Project Zomboid
Zaumby ThursdayMar 28, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsHey all, here again for the March Thursdoid. Lots of stuff from lots of different areas of the game this time, we do hope you enjoy. STRIKE A POSE We’ve mentioned the fact that Build 42 will have a variety of readable materials that you can loot and inspect, but we hadn’t shown them off in-game as quite frankly they didn’t look great. They were crammed inside our existing Survival Guide UI, and it really wasn’t going to bat for us. We didn’t really want to create a load of individual images that wouldn’t be readily translatable into other languages either, and become a massive timesink for our art department who are already pumping out loads of vital stuff elsewhere. So, clever Aiteron got onto the case... So what is this? Well, it’s a secondary UI API system – and with it both ourselves and modders can create readable text UIs in easier and more flexible ways, and what’s more reuse templates for them too. Techie bit: currently, 4 Java elements have been added: Base, Text, Texture, TextEntry, and then based on these we’ve built a more complex UI in lua that’s easily manipulated by us and modders to play around with position, rotation angle, scale, color, animations, text settings, etc. Alongside this a new RichText system has been added, meaning the media templates can be changed completely in translation files (including size, position of elements and other settings) so we can make great media for our whole international audience. Video for modders who might be interested here. How are we using it? For Build 42 we are using this to create two flavours of lootable reading material, although not all of it will be available in the game we moment we go into unstable beta. Newspapers and Community News pamphlets, to help with world-building and to fully flesh out the timeline of the Knox Event.Local business flyers, house listing advertisements, restaurant menus and the like. These will all be locations that will be useful to your survival story – and reading the flyer will automatically reveal their location on the player map. In this way we will direct new players to helpful looting areas, and some of the community’s favourite safehouse locations. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/6f61e8906525c9460fa6aef526a398d96676f7aa.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/240d059a57dc6eef8fa250cb14d40f3bd3609073.png What’s making it extra cool? This has been cooking for a while, but we were increasingly unhappy with aspects of the way things looked. We were using in-game isometric screenshots, and they didn’t feel quite right for our in-game newspapers as such. We’re delighted to say, then, that community heroes unconid and Werlias have agreed to come on board and help us out with this. Both have been entertaining PZ players with their brilliantly made posed still images and videos using PZ models and imagery, and they seemed amazingly well suited to bringing life to the characters of the Knox Event in readable media. Likewise, we will also easily be able to do fun stuff with...LeapdoidFeb 29, 2024 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/a58ac8f6b03f02876a287fa86bc2da61425961fb.png Hey all, a good mix of things this ‘doid. Fun gameplay stuff, and a chunk of info we wanted to flag for modder-awareness and the more tech-minded amongst you. (Feel free to skip that bit to get to the more enticing gun stuff from Fenris that’s become its first application.) Onwards, then. HUNKER INNA BUNKER Permanent underground structures are being added to the internal build’s map for testing. As discussed before some basement locations will be randomised to add surprise flavour to your looting, but there’ll be plenty of ever-present locations that will likely be survivor favourites for taking over and making your own. Here’s a fun example, which also very clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of B42’s tech upgrade that governs the realistic spread of light. It really is very dark down there, and with that very claustrophobic and scary… Another aspect of the underground structures is sound, and now we’ve got more and more of these in the test build our sound team will be working to cut out wildlife sounds, add muffle, echo, drips and such. Likewise, meanwhile, another focus is adjusting the noise of ‘street level’ activity when you climb higher in buildings. It’s also worth mentioning that in 42, or at least certainly its unstable release, you will not be able to tunnel or break down the external walls of underground structures. This is something it would be healthy for the engine to be able to do (although we’d never have Minecraft-style insta-tunnels in vanilla, clearly) but is probably a can of worms best opened later down the line. CRAFTING In amongst the feverish connecting of code wires from others on the crafting team, Turbo has been working on the new interface that will allow for hand-crafting items on in-game surfaces. We’ve got something ready to go into the internal build, but in its current WIP form still needs some polish – and probably isn’t quite ready to show off before its rough edges have been smoothed out. In essence though, this work has been to cater for crafting items that aren’t as straightforward as ripping clothing to make bandages or opening a can of beans (which will always be feasible just in your hands) but don’t necessarily need a specialized workstation either. Activities like preparing a sandwich or making a nailed baseball bat logically require a handy surface to perform the work. The way it’s being implemented – any logical surface will do (tables, counters etc) but this sort of crafting will no longer be possible while standing in the middle of the street with zombies approaching. In terms of changes in player habits and behaviour going from 41 to 42, this will probably be the one that’s felt most keenly. There’s a lot of muscle memory we’ll be scrubbing out here, after all. However we are doing our utmost to keep it logical, and to keep it real. The current challenge has been to devise an interface that accomplishes all the tasks necess...Hmm, UpgradezJan 25, 2024 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/cfe1b25a7e5c49bc62802bb62b5d7f3c91a50797.png It’s been a really big week for us, as we merged the second-to-last element of Build 42 into the main codebase across the rest of the team – which is the long awaited tech upgrade which brings a whole host of improvements to the engine. It’s currently being tested and the feedback has been super positive so far. This said, it’s also brought over lots of small bugs, visual glitches, and issues with new depth map clipping items incorrectly. Nothing over-dramatic, but enough stuff to keep testers and coders alike fully occupied. This is where a lot of our brains have been at recently, so we thought we’d give you an update on the engine as it now stands while testers run around kicking its tires – alongside some videos they have made along the way. Likewise, we also have some examples of