Spiffo’s Round-Up #3

Hey all, here’s the highlights of the last four weeks of Project Zomboid development – compiled from the Thursday blogs that appear at http://www.projectzomboid.com/blog/ and on the PZ Steam boards. First off here are a couple of gameplay videos. This first one is a demonstration of ‘zoned zombie outfits’ – which is essentially the system that ensures that firefighter zombies spawn in fire stations, chef zombies spawn in restaurant kitchens and the like. (Please note that there are a few individual animations in this vid we want to speed up, and in most cases already have done) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGdxNR-Rrng&feature=youtu.be Next up, meanwhile, we’ve had some significant improvements and fixes made by Bitbaboon Mark to the core animation blending system in past weeks. He’s fixing a whole bunch of issues, snaps and glitches that have been vexxing us for a long time – digging deep into the code, and doing a total rewire where necessary. In prior Thursday vids we cut around these uglinesses as much as possible, but they still reared their heads. Snaps between character animations, jarring moves when turning to certain compass directions while strafing, and various other ugly things that we just couldn’t account for were plaguing us – but have now finally been fixed, leading to a far smoother animation blending system. Zac’s prepared a video demoing the new blending – although please note he’s running in debug, so this doesn’t represent gameplay. https://youtu.be/QMYGUWlVyMI Speaking of, please note, that we’ve decided to put the completion of the high-res model rendering work described in the last Spiffo update on ice for little longer, since there were still numerous issues with it that meant it wasn’t suitable to put into the main line – and also it kept getting further broken by the flurry of additions and changes from the team’s work described above. We feel it would be best approached toward the end of Build 41 dev just before IWBUMS, at the point we could get extra resources on board to get it working right. As such all videos until then will use the traditional character resolution.

TORN CLOTHES AND BLOOD

Zac’s work on masking out different parts of clothing items has resulted in several extremely useful features. First, it now allows us to wear pieces of geometry clothing on top of other geometry clothing – as opposed to being a texture drawn over the character’s skin. This used to be impossible: the clothing worn underneath would always poke through the geometry of the clothing on top, especially when moving. So now we can layer clothing appropriately, and also spray blood on individual layers and garments – instead of your survivor’s body as a whole. Our old solution was to to draw underclothing as textures directly on the character model, which unfortunately led to the side effect of them looking like body paint and lacking the bulk of real clothing. Now we can easily turn off areas of the clothing that are covered, so we are provided with many more options. https://youtu.be/0-DiI2trU7g This also allows us much more visual indications of damage and clothing wear and tear (quite literally). As well as putting a player’s newly scavenged/treasured Spiffo shirt at risk of damage, this will allow much more variety with zombies in particular. RJ has been adding code to implement this new system to further randomize zombie’s clothing conditions, and tie potential clothing damage into the various game systems for the player. https://youtu.be/Y_YEw1zRy7c

SURVIVOR