This week, developers will talk about three of the main four columns of Build 42 – work on the fourth, inventory of players on the server side and a general improvement of MP, was enough "ordinary" Over the past month or so, not so much can be told about what would be juicy enough for public consumption.

Animals and migration

Wild animals will be important for B42 both because of the atmosphere and because of necessity – this will make your experience more exciting if you see deer, skipping through the tree line, and will also make the hunt for the viable method of survival – and necessary for some advanced craft recipes, when society will disappear for a long time.

This week one of the developers under the nickname RJ worked, in particular, on the movement of animals on the map – their migration.

What do we see here?

Basically, during the day, deer will walk along the paths that developers designers (and modders) can outline the Worlded tool – and you can see the virtual animal walking along the path in the video.

Now one virtual animal is a group of animals defined in the Lua file. The current group, for example, consists of one male, several dogs and several deer. Although it is obvious that when they are fully realized, the variability will be greater, and will also depend on things such as the time of year.

As soon as the players come close to the encoded "virtual animal", These deer will appear in the world as real animals – and as soon as you move away, they will return to their virtual status so that the game can take control of their movement and actions again. If the group was divided at this time, they will unite again when their paths intersect.

In their virtual form, animals will move on the map, performing potential actions in different places. They have several periods "sleep" And "food" – Currently, they sleep half an hour between 12 and 16 hours, eat between 5 and 7 hours in the morning and eat again within an hour between 16 and 18 hours.

(Obviously, all this is easy to change at the development stage, and you can also adjust to any other animals that developers will want to add in the future).

To help players who want to become hunters, deer will leave evidence and traces of where they were and what they did. So, there will be traces (indicating the direction), poop, broken branches and undergrowth – while crushed plants will indicate a place for sleeping, and pastures – to the place for food.

The way to which the developers will present all this in the game is currently being worked out, but so far (and, possibly, later) they will provide this in the search mode, which was introduced into B41.

Then the player’s goal may be to walk in the wake and determine the possible places of sleep or food, mark them on your map, and then wait for these places at the right hours and hope that the animals will look at them.

Developers are also working on how to integrate the skill into this skill "Surveillance", but, since the design is still being discussed, they will probably talk about this later. The developers also know that it is necessary to take into account the smell of a person and the direction of the wind that can scare away animals, as is the case in real life, but the developers plan to add this layer a little later.

Finally, here is another video about how the survivor defeats the camp with new tents and other (this time without deer) to give an idea of ​​what the surrounding gameplay will be.

Improving the game engine

The game optimization goes very well, easily reaching several hundred FPS on the hardware of developers when a scale is reduced.

However, at the moment, they still need to study the optimization of the work of fog and puddle – both of these operations are intense graphic operations requiring the framework of the frame. Thus, at the moment they make our cachied fragments invalid and reduce some advantages from optimization.

Therefore, later – either before the first public release, or, very possible in subsequent assemblies – developers plan to return to these systems to optimize them for their new rendering system. This is especially true for the fog system, since the presence of a depth map will make visual effects much better, since the developers will have a reliable representation of surfaces and depth, which will significantly improve the interaction with objects in the scene.

Crafts update

Now all the craft systems are already on the spot, the developers begin to fill the recipes tree and want to show what is being implemented now.

The developers resemble those who may not be so interested in the long -term craft and survival systems that they introduce, that they will be completely optional, regardless of whether you want to engage in them.

If you are more interested in evading hordes of zombies in the center of cities and villages, you can do it.

However, in order to solve the problem of a weak late game, to provide many role -playing capabilities and provide the depth of gameplay out of interaction with the zombie, the developers do everything possible to make craft opportunities as exhaustive as possible. In addition, they create new and more powerful craft systems, in which modders can really bite.

Remember, the landmark guide – a group of players should be able to build a functioning village, even if they appear on a map of wild terrain without signs of civilization. The developers want to make sure that all aspects of the craft are covered in order to allow multiplayer communities to build and prosper, as well as provide the modders with tools necessary to create cool, damn expansive technological mods, as in minecraft, which will allow Zomboid to become a more diverse platform for survival, crafts and automation of game modding in the future.

An example can be work with clay. Clay can be mined near rivers, and it will be used for the manufacture of bricks, tiles, roofs, pottery and many other items and tiles for accommodation in the world.

Those who live on a barren map and want to build a reliable house will be incredibly happy to use bricks and tiles to make a normal dwelling, so that the zombies could not penetrate inside. Similarly, even on a small scale, this craft will be vital when the survivors do not have access to modern cutlery or liquid storage facilities.

So, this is a small video (so far very WIP, the developers have a lot of work on the balance, user interface and polishing), which will demonstrate some craft systems when working with clay.