Everyone’s Infected

For 80% of Project Zomboid’s development and moderation team this week has been about sniffling, sneezing and waking up three times a night on a damp pillow. Seemingly, an unknown patient zero wandered the halls of EGX and infected us all with something contagious. It’s all good research, perhaps, but it hasn’t been pleasant. That all said, the Mondoid must go on! A few items of note first. Twiggy is planning some midweek streams of Build 33’s Radio/TV systems, so be sure to follow his and our Twitter feeds. We’re thinking Tuesday night Brit-time currently, but that may well be pushed back to Wednesday depending on Turbo code tweaks. Secondly, if you haven’t seen it already we ran a really interesting blog on Hydromancerx the main man behind the awesome Hydrocraft mod last week that can be found here .

FMOD Returns

A primary part of Build 33 is in trying to up the ante in terms of immersion, and during a discussion about how to improve our helicopter/zombie moments the topic of some early foundation work we did in integrating an awesome piece of audio middleware emerged. Build 33 just felt right for its inclusion, and as such right now RJ is connecting sound-wires backstage for the inclusion of FMOD . For reference here’s our initial demo video from way back when. This shows reverberation, echo and occlusion. In-game sounds here use actual an approximation of the world: so the size of room, walls and any buildings between the player and the origin of the sound effect are all taken into account. There’s also directional sound on 2.0 speakers, but this will *hopefully* be better on release as we’d like to use an awesome plugin called AstoundSound. That said, right now we need to look into licensing stuff so we can’t confirm it right now. https://youtu.be/xwEcwOIAE4U To follow, here’s a previously unseen video – albeit one with everything ramped up to eleven on the sound-o-meter. It all needs refinement and balancing [particularly with zed noises and ambient music tracks] which is all stuff that’s on RJ’s plate right now. You should be able to hear, however, cool ambient sounds – every bird is a single bird from a specific place, refrigerators hum, blinds flap in the wind and doors creak. Then there’s the aforementioned helicopter. It’s not just a sound file now, but an actual unseen object that moves around the map via AI. It will always be somewhere, heading off the playable map or perhaps doing passes over certain areas – and could also be tied into scripted events that are heard in reports over the new radio system. The helicopter will also have sound blending to make it sound natural as it moves away from you, and we can use the same tricks to make shotguns sound like they’re the correct distance away from when it comes to meta-noises and MP. Instead of a permanent headache, helicopters can now be a real blessing as they’ll drag zombies along with them as they depart – seeing as they are now solid objects in the world making sound the zombies can follow accurately. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo9e8O0nwr8 Also contained within the above are some new layered ambiance tracks from our music maestro Zach Beever. These will be reactive to the gameplay you’re experiencing (we’re taking some inspiration from Alien Isolation here) and will let us play more poignant music at more appropriate moments. That said, this may not appear in Build 33 as we will need more variation in the first version, and likewise in this video there