Hello everyone, and happy Friday!
As always, we're sharing a video showcasing what the inZOI team has been working on this week.
Lately, the team has been approaching development with a fresh mindset by going back to the fundamentals. We've been carefully reviewing every part of the game and improving it piece by piece. The more closely we look, the more areas we find that should have been better from the beginning, and that leaves us feeling truly sorry.
Even so, I believe that as long as we have a clear goal and continue moving toward it, we may stumble, but we won't stop moving forward.
Recently, I've been focusing on redesigning our autonomy system. For this update, I wanted to revisit it from the ground up rather than making small adjustments, so I've been rebuilding much of its decision-making logic.
For example, when a ZOI wants to sit down and eat, the game now searches for the most appropriate dining location step by step.
First, it checks whether there is a dining table or table in the same room. If none is available, it gradually expands the search to look for suitable tables farther away.
If the ZOI is inside a residential or business lot, the search covers the entire lot, prioritizing indoor dining areas before considering outdoor spaces. If the ZOI is in a public area or somewhere outside a lot, the search looks for a suitable table within a 40-meter radius.
If no usable table can be found, the ZOI will instead find a nearby chair and eat while holding the food. If family members or friends are nearby, the system also tries to have them sit close together so they can share the meal naturally.
Of course, if many ZOI's perform this decision-making process at the same time, it can become expensive from a performance standpoint. To address this, we've also been optimizing the search order, limiting the search scope, and reducing unnecessary calculations so these improvements remain efficient.
I'm honestly embarrassed that such fundamental behaviors still needed this level of attention. If you've noticed other situations where a ZOI's autonomous behavior feels awkward or unnatural, please let us know. Your experiences and feedback are incredibly valuable and often help us design better solutions.
We'll continue reviewing the game one system at a time and keep working to make inZOI a better simulation.
The summer heat has been especially intense in many parts of the world lately. Please take care of yourselves, stay cool, and have a wonderful weekend.
Thank you.
Kjun
※ For the video, please check it on Discord or the forum.
🔗 Discord: Link
🔗 Forum: Link
Kjun’s Reply to Your Comments
Hello everyone. Hard to believe we're already halfway through the week.
Here's another update on what we've been working on.
1.Diving Content
A little while ago we shared a preview video of diving. Back when we introduced the open ocean and scuba diving last summer, many of you told us you wanted to swim freely beneath the surface.
As we finally started building the diving feature we'd been putting off, simply moving through the water didn't feel like enough — so we've added gatherable resources and other things to do down there as well. We'll do our best to make it live up to your expectations.
2.Smart Zoi Improvements
We've been receiving a lot of feedback about Smart Zoi lately, and we're currently in discussions with the team responsible to get those improvements implemented.
As our existing content expanded, several bugs appeared where Smart Zoi failed to respond properly. That's where we're starting. Once those discussions wrap up, we'll share the details with you as soon as we can.
If there are functions you'd like Smart Zoi to handle, please leave your thoughts — we'll review them together.
3.Discontinuing the AI Building Feature
We'd love to only ever bring good news, but we have something disappointing to share as well: we've decided to discontinue the AI Building feature.
We're sorry to those of you who have been using it. However, we concluded that with the technology available today, we can't reach the level of quality you're expecting from it. We'd rather redirect the research budget behind this feature toward other AI features where it can make a real difference.
If there are AI features you'd like to see, let us know and we'll pass your feedback directly to the team.
Decisions to remove a feature are never made lightly. Next time, we hope to be back with better features and content.
It's been brutally hot in Korea lately — even stepping outside for a moment is exhausting. How is your summer going? Please drink plenty of water and don't push yourselves too hard in this heat. We'll do our best to at least give you a cool ocean to escape into in-game.
It's thanks to your continued interest and feedback that we're able to find our direction. Truly, thank you. We'll see you again next week.