D'ya Like Them GrappleZ

LIFE’S A DRAG

Something that, clearly, was fundamental to Build 41 was the new animations system – and thus far for Build 42 we haven’t mentioned any improvements to this.

Importantly, it should be underlined that his work isn’t in the internal test build yet (and is certainly unconfirmed as a part of 42 when it first enters an Unstable beta) but we’re far enough along now with work done in this area that we’re comfortable to talk about ‘Zac’s GrappleTech’.

Right now in Build 41 all the animations work perfectly fine in their ‘solo’ states. This is when one player character, or one zombie, is doing its thing individually and not interacting with others around it.

Where problems can arise, however, is when that human/zed interacts with another human/zed. Bites, pulldowns and shoves happen ‘to the air’ around their target rather than the character model itself.

This generally works fine enough but can also lead to feelings of graphical non-interaction, game events not being explained to the player efficiently enough, and the whiff of stun-lock.

How to remedy this then?

An extension to 41’s anims system, GrappleTech allows us to join two characters in a more personal and combined state.

Essentially on a code level, in vaguely technical terms, we have a ‘Grappler’ and the ‘Grappled’ that combine and synchronize their animations together until the grapple is broken.

What’s more, because this is an extension of the Animation system the Grappled state isn’t just a single, fixed animation, nor just a non-interactive cutscene. Rather, all the interactivity inherent in the Animation State system remains.

In short: the ‘Grappler’ character initiates a grapple – perhaps with an attack or pull-down of some sort – and the ‘Grappled’ code decides whether the Grapple is to be accepted or rejected.

The grapple system also takes into account whatever variables we desire when making that decision: tiredness, clumsiness, or injuries on either side that could cause the grapple to fail.

As a prototype, and most its likely first application in B42 once the Unstable beta is underway, we made the player able to pick up and drag a corpse.

As you can see here, Zac has leveraged the logic in the Animation State system, and has been able to wire up Martin’s animation variants for picking up a body from the front and back, and then dragging it.

This is fairly rudimentary currently (clearly it would look better with some physics-bobble on the zombie legs as they are dragged around, and we don’t have SFX yet) but what we do have running to prove out the system are a raft of player effects: an impact on player stamina, the exhaustion from dragging the heavy corpse, and the trail of blood that’ll sometimes drag out behind also.

Super-importantly this whole system also lets Animator Martin, and of course modders, animate two characters interacting in their animation software – and then to see that interaction replicated directly in-game. Formerly ‘interlinking’ character actions would have to be animated separately, which was trickier to say the least.

An instance of this can be seen below – which also serves as an example of how we can also tie the Grapple state to other useful gameplay activities: like dumping the corpse out of windows all in one animation sweep. Every stage of the Grappled state is as interactive as any regular state.

We don’t usually show animations that aren’t in-game yet (this is in Zac’s test build, but very rough around the edges still) but again, this is