Cortman by Night

Hey all. Alongside continued crafting work it’s very much a time of mixing/polishing previously announced and described things in the internal test build.

As such please forgive us if things are a little ‘bullet pointy’ and expanded info on things you’ve heard about before. It’s all stuff that needs doing.



Some of the things we’ve been doing this month on the crafting revamp includes:

• On-boarding three of our friends from TEA games to add some firepower to the crafting team and get it all out of the door. While they’ve been getting up to speed with the code they have also been documenting it all with its latest implementation, which in turn will become our guidance for modders upon release.
  
• Working on crafting station animation interactions. In Build 42 you won’t see direct physical movement of player and crafting station when you interact, for example a potters wheel won’t spin. Until we, potentially, one day include 3D models on the map furniture will remain as static sprites as they always have been.
  

What we do need, however, are natural player movements towards the crafting stations – that will in turn open up their individual crafting menu accompanied by a familiar crafting SFX, and potentially an on/off state dependent on what sort of crafting station it with lights on and glowing etc. They also needed depth textures added to avoid clipping and such, which have now been implemented.

• Working out how best to separate out the new skills. We became concerned that we were introducing too many ‘portmanteau’ skills simply for the sake of keeping the skill list slimmed down. There’s still some folding together of craft skills when there’s clear similarities in tools and techniques, but overall it felt wrong to lump too much together.
  

It won’t be necessary for players to dedicate time and effort into building out these skills for the mostpart, unless they are trying to make a civilization on a forest map and other survivalist circumstances.

• Making sure that there’s sandbox settings that cater for faster progression. Sandbox and settings now include settings for Skill XP multipliers for individual skills, so your speed up each different ladder can be directly adjusted.
  
• Addressing undesired and unfun gameplay loops. A common server admin complaint is that the map swiftly becomes barren of furniture and loot containers due to players chasing XP. As such, in B42 scrapping, dismantling and ripping items will no longer grant XP.
  

We no longer want progression in a skill to involve destroying piles of items or trashing the map; and instead to concentrate on making things. XP for actions such as building structures and repairing clothing has been boosted to adjust for that, and the individual skill XP multipliers in the sandbox settings also offer more means to compensate. (This said, as things stand, XP for dismantling electrical items or wrecked vehicles remains.)

• Adding skills for wilderness play. Knapping and Carving have both been added. Knapping is used for fashioning stone blades from the pieces of flint you can find in the world, for making knives, spears, axes, scythes and other tools. Carving involves carving wood and bone for similar purposes.
  

Some carving will also produce decorative items, especially at lower levels, with more artistic and aesthetic crafting recipes due to be added to help you level up without making the same sharp stick over and over again.

• Improving how recipes work and are learned. There are a great many new recipes in B42, and when you become a Level 10 Master Blacksmith it makes no sense that you may not know some of them within that field. As such many of them now come with an ‘Autolearn’ requirement – in which a skill level (or a combination of different skill levels) will automatically know them.
  

Another, minor, thing we have added meanwhile is making sure that the recipe schematics that can be found alongside the weapons and armor in the randomly spawned survivalist safehouses are generally diagram-based so illiterate characters can also join in the fun.



There are two different sorts of subterranean lair in B42 – random ones that could occur in various set places, and permanent ones.

As far as the permanent ones go there’s a range of bunkers, tunnels and cave networks waiting to be discovered – as well as simply new lower floors to some of the map’s more known and recognisable locations.

What we hadn’t done yet for B42, however, is mark all the potential locations for the random basements and then to test them so they’ll all fire off in your game once we hit Unstable beta.

Here’s a map of one of our locations showing the basic spread of what you can expect. Apologies for spoilers, we thought it wouldn’t be too bad seeing as it was only one town. So anyway here’s Brandenburg.



And here’s a quick video showing some, admittedly posed for the camera, testing – in which the same location is shown to have a different basement on a different run.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The basements on show here aren’t dazzlingly exciting, but this will of course be the case for most of the ones you find. Part of this testing is also checking the rules that we have in place to match random basement size and orientation to the size of the house.



Grappletech is, for all intents of purpose, done. This is the update to PZ’s animation tech that allows two characters to directly interact – whether survivor on survivor, survivor on zed, or zed on survivor.

As discussed and shown before, the first use-case of this will be in fixing the jankiness in PZ that’s always surrounded the carrying, moving and disposing of bodies.

In a previous blog we also showed an unimplemented animation of the player throwing bodies through a window, as an example, of where we would take it next – and this has now been added into the system. This can be seen in the following video, alongside some old friends.

PLEASE NOTE: We are aware that after the window chuck the plummet of the corpse doesn’t look great yet. This will be addressed in future, and is separate to what we’re doing with GrappleTech.

PLEASE ALSO NOTE: The ‘effort’ noises the character makes while dragging corpses will be considerably toned down, or absent, in the release version. It’s a bit much here.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
At present body dragging and window chucking is not in the internal test build, however it will be required at some point for the crafting revamp as this will allow for far more direct animations with irregularly-shaped crafting stations.

We had previously said it wouldn’t be a part of the Unstable beta, but now it’s done and playable feel it’s a potential – dependent on the progress made by the crafting team.

While we’re back at the K&B house by the way, check out how it looks during the day and the night now.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

• Newspapers have been finalled, and this week have been checked through for authenticity by a local American local news journalist. They will next be added to the game’s loot tables once relevant edits have been made.
  

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


• We weren’t entirely happy with the predictable way that deer were following our pre-defined paths through forests, and as such with zoning and biome work complete (as seen last month) a natural next step for this system would be to create multiple pathways for wildlife organically.
  

Work on this is now underway alongside general polish of animal migration, and should make for a more engaging experience come Unstable.

• Over with the Sound Team (as well as providing noises and settings for new items, weapons and altitudes) we have tied their work more closely to the map tools.
  

They will now have the freedom to create building-specific roomtones and oneshots, where as before hey could only generalise between 7-8 roomtones parameter values. So now we could have anything up to 260 different ambiances and reverb settings, which will make for more immersive experiences in key atypical buildings like movie theatres, large churches, more cavernous areas etc.

• We are also currently testing the glow-up of Muldraugh, specifically at night-time, and it’s looking pretty awesome to tell the truth. We hope that survivors are going to be tempted out of their bases during moonlit hours a bit more than usual to see it.
  
  

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. 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 you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Happy birthday to Andrei Knorr. 16 today!