Wotcha, couple of fun things for your inspections today.

First off: same disclaimer as before. There’s still a lot of work to chew through on Build 41: Zac is currently doing necessary work on animation substates that will unlock concurrent animations, and will then need to work on rotational animations. We also need to do a lot of work to get MP up and running, and most importantly we need to optimize – as releasing into IWBUMS now would see it run like a hog on a lot of systems.

Yes, the build is looking great in the vids (which is a big yay, clearly) but it’s not ready for public consumption. There’s still too much broken, and too much unoptimized. The moment it is ready: we’ll open up the beta. We won’t hold it back any longer than we need to – but we’re really not at that point yet.

Anyway, with all that said, here’s some stuff that’s gone in this week:

BASIC STEALTH SYSTEM

We have animations for a more complex stealth system – including cover traversal, shooting from cover, rounding corners, wall hugging etc but as we’ve said before that will be coming in a later build.

What we’ve added into 41, however, is a first taste of it all – tied to a crouch/sneak toggle that’s currently on ‘C’ on your keyboard. Here’s a quick vid that can explain it all a bit better than using words.

Please note: just after recording this video we discovered that the character’s kneeling idle wasn’t playing while crouching when stationary due to a bug. Please note that the character’s visible profile over objects will be reduced more while stationary than what’s seen in the vid. And also make the position less brutal on the character’s knees.

Please also note: unless there’s a huge campaign against it, from within or without, we’ll likely stop zeds eating below the waist of the corpses they come across. It looks a little too much like a horrific sex act.

ZED SCENES

Build 41 will be slightly changing PZ’s zombie lore so that the initial wave of zombification occurred in a manner that people died a bit more quickly – to the extent that the zeds they left behind will be wearing relevant clothing and placed in situations relevant to what they were doing when they turned.

The new model and clothing system means that we can have randomized ‘scenes’ in houses to give a bit of flavor to what was happening in the home before/during the Knox Event, with some common and others rare. Likewise we can do the same for more horrific scenes that happened after the event itself, placed further down the PZ timeline.

To this end then we could, for example, have a small chance of having a home where there was a prayer meeting happening represented by a priest zed and 4-5 civilian zeds holding bibles.

At the other end of the spectrum we could suggest in another house that two people were being over-friendly with each other by having two zombies not wearing any clothes in a bedroom. Or simply that a bathroom zed was having a wash by having them appear in a bathrobe, or without clothes, in their bathroom.

Although it doesn’t look as visually appealing as we’d like it (one day we will hopefully be able to invest in a 3D modeler to work with us on items left on the floor) we can also scatter around bottle sprites, clothing sprites, books etc. to elaborate on the scene.

Here’s a few examples of scenes that RJ has coded in over the past week – covering sexy time zeds and sports-viewing male zeds, while band practice zeds can be seen in the header image of this blog.

If you can think of any of your own scenes that we could conjure up using the zed costumes you’ve seen in recent Thursdoids then feel free to chip in and let us know – they’re really easy to integrate, and can be as rare or common as required. Cheers all!

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! The CBOIT has also been promising a mate that it’ll flag up the cool new game Xera: Survival for ages now. And now it has.