[Notice: Last Weeks Mondoid can be found here]
https://projectzomboid.com/blog/2017/08/skull-face/
Current focus is getting 38 out of the door, while putting roots down for the initial vehicles release in Build 39 and beyond. And so…
BUILD 38
We’re fixing up and polish Build 38 for release, and want it to be as clean as possible so we can drop the vehicles build straight into IWBUMS beta testing afterwards as Build 39 – with the new map expansion that includes the new town of Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club.
This includes ironing the final kinks out of ChrisW’s rooftop rendering and peeking changes – as right now in the beta we’ve still got a few irritations like occasional see-through roof slants, canopies around the edges of buildings that never disappear and wonky player-built second floors. It’s ‘tidy up’ work more than anything, but we want it all to be as seamless as we can make it once it hits public.
As such, while this is done and in the build-up to release, we’ll continue to fix and polish RJ’s existing 38 work with graves, sandbox options and other stuff – alongside turning as much of the Bug Tracker from red to green as possible.
Yuri meanwhile, he of Vehicles Build fame, is going to transfer as many of his branch’s optimizations as we can into the IWBUMS version – so they’re not stuck in a holding pattern. He’ll also transfer his current work on improving gamepad controls and making sure that screens like in-game maps, foraging and sandbox game creation can all be navigated without a keyboard.
BITBABOON GANG
As regular readers will know we’ve now got Mark and Steve from Bitbaboon, both established Technical Directors from the land of AAA, bedded down with the team to help with animations (Mark) and MP/general optimization (Steve).
Steve’s first task is to optimize MP connectivity – and so we’ve set him up with a build so he can get some detailed stats back on bandwidth, cpu and memory for servers, and track what happens when latency rises. While he does so he’s also marking targets for when his role turns to more general FPS optimization.
Mark, meanwhile, is approaching the point at which the new animation system is merged into the main game code, but on a (development side debug) toggle. This means that it will always be integrated into the PZ build, allowing our coders to flick its various visual/gameplay switches ‘on’ as we go and start releasing test versions – keeping it in date with the main game
VEHICLES
We released Vehicle Test Build 16 on Friday, which was something of a ‘wider IWBUMS testing’ preparation build as it put vehicles on a toggle accessed from the Game Select screen. It also corrected and darkened shadow positioning as well as, hopefully, prevented unrealistic car-climbing and bouncing on zombie corpses.
Next up Yuri will be integrating Mash’s redone burnt car models, an example of which is below, before moving onto a spot of optimization. This said, in amongst it all, there are a few other aspects we’d like to see integrated before/during the 39 IWBUMS: specifically clearer headlights, red brakelights, car horns, sirens and accurate numbers of seats for each car model. We’ll see how much we can fit in, basically.
WOLDREN MAPS
If you fancy holding out somewhere new and different than can we also suggest you check out the wide range of awesome maps that Woldren has created? Over the River, especially, is pretty awesome – as it creates a huge bridge over from West Point, with its own docked ship nearby, and a range of interesting locations for you to explore on the opposite bank. Definitely one to check out.
NOLAN GATES
Something we’ll need to be adding to the main game in build 39+ are player-built gates that’ll allow vehicles inside. In the meantime the lovely Mister Nolan has you covered with his new Log Wall Gate mod. Vid here.
Today’s featured image from Boop. 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 Mondoids for info. The 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 here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
Rise of the Baboon
In ‘general beta updates’ news we’re continuing to chase bugs in both our IWBUMS public beta and the public vehicles beta. The IWBUMS beta needs to be polished and bug-crunched until it’s ready for release, and the vehicles beta needs to be fixed up until the cars are in a good enough state to be released as an ‘experimental vehicle’ toggle in the Build 39 IWBUMS beta very shortly afterward – alongside the new map extension.
We’ll be releasing a new IWBUMS version once Chris W has finished off his rooftops/building rendering fixes (primarily the issues surrounding player-built constructions) later this week, while a new vehicles build will probably appear beforehand – which will make cars climbing on top of other cars and burnt-out wrecks impossible and make cars ‘jump’ less when striking zeds.
Work has also continued to improve the sounds that vehicles make and, while still a work in progress, we hope that you agree that they are far improved on what we had last week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6xNH1JHDs
As you may know from previous Mondoids, we now have Mark Rowley working alongside us to integrate the long-awaited animations system we’ve constructed – which will in turn open the door to all manner of improvement and features that’ve been cooking backstage. Now his work is becoming a part of our internal animations build we thought it high time to drop the curtain on him, and have a Mondoid chat.
Before we begin it’s probably also worth mentioning that Mark’s colleague at Bitbaboon, Steve, will also be joining us for a little while each week to help out with MP issues – primarily looking at a fix for zombie lag and its resultant unfair injuries. [General Arcade’s Stas was initially being set on this, but was called away elsewhere and will hopefully return to PZ a little further down the line].
Hello Mark! First off, can you give a bit of background about who you are and the sort of stuff you’ve worked on previously?
