This week we’re going back over to Animation man Martin. Martin’s currently finishing up a fairly laborious re-export of all his anims, which needed some adjustments to bring them up alongside the way visible backpacks are working.

In the midst of all this, then, he seemed quite pleased to dole out some new animated treats for us.

“Animation-wise I’ve been doing some new zombie hit reactions, new player melee attacks, some more incidental anims like eating, drinking and a whole host of other stuff.”

“Beyond that I’ve modelled a couple of new items of clothing, but a lot of the work has really been new textures – adding some variety to what the player can wear. With Captain Binky’s new player character models we’ve been trying to optimise the models and textures so we can have layered clothing with the addition of dirt and blood splatter; but doing it in such a way that it won’t overly impact performance.”

“Then, as we showed two weeks ago we’ve got new items, some of which are derivatives of existing weapons like the hammer which, along with the original, now has variations like ballpeen, mallet and clubhammer. Other items are everyday objects a survivor may use to fend off zombies who get too close, like a toilet plunger, saucepan, pipe wrench etc.”

“As I mentioned last time though, there’s a lot of stuff to implement and balance. Creating the assets is only one part of the process – so don’t expect everything in the very first anim update.”

“With that in mind, then, I’ve also made a batch of improvised “spears” that have their own set of melee attacks. Whilst their material cost and damage still need to be worked out and balanced, the intention is that anything you can use to stab with will also have an improvised ‘spear’ version.”

“You’ll also be able to fix a bayonet or other improvised stabby thing to certain guns and use them in a similar way to a spear. Finally, as I said last week, please keep your suggestions coming on the forums. I read everything and people have come up with some great ideas!”

There’s plenty more cooking that we’ll discuss next week, although it might be worth mentioning that last week’s Operation Big Tree is done and awaiting the first internal test build of Build 35. Thanks to the hard work of community translators like Teesee, Geras and their teams, meanwhile, it’s looking likely that French, Polish (and maybe a few other localizations) of the Radio and TV channels will also be in 35.

Oh, and we also just wanted to spotlight a new PZ RP server that’s sprung up over the past week. So, if you’re of an RP persuasion, then please do check out ZomboidRP.com.

This week’s featured image by AwesomeMMM off of 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!