noiseworks overhaul is merged in there will be 3044.
 

Why so many? Well.. the game will take into account what surface you (or your friends) are walking on.

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There are ten main surface types: Concrete, Grass, Gravel, Puddle, Snow, Wood, Carpet, Dirt, Sand, Ceramic and another surface category that’s essentially ‘footsteps heard upstairs’.
 

On top of this the new sound system will also take into account what sort of shoes you are wearing – if any. There are different sounds for each surface dependent on whether you are barefoot, wearing boots, or wearing more standard sneakers/shoes. 
 

Then on top of *this* each footwear type has been recorded in four different performances: a Sneak footstep, a Walk footstep, a Run footstep, and a Sprint footstep.
 

And in amongst all of the above? Well there’s also dry and wet versions for external sounds that depend on the RainIntensity values, and likewise surface modifiers for walking on glass and through puddles.
 

When you mix it all in with the rest of the SFX (like additional water drop impact details on harder surfaces like concrete) then it truly is, as the kids are told we say, ‘immersive af’. 
 

Here’s a vid!
 

Please note this is ALL work in progress, being heard without the full soundscape, will have volumes balanced, has an occasional audible ‘double footstep’ bug that will need a fix etc. etc.


WILDLIFE

We previously shared an ambiance video in which the natural world of Kentucky can be heard in amongst the various weather and world effects. What we didn’t say, though, was what was being heard and how.
 

Here it is reposted in all its glory. 


Essentially here we have a range of different mammals and bird species, all residents of Kentucky, that can be heard through the world. Their unseen location is completely dynamic, and spawned around the player randomly.
 

Each species sound has a different chance of playing that’s based on when you’d hear them in real life – so it depends on the season, the time of day and which ‘map zone area’ you are in: forest, deep forest, town, vegetation/field, close to water etc.
 

On top of this each different map zone has different ‘insect noise’ sound beds that depends on the time of day, while there are also random birds that will be heard in particular randomly assigned trees that are appropriate to your location.
 

Right now animals and bird sounds will start to peter out when the weather changes, or the wind picks up – and in future we would like the noise of gunfire (for example) to prompt noises of birds taking flight.
 

(Beyond this too, we would clearly like these sounds attached to real/seen birds and beasts – but we’re clearly not at this point yet.)

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Right now Noiseworks have sourced around 70% of the bird/beast noises we need (some might be harder to find than others) but hooks are already present for all of ‘em.
 

Here’s the current bird list so you can get an idea of the breadth we’re aiming for: Wild Turkey, Grebe, Pigeon, Cuckoo, Sandhill Crane, Gull, Loon, Heron, Hawk, Eagle, Owl, Woodpecker, Eastern Phoebe, Kingbird, Shrike, Vireo, Bluejay, Lark, Swallow, Nuthatch, Winter Wren, Kinglet, Thrush, Catbird, Mockingbird, Sparrow, Grosbeak, Longspur, Bunting, Oriole, Warbler, Quail, Crow and Raven.


WEATHER

Next, we go over to Noiseworks’ Sound Designer Matteo Lupieri for the lowdown on how weather ties to the new soundscape.

“The weather system was an interesting one to work on!” explains Matteo. “We needed to take into consideration that as weather intensity changes with more wind and more rain, the whole world surrounding the player should be heard to react.”

“So when in a forest, the rustle of grass and trees can be heard increasing with wind intensity – and raindrops hitting the canopy will get louder and busier as the rain gets heavier. You will also hear trees creaking, and branches snapping and falling during storms.”

“We’ve also thought of the equivalent sounds in urban areas – so in towns you’ll hear metal signs squeaking and creaking more and more based on the wind intensity. Similarly, lakes and rivers will get agitated and start to form audible waves with stronger and stronger winds”.


OTHER NOISES

Next time we do a Noiseworks update we can inform on the current car noises (which we haven’t heard ourselves yet), the zed noises themselves (which we are being very annoying and prima-donnaish about) and the situational music revamp (which amaze-o Zach Beever is back in touch about and supplying original multitracks for).
 

