GoodOldLeon

How do all. Here’s a check-in from a few different Build 42 departments, that also occurs in the lead-up to the first in-person meet-up for the wider PZ team since 2018. We’re all aflutter about it (and trying to remember everyone’s real world names instead of online handles) and hope to have lots of good B42 chat in amongst the introduction of an international team to traditional Geordie culture.
 
Let’s pop into a few different areas, then – with the caveat that for a fuller B42 overview our last dev blog is probably a better destination.
FIRE
Work continues on the fire rewrite branch with the intention being to bring it up to a state in which it can safely enter our internal test build.

It recently came to mind that a lot of the ‘fire dev’ chat in blogs took place in the distant past, before we had to reshuffle and our current MP team became what it is today – thereby forcing flames into the sidelines for an elongated spell.
 
As such the guys have made a vid for us today that spells out some of the foundations of what is being done here, in terms of how fire spread, size and duration is governed – and indeed the sort of stats that lie beneath the hood that we can balance with, and that the community can mod with.
That’s the first half of the video: done with our old fire effects (which are too transparent and also on fast forward) so please take this aspect as instructional/iterative rather than a fait accompli.
 
The second part of the video then moves on to show our experimentation with fire visuals, working alongside our VFX artist friend Brian, as we work out different ways to make in-game flame effects better match our particularly coloured iso-world.
 
MP TEAM
As regular readers will know, alongside tidying up smaller multiplayer irritations as they go, our MP team are currently transferring player inventory actions over away from the client and onto the server. They have another three or four weeks set aside for the first stage of this: at which point we will the player’s inventory loaded from the database on the server, and the server always having an up-to-date player inventory – hopefully all working in sync with the progress bars, item move times and expected results you get currently.
At this point the second major part of the code work will be getting underway: having all the item manipulation occurring on the server side, and ensuring that the server no longer trusts clients (those sneaky clients!) so that stuff like item adding cheats are rendered defunct.

After this, clearly, there’ll be a heap of testing and such – but we thought the more technically-minded amongst us would appreciate a catch-up on where the guys are with it.
 
FISHING
This past week Aiteron has been working with the testers who’ve been reporting back on bugs and gameplay in the latest version of our revamped fishing – and has been largely working on an improved/experimental control system for a more chilled out and less button-holdy-tappy experience.

He has also been working with our aforementioned VFX specialist friend Brian, who has been supplying us with various splashes, bubbles and signs of water movement that will indicate the presence of fish, and also be a suggestion of the size of what lurks beneath. On top of bug fixes, changed recipes and improved items for the system he’s also been firming up on exactly what sorts of fish we’ll be adding to the game, and whether they’d be found in rivers or lakes (and definitely not swimming pools).
 
There’s gonna be lot of bass: largemouth, smallmouth, white, spotted and striped. And let’s not even get started on the crappies…
CRAFTING
After an awful lot of code-side tinkering, a super WIP version of our crafting improvement has surfaced into something that’s viewable in a vid. Please note this is the visible tip of the iceberg, and clearly what’s on show isn’t final: you do not saw logs in a furnace, and this isn’t how you make a hammer.
 
So what’s on show here?

Various objects can now be entirely created using the game’s scripting language that’s been made similar to the way items and vehicles etc. are defined.

This covers various currently planned objects that can function as a craft station: stuff like blacksmith furnace, tailoring bench, fletchery, brewing stands, kilns etc. And, unlike the way it is now, these can also be objects consisting of multiple tiles/sprites with various rotations etc.
At a craft station the player is able to use their normal recipes (which may provide a bonus for doing the recipe at a craftstation) but it’s here that they can use their blueprints – and which ones are available will be defined by the associated object script.
Blueprints (working title) are similar to recipes in that they can take inputs, and produce outputs. However they are distinct from your usual recipes in the following ways:
 
They have different duration modes – in real world seconds, game minutes or can run passively in the background for long periods. They may not require the player to be present. For example, a melting process may run on the craftstation while you run off to do other things. As well as items, they can take the input (and produce) Fluids and different in-game ‘energies’ – Electric, Heat, Kinetic or Steam. When active a Blueprint in progress can store its inputs/outputs, and may have storage capacity for them. For example, a blueprint that needs water as an input may well have an internal storage buffer for water. We’ll probably show this in a development vid next time.
Blueprints are processed much like recipes where the inputs by default are consumed to create the outputs. However the default behaviour can be complemented or overridden by custom lua code for certain blueprint events like OnStart, OnUpdate, OnFinish, OnCancel. This is similar to normal recipe events such as OnCreate.
 
Using this custom lua code interesting things can be done – like for example a blueprint for a Meat Drying Rack which has several input slots for meat. The blueprint can be set to run passively, so it wont require a player to manually start it up.
 
The OnUpdate event then triggers a lua function which checks if the Meat Drying Rack is situated in a exterior space, and if so we can then go into our usual PZ super-nerdery level of depth by calculating the amount to dry a meat item based on temperature and the cloud intensity / sunlight at that time. So when a meat item is dropped in one of the UI slots it starts passively drying the meat.
 
Another feature of blueprints is that their UI can be scripted. The video shows a few simple (bizarre) test examples of different UI layouts. However they can potentially be scripted to have any desired appearance – using any of the game’s existing UI elements, or indeed modded ones.
 
As mentioned heavily above: the video is very early WIP, especially where the UI is concerned, and there are still some parts not yet functional. In a future update we can show a more functional UI, and run through some more interesting case examples.
LES ANIMAUX
Finally, over to RJ in the animal zone.

“I’ve been diving more and more into a farm animal’s designation zones – which are paddocks you outline for your animals to occupy (as long as they don’t get loose) and where the game will allow you to do all your various primary animal-rearing tasks. For most of this week I’ve been refactoring and simplifying my animal behaviour and meta code, but there’s a few interesting things to mention.”
 
“Cows and sheep can now recognize a roof area and stay under it during heavy rain, I’ve been trying to get sheep to move in more of a flock most of the time, and baby animals will follow their mother more correctly. You can also now drop food directly on ground for them to eat, or in the feeding trough container – where it won’t spoil quite so quickly.”
 
Also, among many other things (haircare, first aid, dropping bags, new emergency broadcast system noises) the Sound Team have also started making animal noises.
 
Behold, the cows now have hoofsteps.
 
This week’s tarmac follow party from Darth. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

Hey all, hope you’re all doing well and that thus far 2023 has been kind. Let’s get straight into it.
NEW FACES
First of all we’d like to welcome officially three new people to the full Project Zomboid team.
 
Fenris_Wolf should need no introduction to the old hands of the Project Zomboid community. He took over and maintained the ORGM mod with great aplomb from the original creator ORMtnMan – and will be a name familiar to many.
 
Right now he’s reacclimatizing himself with the PZ codebase, charged with clearing out some of the niggly things that have been on our ‘to do’ list so he gets his fingers dirty in many and various different areas of the game. Clearly his expertise with guns and the firearms code will likely come into play at some point in his time with us, but for now it’s all about bedding down and getting comfy in Spiffo’s hovering mothership.
Also joining us officially, meanwhile, are Amz and Pat_Bren.
 
Amz is another familiar name from the community, and was a great help to us in the days of 41 MP testing. She’s now officially a full-time tester working with Sasha and Yana, and will also be making cool videos for our blogs and improving our (already extraordinarily professional) social media engagements.
 
Pat_Bren, meanwhile, has been writing up a storm for Build 42 on a part time basis – writing new radio and TV channels and content, new lore for what’s going on around the world and much more besides – and will now be working other cool future content in an official and ongoing capacity.
42 STUFF
Right now, we’re probably due an ‘overview’ of Build 42, so everyone is on the same page about its contents rather than skipping about between them each blog.
 
42  boils down to four large chunks of deep-rooted work that we want to all come together: the crafting/animals update, the map expansion, the optimization/lighting/basements engine upgrade, and the weighty job the MP team have taken on to move all inventory interactions over from clients to server.
 
These are all at different stages – for example animals are further ahead than a lot of the elements of crafting in terms of being ready to actively test and play with. Right now with the crafting, the work taking place is on the back-end codeside of crafting stations and component UIs.
Meanwhile with the engine upgrade at this point we’re essentially fixing up various different rendering issues that were broken with our quite fundamental changes to the system up to a point at which it’s ready to be merged into the test build.
 
The map team meanwhile continue to pump out new towns, interesting locations and fun places to travel to and hold out in.
Around these big ticket items we also have other coders, writers, artists and 3D modellers working to improve aspects of the current game.
So there’s the in-depth fire overhaul, Aiteron’s revamped fishing, better farming, more imaginative and fun items to find and use, better events to come across, improved recipes, new animations and activities, improved music system and deeper soundscape – and general piles and piles of polish and improvement throughout.
 
So with all that firmly held in mind, let’s have a quick dart around some of the different departments of PZ to catch up on a few bits and bobs.
Our smashing friend Steve N, who we’re borrowing from EverCurious Entertainment, has been digging into our animation system and working out some longstanding issues that we’ve been desperate to fix. We’re currently jumping into a test build to check nothing else has been broken by his changes, but the result will be a lot more silky smooth turns and 180s in your survival forays. The big debate currently in our work with livestock is how to make it clear to players that you’ll need to designate areas that you want them to occupy and produce within, alongside building them fences they won’t escape through. We’ve got various ideas for this and will be running our experiments past the testers.

Increasingly we’re realising just how much more ‘life’ these non-human and non-zombie creatures bring to the game. To which end we are also experimenting with some non-interactive beasts that will run before you get near, and give the game a smidge more desolate colour…
  As mentioned before, alongside refinements and improvements to the music system, right now via Formosa/Noiseworks we’re in the process of getting real life human actors (in Los Angeles! In America!) to record some basic bodily noises to give extra life (and pain) to our Knox Event survivors. Imagine how cool it will be in MP when one of your buddies reaches you, having escaped zombies and run in terror, and you can hear their panicked heavy breathing.

That’s the sort of thing we want to capture, alongside noises of hurt and exertion as you tumble around the landscape. While we’re there we are also going to get a variety of other ‘spoken’ TV and radio noises that we can then obfuscate to improve the entertainment system slightly.
  Aiteron is back with us and has picked up on his work on fishing. This is its current iteration, which will shortly be mixed into the internal test build. This probably needs some more tweaking with the ‘strain’ animations – and the indications that a big fish is being caught – but is really getting there now. It’ll be mixed into the internal test build soon, which is also the point at which Formosa can start working on the new sound effects and such.
  About a bazillion new items – some useful (hose now required for gas siphoning, kids) and some more aimed at making the world feel fuller and more ‘real’ are also currently going into the internal test build. Here are a few examples.
This week’s wintry scene from BruceWayne (not the real one). A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Thanks to everyone who voted for Spiffo in the Labo(u)r of Love awards. He seemed quite chuffed about it.

I've been voting for PZ since the awards started (I think it was around 2016 or 17) and it makes me so happy to see it finally nominated, I can't think of a group of devs that deserve it more, you're slowly but surely creating a masterpiece that will raise the bar forever. Keep up the good work.  

First off… ahem… “Vote for Project Zomboid in the Steam Awards!”

In a fairly mindblowing chain of events, mainly due to the awesomeness of the survivors of the Knox Event, Project Zomboid has been nominated for Labor of Love in the Steam Awards.
 
We are up against some fantastic other games (vote Deep Rock or No Man’s Sky if you’re less keen on us – those teams are incredible!) but just being on the list is a massive achievement for us and we’re so grateful for the community for getting our name up in lights like this.
 
So thanks everyone, it really does mean a lot!
BLOG BEGINS
We’ve got a lot of the team away on their Christmas break this week who weren’t around to prod for contributions, or have a house full of sick people who need attention (that’s me, Hi), however the following items were shoved into the blog writer’s sack nonetheless.
 
In preparation for getting real actor-recorded body sounds, huffs and puffs for the game – Matteo has been recording his own voice to get a feel for what’s required. He’s kept them quite subtle to match the perspective, and the consideration that the player doesn’t want to be heard by zombies, so right now they’re not too over the top. We might change the approach with this, but it’s interesting to consider them and think what they’ll bring in terms of immersion to the game.
 
  We’re currently working on bringing our optimization and basements branch (both mapper-placed underground areas that always appear, and the randomly occurring ones placed as surprise features and treasure/zombie boxes) into a testable state. This is an ongoing process, but a lot of progress has been made this week so it’s rather exciting nevertheless.
  The integration of fire is still trucking along with most of our attention currently being on making flames fit the scene, we have a VFX artist joining us for a little while early in the new year – and in the meantime are experimenting code-side too. We’ll share some vids when we’re closer to the finished article.
  Blair is working on a variety of things – and is currently super proud of ‘LootLog’ which he wants advertised so modders are aware of it. This is a dev and modder tool that, once activated, logs every item that spawns around the player rather than wait for the player (or modder/dev) to discover it. Info logged includes a list of items; the room definition in question; the container type in question; and the X, Y and Z coordinates of the container in question.

