Hey everyone! It’s been a busy week!

Build 41 IWBUMs

In the past week we’ve put a few builds out of our animation build beta, and response so far has been great! We’ve been responding to people’s feedback on character movement by tightening it up wherever possible. There may still be improvements to be made, but on the whole feedback has been very positive after various changes to locomotion and we feel we’re getting close.

We still have issues with character and car saving being unreliable, which we continue to look into, and performance is an ongoing concern we will work on throughout the entire IWBUMs. There are still zombie spawning bugs that we’re still investigating. Most of the crashes have been solved, but a minority of players are still having issues that we are continuing to work on. There are numerous other issues, but we feel we’re starting to iron out the most serious and will be able to start cleaning up the less serious once we get to them.

A lot of people have been enquiring about when multiplayer may drop into the build, and it’s not going to be imminent. The reason we released IWBUMs without MP was specifically because we anticipate the multiplayer work that is required to take at least a month, possibly more. Not least because the devs that need to take care of the multiplayer also have a pile of issues with the build that still need resolving to make sure the game plays well on single player. We know this is not ideal for those eager to get into multiplayer, however we hope you appreciate that we got you the single player game ASAP instead of holding it all back until it was done, and our plans are for build 41’s multiplayer to be significantly improved in stability and reduced lag and rubber-banding post IWBUMs, so should be worth the wait.

The next animation system related feature we expect to drop in is the new zoom system, which as stated in previous Thursdoids will both eliminate a large amount of GPU memory being currently squandered on super-sampling a much huger game-screen than the resolution the game is running at (which may help some of those on weaker GPUs), reduce the general rendering overhead of zooming out, but also will provide much more detailed game characters on-screen since their rendering will no longer be bound to the resolution of the super sampled FBO. There are still issues to solve with this, so no timescale on it, but we consider it priority outside serious bug fixes so that we can get onto multiplayer support fully.

Insulation

Why is insulation not implemented yet? I hear you ask.

As usual, the level of simulation planned for insulation is typical Zomboid levels of ridiculous depth. Turbo has been working on this for a while now, and while it’s proving tricky to balance the values to be stable, and has required a few iterations to get right, it’ll be worth the wait as it’s planned to provide an extremely realistic and detailed system for how your body reacts to temperatures and dampness, how heat escapes from your body, even down to how your blood vessels contract and dilate in various body parts. 

Clothing you are wearing will affect you in numerous realistic ways, depending on whether it is wet or dry, its insulation properties, where they are placed, and other factors to make clothing even more important in future.

Note not all this information may be presented to the player, and we’ll likely have more moodles to cover some of the details as ‘feelings’, as a character would likely not know accurately as to the amount of contraction of particular blood vessels.

Hotbar

This is a project RJ’s been working on for a while whenever he has a quiet moment and no super pressing issues to fix, based on the model attachment system EP added, which we hope will dramatically improve player’s weapon and inventory management – as well as make their character’s look even cooler to boot.

A special hotbar system will be making it to build 41, where some clothing will provide hotbar slots at the bottom of the screen that items can be placed in for quick access. Find a holster, and you’ll have a slot to place a pistol that correlates to a number key on your keyboard. The pistol will be visible in holster on the model and will be equippable at a faster speed via that hotkey. Weapons can be carried on the player’s back, or in their belt, and thus clothing that adds these slots will have a weight reduction bonus just like bags and other containers.

This system should give survivors an extra way to prepare themselves and quickly equip weapons when they need them. We will likely expand this system in future, perhaps providing additional bonuses to equip speed and such dependant on the clothing providing the slot.

Here’s a video. Please note however that only ‘equipping weapon from back’ has an animation currently, the others simply snap into hand, but this will be addressed before release.

This week’s image from Airpex. 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!