Heat of the Night

Hi everyone, it’s been a good month of general work and polish on our closed build. Lots of general required mop and brush up, but as examples of what’s been going on here’s a few items:

Making fishing clearer and easier to follow for new players – making the messaging clearer to the player when fish are present for example via the disturbances on the water, and making it more obvious when a fish has been caught.
Fixing issues with body-dragging, for example bugs with phasing through walls on pick-up and drop.
Improving animal pathfinding to make them act more realistically around walls and map structures, and continued general work on the unseen paths that animals will follow.
Optimization work on the player’s view cone to help the game in busy areas.
Map testing and fixing throughout new towns added to the game, and all the existing areas that have been given a glow up – which are primarily in Muldraugh.
Adding more opportunities for players who generally don’t go to farms and forests to come across animals in-game.
Adding 42’s new depth textures to scenery and items that testers discover, and that we previously missed out.

There’s clearly a myriad of other fixes and changes going on also. These and all of the above are necessary things, but not particularly sexy in a dev blog – for which we apologise.

We are also navigating the final implementation of better handling of drainables (‘used up’ items in recipes and such) in our revamped crafting system – and providing some neat short-cuts for both our own developers and modders by using input flags for many crafting use cases. Work on the Build Menu, meanwhile, continues apace – though the fundamentals are in the UI isn’t quite there yet, however, so we won’t be showing it off in today’s blog.

[h3]Languages[/h3]
From the very beginning of PZ amazing community translators have brought so many people from around the world to our game, and allowed non-English speakers to better enjoy the Knox Event.

Recently, however, due to the extent and expanse of the full translation sheets over twenty different languages it became clear that it was simply going to be too complicated to keep going in this fashion, especially with the motherlode of B42 content still soon to drop alongside everything that we on the team know still lies ahead.

There’s at least 100,000 words in Build 42, possible more depending on how many new CDs and VHSs we get in, so it’s about a novel’s worth all added up.

Build 42 will see a big shift for us in terms of localization, then, as we are moving to a complete professional translation of the entire game in a full 21 different languages. Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Spanish and many others.

We have essentially covered all of our most popular playing languages, and all of our most requested inclusions.

This will cover everything in-game: including both new content, and edits to the old. Existing translations have been checked through to ensure consistency and accuracy, and to fill in some of the gaps a few of the translations had due to the sheer vastness of the PZ broadcast system.

Importantly, access to all existing community translations – and prominence of existing community translator game credits – will clearly remain in the game.

We are so grateful to our amazing community translators, and we have worked out some cool ways that we can thank such a hugely complex web of people from all over the world – whether they have worked as individuals, or within smaller circles of co-translators who’ve been dedicated to various different parts of the game during different timeframes over the many years of PZ’s existence.

If you are reading this and you are in this bracket (ie. if you are a credited community translator, or have been in the past) then please go into the translations channel on our PZ Discord for further information about your ‘Thank You’ package, or email nasko[a]theindiestone.com.

[h3]Zombie Heat Map[/h3]
When the game map for a new build approaches final, one of the main jobs we always have to do is update the zombie heat map. This is what governs zombies that spawn outdoors: around buildings, on roads, around farms and fields. The current Build 41 one for Muldraugh looks like this:

Now, a criticism of the current zombie spawn is that it isn’t realistic. We veer away from the feeling of a classic zombie movie slightly because zombies aren’t always in realistic places. Zombies are all over the roads, in random fields and basically… a long way from where they probably died.

With 42’s current (experimental) zombie heat map we are trying to address this a little. The map is more intricate, and we hope feels more real.

Now if you see zombies, it means there are houses, businesses and lootable locations nearby. Zombies also appear in groups more than before, and spawn less on the road – unless there are parked cars or traffic jams.

This also makes for more requirements to sneak by the horde, and a generally more realistic-feeling apocalypse. Random empty spaces will have less zombies, and places of interest and choke points will have far more.

The current experimental 42 zombie heat map for Muld looks like this:

This will require playtesting and closed test feedback. Some areas will feel emptier, but places that you would expect to have lots of zombies (and which you’ll want to loot) will have them in abundance.

This will be far more in keeping with a Romero movie, however, so we felt it an experiment worth taking on for the 42 heat map – but will also clearly have to keep an eye of difficulty levels at the same time. Here’s a quick comparison video from its first WIP iteration.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]From the Art Studio[/h3]
All the newspapers are now finalled, and as such Pat, Unconid and Werlias are moving onto the in-game business flyers – which serve the gameplay function of revealing interesting areas on the player map.

This will in turn encourage exploration, and serve the function of showing new (and existing) players interesting locations that they can journey to and could perhaps prove useful in their continued survival. (Some typos in the following – we will be finalling the first batch of these over the next month).

Meanwhile, we’ve also commissioned a load of new art similar to our primary ‘Bob on Car’ image that everyone knows so well.

These will be used in various different places in-game, such as the background of new screens like the MP connection menu.

[h3]Nu_Twiggys[/h3]
Next up, here’s another quick glow-up video of a survivor-favourite location from the map team – alongside some neat day and night visuals.

Also shown in this video is an example of one of some of the super rare vehicles that will be found spawning in particular towns – there are multiple examples of cool surprises like this that you’ll come across in your travels in B42 that we’ve been dropping into the game as development has gone on.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The Knob Creek Hunting Lodge has also been converted into a log cabin design, which is one of our own favoured places to hang out on the map.

Oh, and we also thought we’d do you up a little showcase of some of the other player animations that you’ll see in 42, but which we haven’t really mentioned or shown before.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Finally, this past month or two has also seen a big, positive shake-up behind the scenes in terms of organisation, issue-tracking and general team communication.

As Build 42 development has continued the team has steadily grown, and we’re now at the point where there’s almost twice the number of people currently working on PZ than there were for Build 41 – and we have been updating our practices to reflect that.

We know that waiting for B42 can be arduous, and that when folks point this out it can feel like they are shouting into the void, but we wanted to let you know that we are listening. While the impact won’t be instant when you’re looking in from the outside, we are putting both processes and personnel in place that we hope will improve matters as we move forward through 42 and beyond.

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 Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something. We also live on Twitter/X right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. If you fancy you can sign up to receive PZ blogs in your emails right here.