some of its new capabilities that we will be able to explore in future – perhaps during the Unstable beta, perhaps beyond. So, a run-down of what this tech upgrade brings into the game: OPTIMIZATION We’ve made huge optimizations to the rendering of the map that should have a huge impact for most lower-midrange and upwards systems. We are now easily able to get a solid framerate even on 4K, or on furthest zoom. The difference in performance is honestly surprising, and extremely satisfying. For full disclosure, however, we’ve discovered that a few of the absolutely lowest end systems capable of running our game are still adversely affected. This is because the solution for such large FPS optimization comes at the expense of GPU memory usage for the caching textures used. Cards with extremely low dedicated GPU memory may run into problems. We’re investigating and trying to optimize this further to make sure as many systems as possible can benefit, and worst case scenario these optimizations will be disabled on systems where they would do more harm than good. However, it’s still entirely possible that we’ll be able to resolve this completely and provide a large boost to even the most potato systems. More likely, we’ll provide some kind of automatic detection to provide as large a portion of the optimizations as possible for a GPU’s available memory. This will be our next task post visual-bug clear out. Generally we estimate that a huge majority of our playerbase will benefit greatly from the optimizations. Since most of the optimization frustrations we hear come from players who feel their machine should be able to run PZ at a solid framerate, we feel this work will ease the vast majority of performance sadness we see in the community. VIEW CONE Another improvement born out of necessity is an improved and smoother viewing cone. Due to the optimizations, it was no longer feasible to alter the lighting of tiles frequently enough to allow for the smooth light changes required for our tile based viewing cone. As such we needed to implement a completely separate and newly-coded viewing cone that didn’t re...Zleigh RideDec 21, 2023 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/471f9d0e9b404d8e0fd517b79c92eb6fc7c3324f.jpg Happy winter religious festival if you celebrate it, or if you have it in a month’s time, or just if you think it’s nice because you get a few days off while your neighbours drown in eggnog! Here’s the December news round. CRAFTING TEAM UPDATE With the last Thurzdoid some people arrived at the mistaken impression that in normal b42 play, the iron ore deposits would exist on the map and be the primary source of metal for crafting. While we’re not ruling this out in the long term, and it’ll certainly be the only source of metal to be found within the wilderness map (more on this later), the primary logical source of metal would always initially be found within the now abandoned civilized world itself. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/836e4e317b4860311911113b51ecfb50df95221b.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/bd626ce8d85a9ad48a13bc678220e51a060b5e7d.png For several builds now, players have been able to dismantle various metal furniture and other objects in the world, including wrecked vehicles, to get metal bars, sheets and scrap. This still exists in build 42, and should serve as the primary source of metal–in various sorts and sizes–for crafting. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/01ccb12a7e2c9a22a26d7c9899c71bb31834a0f2.png This also includes taking apart railroad tracks, which is fortunate in that you can use a piece of the track to construct a makeshift anvil. On the subject of “modern metalworking”, here are some new workstations, a standing bandsaw, drill press, and arch furnace. The bandsaw currently can be used to cut metal pieces into smaller metal pieces, which can save you some wear and tear on your hacksaw, and the drill press can be used to put holes into metal, such as fabricating tools such as header tools for making nails or a drawplate for making wire, among other uses. The arc furnace can be used for melting down assorted items to cast various metal ingots and bars. Now this isn’t the extend of the uses of these workstations, or the end of what we’re adding in this vein. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/8621a0f40ba643f2cc250f52e4336cbb11c7c1d3.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/87b5bdaeacecb7fb42965d0366104bf630376287.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/8ac8848daacb1425b50f9b5810ab08f4d6e3b500.png Speaking of other workstations, here are some of the new agricultural stations in b42, herb and crop drying racks, stone quern, and mill, as well as some new crops: Barley, Flax, Hemp (industrial), Hops, Rye, Sugar Beets, Sunflowers, and Tobacco. This gives us a great foundation of resources for textiles, cordage, brewing and oils. We have more crops coming, including some winter crops, garden vegetables, hot peppers, and some pretty herbs. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/1c693b1d25d1853ab29898191c26e30b03c4db4f.png Moving on to things relevant for the wilderness, here is an example of a campsite made using primitive tier resources. It includes a small worksurface boulder and tree stump, which are n...Project Zomboid shows off exciting upgrades for long-awaited build 42Nov 24, 2023 - PCGamesNProject Zomboid is perhaps one of the most aptly named games I can think of. The beloved zombie survival sandbox game has been a labor of love for developer The Indie Stone since 2011, and celebrates ten years on Steam this month while still maintaining its early access status. Yet, it's clearly found success; with an impressive 94% 'very positive' Steam rating across more than 190,000 reviews in that time, the ambitious game has certainly found a loving audience, and now we've just been given a big update on what Project Zomboid build 42 looks like. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Project Zomboid build 42 will allow spooky basements and sewers Project Zomboid Build 42 will make the map a lot bigger Project Zomboid update 41.73 lets you store gas in bottles One Door OpenZNov 23, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsYip yip, hello. Let’s dive in. SWING BOTH WAYS Another exciting addition to the build 42 tech upgrade branch has just dropped. The tech upgrade branch is what contains our optimizations, improved view cone, basement/skyscraper technology and now… an immersive improvement that we’ve wanted for a long time, that could potentially lead to many cool additional gameplay opportunities that weren’t possible before. That’s right, kids, doors have now entered the third dimension. Where before doors would just flip instantly on the tile the moment they are opened or closed, now they are animated and use the tech branch’s depth buffer. This is obviously a huge improvement for immersion, but could potentially lead to cool new mechanics in future (note, certainly not b42’s initial release) like opening doors at different speeds, doors being left slightly open, peeking, bashing open, one-way fire doors and such. While easy to overlook, our doors are pretty much unchanged since the 0.1.5d days yet also one of the most fundamental things about PZ gameplay – so getting some visual niceness, and some future gameplay opportunities, feels like a win. So let’s have a quick noisy vid in which doors open and slam shut in unison. (In future we clearly also already have the tech to have doors and visibly opening and closing on vehicles too, it’s already in the code and used by many mods, however in the main game it’s always been the plan to couple this to in-car character animations, visible interiors and such.) CRAFTING STUFF We’re operating in various different areas with crafting, but the one that’s becoming most interesting and fleshed out with recipes and new items is definitely blacksmithing which has come a long way in the last month. So let’s head over to Blair to have a chat about the ways in which you’ll be getting to grips with the creation of some of these beauties. