The ladies have finally made it into the animation build! After a couple of weeks of puzzling incompatibilities and glitches across the export chain, we got everyone together and finally winkled numerous bugs out of the system. So now all the female models are working with the animations that’ve been exported and thrown into the PZ mainframe so far.

As we mentioned before, until the animation build is good to go we’re not going to do Mondoid videos as the time they take to produce/edit/whatever diverts us away from cranking the actual new systems out into the open. That said, we can still show you a few images of the new lady survivors in action.

This should stand as the last technological hurdle for the getting the anims out into testing, although there could possibly be some multiplayer sync issues to work out that would make us consider a single player anim branch initially if that were to turn out to be the case.

Since we’ve been focused on getting the female models working in-game for a fair wedge of the last little while we still have some of the ‘tying in’ of the new animation and combat system to finish off. There’s still a fair few fixes and things to add ahead of us too, but getting the women into the game was by far the biggest. So we’re definitely edging much closer to getting this stuff out there to you all but, as usual, will refrain from putting a specific ETA on it.

Build 35 IWBUMS

The release of the combat/anims/clothing build will open up the path to plugging in the big pile of work we’ve done for our remaining feature milestones. It will also, meanwhile, provide coders like RJ with a deluge of fun new jobs like zoning the ‘career zombies’, adding in new weapons, sounds etc.

As such, in the remaining time before the anims go in, the Build 35 IWBUMS will be used to do lots of ‘small job, big impact’ jobs that we’ve been meaning to do since forever – many of them community and mod team suggestions that’ve been stacking up. As IWBUMS public beta testers are aware – from build 35.9 zombies will be able to tear down sheet ropes, while in future builds we’ll tie sheet rope breakage and fall damage to player weight and attributes.

We’ll also be finally letting towels dry, giving some foods a thirst value, making rotten food disappear rather than be a permanent fixture – that sort of thing. It’s basically ticking off a bunch of ‘small stuff’ that’s been nagging on players in one big go before the animations arrive with all the extra (and awesome) potential that they bring. If you have any such suggestions, like this one nudging us towards tying the ‘E’ button to TVs and channel changes, then please drop ‘em in the forums.

Insomnia

Just a quick note to say that PZ will have a presence at this weekend’s Insomnia gaming event at the Birmingham NEC, and a few members of the team who aren’t banging upcoming builds with spanners will be present on the Sunday and Monday if you want to come over and say hello.

This week’s topless survivor by Eden404 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!