It’s all super exciting and, we hope, interesting enough to warrant a blog while Yuri and Andrei are off on their Russian holidays.

 

This week’s Zeddy Mercury from TM_Monkey on Reddit. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. 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 you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right hereOur Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

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Very impressive and well thought out. As i understand you tell Noiseworks what sound effects you need and they design it? Re-watched video two times, its a bit hard to hear tree creaking noises during strong wind, but still, that was very pleasant to listen.

 

Speaking about zed noises, you know what would be nice - when attacking zeds, on top flesh hitting sound effects add occasional bone cracking sound. Imagine when you land a one hit kill or hit so strong, that even bones crack :)

 

edit:

Found an example, you can clearly hear prolonged tree creaking sounds:

 

 

Edited by Toshis
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Claps hands enthusiastically....wonderful wonderful post. Thank you so much for giving us "single player" players something to be excited about. It feels like it's been a long time since new features and updates have been directed toward the single player gameplay. Not at all complaining. I/we are being very patient as the team concentrates on getting multiplayer out the door. I've watched for months as the posts get louder and louder regarding  "When Is Multiplayer Going To Be Finished?" After a while it gets pretty annoying. It's understandable that at some point you would want to direct all resources toward getting this feature finished. Maybe you'll be able to take a breath afterwards. True, I have missed the updates and new objects that I use to wait for each week but, I'm sure you have noticed that there has been no growling and hissing coming from the single player group. We appreciate all your hard work and dedication and recognize that the world does not revolve around us. 

 

Again let me offer accolades to the Noiseworks people for their great work. Loving every bit of it and looking forward to enjoying these new sounds in my game. Hat's off to the PZ team for reaching out to Noiseworks to continue their efforts in making Project Zomboid the greatest zombie/survival game there is. 

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I dont know why I still checking this useless thursday news. I really have the feeling to be led by the nose by devs, explaining for months (years indeed) working on, you know what. We dont care about playing at 120 pp on a server. We are mainly small groups of friends (3/4/6 people). For a year now, "There is covid", "a week of vacation in russia", ... And being told of news on solo (witch we dont play, and I guess, witch is puching back in the time the one interesting release). So of course, solo players are please every week, but the others are just taken for fools.

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22 minutes ago, sucaralt said:

I dont know why I still checking this useless thursday news. I really have the feeling to be led by the nose by devs, explaining for months (years indeed) working on, you know what. We dont care about playing at 120 pp on a server. We are mainly small groups of friends (3/4/6 people). For a year now, "There is covid", "a week of vacation in russia", ... And being told of news on solo (witch we dont play, and I guess, witch is puching back in the time the one interesting release). So of course, solo players are please every week, but the others are just taken for fools.

As much as i appreciate the effort in the sound design....the majority of players legit dosent care they just wanna play with maybe 1 or two friends your post really sums up the feels i has over the past months thank you

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41 minutes ago, sucaralt said:

I dont know why I still checking this useless thursday news. I really have the feeling to be led by the nose by devs, explaining for months (years indeed) working on, you know what. We dont care about playing at 120 pp on a server. We are mainly small groups of friends (3/4/6 people). For a year now, "There is covid", "a week of vacation in russia", ... And being told of news on solo (witch we dont play, and I guess, witch is puching back in the time the one interesting release). So of course, solo players are please every week, but the others are just taken for fools.

I don't know what to say. I'm getting the impression you've barely read the past blog posts? 

We have had plenty of people say they're tired of all the reports on MP development, and now you're here telling us we are somehow pleasing solo players every week. 

 

MP has one big technical hurdle left before we're considering a release. That's the client ownership swap that we've mentioned.

We have said time and time again that the remaining issues do not discriminate between 2 or 30 or 100 players, more players just made them easier to spot.  

We've also said that the first release of MP will only support up to 32 players max and we will continue to push that number while public testing can already commence.  

I know there are a lot of them, and I don't blame anyone for not reading every single one, but that's something we've been saying multiple times in our blogs and in the comments.