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/3e3b2230105ad9074905a9bd2d1477df51cd7bc3.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/f71fe92ad040e963e1776d458f765d4c9dd986ec.jpg “For blacksmithing in build b42 we have the tiers, workstations, and materials worked out; now most of the crafting recipes have been made as well, and it’s a case where content is being added almost daily as the art assets are completed.” “Most items that one could reasonably expect to be blacksmithed can be blacksmithed, and in most cases the resultant item is a more rugged, crafted version than the default version of the item that you may be used to.” {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/7fa3a3c2c24f7b1af8de7cc15566aab3556fd91f.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/cab3d544e58f62d76d21b09b80e98d878e1e7013.jpg “In many cases there are multiple tiers of items, requiring better skills, stations and materials to produce, where it serves the game. Weapons are an example of where this extra attention is being put into the system, where there are distinct tiers of the basic types, that differ in both appearance and performance.” {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/07e2fc51c10e0e40bfe...Cellar Door-doidOct 19, 2023 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/47bda1b1ce7fdf2396e4aedf6e394e40745a7ccf.png Evening all, here we all are again. Let’s take a stroll through the development Event zone. Crafting Overhaul Recap Now the vast infrastructure overhaul of the crafting systems has been merged and opened up to the rest of the gang, we’ve had a crack team of coders working solidly on implementing the various new post-apocalyptic profession tech trees, workstations and recipes that will provide for a vast amount of options for crafting and building in B42. As a summary for anyone who isn’t up to date on our overall goals, the crafting overhaul is intended to provide the following things to Zomboid: Give Zomboid a more feature rich end-game. At present, long time players of the game often find they run out of objectives once they get a well-stocked and secure safehouse. We want to provide many more objectives a settled survivor can undertake to improve their safehouse, or indeed a community of players. More things to build. More opportunities to craft. More ways to be creative. Provide a way for servers to be able to run indefinitely without the need to wipe or respawn loot. At present the gameplay loop relies so much on looting the map for items that servers run into problems when most urban locations are looted. These either cause servers to rely on unrealistic loot respawning, or to frequently wipe the server. We want servers to be able to run well into the ‘Alexandria years’ and for players to experience life much further within the post-apocalypse in an interesting way that feels and plays different to the early chaos. Provide believable post-apocalypse professions that would emerge in a post-technical post-apocalyptic society. If it’s been 30 years since the apocalypse, making a new character who is a burger flipper ceases to make much sense. As time ticks by from the initial infection, we will retire pre-apocalypse professions and introduce post-apocalypse professions that mirror pre-modern professions such as blacksmithing, tailoring, butchering and so on. We are also tying these skills into relevant modern day professions where applicable. Provide more community cooperation in multiplayer (and NPCs in B43 and beyond) with different interacting professions that can contribute to a community – as well as provide much more extensive crafting and building, encouraging trade and other interesting player interactions. We want to give players more interesting choices of professions and activities to contribute to a survivor community, and allow for players to cut more unique and interesting niches for themselves within a survivor group or community. Part of this is reshaping how the skill and XP system work to both make individuals less capable of mastering everything, while making their initial potential a lot higher without grinding if they spec into a particular skill heavily. Simultaneously, meanwhile, we still need to be providing sandbox options to allow solo players to ...Sky HighSep 21, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsSo… hmm, where were we? Okay so, recent weeks have seen two mega-merges into our trunk internal testing build. The first was latest from our MP team, to top up the central development branch with their latest from their ongoing server work to flag up any unexpected issues and to get a few gameplay systems back online in MP. The second was the guts of the long-awaited crafting revamp from Turbo, which means that the functionality for all our primary crafting stations is now in – and it’s a matter of banging heads together and integrating everything we’ve had stacked up for it. To this end we’re pleased to announce that we’ve hired yet another stalwart individual from the modding community to aid us in this quest. We were thinking about the different modders who could give our crafting team a little extra grunt, we have so many amazing ones after all, but the offerings of Soul Filcher stood out as being produce of exactly the sort of brain we needed. We’re really happy to have Soul officially on the team, and while his initial introductory task has been some tidy-up work and minor improvements on our many and varied different traits he should be diving into the new crafting stations with the others in the weeks ahead. SKY HIGH The engine upgrade is now in a phase of finding all the edge case issues where something doesn’t render correctly due to the new caching rendering method. Alongside this, very excitingly, the map team are working on larger buildings and basements to be slotted into the game map. EP tested out the first building to use the increased floor limits, a literal 32 floor skyscraper which looks super impressive to see in-game. This, as yet unnamed, skyscraper