Hey survivors!
This update focuses heavily on performance improvements, foliage and environment optimizations, and early prep work for vehicle spawning. We’ve also got more vehicle-related updates coming soon 👀 - thank you for sticking with us as we keep building this world one piece at a time.
🚙 Vehicle System Prep
We’re laying the groundwork for proper vehicle spawning and future driving systems.
Added 15 Vehicle Spawners across MainLevel!
Updated core spawner class to better handle vehicle spawning logic.
Added a child vehicle spawn point, giving us more control and consistency in where vehicles appear.
🌲 World & Foliage Optimization
Huge focus on performance and making the environment run smoother on all machines.
Small LOD tweaks to trees, objects, and skeletons.
Configured a new LOD group for large foliage and made LODs for big trees and some rocks much more aggressive. (Your GPU thanks you.)
Enabled density scaling on grass and small foliage meshes.
Removed collision from tiny dirt-pile foliage.
Grass and small non-interactive plants no longer cast shadows, helping performance in dense areas.
🎒 Inventory & Movement Changes
You can now move while your inventory is open, as long as you don’t have an external window open (like a world container).
Movement is intentionally slower while the inventory is open to keep things balanced.
Adjusted the jump logic so you can’t jump while your inventory is open (a side effect of the new movement behavior).
🔥 Hotter Coldbar
Made the coldbar a bit more “hot” by lowering its use cooldown from 1.5 seconds to 0.5 seconds. We stress-tested this by equipping/unequipping a bunch of items rapidly and didn’t run into issues, but we’ll still be watching it closely.
🧟 AI Performance Improvements
More optimizations to keep the hordes running without melting your PC.
Adjusted bone tick poses so they don’t update when the AI isn’t being rendered. (Doesn’t apply to characters using live retargeting.) Then we realized this doesn't really work on the dedicated servers since AI needs to be rendered at all times. This resulted in a few hotpatches over the last couple of weeks. Oops & thank you for your patience!
Additional mesh-component optimizations like:
Disabled bone motion blur
Skipped bounds update during interpolation
Other tiny engine-level gains
All these micro-optimizations add up!
💾 Stability Fixes
Fixed a potential null pointer in the save backup system during testing. (We’re not sure it would ever crash in a real playthrough, but we added extra safety checks just in case.)
Known Issues (Targeted for Upcoming Updates)
Based on survivor reports, we’re actively investigating and working on the following:
BP_RangedAI still needs to be updated to use our new damage interface
Show Item Tooltips and Show HUD Buttons appear to have been disconnected and are not behaving as expected
✨ Visual & Experimental Additions
Tested some new Niagara VFX for a possible anomaly event and upcoming world decorations. Nothing final yet, but the early results look spicy.
Lastly, more work on the coming cave update!
Thank You, Survivors
As always, thank you for supporting ZSGO while we continue improving the game piece by piece. We’re a small part-time team, but updates like these wouldn’t happen without your feedback, bug reports, and encouragement.
More exciting stuff is on the way!!
Stay alert & drive safe,
- The ZSGO Team 🧟♂️