This is intended as a tool for us and the modding community to evaluate the amounts of loot that spawn, and where it spawns. The blog writer is aware that it isn’t super sexy blog content – but Blair underlines that it is a ‘niche pleaser’ so if you are in that niche: consider yourself pleased.
  Also in the Algol pipeline this week: improved ‘profession’ houses with cars outside that match the profession, new weapons, new zed stories, new ‘filler’ book items with names dreamt up by dreamy Pat_Bren and the implementation of all sorts of new foods and 3D items.
  RJ’s animals have entered initial testing, which made for an extremely fun first day of crazy bug reports and ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and cuteness. It’s amazing what ‘life’ non-human and non-zombie animated creatures suddenly bring to PZ when you encounter them in-game.

Fun bugs we dealt with included: Alongside the chickens that keep opening doors, five eggs dropped on a wooden floor created a house full of roosters.

Pigs breeding so fast that a piglet horde started to form before one of our tester’s eyes.

While not a bug, this one was deliberate, here’s also a picture of some cows in a strip club.

Merry Christmas.
 
This week’s festive grave visit from 지혁! A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. We’re also on sale at the moment if any of your mates fancies it x

Calorie consumption became inadequate. You eat margarine every day, otherwise you quickly become dystrophic. The game becomes Farm Frenzy without options

Let’s get something out of the way first then. Ugh. We feel so unclean doing what we’re about to do. SORRY. SORRY EVERYONE…
All the other games were posting Steam Awards links like that, so we did too. Don’t vote for us if you’d rather not, but if you do – well click on the above massive intrusive image and that would be swell.
 
So, back to business, we released some final-ish fixes for the current stable build yesterday – the changelist for which can be found here.
There may well be another smaller patch, early next week, with some other minor changes – namely a few small anti-cheat measures, a fix for some modded textures and a bit of metal walls weirdness that still needs addressing.
B42 FARMING
This week we’re going over to Blair, and his current mission on overhauling our Farming system. Now, priority number one is to get things more tactile and animation-led with farming: when you use a watering can we want it through a direct mouse-click and not a maze of sub-menus.
Away from this, however, we are also making the overall system more complex, varied and interesting. Elements of this already coded into the 42 mainframe include:
 
Plants have growing seasons, and for most crops there are one or two optimal planting months. You’ll be able to read the best month to plant your crops on the back of seed packets, and if you plant at the wrong time of year you’ll get a reduced yield, and perhaps the risk of producing sickly plants. Appropriate plants, such as Potatoes, can be planted using the vegetable itself. You’ll be able to dry seed Corn and Peas to preserve them for planting next year. Plants can accumulate slugs and snails for the player to deal with – either using looted pest control, or perhaps using a folksy remedy. Nearby slug repellent plants such as Rosemary will help too. Rosemary is one of several herbs added as well. They tend to grow more quickly, and when harvested are knocked back a few growth stages –  and then can be harvested again later. The herbs you pick can also be used to propagate new herb patches while they’re still fresh, and can be dried as well. We are expanding the need to water your crops to houseplants. Potted indoor vegetation that players find in the world will now be living – similar, but not identical, to crops. They need to be watered, can fall victim to diseases, and will become visibly unwell before they die and become a dried husk. This also means that they will be another cool signifier of the days that have elapsed since the beginning of the Knox Event – since in time all the plants in homes, shops, the mall etc will wither and die. Elsewhere, we’ve been seeing what animals look like without their clothes/skin on. We’re thinking that these look realistic but a little too fatty and should have a little more muscle on show – but it’s interesting nonetheless.
These past two weeks we’ve also made a lot of progress with getting the previously shelved fire system back on track, including the ability for the game to have liquid-looking Molotov fire FX on the ground. The actual visuals are going to be fine-tuned and improved soon, so we’d rather not share images of it, but rest assured it’s going to be pretty cool.
 
Finally, another quick bump for the Spiffo plush that Makeship are creating for us – which is something that the community has been asking for since forever.
 
If you want one you’ve got two weeks to put your order in.
In case you want to give it for Christmas then Mash has also created a certificate of gifting intent that will hopefully come in useful.
 
This week’s road-side (well, centre) picnic from Athena. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

We skipped public testing for 41.75.
The TL;DR of the changes from 41.74 to 41.76 is that the Steam Networking API implementation was improved; Linux crashes should be fixed and overall networking performance has been improved alongside connection stability in internal tests.
In essence the game will now also use direct communication with dedicated servers, instead of going entirely through Steam’s own networking API, improving performance and stability for dedicated servers.
 
 
MP
 
- Improved Steam Networking API implementation.
- Selected game data is no longer transmitted through the Steam P2P API but through UDP instead.

- Adjusted Anti-Cheat Types 21-24 to result in fewer false positives.
A note that if you do not run a public server (i.e. a server exclusively for you and your family & friends without the worry of griefing and cheating), you can entirely circumvent any sort of frustration with false positives by disabling all AntiCheat protections in the servers .ini file.
 
- Split the large ConnectionDetails packet into several smaller packets with one of the ConnectionDetailsPacket.State enum values indicating which data is requested.
- Improved algorithm for the transmission of large files while playing.
- Loading screen now shows the download status of large files when connecting to a server.

- ZNet library was rebuilt on all platforms.
 
- Fixed ObjectModData packets not being sent while the server was in the FastForward state.
- Fixed bug in world dictionary when an item in a different module but with a similar name as an vanilla item was removed.
- Fixed a new stubble Beard getting added to remote players after each appearance change, which resulted in receivePlayerZombieDescriptors errors.

[Note: Parts of this patch were previously released as a 41.73 Unstable hotfix.*
A version bump ensures players running the Stable client get a clearer error (version mismatch) when connecting to servers running the Unstable branch.]
 
 
This patch addressed the Linux server crashes.
Please let us know about any remaining crashes and the performance you're experiencing.
 
If you continue to experience crashes on the Unstable branch after this patch, please send us your hs_err_pid**.log file (you'll find this in the server installation folder) in addition to a .zip file of your Home/Zomboid folder (remove the "Saves" folder from it to save space). If you're submitting them outside of our Discord techsupport channel, please make sure to provide a download link from your filesharing service of choice.
 
 
MP

- Migrated to newer Steam API.*
- ZNet library was rebuilt on all platforms.*
- Steam network logs are added.*
- SteamGeneric packet was removed.*
- Old steam session info was removed.*
- SteamGameServer.BUpdateUserData method call is removed as deprecated.*
- Error descriptions for the ESteamNetConnectionEnd and EResult  were added.
- Fixes to Steam logging.


Additional MP fixes will follow in the coming days.

Latest patch unstable beta released!
 
As ever, if you find that your mods have become unstable then please inform the relevant mod authors - and be patient while they revise and update  Thank you!

-----------------------------------
 
NEW
 
- Added the MapRemotePlayerVisibility server option for Multiplayer.
  1 = Remote players aren't visible on the in-game map
  2 = Remote players in the same faction or sharing a safehouse are visible
  3 = Remote players are always visible
 
- The OPT button in the in-game map that was previously visible only in debug mode or for admins is now always visible.
  When not in debug mode, these options are available:
  - Players
  - Remote Players (client only)
  - Player Names (client only)
  - Symbols

- Added MapRemotePlayerVisibility server option to the server-settings editor and admin panel.
 
- Give zombies that are targeting a player higher priority for pathfinding than other zombies.
- Added a panel to the Attachment Editor (Shift-F7) that is displayed when a "world" attachment is selected. This new panel displays the selected model as it would appear on the ground.
 
- Added new loot maps from Pat Bren.
- Split the single Louisville map-item into nine separate maps.
- Added Louisville maps to the loot tables.
 
- Added highlighting to changed Zombie Lore Sandbox Options (options that differ from Apocalypse mode are highlighted).
- Added an "AttachedToGlass" tile prop to fix signs attached to windows not being removed when breaking the window.
- Prevent the loot window from popping open when clicking on objects when using the furniture-manipulation tools.
- Added "Default=" to combobox sandbox-option tooltips.

- Allow empty bottles to store gasoline.
- Added water capacity in context tooltip when filling water container (if only 1 item type)
- Updated community translations.
- Updated credits.

- Improved icon draw for context menu
- Added ISContextMenu.addDebugOption() which adds an option with iconTexture=media/ui/BugIcon.png.
- Added a way to rename a savefile in the load-game "More..." panel.
- Added the various pictures frame missing (not spawning yet, also no inventory icon yet - currently using empty frame icon)

- Allow building double doors inside buildings.  This is to fix a bug where double doors couldn't be built on some outer walls of buildings.
- Added checks for wall-like obstacles that should prevent opening or closing double doors.
- Don't allow building stairs where there are walls or obstacles at the top. The player will pass through these when going up the stairs. Building walls or obstacles at the top of stairs was already disallowed.

- Incorporated Baph's latest additions, which include: new movable script items; new modder-orientated procedural distributions tables; new zombie outfit distributions; new vehicle distributions; more through junk tables; new items.
- Longer evolved recipe names; now up to 3 ingredients will be displayed in the display name of compound recipe items.
- Updated ISAddItemToRecipe and translation text with translation string support for new recipe naming system.
 
SFX
 
- Updated sound banks.
 - New action music track.
 - Fixed one male zombie voice looping the Hit sound.
 - Added missing sound for taking water from a dispenser.
- Added an ambient sound to the Gas-2-Go pumps.

- Set the value of the FMOD parameter "Generator" on powered items so they play a sound when powered by a generator.

- Added ZombieCrawlLungeSwing and ZombieCrawlLungeHit sounds for zombie fence/window crawling attacks.
- Zombies play their Attack and GettingUp sounds during fence/window crawling attack animation. 
 
MAP

- Full export of the current Knox Event map, not including new areas being worked on. This will be the final B41 map update.
 - Updates many farms and farmsteads
 - Improves upper class areas in Louisville
 - Adds many new tiles on the tilesheets
 - Fixes many and various community-reported map issues and bugs
 
FOOD AND RECIPES
 
- New Ice Cream Cones now melt and produce a Melted Ice Cream Cone item.
- New Gravy Boat, Baloney Slices, Salami, Salami Slices, and Snack Cakes models.
- New Canned Condensed Milk item; can be used for the same recipes as milk.
- Balance adjusted assorted values of food items and recipes.
- Appropriate bottles can now hold gasoline.
- Baloney and salami can be sliced.
- Many food items have more options for being used as evolved recipe ingredients.
- Recipes for Onigiri; Baguette Dough; Biscuit Dough; Meat Patty; Scooping Ice Cream; and Trays of Cookie Dough.
- Crayons can be used to write notes and mark the map.
- Toast can be made from Bread Slices by cooking them.
- New recipe for a Cheese Sandwich item; cook a Cheese Sandwich to make it into a Grilled Cheese Sandwich.
- Evolved Recipes for Ice Cream Cones; Sweet Pies; Bread; Toast; Bowls of Oatmeal; Mixed Beverages; and Glasses of Wine and Beer. This makes it possible to make foods such as Ice Cream Cones with candy and fruit on them, chocolate, cheese, or sunflower seed Bread, Toast with beans or avocado on it, Bowls of Oatmeal with berries and honey, cocktails, and such.
- Whole Pizza item added.
- Glasses and cup items can be filled with water.
- WildGarlic item replaced by WildGarlic2 which is edible; this was done so that Wild Garlic could be a food item and be used in recipes. Otherwise identical to the old Wild Garlic.
- Canned Condensed Milk item; can be used for the same recipes as milk.
- Maggots that spawn with zombie corpses will be mildly poisonous.
- Added evolved recipe item PizzaRecipe; "Pizza(Uncooked)" can be used to make an evolved recipe pizza with toppings.
- When Hot Drink beverages are made using Black Sage, Common Mallow, or Lemon Grass the medicinal properties of those items are transferred to the Beverage, "Herbal Teas".
- For herbal tea purposes, Hot Drinks are more flexible re ingredients and have special naming.
- Coffee and Espresso Machine stoves will now only accept mugs and other appropriate items.
- Added placeholder texture for Bag_MedicalBag.
- Added BrokenGlass tag to broken glass movables and smashed bottle, and added recipecode code for the tag, for modding purposes.
- Added support for the tag "SewingNeedle"; this will allow modders to add new mod items that can perform tailoring and wound stitching tasks.
- More flexible Tag support for writing notes.
- Added Tomato Paste item for pizza crafting.
- Added Prepare Pizza recipe to make a RecipePizza base evolved recipe item.
 
BALANCE

- Baloney, Salami, Ham, Onions, and Watermelon must be sliced before being able to be used in evolved recipes.
- Watermelon must be sliced or smashed before being able to eat it.
- Values of many food items adjusted for balance, consistency, and QOL purposes such as allowing one instance of an item to be used in more evolved recipe portions.
- Only Bread Slices and Toast can be placed inside Toasters.
- Some recipes now require a bowl as well as a spatula, spoon or fork, to mix ingredients.
- Many recipes adjusted to allow for more ingredient flexibility.
- Hot water is now required to make Bowls of Oatmeal. Tim is now satisfied.
- Added new param to Recipe: "InSameInventory". When this param true items gets only from same outermost inventory. (Need for fix Rip clothing only from player inventory or only from Floor/Container)
- Changed Rip Clothing recipe
- HandWeapon.weaponSprite is saved if it is different than the item-script's value.
- Slightly increased zed attraction to gunshots in MP
- Reduced the endurance loss when missing a hit (especially when pushing).
- Set sprite properties on the "Wood Pegboard" and "Wood Top Workbench" in location_business_machinery_01 so they are movable.
- Added all the missing translations to Moveables_EN.txt. Any missing translations for this are printed to the console when loading a game.
- Added a "Slice Onion" recipe so Fried Onion Rings can be made.
- Made the Composter thumpable by zombies.
- Sometimes the corpses that spawn as the player explores the world will be fake dead.
- As corpses progress in rot stages they have a chance of becoming fake dead.
- Additional appropriate corpses spawned in randomized world stories will rarely be fake dead.
- As corpses progress in rot stages they have a chance of spawning maggots in their inventory and in their square.
- Food value and evolved recipe name adjustments for more flexible recipe usage and shorter compound names.
- Obese is now mutually exclusive with Light Eater and Very Underweight is mutually exclusive with Hearty Appetite at character creations.
- Adjusted weight of Spears
- Floor tiles will now provide a maximum of 1 nail when dismantled.
- Eggs are dangerous uncooked but now with a greatly reduced chance of causing food sickness.
- Ice Cream Cones now melt and produce a Melted Ice Cream Cone item.