also allowed us to get a fun new animation into the mix as well… PLEASE NOTE: Impact with pavement is WIP. There’ll be far more crunchy SFX, far less blending issues with the character standing back up, and also more blood obviously. Screaming too. Elsewhere we are making the most of the improvements to how sprites are cached and handled. This now allows, for example, sprites to be combined with overlays into a single cached texture. With this we can create nicer, and more accurate, highlighting and borders when they are selected and moused over. As seen here: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/2b47582d0824077742e65d94e747eccd0bc63988.png Increasingly with the engine upgrade it’s become ever more clear that with it we’ll be able to polish up more oddities and visual quirks of Zomboid in the long term. If you’re interested, this is made evident by the testing tools that we’ve added to Zomboid’s debug menus that put the new tile depth system through its paces. In this video you will see a large debug 3d cylinder that can be moved around to test how it interacts with the map environment. This now interacts with walls and other objects as if they were bona fide 3D geometry within the iso scene, which was impossible up till now. Previously it would have inserted itself in its entirety betwee...The Connection Is MadeAug 17, 2023 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/b000af9b92dc41033559acd4850509f5feb91be3.png Hey everyone. Jumping straight in with an update on the new and improved crafting system this time around if that’s okay with y’all. As we’ve talked about in previous Thursdoids, a large part of the crafting overhaul revolves around creating a unified, powerful and expansive system for machines, crafting stations and appliances. This covers all the different things you find around the world, and those crafted by yourself and your friends. A primary piece of this puzzle has been in the creation of dev systems and methodology that allow for the hugely swifter implementation of far more varied/interesting crafting and devices – which in turn is a big thing for modders, and for the nu-medieval post apocalyptic society gameplay we will now cater for. This has also been built, however, with a framework that will allow for a wide variety of other gameplay aspects – some of which will be a part of the initial 42 release, while others will be drip-fed into future 42 builds, and more still in the mainline builds beyond that. (The underlying systems will be available for modders from the word go, however.) One of the advantages that the crafting revamp brings with it is the opportunity to provide engineering and electronics gameplay with a ton more depth. This system revolves around the concept of components. An example of this would be a ‘power input’ component, which provides electrical power to a machine from an external wire. Another would be a crafting component, which would undertake a crafting recipe that can make use of any liquid or item within a machine’s resource component, that can store items, liquid or power. Importantly, every component also has an associated UI that’s been designed for player interaction. This will mean as our library (and the community’s library) of components grows, we can quickly put them together to create all sorts of in-game machines and appliances. It’s also relatively easy to slap a UI skin on to each component (perhaps something already existing from the game, perhaps something new) to make them appear in the most appropriate way. Components will also be moddable, so modders will be able to add new components that could then be used as parts of a machine’s in-game functionality and UI. The end goal is to open this up to the player in-game, having these components as items obtainable through disassembly. A burglar alarm for example will be comprised of a speaker component, as well as a battery input component and a motion sensor component. A player could feasibly go around collecting the components, removing the motion sensors and installing them around their base, wiring each of them up to lights to act as an early warning system. Meanwhile the speaker component of the burglar alarm could be similarly wired up to a switch to allow people in the base to create a distraction sound to lure zombies away or into a trap. These are just two potential g...NEW CHARITY SPIFFO!Aug 4, 2023 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/8400026d0cdf8b4d6fd82c251447ea1c7b404f35.png The Indie Stone are pleased to announce another crowd-sourced Spiffo plushie through our friends over at Makeship – this time raising money for a cause that’s dear to all our hearts. First off, let’s meet the raccoon himself. INTRODUCING… STEADFAST SPIFFO! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/59aee7c57560fb78a02c3fc62b3ae6beb77c8a3a.png They came for him… they still come… but he will NEVER yield. He is: Steadfast Spiffo. Spiffo is BACK, with maxed out levels of adorability. With his roomy camping backpack filled with useful survival supplies, sturdy axe, and many utility belts, he’s prepared for anything… and for a limited time, can be added to inventories as YOUR companion in the apocalypse! Face down the odds. Fight the fight. Survive against the horde – all accompanied by a plushably grizzled hug-raccoon! Interested in putting down money for Steadfast Spiffo? Then visit the crowdfunding page over on Makeship! We’ve timed it so (hopefully) orders will be ready to make for amazing Christmas presents. FUNDRAISING All money raised by the Indie Stone from Steadfast Spiffo will go to the Queensland Cancer Council, an Australian cancer charity that brought help and solace to a good friend of ours during very difficult times. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/7cffeb4642a3e5d70e2256b393040d2d1db17e94.jpg Vicki Ann Woods was the partner of Zac Congo, one of the principal architects of the animation system that made Build 41 (and PZ) the success it is today. Even during a long illness, her love and moral support became a part of what the game has now become. Sometimes (not always, but sometimes) we get people asking how they can further support Project Zomboid. They say that they paid some money long ago, but have so many hours of gameplay that they want to add a little more. We always tell them not to be daft, and just tell some friends or leave a nice review. Well, for the next 21 days we have a different answer: please buy this Spiffo! Buying this Spiffo helps support people like Vicki, and like Zac, during their times of greatest need – and to aid research that will help all of us and our families worldwide. Thank you x (And here’s that link again if you need it) BagZ of funJul 27, 2023 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/d67f157909f5147584da2672e4814ac4e51c6e7e.jpg Let’s have a dig into what’s happening in everyone’s favourite apocalypse. (Although other apocalypses are available. First off a quick check-in with three of the four main pillars of Build 42 – the pillars in question being crafting system