 

 

18 minutes ago, tagebuch said:

As much as i appreciate the effort in the sound design....the majority of players legit dosent care they just wanna play with maybe 1 or two friends your post really sums up the feels i has over the past months thank you

Thanks for letting us know.  

Due to the holidays there was not much to report on this week in terms of MP development, which is why we reported on *something* instead. Surely better to update people on progress of other departments than radio silence just because we couldn't say much on MP compared to last week.

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Seems like some people dont understand that by improving graphics, sound or other game mechanics, not only single player experience becomes better, but also multiplayer. Its a win - win situation. Also, it seems that some people dont understand that multiplayer and audio is worked by different people in parallel. And also, some people dont understand how hard and long it is to develop a game. To create something from nothing. Personally, i do care about other aspects of the game, not just multiplayer.

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My friend as much as i love this game ill have to say nobody gives a shit about military boots sneaking noise on third floor of a wooden house there are more important things to put your time in like trapping or hunting you promised for months and the game not freezing every time theres more than 10 zombies on screen.

 

Thank you

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2 hours ago, ulysses said:

My friend as much as i love this game ill have to say nobody gives a shit about military boots sneaking noise on third floor of a wooden house there are more important things to put your time in like trapping or hunting you promised for months and the game not freezing every time theres more than 10 zombies on screen.

 

Thank you

The team working on sounds is a team of sound engineers and designers that was specifically hired to make sounds. 

People do care about immersion and sound is a big part of that. 

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Are you planning to update the new soundscape in the coming update? Or is that something that's further down the road? 

I don't play multiplayer, so I don't know how much improvement I'm going to actually see in the next update. But if the new sounds drop that would be more than enough to make it totally worth the wait. (It's always worth the wait, but you know what I mean)

Edited by Snuffleupagus
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3 hours ago, Snuffleupagus said:

Are you planning to update the new soundscape in the coming update? Or is that something that's further down the road? 

I don't play multiplayer, so I don't know how much improvement I'm going to actually see in the next update. But if the new sounds drop that would be more than enough to make it totally worth the wait. (It's always worth the wait, but you know what I mean)

The sound update will come later :)

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On 07/05/2021 at 13:07, nasKo said:

Je ne sais pas quoi dire. J'ai l'impression que vous avez à peine lu les derniers articles du blog? 

Nous avons eu beaucoup de gens qui ont dit qu'ils étaient fatigués de tous les rapports sur le développement des MP, et maintenant vous êtes ici pour nous dire que nous sommes en quelque sorte en train de plaire aux joueurs en solo chaque semaine. 

etc ...

 

I read every news and dev blog. I appreciated when you did a thursdoy explaining in details your problems and the challenge MP was to synchronise everything together. It's ok, MP focus lasts for couple of weeks and when I read "too much focus on MP" I just realized how far you were from it (we know how to survive in your game and incindentally how to read between your lines). This release should be your first and one priority (we are in may 2021). You know i'm right and how legitimate is our anger (I'm not alone). We just need a first  playable version with few pp, we are already used to bugs (previous version was not empty of bug anyway so it's okay). 

I'm sorry but I can't read anymore things on new birds noises implementation. Those extra workers should have been hired to finish MP.  Period

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You can't expect sound designers to finish MP faster, that's not how it works!

 

I for one love and appreciate the new sound effects big time! I am also waiting for multiplayer but I'm not gonna bitch when we get cool new content. I am excited to hear what snow sounds like.

 

The animals are also great!

Are Foxes are one of the mammals?

 

I really hope tameable foxes will be available when animals come out properly someday.

 

Edited by Gurluas
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9 hours ago, sucaralt said:

We just need a first  playable version with few pp, we are already used to bugs (previous version was not empty of bug anyway so it's okay). 

 

We have these conversations multiple times a week.
It boils down to the fact that MP needs to make a good first impression. Not squandering the opportunity to grow the game by releasing a buggy first build that's going to disappoint anyone who touches it is also a priority. 
People would get straight up omae wa mou shindeiru'd by zombies teleporting behind them and the word would quickly spread that MP is unplayable.