ANIMS

- Added new fill from bourbon bottle anim
- Changed fill from bourbon bottle xml to use new anim

Emote Wheel adjustments:
- Adjusted some emote bone masks to reduce clipping
- Added some stealth emote versions to reduce clipping and posing awkwardness
- Added emote states for different weapon poses
- Added an eating animation for WaterPotPasta WaterPotRice. The animation is the same as for drinking out of a pot.
 
Idle extension adjustments:
- Adjusted normal stance extensions bone masks to avoid clipping and awkward poses
- Added normal stance extensions anims, where appropriate
- Added normal stance extension xml for different weapon stances, where appropriate
 
MP

- Various anti-cheat improvements

- Sync and physics improvements for vehicles.
    - Refactored and decreased vehicle physics packet size.
    - Vehicle interpolation was refactored and improved .
- Improved towing physics and behaviour.
    - Updated PZBullet library on all platforms.
    - Rope constraint is added to PZBullet. Now used for vehicles instead of z-offset for point-to-point constraint.

- Optimized Vehicle authorization on exit
- Allow admins to repair clothes via Edit -> Condition, and remove wholes when the item is set to max condition when the item is in their inventory. 
- Visual data for damaged/fixed clothing will now sync between clients.
    
- Hit reaction translation length is now calculated by appropriate animation clip
- Use WaveSignal packet on client
- Improve auth/towing for cases with two drivers/swap tow
- Stopped clients updating rotting corpses and fake-dead corpses.
- Added check for IsoDeadBody.getHumanVisual() being null.
- Server will send the success result of recipes checksum validation if the client is untouchable.
    - The game will calculate the checksum using the original recipe name.

- The driver now stops the vehicle before they exit from the vehicle or switch seat.
    - Added ISBaseTimedAction timed action.
    - The IGUI_PlayerText_CanNotExitFromMovingCar string is not used now.
    - The BaseVehicle.setForceBrake function was added. Calling this function activates the brakes for 1 second.
- The SystemDisabler.doDisableTunePhysicDelay variable was added

- If FPS is capped the updatePhysic function receives time delta uses the PerformanceSettings.getLockFPS function.
- The game server will not send the PlayerUpdateReliable packets from players who are far away.
- Improvements for some anti-cheat checks
- ServerOptions to enable/disable AntiCheatProtectionType checks for types 21-24 are added.
- Added log message for LUA debugger

- Improve vehicle logging
    - Add DebugLogStream noise methods
    - Logs can be filtered by severity
- Reformatted log streams for damage, death, and multiplayer log types
- Added server log command for vehicle traces (ex.: "log vehicle trace" or "log ve t" for short)
    - Command entered in general chat tab changes severity on the client
    - Command entered in admin chat tab changes severity on the server 

- Fixed Zed appearance not syncing between players.
- Fixed one player being able to use two radios / walkie talkies.
- Fixed text not displaying above the placed HAM radio if there is a Walkie talkie in your hands.
- Fixed vehicle radio using wrong coordinates.
- Fixed vehicle radio not working in the same way as world placed radio.
- Fixed other vehicle radio issues (radio stations, text, chat, VOIP).
- Fixed vehicle radio text processing.
- Fixed trailer authorizations / floaty trailers.
- Fixed Item Remove tool not removing items from containers on a server.
- Fixed clients sending StopSound packets to the server for zombie vocals.
- Fixed clients sending climb-over-fence sounds and climb-through-window sounds for players and zombies. It seems each client runs the ClimbOverFenceState and ClimbThroughWindowState, so these sounds may be kept local.
- Fixed clients sending climb-over-wall sounds.
- Fixed seat authorizations.
- Fixed null pointer exception in the VehicleManager.serverPacket function.
- Fixed incorrect delay-tuning algorithm. 
- Fixed issues with Handle BufferOverflowException sending map_meta.bin and map_zone.bin for servers that use many map mods.
- Fixed issues when characters are hit by trailers.
- Fixed corpses disappeared when killed by trailer
- Fixed issues with vehicle physics debug log messages.
- Fixed Admin being kicked because of incorrect checksum.
- Fixed car changing its place after re-login.
- Fixed normal vehicle not being removable in mods.
- Fixed movement sound when vehicle is stopped.
- Fixed movement sound when player changed seat from driver to passenger. Redundant vehicle packet EngineSound flag is removed.
- Fixed disappearing trailers.
- Fixed physics update limits.
- Fixed a vehicle and towed vehicle having different physic delays right after they were attached, causing clients to see the two closer than they actually were.
- Fixed attached cars being disconnected after re-login.
- Fixed passenger not being able to exit attached car if they occupy driver's seat while the car is being towed.
- Fixed attached trailer twitching after player gets in car. The server gives authorization for a short time to a player if both vehicles don't have drivers.
- Fixed empty RequestGetFull being sent.
- Fixed vehicle passenger could have vehicle authorization after collision.
- Fixed vehicle collision owner.
- Fixed tow re-attach.
- Fixed vehicle seat switching.
- Fixed passengers seeing black boxes at high speeds.
- Fixed vehicle not damaging players after re-login.
- Fixed vehicle local simulation pass through another vehicle.
- Fixed player can't become owner of pushed vehicle.
- Fixed bouncing vehicle authorization at the end of local simulation.
- Fixed player can exit or sleep in moving car.
- Fixed rare incorrect vehicles authorization after towing.
- Fixed engine sound disappearing without a driver.
- Fixed car not stopping when driver changes their place due to cruise control.
- Fixed error when try to type "[" in Item list viewer.
- Fixed bug in the GameTime class. The class had insufficient precision when calculating the time in the syncServerTime function.
- Fixed car stopping condition. The vehicle is stopped if the speed is less than 0.8 kmph.
- Fixed clipping vehicles.
- Fixed remote cars lag. The stepSimulation function will receive fixed update period. This period will not depend from FPS.
- Fixed Vehicle simulation speed depending on locked fps.
- Fixed the server kicking players when SystemDisabler.doAllowDebugConnections variable was set to true. 
- Added MapRemotePlayerVisibility server option to the server-settings editor and admin panel.

MODS

- Improved log for lua errors. Now it shows if it modified file error
- Added list of mods in Pause menu + this list show mods that cause errors
 
FORAGING
 
- Adjusted the position of foraging pin icons and direction arrows. The arrows always pointed to the northwest corner of a square, which didn't look right for dropped items.
- Turn the player to face a forage item when picking it up.

- Fixed the foraging system not handling non-rectangular zones (i.e., polygon or thick polyline zones).
- Zone.getRandomSquareInZone() now handles polygon and thick polyline zones.
- Zone.getTotalArea() returns the area of polygon and thick polyline zones.
    Note this isn't an accurate count of the squares in such zones, it is the sum of the area of each triangle that forms the polygon.
    For other types of zones, width * height is returned.
- Added the OnLoadedMapZones event which is called after map_zone.bin is loaded.
    As before, the existing OnLoadMapZones event is triggered before map_zone.bin is loaded.
- forageSystem.init() is called by the new OnLoadedMapZones event instead of OnLoadMapZones.
- forageSystem.integrityCheck() checks whether the original map zone represented by each ForageZone still exists.

ADMIN/DEBUG

- Added Brush Tool for copying, destroying, and building specific Tiles, as well as a Fire, Smoke, and Explosion-Brush. .
    - Controls:
    - Turn on Brush Tool cheat via the Debug Menu -> "Cheats" -> "Brush Tool"..
    - Right-Click on any tile -> "Brush Tool Manager", "Copy tile", "Destroy Tile".
    - When a tile was picked from the Bruth Tool Manager -> keys "[" and "]" for scrolling between tiles.
- Added trigger thunder tool (for admins).
- Added respawn new loot in container by RMC-ContextOption on container button (when LootZed cheat on or isAdmin).

- Changed LootZed manager opening on RMC-ContextOption on container button.
- Allowed admin to create any VHS out of spawned VHS-home (like in debug).
- Added sync for Health panel cheats.
- Trailers debug is improved.
- Small fix to Lua closure.
- Improved spawn vehicle menu.
- Added ability to change weight in Player Stats window.
- Added destroying objects without a sledgehammer if building cheat is on.
- Added sliders for change weight and calories in debug panel.
- Added Step Into, Step Over, and Resume buttons to the Lua debugger.

- Improved ContextMenu
- Now you can add icons for context options:
       local myOption = context:addOption("My option name", ...)
       myOption.iconTexture = getTexture("media/ui/MyIconForOption.png")

- Added new functions for context: insertOptionAfter(...), insertOptionBefore(...), removeOptionByName(...), getMenuOptionNames(...)
- Improved Debug/Admin options.
- Added new options for doors - Now you can set a building ID for doors and force-lock doors inside buildings. 
    - Added Door Options can be found in the Right-Click Context Menu -> Objects.
    - To lock a door inside a building, set a Building Key ID for the door, set Force-Lock to "True" and click "Objects" -> "Door Lock" in the context menu. A key for the door can be spawned via the "Get Key" option.
    
- Added 'make noise' options to attract zombies.
- Added option for removing all zombies in a zone to the Admin tools.
- Added icons in context menu for ADMIN/DEBUG options.
- Added elapsed time since server started in server statistics info.
- Added access to some Admin tools for moderators.
- Added an external anim debug UI for Martin.
- Removed the line "Press Esc to open Admin panel" from Server toolbox UI