revamp, MP improvement, the depth/performance/lighting tech upgrade, and finally animals – which will have to wait till next time as RJ is only very recently back from his summer hols. Turbo has been finalizing his machine and crafting station systems for a check-in next week, after we decided on some ways to maximise their utility for both our own devs and modders and give them as broad and solid a foundation as we can. The results are exciting and the design process for machines and the numerous crafting stations continues to expand these systems over the new tech tree and across existing devices over the entire PZ map. (Stuff like gas stations, wells, water pumps etc will also eventually be tied to the new system – but maybe not in the initial release.) Next up: tech upgrade. Lots of stuff going on in codeland for this – but the topline additions have been improvements to the new visibility polygon, and continued work on the tile depth addition that will remove annoying character/wall clipping and ultimately make proper addition of lying and sitting down in all four directions feasible for mainline addition. (As well as the rendering optimizations it will entail obv.) Alongside this the continued whackamole of things broken by the foundational changes made by the engine upgrades – stuff like (to grab a few random examples) doors not shaking when thumped, muzzleflash not showing, railings not being cutaway properly, rendering of zeds on hidden floors not working and many/varied other important stuff. Finally, we now have four coders and two MP-devoted testers beavering away on our multiplayer – two coders devoted to the ongoing mission to bring all player inventory operations server-side, and another two knuckling down on general MP bugs and required polish. Over the past two weeks the guys have also been hooking up ‘new for 42’ systems, like the revamped fishing, to the netcode – and looking ahead to properly wiring up the animals too. SOUNDSCAPE IMPROVEMENTS Last week our Formosa UK’s primary PZ-dedicated chaps, Michael and Matteo, took the opportunity to do a full new mixing session for the game while they were both on the same island – said island being Great Britain. A proportion of this was done with MP in mind, and especially gunshots, but seeing as multiplayer is currently broken/WIP in our dev build they instead hooked up an in-game barbecue to a long sequence of gunshots and worked around it like that. (Enterprising chaps, these two.) We’re still waiting on some improved occlusion settings for indoor/outdoor, and the like, and some tweaks to player related sounds – but otherwise the following has been tweaked and added. Re-bala...Knox Event: 30 Years OnJul 6, 2023 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/a90228b2bb85a4f478f66286bda9a0ddaf5c8f1f.jpg Today marks a day in history. It is EXACTLY thirty years since the Knox Event broke out on 6th July 1993. Our thoughts are with everyone impacted on this sad anniversary. To commemorate this we are allowing everyone to relive the experience IN REAL TIME on the Twitters. Please follow @TheKnoxEvent to experience a textual timeline of what manifested three decades ago, albeit (one would hope) with a little less inevitable death than the real thing. TECH UPGRADE Okay so this week one of the four pillars of the next main PZ build is going back into the spotlight. We’ve seen good progress backstage in crafting, MP improvement and animals/wildlife – but it’s the engine upgrades that’ve given us something cool and visual to show off this week. The tech improvements will be supplying basements, the 32 floor limit and new light propagation system – but clearly a primary focus of it all has been with performance. Using 8×8 tile chunks, in the tech branch we are caching areas of the map to speed up drawing the scene dramatically. The benefit of this is obvious when it comes to FPS, with our own machine averaging over 300 FPS when zoomed out to maximum. (In the end product, once in the game proper, your mileage may differ for better or worse.) The downside to this, however, is that the upgrades involved meant we would be unable to change the lighting on tiles in front of the player – which has always been used to represent the viewing arc and line of sight as the character turns or moves. With the changes in the tech branch doing this would always invalidate the cached chunks in every frame, thereby rendering the optimizations ineffective. To replace this in early B42, as a stopgap, we had a much more naïve and simpler viewing cone that was drawn over the screen which also allowed you to see what parts of the screen were outside the character’s viewing arc. You can see it on the old Light Propagation Demo we posted in the initial 42 Techdoid a while back. However, this was never ideal. With this it was impossible to tell if an obstacle in the world is blocking your view, as it would just blindly extend to the edge of the screen with no concern for obstacles in the world. As such, EP has been working on a new system that gives all the same information as our old system but without the extreme FPS consequences of it – and also far slicker and more accurate than our old tile system. What he’s done is pretty cool! As you can see, there’s now much more precise and smooth LOS information than the old tile system ever could muster. We’re now experimenting with different levels of visibility and blur on the effect to make sure it is a) visible enough to convey the line of sight information to the player, but b) not overbearing enough to distract the player as it moves around in real-time. Where we’ve got it right now in this second video is still super cool (note the effect when doors and curtai...Great moments in PC gaming: Building a little server community in Project Zomboid then dying six times in a rowJun 25, 2023 - PC GamerGreat moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories... Read more.Snack AttackJun 22, 2023 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/81c1b6bc884b67b7f29716187b4ee2eb3803cd75.png Haylo, here’s another dev-log sent down from the mothership. Few different things form different areas this time around, starting off with an example system update from one of the four main pillars of Build 42 – which are the crafting improvements, and the sorts of places they could take the game to. CRAFTY BUSINESS For the past few weeks Turbo’s focus has been on making the new machine scripting system more versatile and easy to use. As well as creating the crafting stations and machines required for the crafting tree we’re working on (potters wheels, anvils, woodwork benches and such) our ultimate goal is to allow all machines and appliances on the map utilize this system to unify how machines work within the game. This overall goal won’t be present in its entirety for a first release of B42, but the framework will have been installed that allows for them not only to share the same UI systems to keep them consistent, but also allow for them to be connected together, and allow them to have more complexity of interior parts