Hey survivors, here’s the latest from Zomboidton.

IWBUMS 34.19

The marvellous EasyPickins continues to build some nice tweaks and fixes in to the public test of Build 34, which seems to be coming to a natural climax now – although we still need to work out which side of the release fence polished nutrition and metalwork will be landing. An item of note in .19 is EP’s new precipitation system, which looks nicer and opens the door to falling snow and whatnot. If you want to join in with testing you can find details here.

BACKPACK LATEST

So with the animation update now surging through the pipeline we’ve got anims that allow the player to take bags off their back, and rifle through the contents on the floor.

As well as looking pretty as they jiggle about – they’ll also make a significant gameplay difference. If you’re carrying a bag on your back you will, in most cases, be unable to go rooting around in it unless you first take it off and put it on the floor in front of you. This means there will be no more intensive backpack resorting done while wandering around, as well as making looting much more interesting, with the potential of a panicked looter leaving their bag behind if they are not observant.

[Note: in the anim cycle the strap currently disappears when the bag is taken off and reappears when it’s put back on. There aren’t any easy ways to avoid this, but with clothing worn and in-game it will be far, far less noticeable.]

Holding a bag in your hand will add the extra advantage of being able to interact with it without stopping, which will make bag management much more strategic. Finally we may be able to look into a few more traits to further increase player’s capability to interact quickly with backpacks, as well as provide different speeds based on the type and convenience of the bag used.

If you weren’t around for the previous bag vid then let’s have another repeat, as it does look lovely.

HELLO LADIES

To complement all this, character-wise, Binky is currently experimenting with unifying the textures between the male and female animation meshes. Currently our new player and zed anims are all chaps, y’see. The result of this (if successful) will be a more in-depth way of assembling the base models. We’ll lose the need to double-up textures – have more variety in skin tones, will let players wear whatever they like and will also tie into having blood and bandage overlays on the characters themselves.

With the base mesh and clothing overlays all using consistent texture layouts we’d be free to overlay this stuff wherever appropriate. Better clean that bite mark, dress the wound, and grab a clean long-sleeved shirt if you want to pretend you’re unscathed and not in imminent danger of eating your compadres!

FINALLY

Do check out lovely Blindcoder, of map fame, and his new building mod. Thanks all!

This week’s featured image by Shadows on Steam. 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! Okay thanks bye! Oh, and community GoT spoiler chat goes… here!