Well I taught myself how to program way back on the C64, then progressed onto the Amiga and the demo/cracking scene. Then later on I studied electronics and decided to get a ‘real job’. I worked in fire detection, weights and measures and almost made a career at the Ministry of Defence before I was lucky enough to get offered a position at my first games company… that was 17 years ago and I haven’t looked back since.
Since then I have worked at many companies all over the world, on many titles. In terms of animation systems specifically I’ve worked on multiple games engines, but the largest would be the Assassins Creed Engine, Don King’s Prizefighter for Take2, procedural animations for Prince of Persia while at Ubisoft and then London 2012 Official Olympics game at SEGA.
Where’ve you encountered PZ before and what brought you into its orbit?
PZ has always been a game I have enjoyed and followed, so when I heard they were looking for some help, I jumped at the chance. I know Lemmy from long ago, during our mutual time at Reflections on Driv3r, and I have heard a lot about Will from colleagues at SEGA. It’s a very small industry!
While we had crossed paths a couple of years ago during my time at SEGA, it’s only been recently that I have been in a position to help out.
Just to get everyone up to speed – where was the new animation system when you joined us, and what have you added/improved in the past month or so?
It’s pretty impressive, lots of features and efficient, so my focus has been to make it easier to maintain and extend, and get it delivered to the players.
Over my career I have found the enormous value in data driven systems, and we have now implemented the foundation systems into PZ to allow data driven animation and character states that should mean its robust, easy to extend and more importantly easy to maintain.
You’re currently merging your work in, so what’s next? What plans have you and the team concocted?
The animation system is being merged system by system, and then we will hook each of them up. Each character ‘state’ will be implemented and updated to use the animation system as much as possible so in the future it becomes really easy to extend.
My work is also a drive to reduce code and eliminate bugs before they happen. As an example, let’s take ‘climbing over an object’ which in the initial anims build required code to pick a new animation for each and every type of object. This meant that whenever we wanted to add a new type of object and a new climb animation it would mean diving into the code and manually hooking up all the data.
Now we’re driving this logic through the animation system with much simpler queries to the player’s state and world which makes the change through pure data, and to help manage it we have a nice simple editor to go with the changes called AnimZed.
As a PZ player, during your work with the animation system so far and having access to Martin’s model and movement databanks, what aspects of the new animation system have you spotted that you reckon will bring cool stuff to the game? Will it be worth the (lengthy) (very lengthy) wait?
Firstly it will just be the way animation seems much smoother, but over time as we evolve the systems we can start to add more depth and subtlety. We have also looked at extracting the velocity and motion of character from the Animation data, so changing the pace can be controlled by Martin a lot more precisely.
Couple this extracted motion with the ability to blend between states of animation, and we will start to see more than just simple switches in animation. Imagine instead of walking and then suddenly limping when you get an injury, seeing that limp get progressively worse and really slowing you down the worse it gets… which will be even more fun when you’re slowing down those Z’s and watching them limp mindlessly after you.
It’s pretty evident that the wait has been a really long one, but I think it will be worth it when players start to see much more depth to the way things move, but also for the developers with the ability it creates to add more dynamic content – adding greater variations of players and zombie movement without the massive amounts of work it would previously involve.
It’s also making it much easier to bring other things, like animals, to the world without writing lots of complex code. I know the whole team is looking forward to unleashing this guy on the world.
This week we’ve also been getting your colleague Steve wired up to the PZ coding mainframe. I’m sure we’ll talk to him at a later date blog-wise, but in the meantime would you mind introducing him and the sort of work he’ll be doing?
Sure, I have worked with Steve for over 10 years now at various studios around the world, and around 4 years ago we started our own company specializing in helping out other studios and developers with their projects. I won’t steal his thunder, but Steve is one of the most thorough and skilled engineers I have ever worked with … for us both to working on PZ is awesome.
I believe he’s going to be looking at a backlog of network features and fixes, but we’ll let him explain his plans himself later.
Thanks Mark! We genuinely love you.
Today’s featured imagefrom Jim. 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 Mondoids for info. The Block of Non-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 here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
Thank you George Romero
It should go without saying that without George Romero there would be no Project Zomboid. In fact, the entire face of video-gaming would have been very different without his vision. Since its genesis PZ has been about trying to recreate the feeling of Romero’s movies, and there’s no doubt that alongside legions of other video-games, books and movies we owe the man a great debt.
We were greatly saddened to hear of his death at the age of 77, and our thoughts are with his family and friends. The legacy he leaves behind is a brilliant and astonishing one.
VEHICLES
As mentioned last week the public vehicles build is going to keep on getting updates until the point it’s ready to have its stream crossed with an IWBUMS beta – so we can get an ‘experimental vehicles’ option into the main beta channel, get its optimizations into the main game and make tester life easier.
Tomorrow Yuri will be updating the public build with a few cool changes. Firstly while playing around with sound implementation we realised that the noise of gear shifts was fairly vital, but also that the behaviour of the cars themselves didn’t leave much room for this – and the inclusion of actual player-controlled gear shifts seemed a little too hardcore.
