My Zeds is on Fire

How do all. Here’s a check-in from a few different Build 42 departments, that also occurs in the lead-up to the first in-person meet-up for the wider PZ team since 2018. We’re all aflutter about it (and trying to remember everyone’s real world names instead of online handles) and hope to have lots of good B42 chat in amongst the introduction of an international team to traditional Geordie culture.

Let’s pop into a few different areas, then – with the caveat that for a fuller B42 overview our last dev blog is probably a better destination.

FIRE

Work continues on the fire rewrite branch with the intention being to bring it up to a state in which it can safely enter our internal test build.

It recently came to mind that a lot of the ‘fire dev’ chat in blogs took place in the distant past, before we had to reshuffle and our current MP team became what it is today – thereby forcing flames into the sidelines for an elongated spell.

As such the guys have made a vid for us today that spells out some of the foundations of what is being done here, in terms of how fire spread, size and duration is governed – and indeed the sort of stats that lie beneath the hood that we can balance with, and that the community can mod with.

That’s the first half of the video: done with our old fire effects (which are too transparent and also on fast forward) so please take this aspect as instructional/iterative rather than a fait accompli. The second part of the video then moves on to show our experimentation with fire visuals, working alongside our VFX artist friend Brian, as we work out different ways to make in-game flame effects better match our particularly coloured iso-world.

MP TEAM

As regular readers will know, alongside tidying up smaller multiplayer irritations as they go, our MP team are currently transferring player inventory actions over away from the client and onto the server. They have another three or four weeks set aside for the first stage of this: at which point we will the player’s inventory loaded from the database on the server, and the server always having an up-to-date player inventory – hopefully all working in sync with the progress bars, item move times and expected results you get currently.

At this point the second major part of the code work will be getting underway: having all the item manipulation occurring on the server side, and ensuring that the server no longer trusts clients (those sneaky clients!) so that stuff like item adding cheats are rendered defunct.

After this, clearly, there’ll be a heap of testing and such – but we thought the more technically-minded amongst us would appreciate a catch-up on where the guys are with it.

FISHING

This past week Aiteron has been working with the testers who’ve been reporting back on bugs and gameplay in the latest version of our revamped fishing – and has been largely working on an improved/experimental control system for a more chilled out and less button-holdy-tappy experience.

He has also been working with our aforementioned VFX specialist friend Brian, who has been supplying us with various splashes, bubbles and signs of water movement that will indicate the presence of fish, and also be a suggestion of the size of what lurks beneath. On top of bug fixes, changed recipes and improved items for the system he’s