FIXES

- Fixed radio batteries spawning at 100% charge no matter how much time has passed. They should be depleted after about 4-5 days.
- Fixed radio batteries sometimes not draining after loading a game after quitting to the main menu.
- Fixed Weapon-part models (for scopes, etc) not being displayed for weapons on the ground.
- Fixed ability to disassemble the floor at the top of a staircase. It was already forbidden to destroy such a floor using a sledgehammer.
- Fixed the composter becoming unusable after moving it.
- Fixed being able to move a composter if it has compost in it.
- Fixed food unhappiness being reset to the default value when loading the item, when it was set to zero after being cooked.
- Fixed clothing dryers and washers not consuming fuel from generators.
- Fixed generator fuel consumption not being updated properly when turning things on and off.
- Fixed picking up and placing powered objects not updating generator fuel consumption.
- Fixed battery-powered radios consuming generator fuel.
- Fixed requiring 2 or more units of gas in a can to refill a generator, rather than 1 or more.
- Fixed playing VehicleAddFuel instead of GeneratorAddFuel when refilling a generator.
- Fixed opening a smashed window when holding down the E key, when a vehicle blocks the other side.
- Fixed "Grabbing XYZ" appearing in the crafting UI when putting items back into containers.
- Fixed IsoGenerator.setSurroundingElectricity() calling IsoObject.checkHaveElectricity() before each chunk's list of active generators was updated.
- Fixed exterior doors and windows not playing ambient sounds if they are on the west or north edge of a chunk but the adjacent chunk hasn't been loaded yet.
- Fixed VehicleAmbiance stopping immediately after starting sometimes.
- Fixed some object ambient sounds that don't use the Generator parameter stopping immediately after starting.
- Fixed Base.BareHands.HitFloorSound.  It was trying to play the non-existent default BatOnFloor sound.
- Fixed hot food not cooling down when placed on the ground.
- Fixed incorrect weights of weapons with upgrade parts.
- Fixed equipping an already-equipped item causing the item to drop on the ground when the player's inventory is near 50.
- Fixed hearing rain hitting a vehicle when the vehicle is inside a building.
- Fixed ambient sound playing at "outside" volume when inside a vehicle that is inside a building.
- Fixed ISVehicleMechanics.OnMechanicActionDone() calling undefined noise() function.
- Fixed Lua errors on the Steam Deck after disabling the "Steam Virtual Gamepad" in the controller options UI.
- Fixed not being able to upgrade wall frames or walls when there is no floor to the east or south of the wall.
- Fixed incorrect math applying a model's "world" attachment when displaying an item on the ground.
- Fixed MagazineGround and MagazineOpenGround models appearing off-center when on the ground.
- Fixed and adjusted many model "world" attachments.
- Fixed bug when character weight does not decrease if day length > 1 hour
- Fixed equipped radios only updating for one splitscreen player.
- Fixed stacking of military crates and the popcorn machine.
- Fixed the freeze the first time a vehicle is entered. This was due to loading all the vehicle-dashboard textures.
- Fixed "Min= Max= Default=" not being displayed in server-option tooltips as is done for sandbox options.
- Fixed accidental change of Muldraugh map bounds to Louisville area.
- Fixed mapper-placed open doors not being IsoDoor objects. There are some open doors at the Louisville stables that couldn't be interacted with.
- Fixed each part of a double door being randomly locked or unlocked on creation. Now they are always unlocked.
- Fixed the wrong type of item being returned when the foraging "search focus" causes an existing item to change type. There is still an issue where an already-seen item may change type by spamming the End key.
- Fixed ISForageIcon.lua overriding ISBaseIcon.checkIsForageable() by mistake.
- Fixed (again) incorrect placement of the foraging pin icon over the item icon. ISBaseIcon.textureCenter is no longer used after this change.
- Fixed the animation played when filling Bourbon and Wine bottles.
- Fixed bunker tiles cutaways.
- Fixed blood appearing on destroyed windows.an destroyed fences.
- Fixed holding SHIFT made weight decrease faster.
- Fixed holding SHIFT without moving having the same impact as running on hunger.
- Fixed sitting on a chair giving a different endurance regen than sitting on ground.
- Fixed car's engine not taking damage when running over zombies when the hood was removed by player.
- Fixed not losing endurance when stomping zombies in the legs.
- Fixed more cases where indoor zombies can spawn in inaccessible locations.
- Fixed picking up and placing WallOverlay movables (like mirrors) on the east and south edge of a square.
- Fixed LuaClosure.toString2() exception when a function has no filename. This includes everything in the built-in stdlib.lua code.
- Fixed missing tile properties on the Public Garbage Bin (and added translation).
- Fixed the Small Crate (found in Greene's Grocery) not being stackable.
- Fixed police cars at blockades with their headlights and flashers on not spawning with the battery drained according to the amount of time that's passed.
- Fixed the properties on some new stove sprites.  They became IsoThumpable instead of IsoStove.
- Fixed weapon parts not appearing on equipped weapons on corpses or on the character-info avatar.
- Fixed stepping over a Lua function in the debugger that adds a UI element adding the UI element in the debugger instead of in the game.
- Fixed the Lua debugger not handling changes to screen resolution.
- Fixed bug in vehicle skin editor in SP.
- Fixed bug with fast transfer leaving item in inventory after crafting (for example stacked logs).
- Fixed tile properties on a stair railing creating invisible walls.
- Fixed CornerNorthWall and CornerWestWall not having tile properties.
- Fixed zombies only playing their Hurt sound one time when hit on the ground.
- Fixed spear-charge zombie kills not being counted.
- Fixed the container highlight color not being displayed for painted crates.
- Fixed not being able to sleep on brown picnic table.
- Fixed Spiffo's green arrow requiring farming skill to be picked up.
- Fixed some desks that couldn't be picked up.
- Fixed some office whiteboards that couldn't be picked up.
- Fixed (again) aspects of Composter sprites as RJ BROKE EVERYTHING.
- Fixed bug when generator can charge vehicle battery.
- Fixed water containers not getting fully emptied when watering crops.
- Fixed clicking "Health icon" while Health Panel info is open adding spaces in the bottom of the text.
- Fixed players being able to start changing parts of vehicles when inside a certain vehicle.
- Fixed Dirty Rags being used to build a Log Wall when there are exactly 4 Ripped Sheets in inventory.
- Fixed missing translation for new movable Medical Desk.
- Fixed bug with rip clothing menu.
- Fixed bug with double checking fishing net.
- Fixed being able to dismantle favorited Electronics.
- Fixed bug player not takeing nearest item in inventory for smoking.
- Fixed character info panel showing male player model when the character was female. 
- Fixed zombies colliding with the player's vehicle when walking into a different, nearby vehicle. This only affects singleplayer.
- Fixed debug rendering of vehicle trailer positions. Only one of the two locations was drawn in red when obstructed.
- Fixed radios with dead batteries still being turned on.
- Fixed missing space after the water amount in the farming tooltip
- Fixed the animation speed of the wind effect on water being faster at higher framerates.
- Fixed fog from a previous game appearing briefly when loading a different game.
- Fixed the character Info and Protection panels displaying no help text when the "i" button in the titlebar is pressed. These two panels have no translations, so the help dialog is now hidden when either is displayed.
- Fixed the character-info-window help dialog not resizing to match the height of the text.
- Fixed ISAdminPanelUI.updateButtons() overwriting self.climateOptionsBtn and self.showStatisticsBtn.
- Fixed the 'pinned' state of the character-info window not being preserved.
- Fixed the 'pinned' and 'visible' states of the forage ui not being preserved.
- Fixed flashlights no longer falling out of hands when climbing over walls
- Fixed lack of shoveling sound when filling in graves.
- Fixed being unable to dismantle Electronics with a favorited Screwdriver.
- Fixed Flashlights falling out of hands when climbing over walls.
- Fixed dried foods and Ramen noodles transferring their thirst values when used in evolved recipes.
- Fixed granola bars and cookies being perishable.
- Fixed missing fruit cocktail item.
- Fixed items being used in evolved recipes not having their thirst values reduced.
- Fixed Pancakes being unable to be burnt.
- Fixed evolved recipe tooltip displaying uncooked icons for cooked ingredients.
- Fixed partially eaten food not getting lighter in some circumstances.
- Fixed cutting Bacon Rashers into Bacon Bits producing rotten Bacon Bits.
- Fixed the names used for ingredients in evolved recipe names to be shorter.
- Fixed the junk tables entries in the loot distribution tables being affected by zombie population density.
- Fixed PiePrep not having a debuff.
- Fixed Ice Cream Cones now melt and produce a Melted Ice Cream Cone item.
- Fixed added several missing models.
- Fixed renamed items are now limited to a new name of 28 characters or less.
- Fixed Display Category for the PetrolBleachBottle and PetrolPopBottle items
- Fixed missing models for Muffin Tray, Carving Fork, Gravy, Gravy Mix, Spatula, Teacup, Baloney Slices, Salami, Salami Slices and Snack Cakes
- Fixed renamed items being able to have new names of more than 28 characters 
- Fixed animal-in-trap sounds not being sent from the server. Currently this only happens every 10 minutes so they're easy to miss.
- Fixed music not restarting after creating a new character in-game.
- Fixed missing PikeRotten.png and PikeCookedRotten.png - which is currently unused.  Food models are rendered as Cooked or Rotten but not both.
- Fixed not being able to navigate out of the Sandbox options preset panel with D-pad left and right.
- Fixed previously-loaded buildings possibly being randomized (burned down, etc) after a server soft reset. This could happen any time map_meta.bin was deleted since that is where the "has this building been checked before" flag is kept. Now, a building will only be randomized if it hasn't been checked before and if at least one of the chunks covered by the building was loaded for the first time.
- Fixed the custom weight of trapped animals not being preserved.
- Fixed inaccurate weights for partially eaten food items with custom weights.
- Fixed renamed items not being limited to a new name of 28 characters or less.
- Fixed accurate weights for partially eaten food items with custom weights.
- Fixed claustrophobic characters being able sleep in small rooms by  right-clicking the bed from outside the room.
- Fixed two-way radios installed in vehicles not transmitting text chat; needs testing for VOIP.
- Fixed vehicles with premium radios installed not being able to play CDs in them.
- Fixed Gravy Boat, Baloney Slices, Salami, Salami Slices and Snack Cakes models.
- Fixed missing models for Muffin Tray, Carving Fork, Gravy, Gravy Mix, Spatula, Teacup, Baloney Slices, Salami, Salami Slices and Snack Cakes.
- Fixed missing Sport T-shirt icons.
- Fixed missing tooltip explaining that to purify some water containers, a microwave must be used.
- Fixed error with Baguettes being unable to be used to make sandwiches.
- Fixed missing add-all option in the fill menu for Generators.
- Fixed not being able to equip a weapon as secondary when a handgun is equipped as primary.
- Fixed Sweet Pies being unavailable in the crafting UI.
 
CODE / ENGINE

- Changed ZomboidFileSystem.getGameModeCacheDir() to not append a trailing File.separator.
  Most callers of getGameModeCacheDir() already appended a File.separator, resulting in two separator characters.
  These duplicate separators didn't seem to hurt anything.
 
 

Compliled changelist (41.74-41.77)
These small updates were intended to address the crashes affecting Linux MP servers and improve the client-to-server connections.
 
41.77.9 Hotfix October 20th:
- Added checks for a null VehicleScript to IsoPlayer.getNearVehicle() and IsoZombie.getNearVehicle().
 
 
41.77.7 Hotfix October 17th:
- znet libraries were rebuilt.
- Minor revision number now displayed on main menu instead of just inside the console.
- Fixed being stuck on the connection screen or a black screen when trying to connect to a co-op server.
- Fixed: log messages and NPE during the processing of the RakNet already-connected packet.
- Fixed instances of clients being unable to connect to a server where logs showed that the client is already connected. The client will use 127.0.0.1 to connect if it is a co-op host.
- Fixed host connections from remote clients.
- The client will save coop server logs to the logs.zip file before and after each start.
 

Hotfix October 7th:
- Rebuilt znet libraries
- Fixed /banid command
 
________________
 
 
MP
- Improved client connection.
    Important for server providers: Servers now have two ports for clients to connect to.
    The game port (UDP 16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (UDP 16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection. These ports can be configured through the server options.
    Clients will first try to use a direct connection. If direct connection fails, clients will try to connect via Steam.
    The non-Steam version works as usual.
    UPnP rules were changed accordingly (UPnP is used in cases to prevent manual port-forwarding).
    The client will show the warning message "WARNING: SERVER HAS PORT %1 CLOSED. PERFORMANCE MAY BE SEVERELY AFFECTED" if the client can't connect through direct connection.
 
- ZNet libraries rebuilt for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
- ZNet, Connection, and Kick logs are improved.
 
- Improved Type5, and Type21-24 Anti-Cheat behaviour to reduce false positives.
    A note that if you do not run a public server (i.e. a server exclusively for you and your family & friends without the worry of griefing and cheating), you can entirely circumvent any sort of frustration with false positives by disabling all AntiCheat protections in the servers .ini file.
 
- Split the large ConnectionDetails packet into several smaller packets with one of the ConnectionDetailsPacket.State enum values indicating which data is requested.
- Improved algorithm for the transmission of large files while playing.
- Loading screen now shows the download status of large files when connecting to a server.
- Extended checksum logs for debugging CRC differences.
- Increased kick delay for CRC differences.
- Additional logs were added.
 
- Fixed ObjectModData packets not being sent while the server was in the FastForward state.
- Fixed bug in world dictionary when an item in a different module but with a similar name as an vanilla item was removed.
- Fixed a new stubble Beard getting added to remote players after each appearance change, which resulted in receivePlayerZombieDescriptors errors.
- Fixed kicks after disabling VOIP.
- Fixed connecting to host after disconnection from a dedicated server.
- Fixed infinite connection attempt to non-steam server when it's not up.
- Fixed the client displaying "Disconnected" instead of "Wrong username or password".
- Fixed players being able to change their saved password for an already created account in some instances.
- Fixed Type21 black screen at connection stage when Type21 anti-cheat check is disabled.
- Fixed the character model always using media/textures/Body/Masks instead a clothing item's UnderlayMasks folder.
- Fixed black screen issues with certain mod constellations.
- Fixed the timed-action progress bar position not being updated during actions without a fixed duration.
- Fixed the animation speed of the timed-action progress bar at different framerates.
 

NEW
- Added a looping progress bar for timed actions that have no defined end. This is mainly a stopgap "fix" for entering cars, to visualize that there is an ongoing unfinished action until we can have visually open doors, etc.
Specifically added for the scenarios where players reported being bitten through the car door after they had entered a car and interrupted the "enter car" action before it could finish (e.g. by opening the map, etc), i.e. before the door was "closed".
This bar extends to other "infinite" actions like Walk To.
 

MODELS
- Added new body locations: Jacket_Bulky, JacketHat_Bulky, TorsoExtraVest, and JacketSuit.
- Assigned new body locations to existing clothing items to avoid clipping.
- Tweaked and added many clothing masks to avoid clipping through each other.
- Adjusted several clothing models and bone weighting to improve clipping.
- Removed Bowling shirt model from Bowling shirt definitions and made Bowling Shirt a texture. The model was left in the files in case mods use it.
- Improved base Body mask to help with clipping.
- Re-exported ALICE packs as some straps were missing.

41.71
 
MUSIC

- More tracks for the new dynamic music system - we now have ten of the refigured music tracks in-game, with four more still to come.

MODELS AND ANIMS

- Changed Diamond Pattern Sweater Vest and V-neck Sweater Vest to use Sweater body location
- Changed High Viz vest to use Sweater body location
- Added a different animation played when destroying floors with a sledgehammer.

SOUND

- Fixed SFX and music cutting out in busy situations (often seen on MP servers)
- Reimplemented ZombieVocalsManager to limit zombie voice events to the nearest 20 zombies.
- Optimized sorting objects in DoorAndWindowEmitters and ZombieVocalsManager.
- Changed handling of object ambient sounds so they only play from the nearest 20 objects. This includes doors, fridges, trees, windows and any sprite with the AmbientSound property set.
- Removed DoorAndWindowEmitters.  This is combined with ObjectAmbientEmitters.
- Fixed ZombieVocalsManager not actually stopping vocal events when one of the 20 slots was reassigned to a different zombie.

