Spiffo's Roundup #2

Hey all, here’s the highlights of the last four weeks of Project Zomboid development – compiled from the Thursday blogs that appear at projectzomboid.com and on the PZ Steam boards.

LATEST IMPLEMENTATION VID

First off, a general ‘recently implemented animations’ video to whet your appetite along with some new Zach Beever musical goodness that will be coming in build 41. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj2NBd8kR6c

MAP ZONING FOR ZED OUTFITS

A key aspect of PZ mapping is zoning – which we primarily use to mark up areas that are (for example) suitable for foraging and car spawns. Now however, with different clothing for zombies, we can flag which parts of the PZ map can spawn which particular zombie – or which group of particular zombies. This, then, is how we can spawn only guards and orange jumpsuit-wearing prisoners in Rosewood prison.

Likewise, RJ has created a ‘wedding’ spawn zone over one of the churches on the map – which ensures that all zombies inside it, and outside for the selected area, have a very high chance of dressing in smart clothing, with a guaranteed bride, groom and church minister amongst them. This system will allow us to have many and varied different pockets of particular zeds – police in police stations, lumberjacks at McCoy logging, military in military areas etc. Likewise, we will be examining the best methods to make sure that zeds in bathrobes or not wearing clothes are only found in homes and home bathrooms in particular. (It should be noted that aspects of this will also involve a very slight rewrite of PZ lore in terms of the outbreak, but we had intended to return to the radio/TV broadcasts soon in any case).

GAMEPLAY CHANGES

We’ve been waiting for some important/complex work on rotational anim movements from TEA for a fair amount of the past few weeks – but there’s still been plenty of other areas for us to work in this time. A few examples of this includes knife attack animations, and tying survivors and zeds getting bloodied by attacks in general in-game. This has also involved us adding some additional combat skills, and in the process removing the skill point system. From Build 41 onwards skills will automatically level up when you gain the XP requirements, as we felt the manual skill point system never worked particularly well and would do so even less with many more skills.

ZED BUMPIN’

RJ also adds a note on how running through crowds of zeds will now be a little more fraught with danger. “One thing that’s new and that people might be interested to see in action, is an effort to make sure players can’t dash through hordes without getting slowed down.” “As seen in the video below, we’ve now added bumping against zeds. Colliding with one or two while you’re running isn’t dangerous, you’ll just get slowed down, but try running through a horde and you’ll stumble and fall – leaving you temporarily exposed to the encroaching zeds. We might add in a few more different sorts of animations for nudges/pushes, but right now it looks like this:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQB4ewT412s

MODEL CLARITY

Next up, the issue of character and zed model visual fidelity. An area that was proving strange in terms of 41 development was that somewhere along the way some of the visual fidelity of characters had been lost – and simultaneously, somehow, models looked far