This week saw us start our “survival” gameplay focus. This means most of our gameplay development focus is on refining the survival aspects of the game. We detailed some of the initial work for this last week.

Trying to get 0.37 to stable

Our main focus this week was to deploy a new version of the game to stable branch. We have two public “branches” of code, stable and experimental. A deployment to stable branch of the latest version of the game was scheduled for Wednesday, however we were not happy with some of the issues that remained.

Three major code changes have been occurring. We have been changing the way collision works to solve a number of bugs, such as shooting while prone colliding with the world and zombie collisions. Also our new physics system has been implemented, allowing us to have throwing, dragging, ragdoll, and even vehicles. In addition, a new guaranteed network message system has been developed to solve network issues, improve client/server performance, as well as reduce the “desync” issues experienced by many.

A number of bugs came out of these developments, two of which cause situations where players and zombies can become invisible to some clients. We want to solve this issue before we deploy to stable. You can try the current version out for yourself on experimental branch.

Survival Cooking

Progress continued with the development of several different kinds of fireplaces, and has moved onto creating assets for constructible ovens. These items will be persistent in the world, allowing the player to cook many things. The temperature system developed in the engine has been refined to have correct return from hot or cold to ambient temperature.

Survival Combat

A new area of work commenced this week is combat directly supporting survival. This includes throwing items, bows and arrows. We now have a great new animation for throwing, and the system developed for this will allow us to support proper animations for bows (e.g. drawing bow back, awaiting player input to fire).

The next week

Both Survival Combat and Cooking are our gameplay focus for the next few weeks, with our primary goal to get 0.37+ deployed to stable as soon as possible.

We’re also looking ahead further now towards how to best position ourselves to release vehicles, barricading, and advanced physics. It’s exciting times for us all here and we can’t wait to show what’s coming in our next video blog!