BALANCE

- Muffins produced by the "Get 6 Muffins" recipe have the name of the ingredient added to the muffins, if any, such as "Apple Muffin".
- Muffins produced by the "Get 6 Muffins" recipe are marked "Cooked", so the hunger-reduction bonus due to being cooked is applied.
- Fixed adding a spice to a stale Taco increases boredom and unhappiness.
- Added new methods to the Food class (to fix the above issue):
    getBoredomChangeUnmodified()
    getEnduranceChangeUnmodified()
    getStressChangeUnmodified()
    getThirstChangeUnmodified()
    getUnhappyChangeUnmodified()
- Higher level carpentry crates now have more space.
- Can now move empty composter.
- Can now move military crates.

FIXES

- Fixed new player's natural hair color being different than their hair color. This caused the hair color to change when it regrew after shaving it.
- Fixed Consolidate All stopping after the first full item.
- Fixed "Fill All" stopping if an item was in a carried bag and needed to be replaced by a different item type.
- Fixed the player moving to a strange position when performing the "Place Item" command on items that are inside a vehicle.
- Fixed the "Place Item" command showing when the player is inside a vehicle.
- Fixed displaying a submenu for single items in the "Fill" menu.
- Fixed ISRemoveBurntVehicle not checking whether the Propane Torch has enough propane.
- Fixed the Dismantle Car Wreck tooltip showing the incorrect required amount of propane when the player doesn't have a Propane Torch.
- Fixed the player standing on floors they are destroying with a sledgehammer.
- Fixed the level-up text above the player's head not being displayed in the first hour of life, for passive perks (Fitness and Strength) and for the first experience level.
- Fixed no sound playing when unloading bullets from a magazine.
- Fixed playing GetWaterFromTap when filling a container from a puddle.  Now it plays GetWaterFromLake (which is a bit loud when filling a bottle).
- Fixed incorrect hunger calculation when adding ingredients in evolved recipes.
- Fixed bunch of tile definitions problems.
- Fixed various table story problems.
- Fixed dismantling log wall not giving logs.
- Fixed some issues with 3D models.
- Fixed "Film Camera" not being called "Camera Film" and lowered the weight.  The item is not a camera.
- Fixed some hedge sprites becoming invisible when covered in snow with x1 textures.

Hola, zomberinos. Short-ish blog this week, but some fun info-nuggets none-the-less.
FINAL 41 PATCH
We released 41.78 to Unstable last week, and released a fix-up patch yesterday. There’ll probably be another update to it before we consider it safe for a full stable release, but there hasn’t been too much to mop up this time around – so our thanks to Blair who was the chief coder on this release.
One thing it might be nice to get in before we wrap 41 and the long wait till 42 begins, are the products of our investigations into ways to make it clearer to modders and users alike where errors in their mod setup lies – when it comes to different capitalisations in folder paths and different file orders between server and clients.
 
These often result in error messages that are confusing and/or unclear, making things hard to troubleshoot for modders and our support team. It’d be nice to bring about some clarity before we leave 41 for pastures new – so that’s the main thing we’re waiting on now.
WORK ON 42
Slightly technical details from the land of 42, but something that Blair has also been moving onto is working on the architecture of our recipes system – to make it more foolproof and effective for both us and modders.
 
We are streamlining our evolved recipes – using ‘templates’ similar to the tags we use for individual items. This will make it more straightforward and simple for both us and the modding community to add in new evolved recipes and food items.
 
The system ‘as is’ in Build 41 has a sizable amount of ‘clunk debt’ associated with it – that gets compounded by the number of food items we have in the game. The way we are restructuring things strips out some of the complexity, and lets us add new stuff easily – while simultaneously managing our existing recipes and foodstuffs.
 
Next up, we also have more ideas about further streamlining this using item tags to offload a lot of the recipe ingredient stuff to tags and templates. We’ve also got the roots in place of an Evolved Recipe name system that will notice you putting ham and pineapple on a pizza – and call it a Hawaiian Pizza. Or name a sandwich a BLT if you’ve added bacon, lettuce and tomato.
 
On top of this there’s a lot of wash and brush up of existing features. There’s a lot of big name gameplay stuff going into B42, but when it eventually rolls around we want to underline that there’ll be a bunch of more iterative improvements on existing PZ too.
 
For example, right now we’re working on making the randomized profession house stuff more cool and obvious- right now you probably aren’t aware when you’re in a carpenter’s or an electrician’s home as there aren’t enough indicators. We’ve got stuff going in to make it clearer and more thematic. Likewise we’re improving the procedural loot system to make loot and looting more interesting in of itself.
 
There are also new ‘zed story’ events to come across where costumed zombies will tell a story – gun store sieges, hillbilly hoedowns, kids party raves in the forests, a variety of campsites to come across etc.
 
Oh, and we’ll be widening the melee weapons pool a bit also. They’re not in-game yet, and no SFX for them yet either, but here’s a quick look at some of what’ll be on offer.

 
This week’s prison visit from Abby. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Now then, survivors. Let’s do the thing.
 
NEXT
This week we released version 41.77 into our Unstable beta. This is primarily aimed at fixing the Linux crashes that have been plaguing server hosts, and so far seems to be a mission success in that regard.
 
It also improves client to server connections by preferring a direct connection to the server. Servers now have two ports for clients to connect to, configurable through the server options. The game port (UDP 16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (UDP 16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection.
 
We’ve had a successful wider test of 41.77 with more than 30 people on a server without any crashes, and we’ve tested a modded setup afterwards as well.
 
Upon release there were servers running mods with 41.77 just fine, but unfortunately it seemed that some mod setup constellations caused conflicts that resulted in black screens for some servers.
 
We have just pushed a hotfix we believe will resolve this.
 
If, however, you run a 41.77 server and you are still experiencing players unable to log on (only seeing a black screen) then please send us: the list of ModIDs (specifically the “Mods=” line from their server.ini, the workshop= line, and your server logs.
 
Posting these in the forum release thread or in our Discord techsupport channel would probably be best.
 
Likewise, any reports of ongoing server instability or general misbehaviour – please let us know ASAP.
 
THEN
We’re still adding tweaks and polish to our final B41 patch that we’ll put out once the current network improvements are fully tested, released and stable.
 
This is the current changelist, with notable additions in the past few weeks on show here if you already read up on what was incoming in our last blog.
 
OOH, 42
Build 42 will be a very big update, and it will appear a sizable amount of time after Build 41 is fully wrapped. We’ve announced most of the things that we currently have brewing for it, but there’s one thing we’ve only hinted at so far – and which is very likely to feature.
As regular readers may remember, a while ago we wrote a blog called Techdoid that detailed some of the big engine improvements we have slated for 42.
 
Amongst them is a new rendering pipeline which allows for entire chunks to be cached with a depth buffer, which will afford us MASSIVE rendering and scene construction improvements and should rid us of all the performance issues we’ve been plagued with due to the isometric draw order over the years.
 
 
There’s also a new light propagation system, which allows for light to naturally leak through doors and windows, providing much more atmospheric and believable lighting
  We also got rid of the 8 storey limit on chunks: specifically we allowed each chunk to have its own unique defined height up to 32 levels.
Finally, we discussed that we’d fixed the many areas of the codebase that used static casts to round the player’s position to determine what chunk or tile they were on to using Math.floors instead. This method allows for negative coordinates to work where prior the calculations would have failed if the player was stood on a tile with a negative coordinate.
 
This in theory will allow for us, or modders, to build north or west to the same extents as we currently build to the east and south, effectively quadrupling the maximum size the map could be extended to and open up a great deal of extra land to populate should we need to in future.
Whilst all these features are gamechangers in themselves, they were also done in service of another very specific feature we’ve had planned for a long time, which required each of them to be made feasible in any way.
 
The current in-game lighting system means that the indoor ambience levels are defined solely by the time of day. If it’s daytime, the ambient light levels inside a building are above zero, giving just sub-daylight levels, even if there are no sources of natural light that should fall on a tile just by virtue of it being day. That wouldn’t work very well if we were wanting to do… a certain other feature.
 
The previous eight level hard limit and high rendering cost of multiple levels was rather restrictive if we were to… want to do a certain something.
 
The lack of support for negative coordinates for character positions? Well that was IMMENSELY restrictive if we… were to want to do a certain something.
 
A few people may have been able to read between the lines of what all these lead toward. Many more will have just watched the video already.
  The plan we have for basements and sub-levels is an interesting one, as it will provide a lot more replayability to the game map, which is otherwise completely static at the moment.
 
Essentially in 42 we, or modders, can list positions on the map (along with staircase orientation) that have the space for a basement and can be allocated the potential to have one. However, no basements are placed within the map itself.
 
When an area is streamed in for the first time, an appropriate basement ‘building’ created in the building editor and exported as a binary file is selected randomly from the list of all possible basements and will be injected into the map as it is loaded.
 
We could add tags to make it pick an appropriate category of basement to fit the specific house, though right now the code has it set as completely random. Each basement has stairs leading up from its ‘top’ floor and these stairs will be aligned to the correct position when it is injected into the map.
 
This means that despite the map being static, any areas with basements will yield surprises in every playthrough. This will also, clearly, cause the least disruption to the existing map development, modded maps and everything else.
 
Whilst most of the basements will be modest basement rooms, that will have their own unique layout and lootable containers and will change on every new world and be populated with our own collection as well as any collections of mod basements that are subscribed to.
There may be a few, however, which are more extensive, the player could happen upon a super rare and extensive underground complex. We have 32 levels to work with that can be distributed in any way above or below ground per chunk as required, so there’ll be few limits particularly in what modders can do with this.
 
We can also hardcode some specific basement levels, so we could say provide key buildings within the map with bespoke basement levels that fit that particular building and will always be the same on every map.
 
Also, with the new light propagation system, you better bring a torch – because unless there are light switches, its gonna be dark even if it’s daytime!
 
We’re also considering the possibility of other sub-surface structures, such as sewers for locations like Louisville. We’re still researching what would be appropriate and sufficiently realistic for this, however, and it’s not certain what could/would appear in b42 beyond what’s discussed above at this stage.
 
SPIFFO: BEYOND
If you are a Terraria player then right now you are likely enjoying the amazing Labor of Love update, and maybe you’ve even discovered a certain someone has made the jump into another game – heralding the beginning of some sort of Spiffo Cinematic Universe.
Our endless thanks to everyone at Re-Logic for letting our little dude spread his wings (or spin his tail, I guess) and treating him so well.
  This week’s stunning outdoor scene from Citro. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us, especially if you’re an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.

Hello everyone.
NEXT
The situation with Linux server instability remains ongoing, with the MP team working on another update to the Unstable beta – and an internal test of their work tonight.
 
The good news from the Unstable release of 41.76 was that overall network and connection speeds were improved, and will be beneficial to all online players once fully released, but the far more pressing issue was that residual errors in our zombienet library carried over server instability. Getting this, finally, sorted is currently the team’s number one priority.
 
This issue doesn’t impact all our players, but we recognise how frustrating it must be for those who play regularly on Linux servers – and above all those who operate them. We can only apologise for the continued outage and ongoing work, and recognise that patience has been running understandably thin.
 
In our travels fixing the issues, the networking has been changed so as to more directly communicate between server and client. The server now has 2 ports to connect to. The game port (16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection, and thus circumnavigate the data travelling through the steam network which was impacting latency and throughput significantly. These ports can be configured through the server options.
 
We’re aware this may cause a bit of disruption when we first release this to stable. However, the positive impact this will have on server performance, reducing lag and improving syncing of the game is too great to ignore, and should be just an additional port for server operators to be aware of and shouldn’t affect the vast majority of players connecting. The non-Steam version, meanwhile, will just work as usual.
 
THEN
Most of the non-MP team are now fully on B42 development, but we do have a few brave soldiers working on the final 41 patch that’s currently backlogged behind the aforementioned MP fixes.
 
The intention of this patch is to be as non-disruptive as possible, and to leave 41 in the best possible condition during the next period of extensive Build 42 development.
 
As such it’s primarily fix-based and polish, but there are also some expanded sandbox options. You can see the topline of new changes in the screenshot below.
 
 
You can thankfully also view the full current changelist by following this hotlink.
This build will go into the unstable beta once MP servers are fully patched up and stable.
 
42
We’ve got a couple of videos from RJ this week to show his current work on domestic animals. They are fairly self-explanatory when you watch them, but PLEASE NOTE everything you see is heavily WIP.
 
RJ is working in something of a development debug sandbox here, and as such everything will have rough edges – and likewise some player actions will have more appropriate animations, animal sizes will be improved, sound effects, further polished UI etc. etc.
 
 
 
Finally, just to give you the shivers, here’s a sample of the Sound Team’s latest work on sprinter screams. Don’t have nightmares.
 
 
This week’s book club from Kawri. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us, especially if you’re an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.
 

Hey all, we’ve had our heads deep in MP stuff this past ten days – so please excuse a blog that’s heavy on busywork and housekeeping.
We released 41.73 to stable last week, which came with an unanticipated issue that saw Linux servers (of which there are many) having frequent crashes – generally when multiple users tried to connect at the same time.
 
This wasn’t great, to say the least, so a lot of the B41 team’s bandwidth has gone into investigating, testing and finding a solution for this over the last ten days.
 
