A few more details have been released about the zombie-shattering technology in Dambuster Studio's upcoming first-person game Dead Island 2. In a chat with Game Informer (opens in new tab), DI2's Senior Render Programmer and Technical Art Director revealed that the procedural FLESH system (Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids) shed a little more light on the subject. I am about to write the words "FLESH system" about 100 times. It's too late, but you can still get away before the phrase lulls you to sleep.

Dambuster has talked about the Flesh system before (open in new tab), but this time he goes into nauseating detail about what this system does and how it does it. The system procedurally models weapon-appropriate wounds on the bodies of zombified enemies. Knives slash, hammers strike, and pass through layers of skin, fat, muscle, bone, and organs. If you keep hacking at the same spot on the enemy, it will eventually penetrate, creating a kind of procedural dismemberment system.

This system is applied to every zombie in the game, modeling all sorts of fine detail. At one point, one of the developers boldly stated that depending on the type of weapon used, he could even "bruise around the wounds" of his enemies. It is an impressive boast, as well as an unpleasant one.

The developers say they put a lot of work into making this system feel right: you can't cut a person in half with a dagger or inflict a minor head wound with a hammer, but the type of damage inflicted depends on a variety of factors. The zombie's overall health, how many times it has already been hit in the area you are aiming at, the type of weapon you are using, and things like that all go into calculating what effects will be applied.

This sounds very impressive and looks convincing in the gameplay clips presented in the GI video (link above). And while it may be a little disconcerting to hear praise for a system that tears apart the human body, Dambuster says it is aiming for a "cinematic" or "faux-realistic" violence." Instead of making you think, "Oh, this is horrible, I don't want to see this," the developers say, "this is horrible, I want to see this."

Dead Island 2 and its myriad crimes against the human body will finally be released on April 28 of this year, nine years after its original announcement (opens in new tab), and can be found on the Epic Games Store (opens in new tab).