Hey all, lots of ‘under the hood’ whatnots this week. We’ve got a few nuggets of info on how various things are progressing though.

ANIMATION GOINGS ON

Lots of cool animation stuff but it’s not yet clear exactly what’s going to drop into Build 34, the most recent public test build of which is 34.14 and was released over the weekend.

Some new animation sexiness to come from Martin’s direction are various shoving animations for the player while sprinting and bashing into zombies (that could go backfire terribly for the player, we should remind the one concerned Zomboid survivor on the forums wondering if being able to bash zombies over would make getting through them easier), more hit reactions for combat, as well as dedicated ‘walking/running through bushes / trees’. We’re really excited to see it come together!

ANIMATION RELATED GOINGS ON

Since we got the double sized tiles in, and seen the new animation system and clothing in the game, there is one element of the zombies and characters that still needs to be updated to complete the zombie experience, and Binky’s undergoing an overhaul on the texture mapping across the characters and clothes. While this may sound rather dull (and Binky made it clear it is very dull) it will allow the characters skin to no longer be mirrored across both halfs of the body, allowing for more varied detail on the zombies.

One particular benefit from UVs shared across clothing and skin is it will allow us to construct varied blood overlays for injuries and more crucially zombie damage / decomposition. We want to be able to overlay more gore and blood onto their clothing and skin (astute viewers already spotted a hint of what else is to come related to this at the end of the animation video a few weeks back).

ONLINE COOP UPDATE

We’ve current got a new build of the ‘easy co-op’ stuff that General Arcade have been conjuring up for us in internal testing, and so far so good, so *fingers crossed* that might drop in soon too, GA just looking into a few remaining issues with friend invites – alongside all the lovely server option stuff that EasyPickins has prepared for it in 34.14.

METALWORK

As we mentioned last week in our brief Easter Mondoid blog, meanwhile, we’re also rethinking, recoding and rearting our previous plans for late-game metalworking. A lot of valid points were raised both within the dev team and in the wider community, so hopefully our retooled (and now ingot-free) version will feel a lot more in-keeping with the game. It’s a hot topic, so we’ll talk about it in a Mondoid when it’s in a test build and we’re sure it’s working well.

In other news…

Blindcoder is pleased to report that the PZ map now has a beta version showing off all Mash’s cool new higher definition sprite-work. It can be found here.

Some interesting stats from Blindcoder: The old map was 537600px x 230400px, and the new one is now 1075200px x 396800px. The old map was 36 gigabytes, the new one is 132 gigabytes. The number of files in the map project has also gone up from 630.450 per level to 2.171.000 per level.

Our thanks to Blindcoder for creating something that can handle such gargantuan figures!

This week’s featured image by Exjia over on Steam. The Centralised 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!