We’ve recently released version 41.74 to the Unstable beta, which has fixed the crash issue at our end – and we would ask that anyone who hasn’t been able to play due to linux server crashes to try it out. This includes a full update to Valve’s latest Steam API.
 
If you continue to experience crashes on the Unstable branch after this patch, please head to our Discord techsupport channel or forums and send us your hs_err_pid**.log file (you’ll find this in the server installation folder) in addition to a download link to a .zip file of your Home/Zomboid folder (remove the “Saves” folder from it to save space).
 
Doing a wholesale update to the Steam networking interface like this isn’t small beans, and it has thrown up a few issues that we will be remedying in the coming days – but in the interest of getting folks missing out on their PZ ASAP we have released the fix to Unstable to get people back on-board, and report back on any other misbehaviour.
 
We will also be making some of the new anti-cheat additions far less twitchy, as these too caused issues for some people on 41.73 launch.
 
NEXT PATCH
Slightly logjammed behind 41.74 is a wide-ranging patch full of many and various things. To minimise future disruption to B41 players we are thinking that it may well be the last major patch before all coders are moved to B42 and more feature-based development.
 
Clearly there will still be fixes and maintenance where necessary. We’ll be wanting to leave 41 in the best state that we can, and with as many annoyances removed as possible. Plans can change of course, but this currently our direction.
 
Some of the logjammed items ready-coded and awaiting internal integration and testing are:
 
New flatpack model for movable icons. Cleared up plastic/metal bucket confusion. New watering cans. Added compass support for the forthcoming compass item. When an item with the Compass tag is in a player’s inventory, the tooltip on mouseover will include text indicating which direction the character is facing. Recipe improvements: – more food items capable of being added to tacos and burritos. Rebalanced weights/encumbrance of: walkie talkies (for French speakers: talkie walkies), fire extinguishers, branches, spears, more. Adjusted the capacities of pistol and revolver cases from 7 down to 4. Changed the sawed off shotgun recipes to only use the hacksaw, and not the garden saw. Longstanding bugbear that using lighters with Molotovs completely drains them fixed. Also when a Lighter is equipped it will no longer automatically become lit, instead it will do so only if activated using the flashlight keybind or radial menu, or using the inventory context menu option to activate them. Several new zed and building stories. Added a new sandbox setting “EnablePoisoning” which has the settings “True” (default), “False”, and “Bleach is Disabled”. It governs if poison, or only bleach, is disallowed from being added to foods. Although this is primarily intended for MP servers, as an anti-griefing/no-PVP allowance, it has been requested for singleplayer as well, thus why it is a sandbox setting and not a server setting. Building keys spawn on zombies and corpses when they spawn inside buildings, when appropriate, instead of when they die inside of one. (WIP – may be B42) Set some traits to be mutually exclusive to remove exploits or illogical combinations: Brave & Agoraphobic/Claustrophobic; Adrenaline Junkie & Agoraphobic/Claustrophobic/Cowardly. Rebalanced the maggots that spawn on corpses so that they spawn less often in spring and fall, and also so that the maggots that spawn on zombie corpses have a poison value of 5 instead of 3. Improved how current fakedead zombie spawns function. Improvement to buffs and debuffs in terms of XP and moodles shown. Fixed issues that involve spawning in barricaded/burnt/randomized locations. House keys will no longer spawn with a long string of numbers in their display name. (Should’ve improved this previously – apologies) Added attachments to most food models so they appear in the player’s hand while eating /gunshot command can now target a specific player Some work-in-progress changes to zombie behaviour. Random offset to where zombies think a sound came from for unseen squares. Rain increases zombie hearing random offset range and decreases chance for zombies to react to player sounds. Zombies wander more during heavy rain. (Potentially B42 content) Fixes and improvements to the admin tile picker system in MP. Some logical improvements to clothing items. Motorcycle helmets protect from head fractures, firefighter gear protects from fire etc. A fix to how you’re unable to claim a safehouse unless standing on the ground floor, and how game currently doesn’t check upper floors for other players or zombies when claiming. “Streamer Mode” audio option which changes vehicle siren sounds to avoid bizarre copyright strikes. Various improvements and fixes to the cutaway system. Colour-blind friendly accessibility addition – letting you add:another variant to red/green in aiming outline – and also to reduce difficulty when zed is standing on snow. Added highlight to crates so it’s easier to differentiate which one player is interacting with. Optional Sandbox Setting To Disable The Tainted Water Tooltip/Warning For Hardcore Play Improvements to level of damage burnt food does to players with weak stomach trait Changes to how car alarms function in-game, seeing as currently they are an extremely rare threat.  
Although its early days yet, and unconfirmed for B42, we are also currently spending some time doing some backstage experimentation with basements and improvements to our loot/inventory UIs. If these are successful we may well see them surface in future blogs.
Thanks all!
This week’s supermarket camping trip from 지혁. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us? Details here.

Okay, so here’s a run down on our current basic plans for finalizing Build 41, and then beyond.
NEXT
We’ve left Linux server operators hanging out to dry a bit over the last two weeks and feel awful about it – especially ones with larger/busier servers.
 
41.73 came with crashes on Linux servers, and the version with the updated Steam API we put into the Unstable beta in 41.74 turned out to bring in as many issues as it solved.
 
As such Yuri and Andrei are currently working on another approach that will be going into Unstable beta (and then Stable) as soon as we can muster – which will have the crashes fixed, and should also have increased networking performance and improved connection stabilities for everyone. We’re hoping to conduct an internal test on it tomorrow.
 
In essence the game will now also use direct communication with dedicated servers, instead of going entirely through Steam’s own networking. This should improve things for all players on dedicated servers – including the Linux servers that were sadly the canary in the coalmine that flagged up the fact that something needed to be done here.
 
Again, our apologies to those impacted – we are thinking of ways to repair some of the damage done during the outage and appreciate your frustration.
THEN
We have a staging branch backstage that all our coders are feeding aspects of their work that they wouldn’t want people to have to wait until Build 42 for – so no big features, but instead a lot of fixes and balance.
 
We will also be trying to limit mod disruption and big/controversial changes, as this will be the version that we leave folks with for quite a while when all of us are 100% working on new features alongside the existing 42 team. (Apart from anything urgent we might need to attend to on 41, clearly).
 
The sorts of things we’re currently testing for this patch include: many and various visual issues with the cutaway system, colour blind accessibility options, better crate highlights, many recipe improvements, better ways for the game to handle car alarms and (hopefully) fixes for sounds cutting out in busy MP situations.
 
There’s also some new 3D models where we’ve had icon mismatches, new tooltips to better explain what different items can do, weight/encumbrance rebalancing on some items, the lighter/Molotov fix we mentioned last time and many and varied other fixes. We’ve also done some work improving the in-game server browser that we would certainly like to include as well.
There’s a lot of other stuff too, but you probably get the gist. Nothing that’s going to rock the boat, but also enough stuff to keep the boat sailing until we reach the glittering shores of 42.
MAP NEXT
While we can’t and won’t go into forensic detail on which towns and what design themes we’re going for, it’s perhaps time to talk about the next map expansion – which will most likely hit with 42.
 
Xeonyx and Ayrton are essentially pushing the map out on all sides, apart from beyond the game’s traditional Ohio River boundary.

The map team are returning to fictionalised versions of real places on the Kentucky map – Riverside and March Ridge being entirely fictional. We don’t want to name exactly which ones, but it might be worth mentioning one of them will be Ekron.
 
The location currently commonly known as Ekron within the community is not supposed to be our version of that place, and (for reasons that will become explicit when viewed on the PZ map) is internally known as Fallas Lake. We will erect a sign in Build 42 to make this information more prominent.
 
Here’s a few WIP screens of some of our future locations to keep you all going.
ALSO
Other things currently being worked on for B42 inclusion that we haven’t mentioned before are:
 
The Sound Team are working on sprinter zed growls and screams – our first inspirations here will be the Dawn of the Dead remake but we will iterate until we get it right. Formosa have also created a variety of bullet impact noises (on cars, dirt, glass, plastic, trees, walls and wood) that we will be integrating come 42, alongside the further improvement of the dynamic music system. They will also clearly have their hands full with the cows, chickens, sheep, improved fishing and many and various new post-apocalypse items and actions that B42 will bring along with it.
  RJ is currently experimenting with rats, which could also become part of the Knox Event alongside domestic animals. Martin, meanwhile, has been working on animal transportation – namely new trailers and potential new vehicles.
  Pat_Bren has been expanding the breadth of different TV and radio channels available to tune into at the start of the outbreak, and is now moving onto some other frequencies that players might be lucky enough to come across later on within the PZ timeline too. Right now he’s added Public Access TV, a Music channel, a Sports channel, a movie channel, a new entertainment channel and a radio station called Upper South Radio.
  We can’t remember if we showed it before, apologies if so, but seeing as RJ is back working with his rats – here’s what a PZ rat looks like when it bugs out with human hair.
Thanks all, and thanks for your patience. We’ll see you next time.
This week’s foggy overview from the Universe of Gamer. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us, especially if you’re an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.

We've pushed an update reverting (i.e. removing) the following part from the last hotfix:
 
- Prevent Corpses and other very heavy/large things (Item Weight/Encumberance of 5 and above) from being put in backpacks.
 
It made its way into the build unintentionally. It will be fleshed out a little more and likely find its way into 41.74, instead, in more refined form.

Hello all! Afraid this will be a more hastily put together than usual Thursdoid, usual Thursdoid writer is away this week, and we originally planned to do a stable release today.
 
Last minute, however, literally a couple of hours ago in fact, we concluded that this would be a bad idea not only in the middle of the Steam Survival Sale, but also a big week long and rather huge Spanish streamer event (go check it out!) that heralded some of our biggest Twitch numbers ever (thanks again to Silithur for organizing it!).
 
Stable releases are always nerve-wracking, but doubled up with the zombie respawn issues that we’ve been struggling with on unstable it just felt like a bad time to throw any dice. We believe those issues are fixed, and have done significant internal testing, however throwing it in front of a huge number of players on stable we can’t be absolutely sure it won’t still cause problems, particularly with mods, so doing a release today under these circumstances seemed a risky endeavour with so many new people being exposed to the game.
 
As such, we will likely wait until the coming Monday to flip the switch. This gives us a few more days to see if the zombie spawning reports on the unstable branch start to disappear after the fix went live and is probably the safer option, as eager as we are to see the update out and free up the team for bigger commits toward the next update.
 
 
41.73
So for those who haven’t dipped their toe into unstable, here’s a few highlights of what to expect:
Optionally see other players from your safehouse / faction on the map.  Lots of extra security and anti-cheat to MP Lots of improvements to recipes, new foodstuffs, improved containers, expanded recipes. Improved error reporting for diagnosing mod errors or conflicts. Lots of map polish, bug fixes, improvements. Improved MP Admin tools. About ten gazillion bug fixes.  
 
ADAPTIVE MUSIC
Since Formosa UK (formerly Noiseworks) added the adaptive, reactive action music it went down really well. Making the music react to what’s happening on-screen makes a big difference to immersing yourself into what’s going on.
 
The next stage of this plan is being put into place now, which will involve creating reactive versions of all the other tracks in the game. Not just action ones, but also all the various tracks and ambiences that currently exist.
 
The idea is to allow for the non-action music to change in intensity from background ambient, to how it currently is now, to a more intense version, depending on what the player is doing. Do they leave their house after being in their house for some time? Maybe the ambient music bumps up a notch. Get into your car in the morning to go out on a looting run? Enter a house to loot? Find a rare item? There are countless little game moments we can tie into a music change, that will just help to make the music feel like its telling part of the story and provide much more variety in the music tracks through play.
 
 
B42 CRAFTING
We’ve got a couple of sexy flowcharts from lead crafting crafter Turbo detailing some of the new post-apocalyptic professions that readers can pour over to get an idea of what’s coming in Build 42. We intended to save this stuff until you could see it in-game, but it doesn’t hurt to have a sneak peak.
 
As shown with the liquid system a few weeks back, actual code-side work on the crafting is still mostly foundational. Getting and expanding systems in there to cater for different ingredients used for the new crafting and make them expandable and more in-depth, adding new properties and new systems to items to allow them to track more detail than just ‘condition’, but also quality and other parameters that will impact how they are used and what the results of their usage is.
 
Allowing more nuance in spawning items so for example bottles of beer in a convenience store will likely be full, where a bottle in a house may be half empty, empty, or even contain another liquid entirely. Items in general will have more nuanced conditions and qualities, the crafting system being able to operate on nearby crafting stations which affect the results and also what recipes are available to the player.
Also allowing for multi-tile ‘machines’ that will operate as single objects, and allowing for tiles to be connected to cooperate with each other.
A ton of foundational stuff that needs to be in place before the trees that have been designed are implemented, and progress has been good however there is still more to do, which limits what can be shown in videos at this point.
 
At the moment we have about ten post-apocalypse professions, each with their own crafting tree, various multi tile workstations that are upgradable, and each with many produce that often includes ingredients from other professions, or can feed into other professions.
This image does not expand for spoiler purposes, but is just to give an idea of how in-depth the crafting design is at this point — these trees are only part of the full picture, and we’re still far from done with it:
 
If we look at, for example, the stone working profession you will see the level of detail we are going into with the new crafting. (please note these are early designs, and will likely be incomplete, and also we still need to balance and figure out the ‘right level of detail’ from playtesting, as we want crafting to be in-depth, cooperative, but not drawn out and too grindy to be enjoyable)
 
Below is an overview of the stonecutting profession.
 