To give a feeling of gears then, to accompany the sounds we have brewing in an FMOD studio, Yuri has changed the way vehicles accelerate. Top speeds are now on a curve: acceleration slows in the last 25% of your potential full speed. This will likely need further tweaking, so feedback is welcome, but should allow us to space out RPM increase in sounds and implement the gear shift noises. It will also, hopefully, make high speed driving more rewarding.
To accompany this Yuri has also added a speedometer (kmh) and engine gauge (revs) to the UI – although it should be noted that the visuals and read-outs for these are placeholder, and we’ll be converting to mph with an options toggle in due course. Yuri has also fixed a few bugs, so the people of Muldraugh have now stopped occasionally parking their cars on top of other cars.
IWBUMS BETA
RJ released Build 38.5 into the IWBUMS public beta with a rewrite of his ‘zombie corpse build-up’ code that tracks decaying bodies in a much more localized area than previously. Feedback appreciated as we can certainly tweak this system further.
We should be also be getting some ChrisW fixes to the new ‘rooftop exteriors’ engine code later this week – making players beneath supported roofs and overhangs look less broken – before moving onto player-built structure issues and any other issues the system raises in general gameplay.
OTHER STUFF
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 Mondoids for info. The 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 here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
Hazmatters
Ello, here’s the latest on matters both zomb and oid.
VEHICLES
We just pushed a new version of the public vehicles beta (access details here) in which the headline improvement is probably the improved zombie collision. Formerly piling headlong into zombies without acceleration seemed to have more impact on zeds, so hopefully things will feel a little more realistic now. Likewise collisions with car wrecks would previously slide along like ice hockey pucks, and they now should hopefully feel as if they have more weight and presence in the world.
Yuri has also cleared a bunch of bugs from our plate that our awesome testers have been reporting – including fire errors, persistent engine noise, radial menu problems and the somewhat dangerous ability to read a book while driving.
Our general plan with vehicles will likely be to merge them into the next round of IWBUMS testing as an optional ‘experimental’ sandbox feature (unless the existing one stays in testing for more than a couple of weeks). The thought is that this will allow us to get the vehicle branch’s many engine optimizations into the main game, widen player feedback and also remove the irritation of constant swapping between test builds for our merry band of community bug reporters.
NOISES
As a part of this we’re also now looking into integrating proper sounds for vehicles that reflect their type and condition, and while we’re back in the FMOD studio we’re also taking the opportunity to polish a few other areas of the PZ soundscape.
We’re looking at stuff like different footstep noises on grass, concrete, snow, wood, from a higher floor etc and also more varied seasonal sounds. Right now we have a lot of birdsong in winter, for example, which could be easily removed and replaced to give a better feeling of seasonal change.
CHRISW ENGINE WORK
Feedback on the more visible upper storeys and window peeking that are currently part of the IWBUMS public beta seems pretty positive – but there are two primary issues that need to be ironed out before we can release.
The first are visibility issues with porches, overhangs and buildings like garage forecourts with supported roofs – as is shown here by Captain Dringo. The best way to sort this is to have the data marked up so that canopies and porches and similar structures can be hidden cleanly – to which end Mash has been marking up impacted locations on the map. This week ChrisW will be adding the code fix and remedying cases where small overhangs are attached to buildings. This procedure will give us an effective way to hide anything that blocks the view.
Currently the system never hides the player or the nearest zombie, but we also need to expand this to other survivors for MP. Likewise to finalise his fixes Chris will be making sure that player built structures and additions respond to the same rules as the game’s pre-existing buildings.
TURBO DEVICES
It’s been off the boil for a while, but Turbo is back on his upgrade to how in-game devices operate and is chasing down bugs and networking issues in a newly operational build. This is an under-the-bonnet feature, but it’ll allows us to make the use of radios, TVs, VHS, computers, military equipment etc a lot more engaging – and will also open the door to a lot of modding.
Turbo’s modular system essentially standardises the code that runs the various different in-game gadgets, and will have repercussions (whether from us or from the community) on how easy it is to introduce/improve a wide variety of in-game and in-building systems. The sort of stuff that’ll now be far easier to create, either officially or from modders, would be: recording/playback of messages, device deconstruction and upgrading, player-created electric wiring and waterpipe systems in safehouses, security systems places like Rosewood Prison and banks, various items of discovered military equipment etc.
OTHER STUFF
First off: everyone keep an eye on what Rekkie’s up to in this thread – as we certainly will be. In terms of ‘us’ stuff though well we’ll have another IWBUMS public beta update later this week from RJ, while Mash’s map work on the next main game area continues. In the long wait for animations, meanwhile, Martin’s still churning out new clothing and models backstage so we’re sitting on something of a stockpile back here while Mark does his stuff. We’ve refrained from showing much during the lengthy delay, but this one that popped into our inboxes this morning made us do a ‘squee’ as it really nails the 90s ‘Outbreak’ movie vibe that we generally go for. And also we don’t give Martin enough love for what he’s doing so well for us behind the scenes.
This week’s engaging water closet from Hootie. 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 Mondoids for info. The 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 here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.
