The long-awaited Build 42 ofProject Zomboidis going to come with a comprehensive shift in how the game’s graphics rendering pipeline works, according to the developer’s latest blog post. Build 42 was already known to be a substantial upgrade to almost every aspect of the game, with features such as animal husbandry, fishing, and farming making their way into the sandbox zombie survival title.
Commonly known as one of the most in-depth and comprehensive zombie games of all time,Project Zomboidhas slowly but steadily been getting substantial engine-level upgrades over the years. The developer, The Indie Stone, started working on the game back in 2011, and it doesn’t look like development is about to stop anytime soon.
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Build 42 ofProject Zomboidhas been in the works for a good long while now, and The Indie Stone aims to make it one of the biggest content and engine-level updates the game has received yet. Not only will crucial survival features, such as the aforementioned fishing and farming, help underline the fact thatZomboidis one of themost in-depth survival games on the market, but the developer is also implementing the 3D depth buffer for graphics rendering. The game has historically had big problems figuring out which tile should be rendered ahead of others, and the depth buffer will solve this problem while also drastically improvingZomboid’s performance.
While the developers' performance trailer doesn’t illustrate a real-world gameplay scenario, as it’s missing many interactive elements and zombie hordes, it is representative of the sort of performance upgrade players should expect out of Build 42, according to the devs. Another notable improvement is that there should no longer be a visible grid separating disparate textures and items at a distance, making Build 42 a truly substantial upgrade forProject Zomboid’s Build 41.
Build 42 is also going to add veritable basements and assorted underground areas to the game, which aren’t currently officially supported, and the addition of negative X and Y coordinates means thatZomboid’s game world will finally be expandable in all directions. The sheer scope and complexity ofmods forProject Zomboidis bound to substantially increase, which is great news for all players.
Project Zomboidis, in a way, every single zombie game rolled up into one. Depending on the way a given sandbox is tweaked, players can act out a zombie apocalypse of virtually any type, and that’s no small feat. Thetroubled zombie MMOThe Day Beforeis seemingly attempting to do something similar, though it remains to be seen how far the developers will be able to move the concept along.
