Hello all, here’s the latest from the Rotation Mines.

ANIMATIONS

The rotationals code is pretty much done, but Zac is now integrating a revamped animation provided by Martin for smooth 180 degree turns – once again using the power of Math(s).

“The idea is to extract the rotation about the up axis to derive the character’s rotation angle” he explains, to the blog-writers complete non-comprehension. “Without having to go through the expense of Quat->Matrix->Euler conversions, so we deconstruct the quaternion transform to derive the result much faster.”

Thanks for clearing that up Zac! Well, anyway – here’s a quick vid of where we were last week – when the rotations were working, but had weirdness around 180 degree turns.

And now, here’s where we are as of this afternoon – with the improvements half-integrated, with a reminder in bold that this isn’t the final product by any measure.

In this vid the walkToTurn and runToTurn anims still need hooking up, so the mid-stride ones used in this vid don’t look right. Likewise, there’s a one frame back-pedal still in there too, that needs hammering out. It’s getting there though.

Everything should be looking sexier next week, and the feel of player movement will be less tank-like and far more enjoyable.

Apologies for not having quite as polished a video as we had hoped this week, but we wanted to show you this at least to show that we’re getting there with it.

By way of apology please have two bug videos that both show what can happen when rotations go wrong AND hint at the modding potential that Build 41 unlocks.

Item 1: “The Spooky Float-Shuffle”

Item 2: “When Dabbing Goes Too Far”

As mentioned every week for a while now (not everyone reads every blog!) rotational anims are a core thing we need to get into the build before we can do a public IWBUMS test – alongside horde optimization and hooking the new anims up to MP.

Of these items, rotationals are pretty much in the can once the above is finalised – barring polish once this 180 stuff is fully implemented.

OTHER STUFF

While the aforementioned pre-IWBUMS work on the animation systems is underway, other team-members are working on other aspects of the game to get it ready. Other stuff added to the internal build this week includes:

Blood layer system so clothing closest to wounds get stained with blood first, before progressively making blood marks on the next item of clothing. So a t-shirt gets a blood stain first, before then starting to make a mark on the sweater that covers it. Quick video of this in testing seen here.

A big bugbear in the current internal build has been that the player could drop-dead from bleeding from non-consequential areas – like a gash in your feet. Now all injuries have their own bleeding modifier, so a neck wound has far worse bleeding implications than, for example, your leg.

Similar to the above, a speed modifier has been added to different body parts – so that injuries on some body parts have a greater impact on your walk and run speeds than others. So, for example, an injury on your upper leg will have less of an impact on speed than one directly on your foot.

The character customization screen has been receiving some polish– improving suggested player and profession clothing load-outs, making coloration choices less garish and polishing the idles of the character model that you’re dressing up.

A ‘player appearance’ tab has been added to the in-game health/skills panel. Here you will be able to make whatever in-game appearance customisations to your survivor that are available to you – dependent on you having the relevant scissors, combs etc. in your inventory.

Disabled roof cutaways and interior furniture loading when you’re moving fast in a car nearby via the new cutaway system – giving a nice frame-rate boost when driving through the built-up areas like central West Point.

TRANSLATOR SHOUT-OUT

As mentioned before, we are still looking for people who would be willing to look over the current state of community translations for Project Zomboid.

We have had quite an uptick in Chinese players this year, which is easily one of our more patchy translations – so would especially like to hear from any Chinese-speaking survivors who would be interested in helping out.

Information is available here on how you can begin contributing for any language.

Feel free to leave any questions or comments in that thread, and Connall is also always monitoring the #translation discord channel should you prefer to talk on there. Many thanks!

This week’s troubling scene from Ocha. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!