| Blog post: projectzomboid.com Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, The Indie Stone are proud to introduce you to our new animation system -- which will be a part of the coming update, and indeed the increasingly imminent public test build R. This was first created during the Easter break, which we decided to use as something of a left-field design brainstorm session. Our use of hand-drawn sprites was starting to be of real concern -- the process was becoming unmanageable due to the sheer number of frames, clothing pieces and directions required. We were generally having to shy away from necessary animations, or resorting to ones with a mere one or two frames. As such we've built a new system that uses pre-rendered 3D models that are consequently rendered into sprites. On top of that we then use various techniques to increase clarity when they're shrunk down so we can emulate the old graphical style as much as possible alongside the crisper animations. We recognise that some people may miss the retro-look graphics, along with the baldy alien zomboids, but unfortunately the move away from individually hand-drawn sprites was fundamentally necessary for the development of the game. Sprite and animation creation now, genuinely, takes a hundredth of the amount of time it did previously. What's more many, many extra features are now on the table for future updates -- without us having to scale the terrifying heights of Mt. Animation. Yanking an axe from a zombie's ribcage ... |