As stated before, the goal with the crafting is to be able to produce anything that it would be realistically feasible for characters with those skills to produce, to dip our toe a bit more into the ‘rebuild society’ than we previously did, for the sake of providing a better long-term MP (and SP with NPCs) experience for those who don’t die screaming within the first week.
 
Players will not be building computers or nuclear reactors, but any of the more primitive to medieval technology that makes sense we hope to be an option. It should be possible to spawn on a blank map with just wilderness and natural resources and have an engaging crafting and community building game, and adding the towns, cities and zombies to the mix will only make that more interesting.
Here’s another example, the bowyer:
 
As you can see, the goal is that each profession will be involved enough, with enough variety, and also enough interaction with other professions, to make it an interesting experience that a player can focus on within a community. We need to find the right balance between ‘involved’ and ‘not too drawn out’, and also provide mechanisms for SP players to be able to use sandbox to allow them to dabble in professions alone, prior to NPCs, without running into a wall of specialisation limit meaning they can’t function in all the professions required to create any items. And also not make the process of crafting an item so drawn out as to be discouraging players from taking part.
 
We’ll go into more detail on the professions when they are starting to be implemented, and we’re more sure on the designs working out within the game.
 
It’s a hard balance to find, and we’ll know more once these recipes and crafting trees get into the game once the systems are in place to accommodate them, and once these go out to the community we can get further feedback to balance the satisfaction vs grind balance of the depth of them.
 
 
FUTURE MP WORK
Checking in with the multiplayer team, they have been working on a big refactor of the MP codebase in their ongoing work for moving player inventories to the server. This will pretty much eliminate all inventory cheating.
 
In addition, they have been working on character creation being moved to the server too, which will forbid clients from cheating with character inventory, skills and perks before the character is added to the server’s database.
 
We’re also going to be looking into a real anti cheat solution that should reduce the occurrences of cheaters significantly. While anti-cheat can be circumnavigated and its unlikely to get rid of any cheating whatsoever, as we are not a competitive FPS, we hope that there won’t be quite the market for selling cheats for the cheat developers to be as willing to fight in the arms race required, and it will push cheat development above the skill level of most casual cheat makers.
 
The MP team have also been making further improvements to vehicle syncing in MP, improving collisions and avoiding vehicles clipping into each other.

HOTFIX JULY 28th:
 
- Increased allowed map_meta.bin and map_zone.bin file size from 20MB to 50MB in multiplayer.
 

HOTFIX JULY 25th:

- Fixed updates to the map causing zombies to spawn inside previously cleared buildings.
- Disabled the transfer of media items (CDs) when installing/uninstalling vehicle radios, as the current method causes issues in MP. Should be resolved for the next unstable release
- Re-added previously removed IGUI_PlayerText_CanNotExitFromMovingCar string
- Removed the -Xss1280k stack-size JVM parameter from Linux ProjectZomboid.json files.
- Increased Linux and Mac -Xmx=2048m to -Xmx=3072m max-heap JVM parameter to match Windows.
- Fixed NullPointerException in IsoGameCharacter.Eat().
 
 
 
Original post below:
__________________________
 
Barring any necessary hot fixes, this will likely be the last unstable patch before pushing the contents of 41.72 and 41.73 into the main stable branch.
 
NEW
 
- Gas container tooltip tweaks:
  1) When adding fuel to a generator, tooltips show the percentage the generator's fuel percentage will increase.
  2) When adding/siphoning fuel to/from a vehicle, tooltips show the item capacity in liters (to match the mechanics ui).
  3) When taking fuel from a gas pump, tooltips show the item capacity in drainable units.
- Updated Community Translations
- Added icons + textures for Medical/Trauma Bag and Canned Fruit Beverage.

MODELS AND ANIMS

- added masks to extended idle xmls to not clip as much,
- added relevant extended idle anims where needed
- capped off hoodieUP xfiles to stop transparency
- adjusted hoodieUP texture for new cap
- added blood locations to a couple of missing shirts
- re-exported female and zombie female base textures after eliminating some erroneous pixels causing holes
- adjusted Hat_Spiffo mask to display properly on character
- re-exported missed zombie body textures that had outlying pixels
- adjusted male and female HighViz vests to visually work similar to hunting vests
- reworked Male and Female HighViz vests
- changed HighViz vest body location
- tweaked Hunting vest masks to work better with underlying clothes

MODDING

- Added additional check to Vehicle Create, Update and Install Radios that may help prevent mods that modify what data is sent to it from causing errors.

FORAGING / SEARCH MODE

- changed double click behaviour of search mode pins to place items into the current selected player inventory panel if possible
- adjusted the search mode snow cover penalty limit as snowy weather combination could easily hit the penalty cap
- fixed an exploit with search focus when spamming the search mode button which could force items to change type
- fixed a visual issue with search focus trigger after spotting items which caused picked up items to sometimes be the original item

BALANCE

- Ginseng now provides an Endurance Buff when used to make a Hot Beverage as a spice.
- Added Basil to more recipes.
- Better handling of evolved recipe item name when they only have spice ingredients.
- Added the ability to install Makeshift Radios into vehicles; this was done for consistency with the requested fix of allowing Makeshift HAM radios to be installed in Ham radio vehicles.
- Allow vehicles that have HAM radios to allow any sort of HAM radio installed in them; Luxury and Modern Cars will also always spawn with Premium Radios installed.
- CDs in Premium radios will transfer to/from the vehicle they are being installed into/uninstalled from.

FIXES

- Fixed mapper-placed broken windows not being smashed IsoWindow objects.
- Fixed vehicle lightbar lights and siren continuing to operate after the part condition drops to zero (due to zombie thumping).
- Fixed the lightbar option not appearing in the vehicle radio menu after the part is destroyed.
  The option appears now, but the lights and siren won't operate at zero condition.
- Fixed multiple lightbar parts appearing in the vehicle mechanics ui.
- Fixed incorrect effect of distance on critical-hit chance with firearms.
- Fixed pans holding less water than pots.
- Fixed issue with zombie maggots + fishing; zombie corpses now spawn poisoned Base.Maggots and not Base.Maggots2 which are now obsolete.
- Fixed issues with new gas bottles and containers in backpacks.
- Fixed missing distributions for barbequestore and bathroom/shelves.
- Fixed Canned Fruit Beverage not having reduce thirst value.
- Fixed Obese and Fit not being fully mutually exclusive in MainCreationMethods.lua.
- Fixed missing translation string ContextMenu_FuelCapacity.
- Fixed inconsistent GoodHot from WildEggs tooltip.
- Fixed ContextMenu_PanicNoSleep not being translated in one instance.
- Fixed IsWaterSource parameter from BleachBottleGasoline.
- Fixed issues with eating quarter and half portions of small amounts of food.
- Fixed recipes to tear denim and leather - temporary fix pending improvement.
- Fixed adding whole and uncooked animal as a bait, removing and butchering it returning a "full" hunger reduction value animal
- Fixed missing tooltip for SafehouseAllowNonResidential server option
- Fixed ContextMenu_ContextMenu_FuelCapacity typo.
- Fixed the wrong sprites being used for windows sometimes.
- Fixed one of the molotov cocktail producing unwanted empty bottles.
- Fixed added AddIngredientIfCooked:true to the Burger evolved recipe so baked bread slices can be used to make burgers
- Fixed missing period in Tooltip_item_RainFromGroundOnlyPurifyMicrowave.
- Fixed missing period in Tooltip_item_RainFromGround.
- Fixed hot drinks with alcohol being too strong.
- Fixed better tooltips for tainted water items in plastic containers that can only be boiled in microwaves.
- Fixed baked bread slices not being usable when making sandwiches; this was on account of them being cooked, the evolved recipe for sandwiches was changed to allow cooked bread slices.
- Fixed missing item Violets that got accidentally removed
- Fixed Peaches having evolved recipe food type "Berry"
- Fixed various mapping issues
 

Haylo survivors.
41.73 STABLE
We have the next patch to the stable branch primed and ready to go, however an issue that our fantastic Unstable beta testers have flagged is keeping it held in its pen for a little longer.
 
Players reported that some houses they’d cleared were spawning zeds upon booting up the new build, which alerted us to a snag in our map export process not dealing with map boundaries changing with map expansions. All previous map expansions came along with forced save incompatibility so this crept through unnoticed until now.
 
While it’s an aggravation rather than a save-breaker, we didn’t want to send a build with a known issue out to the masses – and have spent the last few days setting up a fix. This will need some testing, after which we’ll be looking to pump out the latest version next week.
If you’re interested in the changelist, or want to jump in to try it out, then you can find the unstable release notes for 41.72 and 41.73 behind the hotlinks.
 
42 CONTENT
One of the focus points of Build 42 is on extended survival in the months and years beyond the initial Knox Event outbreak.
For this, we are revamping our crafting system – and Turbo’s role has been in laying new foundations for a set-up that allows for: crafted items that have more RPG-like variable attributes based on the crafter’s skill, stats of input items that are reflected in the attributes of a final output item, and the ability of the game itself to recognise all these different attributes when an item is being passed between all of its various different locations and systems.
 
The next stage of this work, meanwhile, has been in taking this same sort of mentality to the liquids in the game – and also making them ever more interesting in our new crafting set-up.
 
WET STUFF
Let’s start with a video, and then move into some explanation.
 
 
 
So what exactly does this mean for the water, paint, gas, alcohol, washing detergent and bleach of the Knox Event?
Essentially all fluids will be defined and stored in a global registry, which is where we as devs can add new vanilla liquids – but also will make the system very moddable.
 
Each definition will store basic info such as ID, name, colour etc – then has different categories it can belong to like Beverage, Alcoholic, Fuel, Flammable and such. Beyond that we also tie in properties per litre of this particular fluid: for example Carbs, Proteins, Alcohol percentage or Energy if it’s a flammable fuel.
 
Liquids that are hazardous or poisonous can also have modifiers that configure the maximum poison effect, and how the effect behaves when mixed.
 
So yes, we’re going to have the most realistic bleach-drinking ever seen in gaming.
 
CONTAINERS
Containers are the coding class that actually store the fluids, and are the way in which the game code interacts with the above definitions.
Inventory items, objects found in the world and vehicles will all have a fluid container – which will allow them to store and use the liquids/fuels/whatever that they contain. Each container also has information stored with it that shows what particular fluids have been mixed in, and their content percentages relative to each other.
 
The system calculates and caches the summary of all the containing fluids properties based on their percentages. So, if you add 80% Soda and 20% pure alcohol the mixture fluid in the container will have 80% of the soda’s carbs, proteins etc and 20% alcohol. Then, when transferred again, the right ratios will still be maintained.
 
USAGE
Finally, we hear you cry, cocktail mixing will be a part of the apocalypse!
 
Yes, but also consider the applications this will bring to post-apocalyptic crafting – as well as to more basic stuff like mixing paints to create different colours, providing different fuels and different ways to tamper with said fuels.
 
Certain versions of our planned workstations, say one for brewing, could have one or more ‘fluidcontainers’ attached – while also allowing other ingredients as item inputs. Likewise we can have recipes that require more precise mixing and concentrations should we desire it.
The system does retain some control over your George’s Marvellous Medicine creations. We can put limits around what can, and cannot, be mixed – however we’re not 100% on how many limitations we will put on things right now. This will probably come through testing later down the line.
 
Unrestricted mixing would mean, for example, that any Fluid can be mixed with Fuel, which would mean that the energy value property per litre would go down when mixed, and that anything using the fuel such as a car or generator would have its operation and potential damage governed by the sort of fuel that had been put in.
 
The ability to recognise tampered fuel, poison etc. would (as usual) be gated behind the game’s professions – so a mechanic might smell something suspicious with watered down gas, or a chef might spot something odd with a mild concentration of something nasty in a bottle of juice.
 
When it comes to poisonous liquids, each has a maximum effect (mild, medium, severe, deadly etc) and control parameters such as a minimum volume and mix ratio. So, if a poison has max effect ‘deadly’ and the minimum amount required for death is 200ml – and you have 100ml mixed into a bottle – then the final effect when drinking will most likely be a medium poisoning.
 
The new system will also add new depth to such things as filling up a vehicle with gas, or siphoning gas from a car’s tank – but we’ll also retain the game’s current quick context options like “fill bottle from tap” to keep things speedy.
 
HUTCHES
Domestic and wild animals, albeit with fairly basic AI brains, will also be a part of Build 42 – and we have already shown our cows, sheep and deer. A fairly realistic take on poultry-keeping will also be part of this.
 
Please note the following UI is super WIP! We may well end up with icons instead of the 3D chickens.
Based on our own experiences with keeping chickens – if you have a henhouse you will have to close its door every night after your brood have gone in to roost. Otherwise there’s a very real chance of Fantastic Mister Fox paying a visit and stealing a few, and potentially leave others dead in their pen.
 
You’d be advised not to forget to let your hens back out in the morning either – for fear of them losing their condition, and adding to the mess in the henhouse that will need cleaning out.
 
Hens will also enter the nesting boxes within the henhouse to lay their eggs, and from which you’ll have to collect the eggs on a regular basis – if you haven’t collected recently then hens will choose to lay outside in their pen instead, where there’s an added risk of them being eaten by wild animals or going bad.
 
