Guess who just got infected?

It's been a couple of months since my last blog and we've been pretty busy working on ZDay. We've finally got some of the infected zombies into the game with rudimentary, but quite effective scripted AI. We also had our first alpha test giving the testers their first look at the game.

The Infected - meet Adam's brother, Rob.

As we have not been able to get any organic modelers or animators to help with ZDay we decided to purchase the Adam and Torque Motion packs to make our zombies. We took Adam out the back, beat him with a cricket bat and buried him for a couple of weeks to get the look that we were after. We'll probably do a couple more textures for him to add a bit a variety.



Basic AI

Having Rob running up and down the street was great after just having an empty street, but soon got a bit tedious. I laid about 10 paths that ran in loops around and through the houses and created an AI script that basically ran like this:

- If close enough to attack anyone then attack them
- If currently chasing someone then keep on chasing unless someone is more than 50% closer, then switch targets
- If lost sight of target then run to where they last were seen
- If no targets then go to closest visible path node and follow the path
- If no visible path nodes and no target then stand around looking stupid.

Like I said, very basic stuff but with 10-30 zombies running around a small map it was quite fun - and they did give you a scare where they snuck up behind you! They did however have a tendency to get stuck against each other in tight places such as stairways. Nothing more fun than running into a house to escape the mayhem in streets, only to find 10 zombies pouring down the stairs.


The First Test - ZDay Pre-Alpha 0.1

The first pre-alpha test was met with much anticipation from the testers (and much cursing at the slow download speed of the content.) We ran the game server for a week from Watson's home computer for periods of about 8 hours at a time, giving his poor computer time to cool.

The results were mixed, having up-to-date openGL drivers seemed to be important. Several testers had such severe lag that they could only stare at walls without crashing. The biggest thing we learnt was the need to optimise the map with LOD on all our DTS and DIF models- which we knew we'd have to do eventually. We had already zoned the DIFs, but as the map has a lot of open streets from where you can see into several buildings at once, LOD seems to be the big requirement.

Overall the test was fun and as a developer it was quite satisfying to finally see others having fun with your work.

(ZDay is zombie survival MMOFPS being developed using TGE. The official website is at www.zdaygame.com)

The latest teaser featuring the infected can be found here www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PzTMEadYRE



More ZDay screenshots here