Full notes
Full Project Zomboid update
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Repeated intro
Hey all, here’s the highlights of the last few weeks of Project Zomboid development – compiled from the Thursday blogs that appear at http://www.projectzomboid.com/blog/ and on the PZ Steam boards.
What changed
- Compatibility
- Performance
- Balance
First up, we recently had a full stream for 2-3 hours of the current internal build courtesy of steamer Mark.exe. This can be viewed in its entirety here.
If you don’t have time for that, however, then here’s a quick video that’s shows off most of the things discussed in more detail below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyuAw_I5kNA
The primary thing that’s being shown in this video is the rotational animation system that our team, primarily Zac and Martin, have finally managed to conquer – barring polish and minor bugs. We’re not going to give any indication of a countdown for an IWBUMS release, but eagle-eyed Thursdoid blog readers will have noticed that this was always on of the major barriers to releasing a public beta.
At the time of writing, however, gameplay connected to this new system, still needs to be wired up and polished– and optimization still needs to be fed into the machine to improve performance with large zed hordes and also bolster lower-spec PCs.
Something we are considering is releasing the IWBUMS beta in SP form first – before wiring up the MP during the beta process. Not only would this speed up a release (as there are likely gremlins waiting to jump out on us as there always are) but it will make a lot of sense to test and improve MP on a community server – and to restart all the usual Community Megatests and such to aid with the testing.
COMBAT BALANCE
Previously, while looking good in videos and such, player movement felt tank-like and sluggish – but now 180s are smooth, combat/defense can take place at an angle and you can move in the direction you want to move in a far slicker fashion.
A big aspect in build 41 has been the combat balancing. We wanted to make the one on one combat feel a lot easier, where fighting with groups would be much much more deadly. This however has been too successful if anything, and we ended up with groups being SO deadly it was actually near impossible to survive a few fights with small groups, which ended up way too punishing even for ours, the most masochistic of gaming communities. (Sorry) As such, due to the new animation system’s ability to allow animations to play only on the top half of the body, RJ has made a change that allows you to strafe while shoving and swinging your weapon.
We have also, partly in response to community concerns raised that it would be very easy to ‘kite’ the zeds – continually batting them off and keeping yourself safe from the horde, made sure that hordes are… something of a danger. https://youtu.be/k4r-mKPjiDA
MOVEMENT BALANCE
Far and away the biggest change in recent weeks came as a result of some serious discussions about the responsiveness of the main player controls.
For the entirety of anims development the mission had been to balance the increased realism of movement and increased presence with the slight lag of control you have from the character moving realistically: with character footsteps actually accounting for movement, instead of an internal switch that’s flicked the moment you press a key.
Many AAA games have a slight delay in movement, even extremely amazing and popular ones such as Red Dead Redemption 2, so overall we thought this was a noble aim. The end results
Source
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