Hey everyone! Time for today’s Thursdoid! This time will be another rather hastily put together one I’m afraid. And to boot the internal development build decided to break today shortly before I was due to record a video, so hurray! After a few hours of trying to get something together I’ve had to go ahead without.

As alluded to more vaguely last week, fearless leader and Thursdoid writer Batsphinx was last week unable to Thursdoid as he and his wife were busy delivering their new daughter Samantha onto their bathroom floor at 4am (shout out to Nick at the 999 emergency services who talked them through the ordeal!) and as such for the next few weeks he’s getting some rare but well earned Zomboid-free time to be kept awake all night and be milk sick upon. Congratulations Will from everyone in the team!

So it’s left in the meantime for myself, coder and much less organized Thursdoid writer to take over.

Usually I’d be bribing you with an awesome montage gameplay video with new Zach music to take your mind off the piss poor rushed together Thursdoids, but since that’s not happening, I’ll try go into some more details on what’s going on in the team this week! There are still some neat tech videos to show off.

TEA TOOLS AND TECH IMPROVEMENTS

Zach continues his great work adding more tools and features, this time to allow Martin and the other devs to quickly add and test new costume pieces through the AnimZed editor and preview them in game.





Meanwhile, Mark is getting to the bottom of some low level blend bugs which have resulted in various issues and snapping that has been causing problems for a long while. We’re hoping future videos will have that extra smoothness and polish to the character motion because of it.

FIRE IN THE DISCO

General Arcade side, Yuri has been continuing his visual effect work, this time turning his attention to the outdated fire effect. He’s really in the very early experimentation and getting his particle system up and running, so the results are FAR from complete and extremely experimental. We were going to hold on showing until we had textured particles and blurring and further balancing done, but since our gameplay video fell through I thought we’d show where it is. So please no assumptions about size or colour or detail or untextured squares, any other aspect being final, as we already know this is far from complete but are excited to see how the tech is progressing:

GAMEPLAY

The team continue to work on tying the new animations, clothing and models into the game. Romain has been working solidly polishing up the combat and other in-game actions, I’ll let him speak for himself because ‘yum free Thursdoid words!’:

“I’ve been working on adding a lot of the anim currently available, this leads to a whole new system for “extended idle animation”.

Depending on your character moodles, pain or other variable, you’ll see sometimes you character scratching an arm, shivering, checking his weapon, wipe his legs to check for blood etc. On top of that, several new timed action animations were done, and with this some fixes for the current timed actions (digging a graves now equip any shovel in both hands, crafting now check for hammer in container, etc.).

Animation for digging, looting (on the ground, on shelves, in wardrobe.. All different, depending on the container location), cleaning blood…

Blood on clothing now also has its own system, depending on clothes you’re wearing. Prior to this, blood were only applied to character’s textures, now it’ll detect if you have a jacket then blood will splat on it and not on the shirt or your torso… Dress up accordingly to keep your character clean!

New outfits are also being added along with their own zone (Gigamart employee for example!) Other than that, I was focused a lot on combat, fixing bugs & making it more fluid/fun (pushing a zombie will bump the zombie behind him, added character defending from a bite..) I also… Erm. Removed Milk spawning from shelves in kitchen.. Don’t ask me why. [ed: Because the US don’t drink awful UHT milk as standard like the Europeans seem to so keep their milk refrigerated. This turned into quite the outraged debate within the team!]

And that’s your lot! Actually didn’t turn out as bad as I was anticipating. Thanks again and apologies for the video letdown, we’ll try get something sexy for next week to make up for it!

This week’s pic is by us! 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.