This would be a thing with a single person on a server or 20, so it doesn't make a difference. Actively working on just getting the game to work with 4 people or something would actively hold back development and is just not how it works; it's not some sort of stacked cake where the bottom piece is 2 players working fine, then finishing the second piece that allows 4 players to play without issues, etc.   

So again, the game would not be enjoyable even with just a few people because the core of the game - zombies - are simply unplayable right now. 

The explanations of the past blogposts should put this in perspective. I understand being frustrated about the time it takes but ignoring the reasons and explanations already given - especially when they are already addressing the argument you're trying to make - isn't helping you nor us by having to read you venting.
Nobody wants MP out more than us.

 

I also find it quite audacious to criticise us for the fact that we're planning out the future of the game beyond MP by having an external team work on an area where the game has been severely lacking in for quite some time.  

We're trying to make the best game we can. The only thing that would be satisfied with a release of unplayable MP is the impatience of few, and that only temporary because the reality of the state of MP would quickly set in. How we know? Because that's what happened in testing, the initial hype died down really quick.

There are more eyes on PZ now than ever before and wasting our opportunity to grow the game even further by releasing a bad but lasting first impression of MP would put us back, not forward.

 

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12 hours ago, sucaralt said:

This release should be your first and one priority (we are in may 2021). You know i'm right and how legitimate is our anger (I'm not alone). We just need a first  playable version with few pp, we are already used to bugs (previous version was not empty of bug anyway so it's okay). 

I bet it is their first and #1 priority, ain't like you or any of us get to see behind the scenes.  Tell me, how exactly would you show off the progress of re-writing the MP from scratch?  I imagine the goal is to make the MP nearly identical to the previous, from the player's perspective.  How would you excite people with updates saying "hey, we now have player sync, look at them walk around!" or "these horde is synced to ALL the players on the server!" when it would look almost the exact same as MP in build 40 and brought nothing new to the table?  The only way you'd really be able to show progress that looks noteworthy and ""exciting"" is showing people the chunks of code that make up the MP base, which isn't really that exciting when you don't understand code at all.  I'll agree and say this update post is a little lack luster (looking at the sound images) but updates about MP aren't any different. 

 

As for releasing it early, how is it that you don't see the writing on the wall when you say that?  You got a ton of games from the past couple years that basically released earlier than they should've and players, justifiably, got upset.  I guarantee that if they release it early like you want, all it would take is one bad experience caused by a bug (a server hitch while a horde chases you, leading to your demise for example) and the same players begging for MP would say "this game's shit" and they wouldn't want to play it again, especially if they were geared up and lost all of it because of a bug (on top of it, some might even say it was a cash grab from TIS, leading to more hate for doing the thing players asked them to do).  Maybe you wouldn't think this way but a lot of players would, look at Fallout 76 and Cyberpunk 2077 as examples.  I don't mean to sound dick-ish but how can you look at this and think it'd be different when history has clearly shown the opposite?

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Please keep up the good work! You guys rock!

Some people just don't understand the pipeline of game development.

 

I was worry about the connection and lag issue, but at least you guys found a way that seems work isn't it?

 

can't wait for the next post! 

 

I am also very interested about the plan for the next 2 , 3 years.

 

I know NPC and wild animal is one of the plan, but I would like to know more detail about it.

 

Much thanks! 

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On 10/05/2021 at 20:01, HerioJohnX said:

Continuez votre bon travail! Vous êtes top les gars!

Certaines personnes ne comprennent tout simplement pas le pipeline de développement de jeux.

 

J'étais préoccupé par le problème de connexion et de décalage, mais au moins, vous avez trouvé un moyen qui semble fonctionner, n'est-ce pas?

 

ne peut pas attendre le prochain post! 

 

Je suis également très intéressé par le plan pour les 2, 3 prochaines années.

 

Je sais que les PNJ et les animaux sauvages font partie du plan, mais j'aimerais en savoir plus à ce sujet.

 

Merci beaucoup! 

HI  HerioJohnX, PNJ will be probably implement in the game around year 2023/2024. A lot of work to do before. Be patient ! And dont complain ! 

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