that could be salvaged and co-opted for other uses. From fire alarms, to clocks, to ovens, to microwaves. The ramifications of this system will be huge both for the game and for modders, allowing for the machine UI and functionality to be both scriptable with lua and with the object scripting. It will then provide powerful and easy-to-use tools for devs and modders to create interesting machines quickly, cater for slots to place items, and allow for items to interact with these machines in a diverse way with a consistent UI. Instead of needing to build a bespoke scripted UI, and the complex interactions between the player, machines will be able to be added with minimal code for functionality, and provide higher level details on what goes into them and what comes out. Likewise there’ll be stardardised knobs and buttons that this backend will allow to be attached for player interaction. In order to test the versatility of how this system could be applied to vanilla objects within the game (and how far we could push it) we wanted to apply it all to a system that wasn’t strictly a crafting station like the more standard one we showed off a month or so ago with some post-apocalyptic pottery. As such, Turbo put together a test case that could have some fun utilization within a multiplayer settlement in the post-apocalypse – and indeed is pretty cool on your general solo survival adventure too. There will probably be those out there looking at this at face value, perhaps even getting annoyed and asking ‘nggggh, why vending machines?’. (Hello, to those out there!) However, the important aspect to take away from this video are the many unique interactions, systems and features that have been built into the vending machine using this same framework. What we see here allows for a unique key to unlock the machine, allows it to be stocked with different items (which co...Church on ZundayJun 8, 2023 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/28635d58b38aeec2709de1ab90f3035480b2e86c.png A lot of stuff in a WIP state at the moment, so not too many big flashy shiny things in the blog this time round. Hopefully enough to whet your whistle though. In terms of work on the four central pillars of 42, the next big thing happening will be the next merge-in of the crafting revamp to the central trunk build. This will primarily be the crafting station code, which has had a bit of rewiring – and now will also allow for benches/machines etc to (optionally) have ‘parts’ items that degrade on use and can be viewed/added/removed via a maintenance tab. Meanwhile, RJ is working on integrating his deer tracking with the foraging/search mode integrated into Build 41, while in our tech upgrade ‘optimization / lighting / more depth & height’ branch we continue to play a bit of whack-a-mole with issues that have arisen with such foundational changes. So, this week, as an example that’s been stuff like: savefile thumbnail creation being borked, zombies spawning on water, the tops of tall tiles showing through the floor above etc. Finally, in the realms of MP and the continuing mission to bring inventories etc. server-side the gang have been working on getting trapping and nu-fishing working with the new systems, and solving various issues that occur with new object creation also. FARMZ Let’s pop quickly back into the revamped farming, which this week has had some ease-of-use controls added in to make things less of a click-through-UI nightmare and bring a touch of extra Stardewwy-ness. This video shows various elements of fun stuff – but primarily that by taking a farming tool into your primary, pressing RMB and aiming, and then pressing ‘E’ will have you go about the farming action. Likewise with sowing seeds, and harvesting. CAVEAT: Please note that these controls aren’t final, and also that there’s a fair amount of animation polish required to make it all look super-smooth. Also, here’s a quick timelapse of them plants a growin’. OTHER STUFF As previously mentioned, alongside readable newspapers and newsletters, players will now be able to pick up flyers that advertises places of interest on the Knox Event map – and then also reveal that location on the player’s own personal map. This week we’ve really been knuckling down on this, as we’ve realized it’s a great tool to direct new players towards buildings favoured by many in the community for their safehouses. Anyone able to name the following locations from the real estate advertising? {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/da92cb534e228e09afeab8d486dfece92f6457a8.png As well as expanding the current map, we’re also giving existing areas of the map a loving glow-up. Take this amazing improvement from Ayrton as an awesome example. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/a61212d7a8fb00a9ceb5f433a863956f89f25f29.png Clearly any new build will also be coming with new clothing, hats and whatnot. Martin’s also pumping out loads of new fun stuff for you to l...Mizter McGregor's GardenMay 25, 2023 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/c7eef6f421ef0c3f2abdfddac274ba6185c86290.png Last time round we checked in with some of the main pillars of Build 42 – those things being the crafting and crafting systems update, the tech upgrade, animals/migration and MP. As such, for today’s blog we’ll be dipping into some of the stuff that wider members of the team have been working on for more general improvement elsewhere in the game. FARMING First off, let’s darken Blair’s door – and watch him lean over a fence with a piece of straw in his mouth while he outlines what he’ll imminently be merging into our internal branch for our testers to play around with. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/447e9a7ec51d76403d75f88ae42d4235c6145548.png Currently I’m working on smoothing out the interface and interactions for the revamped farming. One important part of the interface, and player feedback, are the new plant sprites Mash has produced to represent plant states. Previously, our far more limited number of plants had sprites for their individual growth stages, as well as some generic sprites to represent trampled plants. Now, for every single growth stage and for every plant, we have 600 additional sprites to represent what’s now grown to 15 crops and 8 herbs. These cover states of: Unhealthy – due to disease, lack of water, or general low health.In the process of dying – due to these aforementioned reasons.Completely dead.Dead-but-also-trampled/crushed. These are for plants that have been crushed by zombie hordes, vehicles etc, and also for dead plants that are degrading over time. With the farming rework we are adding growing seasons (which can also be disabled in the sandbox settings). With these most plants will have a planting season, with optimal months that produce additional yields. Plants that are planted out of season will be destined to wither away and die. This means, that aside from some winter crops, winter farming will be no more. Growing seasons are learnable knowledge. A farmer character starts knowing all of them; a