Project Zomboid Announces Graphics Rendering Change With Massive Performance Gains

gamerant.com:

The long-awaited Build 42 of Project Zomboid is 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 Zomboid has 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 of Project Zomboid has 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 that Zomboid is one of the most 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 improving Zomboid'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.