Howdy all, and happy spring Eastoid festival if you are a participator in such activities.

A few bits and bobs this week. Overall a variety of code-level tasks are being done: blending issues being addressed, optimization, cutaway behaviours, items that should be used as weapons but hadn’t been previously, weapons being held when animations are playing and they should be removed… all that fun stuff.

Something that might be of worthy of mention, and a quick vid, though are some examples of where the new animations system are highlighting ‘in-between’ states that the game could previously got away with – but now either look weird, or have resulted in a show-stopper bug.

A good example of this is when a player either bumped into a zed when escaping through a window, or was very closely pursued by zeds when escaping – this was not only resulting in visual weirdness in the anims build, but also was trapping the player in the window frame for all perpetuity. As such, after a consultation with Animator Martin, we can use this sort of situation for some cool new gameplay considerations.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a WIP animation, and whatever anyone tells you – the big saucepan is a bug that’s already been fixed and won’t be in the final build. (We’re also working on more ‘table against window’ polish).

On top of this we will be improving this further – perhaps with a zed grabbing and pulling you into the window instead of pushing you out. Another example of a similar blemish that we’re fixing up meanwhile (known internally as being on The Sasha Shitlist) is the way that based on the existing game when the zeds are currently pushed left or right their animation is that of staggering backwards instead of the relevant direction – a Martin-provided remedy for which is currently being added into the game.

Other work that’s gone on this week meanwhile includes fixes and improvements for the in-game radio communication system, work on a community translation tool and Zac’s work on a function that will allow us to more directly play with colour saturation/hue of the scene and make the most of our new character models. Oh and finally, Yuri is working out a way to stop saves losing vehicles on irregular shutdowns.

Thanks all, hopefully a more extended gameplay vid next week.

This week’s overgrown safehouse from Dark Oracle. 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 here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.