character with the gardener trait will know most of them; and they can also be learned from reading seed packets and special farming handbooks. CHEEKY RABBITS Last time we properly met the Knox Event’s deer population and their migration habits, and now it’s time to introduce some smaller varmints – who are tied to the same system, but will move around according to a different ruleset. WIP vid. Kitten behaviour will probably get more realistic / change. (‘Kitten’ is the correct word for baby rabbit – we don’t know that either. Also we had a bug this week with the carrots. Also also, with animals comes poop: https://twitter.com/theindiestone/status/1659235346301714450 {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/8ceb8d457693a8e5c73200d682fee1fa64365a1c.jpg MAPPING Now ably assisted by our newest friend Dirk the map team carry on a-pace with the huge map expansion that (most likely) will land alongside 42, or be a part of its beta updates. After a brief spot of beggin...The Skillful HuntZmanMay 11, 2023 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/3f2c6fb51b109260125ae22336ded8b14c2083a9.jpg Hello all! This week we’ll be checking in with three of the main four pillars of Build 42 – work on the fourth, the server-side player inventories and general MP improvement, has been fairly ‘business as usual’ the past month or so and there’s not much to talk about that’d be juicy for enough for public consumption. Steady your loins, then, as first of all we jump into… ANIMALS AND MIGRATION RJ has been taking a holiday (American translation: vacation) from his work on domestic animals and husbandry, and has taken to the woodland and forests of the Knox Event. Wild animals will be important to B42 for both reasons of ambiance and necessity – it will make your experience feel no end more engaging to see deer skittering through the treeline, but also will make hunting a viable survival technique – and one required for some of our advanced crafting recipes when society is long-gone. https://youtu.be/a3gE3T-nTaY What RJ has been working on, in particular, this week is the movement of animals over the map – their migration if you will. So if you could all also have a looksee at the following video too, then we can run into it in some more depth afterwards. Also clearly: USUAL WIP CAVEATS APPLY. Things can and will change through development and testing. So what are we seeing here? Well basically throughout the day our deer will follow paths that our designers (and modders) can map out in our WorldEd tool – and in the vid you can see a virtual animal following a path. Right now, one virtual animal is a group of animals that’s been defined in a lua file. Our current group, for example, consists of one buck, several doe and some fawns. Though clearly once they are fully implemented the variation will be greater, and also dependent on stuff like the time of year. Once players get close to this coded ‘virtual animal’ these deer will then spawn into the world as real animals – and once you retreat away they’ll revert to their virtual status so the game can take over their movement and activities once more. If the group has become separated meanwhile, they’ll team back up again when their paths next cross. In their virtual form the animals will move over the map, doing potential set activities at set different places. They are timetabled to have several ‘sleeping’ and ‘eating’ periods – currently sleeping for a period of half an hour at some point between 12pm and 4pm, eating at some point between 5am and 7am, and eating again for an hour at some point before 4pm and 6pm. (Clearly, all this is easily changed at the dev-end – and can also be adjusted for whatever different animals we choose to add in future) To aid players who want to be hunters, deer will leave evidence and tracks of where they’ve been and what they’re doing. So there’ll be footprints (with a direction suggested), poop, and broken twigs and undergrowth – while flattened plants will indicate a sleeping spot, and grazed ...Bren After ReadingApr 27, 2023 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/857fc7a1bdde41dcc1434ea3b2d4f3c198269e6d.png Hey all, hope this finds you well. Lots of work on the technical side of the four main pillars of 42 these past two weeks – all of which relatively dry, so let’s run through that briefly before checking out some of the other items rolling in. Right now the foundational code to our in-depth crafting systems revamp are being brought into a position where the MP team can better get their hooks into it, while in our optimization/lighting/height channel we’ve been continuing to polish out cutaway issues, errors thrown and the way our isoregions system handles its newfound 32 potential storeys. For our MP upgrade, meanwhile, work continues on getting the machinations of player inventories (building, recipes etc) over onto the server – while also improving the implementation of our (pretty much fully cooked at this point) new fishing minigames and systems. Domestic animals, meanwhile, are in bug fix mode – with additional attention being given to their pathfinding and around animal escapes. While all this is ongoing other team members are beavering away raising the quality of the game in smaller-scale ways, so let’s look at a few of those fun nuggets now. CURRENT AFFAIRZ One way to give our towns and city more personality is to provide more written literature for you to loot and peruse – whether it’s a fully readable lore item, or simply an interestingly named (if non-readable) book found in a house you loot that might deepen your understanding of the life of the zombie you just bludgeoned downstairs. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/cf6dbb88b9194e9a21f5671dbe08a4ed488de7a0.png Build 42 will feature a range of newspapers, each with a final three or four issues to pick up and read in a separate ‘written content UI’. They will contain news articles about the initial build-up to the Knox Event articles, everyday life articles, and even a few breadcrumbs as to what’s really been going in. This will also include smaller scale publications: like ‘town news’ pamphlets for the smaller settlements that don’t quite warrant a full-scale newspaper. Beyond this we’ve also had a lovely man called Stuart taking all our teeny-tiny map logos and up-rezzing them into more suitable forms for both in-game and irl usage. Their first use within the game are ‘local business’ fliers that are also readable via the same ‘printed media’ UI. