We’re really struggling with those puns at this point. Hello all and welcome to this week’s Mondoid. Due to some unforeseen absences this may be a brief one, but still a few newslets to convey.

Vehicles and optimisation

Vehicle and main game optimisations continue apace, we had an extremely fruitful public test event we held last week, thanks to Jake and a lot of awesome people who took the time to help us brute force the system, we managed to get over a hundred people to join, and gathered some valuable telemetry that will allow us to optimise the game further. In addition we were able to put Stas’ new saving system to the test. In short, the saving has been optimised heavily, to cut down on server save times and in addition to pause the game on clients to avoid the players getting themselves into lethal situations amongst paused and laggy zombies. We’re confident the multiplayer experience will be much better once this is merged into the main codebase. Whether this will be in the IWBUMS, or only in the vehicle build will depend on how things go.

Animations

Work on animations continues to tick away nicely. Mark has implemented an awesome layers system that should attack the remaining animation work in various ways. Layers basically add another dimension to the animation state system implemented by us mere mortals, and allows on the one hand much more genericised states, allowing us to add ‘sub states’ that will make it much easier to allow us to tie the animation system into the existing game logic in areas it still needs doing so. An example would be say in injuries, a character will not only have a ‘walk’ state, but also that walk state will contain all the logic for ‘walking with a limp’ or ‘walking with a crutch’ or ‘walking with a vengeance’ or whatever kind of walking we might have or implement later, further allow us to blend granularity between these sub states. This, while still not 100% complete, will cut down on the amount of code required for such things dramatically, and allow us to slip the system in to hug existing code much easier, while at the same time essentially giving us thousands of ‘half way house’ animations between actual animations we create (character is walking with 20% limp in left leg) etc to give the game an even more dynamic and animation rich feel.

Zomboid Dollhouse

Chris continues his work on making the isometric game world look oh so more pretty, ironing out the remaining bugs on the ‘single building cutaway’ system, while we talk about the new cutaway system that will render the interiors of the houses much more pleasant and navigable, and finally do away with the transparent blob effect we currently have in the game. Mash has started work on the necessary cutaway tiles and things are steaming along.

Other Stuff

RJ is currently in the process of re-balancing the corpse disease system, to make sure it’s less brutal and instantly lethal, stacks properly with multiple bodies, and more in line with what you’d expect from hanging around corpses.

Connall’s taking some time to go out on a bug hunt, and will be helping out in the main PZ branch, zapping a few of the longer standing bugs knocking around the codebase and bug tracker.

This week’s vehicular calamity is from Injen_team. 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 Mondoids 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.