Roots n’ Branches

Hey all, hope you’re well. Updates from various departments in zombie land this fair Mondoid.

BUILD 37 IWBUMS BETA

We released a bugfix update last week to Build 37’s Muld/Rosewood etc lootable maps, and also their marking and annotation system. There’s another ‘fix build’ on the brew, and any and all feedback is welcome. Specifically, the new ‘oven dial’ UI has been built for multiple uses across the game’s many devices – so feedback on its general usability would be greatly appreciated. Next up, although we’ll give full details once it’s in the can, RJ is going to work on expanding this system so that it benefits MP safehouses with annotated maps that can be put on public display, and a plan we have about pre-annotated maps discovered on zed bodies that’ll be useful/fun in SP and co-op. Details on how to access the IWBUMS beta – here. [We’ve removed password from the beta, as everyone’s quite used to unstable branches these days.]

ANIMS

One element that’s been a part of the perils of getting the animation build playable and into testing, is that the closer you get – the more issues in general gameplay become clear, and the more evident it is that they need fixing. The ‘not fun’ factor looms large. Primarily, in this instance, was cludgy indoor movement with a side salad of ‘rotate on-the-spot’ zeds and survivors looking pretty crap. As such, while pulling everything together, there’s been a side-thread of work going on with Martin the Animator to see how we can improve things. It’s all to do with ‘root motion’ – in the new PZ anims the movement of characters has always been directly taken from the animation data itself, instead of being pumped into the character in the game logic. Thing is, there was one important part of the system that it became increasingly clear that we needed: we only had support for movement in a straight line, and no support for characters to rotate within animations and for this rotation to translate into the rotation of characters in-game. Up until now we still had to rotate characters/zeds in the game code and completely divorced from the animation. The most obvious consequence of this was that despite characters making realistic steps when walking, sneaking and so on (and in videos as you’ve seen, if the character is rotated while sneaking it works pretty well) rotating on the spot would still produce ‘slidey on the spot rotating’. This works okay in the current game, but looks a bit silly when the animations around it are much more realistic. Without going into lots of technical details this was a much more complicated and confusing problem to solve than the positional root motion system [Mondoid writer aside, direct to camera: seriously there’s been all this chat about Quarteronions that’s pretty much incomprehensible to me], but after a meet-up with Martin last week we finally worked out the best way of how to approach it. Now (well, almost now, there’s still one more bug to sort out that would have resulted in an in-game video today) we have support for rotations, it allows us to improve in various areas, as well as fix the issues mentioned above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXtK2xEh0XQ

In Summary:

a) Rotating on the spot. When the player rotates on the spot, we’ll be able to have them actually make steps to turn themselves without the aforementioned sliding in a circle with feet stationary. b) A big issue with movement that we found it difficult to solve was that with deferred movement it’s important that the character’s movement mirrors