Liquid Zedball

Haylo survivors.

41.73 STABLE

We have the next patch to the stable branch primed and ready to go, however an issue that our fantastic Unstable beta testers have flagged is keeping it held in its pen for a little longer.

Players reported that some houses they’d cleared were spawning zeds upon booting up the new build, which alerted us to a snag in our map export process not dealing with map boundaries changing with map expansions. All previous map expansions came along with forced save incompatibility so this crept through unnoticed until now.

While it’s an aggravation rather than a save-breaker, we didn’t want to send a build with a known issue out to the masses – and have spent the last few days setting up a fix. This will need some testing, after which we’ll be looking to pump out the latest version next week.

If you’re interested in the changelist, or want to jump in to try it out, then you can find the unstable release notes for 41.72 and 41.73 behind the hotlinks.

42 CONTENT

One of the focus points of Build 42 is on extended survival in the months and years beyond the initial Knox Event outbreak.

For this, we are revamping our crafting system – and Turbo’s role has been in laying new foundations for a set-up that allows for: crafted items that have more RPG-like variable attributes based on the crafter’s skill, stats of input items that are reflected in the attributes of a final output item, and the ability of the game itself to recognise all these different attributes when an item is being passed between all of its various different locations and systems.

The next stage of this work, meanwhile, has been in taking this same sort of mentality to the liquids in the game – and also making them ever more interesting in our new crafting set-up.

WET STUFF

Let’s start with a video, and then move into some explanation.

So what exactly does this mean for the water, paint, gas, alcohol, washing detergent and bleach of the Knox Event?

Essentially all fluids will be defined and stored in a global registry, which is where we as devs can add new vanilla liquids – but also will make the system very moddable.

Each definition will store basic info such as ID, name, colour etc – then has different categories it can belong to like Beverage, Alcoholic, Fuel, Flammable and such. Beyond that we also tie in properties per litre of this particular fluid: for example Carbs, Proteins, Alcohol percentage or Energy if it’s a flammable fuel.

Liquids that are hazardous or poisonous can also have modifiers that configure the maximum poison effect, and how the effect behaves when mixed.

So yes, we’re going to have the most realistic bleach-drinking ever seen in gaming.

CONTAINERS

Containers are the coding class that actually store the fluids, and are the way in which the game code interacts with the above definitions.

Inventory items, objects found in the world and vehicles will all have a fluid container – which will allow them to store and use the liquids/fuels/whatever that they contain. Each container also has information stored with it that shows what particular fluids have been mixed in, and their content percentages relative to each other.

The system calculates and caches the summary of all the containing fluids properties based on their percentages. So, if you add 80% Soda