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/259d40f931e16fd0f0ea8aa46c4209c3db859d5a.png Clearly there’s not much zed content that can be made from these, but their gameplay role is to mark up interesting locations (and sources of potentially helpful loot) on the in-game map – a function that we feel will be especially handy for new players. We feel that finding a flier that’s a membership advertisement for, say, the West Maple Country Club and revealing it on the player’s map will give an interesting reason for new players to leave town and explore – and likewise a job advert for McCoy logging...Crafting RamblZApr 13, 2023 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/c1ed94006cd9b458486034688b373ba1904cf8ed.png Hey all! So we’re still not at the point of being able to show anything substantial from the crafting overhaul, however we thought we’d talk about a few topics that are relevant to our current work and give people a bit of insight into where we’re going, our ultimate goals and the design challenges we’re facing. This will be very much a stream of consciousness post, taken from a chat within the crafting team, so forgive if it lacks direction but we hope it’ll be interesting! Inspiration One of our biggest inspirations in terms of what we’d like to accomplish with Zomboid ultimately in terms of crafting freedom and possibility, is to provide similar creative and community experiences found playing the extensive tech progression modpacks for Minecraft. Several of the core crafting dev team have periodically dived into Minecraft modpacks for a good chunk of Zomboid’s development, and spend many hours grinding away decorating our bases, building wonderfully cool machines, laying down pipes, wires and conveyor belts and whatnot to double our ore output or finally get that new power system to power our base. The possibilities we could bring to zomboid have tickled at our brains for many years in this area, and we’re excited to be finally exploring them. Obviously though, Zomboid is a post apocalypse survival game and it would be rather silly to say the least if some zombie apocalypse survivor was building a nuclear reactor or casting rituals to open portals, so this shouldn’t be taken as a literal 1 to 1 inspiration. What we’ve taken away from our experiences is more the overall spirit of building, of expanding, of obtaining materials, of navigating a very tall tech tree formed from the availability of resources, that will finally allow you to explore a new tree and open up new areas of gameplay to the player, rather than the literal experiences of making ore crushing machines, nuclear reactors or ender teleporters. As much as we feel Zomboid is an extremely deep game, it’s never hit the bar we’ve wanted in terms of this area of gameplay. Mixed in with that is the heavy focus on roleplaying, especially with multiplayer or later with NPCs, our ultimate vision is somewhat parallel but different to the experiences in Minecraft, with more of a focus on realism and plausibility, as well as leveraging skills, professions and learning to make the experience more cooperative and interesting in a roleplay environment (though solo players need not worry, as NPCs will fill this gap too, and before them we’ll make sure to adequately provide sandbox options, and likely the builder main menu mode, to not lock this stuff out of the single player experience). Extensivity vs Believability As we stated a while back, our aim with the crafting overhaul is to provide a framework for us to expand the crafting possibilities within the game massively, to allow for a long post-apocalyptic settlement to cre...Eine Kleine NachtmooZikMar 30, 2023 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4460946/04077b976be4af496b9d747f484b2313abaf3fad.jpg Wotcha survivors. The general pattern for 42 dev is that we’ve got four main pillars of Build 42 – all of which are the ‘big stuff’ and the fundamental large-scale tech improvements. These are: moving much of the MP system server-side to give servers more control and less hackability, introducing our deeper and more expansive crafting systems, bringing animal life to the Knox Event – and engine improvements to optimize, give far greater height/depth levels to our map, and to provide more realistic light and darkness for your survival adventures. These are the things we need for release, while other things in development by our dev partners (or staff assigned to more general improvement) are seen as ‘nice-to-haves’ – and some may even fall into patches of 42 when things start to shake out a bit. Going through the ‘pillar’ features though: The lengthy first stage of the MP work (transferring player inventories to the server) is now over, and transplanted very neatly over into the internal test build – so now our MP coders are delving deep into stage two. This will see all operations of player inventories (building, recipes, foraging etc) also move into server control, overview and deference. In terms of the deeper and more expansive crafting – as we mentioned last week the code systems this is all based on has now been merged into the internal test build and as such much of the last week or two has been centred around fixing the longstanding recipes and functions that the new stuff has broken. We’re pretty much back at a standard of ‘operational’ on this, or will be after a commit being made tomorrow, and this too has been a process that was a little smoother than expected. That all said, obviously that has been the focus post-merge, so while progress has been made since its integration, the majority of work has been bug fixing and not much to report otherwise. The team are starting to discuss the next step post merge, and looking forward to it immensely! Animal and animal husbandry meanwhile (or at least the cows, pigs and sheep – chickens are still a little haphazard) are approaching a stage where they’re fun to play around with for extended periods in SP. Following on from the merge of the music system detailed below into the internal test build, they also now moo, oink and baa which has given them a lot of extra life also! Finally, in terms of the tech upgrade we’re mainly at the bug fixing and further optimization phase with the chunked rendering and variable height systems, but it’ll likely be the sort of thing that’ll spit out bugs and countless ‘betcha didn’t think of this scenario?’ gotchas for some time to come, so its not clear when it’ll be merged into main. As said last week, it should be mostly smooth when the time comes though. OTHER STUFF Next up, some of the other items being conjured up for 42 either with our development partners, or the smaller cool stuff...Project Zomboid's Player Base Has Risen from 3k to 30k Peak Players During Its 8th Year of Early Access on SteamDec 20, 2021 - GitHypFrom having the early-Alpha version leaked online to having laptops containing large amounts of the game's original code stolen, the team working on Project Zomboid have somehow managed to survive multiple horrific game dev setbacks over the past decade.
Now, 8 years after The Indie Stone first released Project Zomboid in Early Access on Steam, the survival horror game's popularity is still continuing to spread with the player count increasing from 3k to 30k peak concurrent players this week after the game's latest major update.
Project Zomboid's Build 41, which introduces 16-player multiplayer dedicated servers along with many other major improvements has resulted in the zombie RPG originally released in 2013 now rising into Steam's Top 20 Most Played Games at #18 this week.
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