OTHER STUFF
While we’re going in DEEP (as is generally our way) on stuff like the above – Build 42 will also feature all manner of other improvements to the game engine, MP systems and general zombie survival and early game stuff too. So don’t fret too much if aspects of the above don’t exactly match your own play-style.
 
It should also be said that it’s still some ways off – partly because of dev illness (and recovery!) that we’ve discussed before, and partly because a proportion of the team are still maintaining and improving Build 41.
 
From now on you’ll likely notice the changelist of 41 patches shrink a little, as team members are taken off 41 and plugged into work on features within the 42 matrix.
 
JOB AD AGAIN
We are back on the hunt for an Animations Engineer / Technical Wizard  – most likely someone from the AAA game development space who has pines for joining a close-knit team of indie devs. If this is you, or someone you know, then our job page lives here!
 
This week’s forlorn firemen from OtakuYazawa. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us? Details here.

Hey all, here’s a quick update on what we are all up to.
 
Our initial plan was to release our next 41.72 patch to the Unstable beta today, but annoyingly last night’s internal playtest had too many niggles with vehicle gameplay for us to comfortably let you loose on it.
 
This is slightly annoying in terms of today’s blog, but probably not quite as annoying as you happily downloading the new version only for MP passengers to be stuck revving on the tarmac while their drivers whizz off towards Louisville.
 
Still, once the MP Strike Force have checked everything out and we’ve had another (more successful) test then this is some of the stuff that will be punted out for you to try out:
 
As mentioned last week, the opt-in ability to see fellow MP players in your faction or safehouse on your in-game map. A huge range of new and improved admin powers that should breathe a little more life into online play. First and foremost of these is a brush tool that will allow admins to create tiles, walls, fire, smoke, water etc. in-game.

There’s also the ability to easily trigger thunder, a more synced health panel, improved spawning of vehicles and trailers and the ability to change player weights. Also, also are more zombie-attracting options, improved zed spawns and some powers over whether doors are locked or not.

Here’s a quick video Aiteron has made to show it all off: Another more minor, but quite pleasant all the same, addition from Aiteron is the possibility of adding icons to the context menu. As seen here. New loot maps. Previously we didn’t have any loot maps for Louisville, but Tim has now integrated a bunch from the hand of Pat_Bren into the loot table. There are nine different maps in all, which means that as well as the usual ‘treasure map’ aspects you will be able to reveal a ninth of the Louisville map upon reading them. Also of note in .72 is an improvement to the way in which mod errors are reported. We have added a list of mods to the pause menu, and if one of them is causing errors and ‘the red box of doom’ then the culprit will be highlighted within the list. Perhaps of greater import to mod authors and our tech support team, however, is the improved lua error log that goes with the above: this will show if any files reported in call stacks are overridden by mods. We hope that this will allow modders, players and our own community liaison peeps to easier find mod conflicts and other issues.
  SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF
While it’s not exactly excitement dynamite, we know, this week we hit a point at which our internal tasklist board got a bit… silly. When you have been making a game for as long as we have there is a tendency for minor tasks, small bug fixes and ‘easy win’ suggestions to stack up, and up, and up…
 
The boards were just clogged, and it was hard to see the wood for the trees – and as such we pulled some coders from their features to blitz through and give our testing and production staff some temporary relief. Not sexy: we know, but also necessary for the sanity of some of our team.
 
This sort of stuff:
Having made a sizable dent in this sort of bug, everyone is now back at their usual post – but ‘Enforced Small Task Clearance Week’ also culminated in an event that will hopefully mean that we don’t have to have one of these mandated periods again in future.
 
Prolific modder Blair Algol has joined the team, and his role will be clearing out as many of the remaining hundreds (!) of these minor (but sometimes time-consuming) issues as he can.
 
Blair’s many mods touch so many different areas of the game that it seemed like a very natural fit for such a duty, while he also, of course, comes packaged with many ideas of how to make modding life easier for others in the community too.  
 
Once the boards have been cleared, and Blair has a firmer grip on the codebase, it’s also our hope that he will be able to bring some of his own ideas and ingenuity into the game proper.
 
SOUND PHASE III
Much like the Marvel movies, our soundscape improvement operations have worked in phases – and we recently had the meeting that kicked off Phase 3. The following are Noiseworks/Formosa’s next primary missions:
 
Improvements to how the sound system deals with multiplayer characters and sound priorities. Primary work here is to try and solve the issues where sounds drop out due to clashes in sound priorities and limits when multiple players are around. Expand the reactive music beyond action moments. The ultimate goal is to allow the other non-action tracks to evolve and change: triggered by walking into buildings, looting a container, or any other little action that may trigger a change in the track that’s playing. Likewise making sure that they all also blend more organically between each other. Gameplay related sound effects, like modelling the realistic effects of using firearms in enclosed spaces without ear protectors. Also: improved noises for large crowds of zeds, sprinters and bullet world impacts if the coding team can provide their support for implementation.
OTHER STUFF
We are currently debating whether to release the map team’s current work (fixes, polish, improved farm buildings and agricultural areas, more defined Louisville upper class suburbs) in a 41 patch, or whether to outright say that the next export will be for 42 later down the line – alongside some sizable planned expansion into other towns and conurbations that would be beyond the edges of our current area. More on that, and where we are taking the Knox Event location-wise, in future blogs.
 
As we mentioned last time, we’re coming off the back of Turbo’s serious illness currently – so it’s been something of a month of consolidation rather than massive exciting strides ahead.
 
That said, sometimes strides ahead come in the form of things that will pay off in the far-flung future. Ever since the success of the 41 release we have had a lot more resources at our command, and have been able to invest it in both middleware that could bring PZ to new heights – and the talent to integrate it with our codebase.
 
As we all know, one of the weakest things about PZ is the UI. We all get on with it fine, but let’s face it: it aint a looker, and it can be a bit clunky, fiddly and slow. We’ve always said we’d give it an overhaul, but it’s always been a daunting prospect.
 
Since March, alongside our friends at General Arcade, we have been experimenting with some super fancy AAA high-end UI tech middleware that will make this process easier, and will make the end result better.
 
For the past few months we’ve been making sure that it’s compatible with the game, doesn’t negatively impact performance and will still allow for lua UI for our modders – and it has been this week that we feel comfortable enough to say out loud to each other that it’s going to work, and is safe to proceed.
 
So next time you see someone moaning that the PZ UI isn’t exactly glamorous – just tell them ‘they know, and it’ll take a while – but they’re working on it’. It’ll be some considerable time till we talk about this again, but we just wanted to let you know that this is another iron that we have in the fire.
 
Today’s pile-up campfire from Mr.Crab763. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Want to work with us? Details here.

Hey all, here’s a Thursday round-up. We released version 41.71 last Thursday. We’re big on Thursdays around here.
 
41.71 contained a huge range of stuff, but topline features included: new and improved dynamic action music, a raft of improvements for Steam Deck players, new items, scarecrows, less wobbly and less performance-costly 3D items on your safehouse floor, loads of MP improvements under the hood, the fabled one-watch VHS video fix, new ambient and shutdown noises, modding improvements and tons more.
 
Better to read the forum release post than a long paragraph in the blog, I guess, if you are in need of a catch-up.
 
Since last week we hotfixed some issues with sound cut-outs on busy servers and with rapid-fire weapons, and so now we find ourselves moving onto…
 
41.72
Seeing as we already have a fair amount of MP changes, fixes and balance in the pot for .72 at the moment it feels like it won’t be too long until we move it into the Unstable beta – unless of course a more disruptive feature comes to the boil over the next week or so and requires added internal testing.
 
The current changelist for what we have in this patch can be seen here if you are interested.
 
Primary items of note involve a lot of fixes and polish to radio use in-game, improvements to the representation of weapon-part upgrades in 3D models, and various issues with generators and batteries.
 
Also in the patch will be the opt-in ability for fellow faction and safehouse members to be visible on your in-game map.
 

 
And also some support for our colour-blind survivors, who will now be able to choose their favoured new text colours instead of BAD RED and GOOD GREEN. Thanks to Fox for this one.
 

 
BEYOND
There are many advantages of having a tight small team when making a game like PZ. However, one of the biggest disadvantages is that when serious ‘irl’ stuff happens to any of us it makes aspects of development difficult. We’ve never really mentioned it before, and still won’t go into any detail, but this was one of the reasons that Build 41 itself took a long time to come to complete fruition.
 
The reason we are bringing this up is because one of the primary architects of the revamped B42 crafting system, Turbo, has been very ill (and often hospitalized) for much of the last three-four months.
 
Turbs said it was okay to let you all know this, as it clearly has meant that while RJ’s work on domestic animals and some roaming beasts has been rocketing on ahead – Turbo’s own work on the post-apoc crafting, tech-trees and recipes has had to be on hold.
 
We are so, so relieved and happy that Turbo’s treatment led up to an operation and a complete return to health – to the extent that he has been back working with us again this week. It’s been awesome having him about the place again.
 
We don’t yet know how much this will impact on build content, timings etc, and will be working out what’s what in the week or two ahead – tho B43 stuff is being worked on in parallel, so it hasn’t been detrimental to that.
 
Sorry if this has been a bit of a ‘too much info’ update, it’s probably not something you’d catch in a Call of Duty blog, but with Turbo’s permission, we thought it would give everyone a more accurate insight into where we’re at with things.
 
We also hope that everyone will join us in wishing Turbs continued good health – a phrase for which the Dutch probably have their own term for and that we will google later on.
 
To circle back around to more developmental matters-at-hand, here’s an image from RJ and Tim’s work on ways in which our non-domestic animals will roam the map. These are AnimalZone paths that share points, and allow for both long paths that cross cell boundaries and branching paths too.
 
 
MAPPING
We love seeing the maps our community produces – each with their own flavours, design and challenge. To support all our mappers today we are releasing almost 1500 buildings and associated assets of our own in-game housing, garages, sheds and patio sets for use in community maps.
 
These should help map-builders flesh out their worlds without having to rely purely on their own constructed (and shared community) houses, flats and outbuildings.
 
If you are a mapper then you can find the released assets here.
 
We are not releasing ‘special’ and governmental/military buildings – but there are many, many houses, apartments, sheds, shacks, shops and restaurants here for folks to use in their own apocalyptic zombie nightmares.
 
In terms of our own future map improvement and expansion, meanwhile, check out what Ayrton has been doing to our Louisville rich districts.
 
“To bring more diversity to some locations of Louisville, I am converting some streets or blocks into Victorian-style districts, it should enable us to add a new layer of complexity to the urban plan with areas that are more/less wealthy, ancient, etc. Those new tiles are also being added across existing relevant buildings.”
 
 
Elsewhere Aiteron is playing around with his improved fishing system to mix in some added ‘fun quota’ alongside the improved anims/visuals we showed last time round. Long-term work on server-side items and timed actions for MP continues, and the Noiseworks/Formosa soundscape revolution continues with their next missions due to be discussed in the coming week.
 
Pat_Bren is also, meanwhile, crafting a bunch more annotated survivor maps to bolster our current stock – and also to cover Louisville and other newer areas of the Knox Event map.
 
JOB AD AGAIN
Following the success of Build 41, we find ourselves in a position where we can hunt down other experienced Games Programmers to join the Project Zomboid team.
 
We are looking for coders willing and able to refresh some of our older systems, polish the existing ones and then to delve further into the features that will be part of the Knox Event’s exciting future.
 
Interested applicants should check our jobs page, but we should underline that we currently don’t have any entry-level positions available. You will need to have a fair amount of experience we are afraid.
This week’s touching crime scene from hp.tf. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Heya everyone, so today we’re pushing the 41.69 patch out into the Unstable beta. This is a the first release of a wide-ranging version that touches many parts of the codebase – including some fairly foundational stuff to improve the smooth running of MP, some handy new hooks for modders and many and various different fixes and improvements.

 
The full and unexpurgated changelist is pretty vast, but a quick topline run-through of its contents will now follow:
 
In MP: improvements to car physics, admin improvements, anti-cheat fixes, better handling of dead bodies, PvP and safehouse fixes, fixed grass growing through safehouse floors and much much more. VHS fix – an end to the peril of one-time-use video tapes on servers. A raft of Steamdeck compatibility improvements. New items, new forage finds, updated 3D models, new hair types and more. Scarecrows and Lab Skeleton ‘mannequins’ that can be kitted out in player clothes.  


 
Quality of life features: renamed Skill books, better item placing, movable minimap and many and various other things. 3D items now shown as textures rather than models. As such they now slide around less when the player moves, and have far less of a performance impact when all piled up. New/improved tag system for modders, and other general mod-side improvements. Added ambiance noise for different areas on the map tied to particular buildings and items, such as a little bit of mall muzak.  
Relevant ‘power down’ noises for the above-mentioned sounds to flag the power/water cutting out.
    New sounds for arcade machines, gas pumping, vehicle headlights and car window opening (both via handle and electric windows). Also BBQ noises, campfire sounds, fireplaces and more zed trip/thump stuff. Improved treatment of inside/outside sounds depending on whether doors and windows are open or closed. Loads of UI and controller improvements that are universally handy, but have primarily been put in for (you lucky!) Steamdeck users. 41.68 works okay with the new handheld device, but 41.69 should provide some vast improvements. Lots of general balance, including a spotlight on foods and recipes. A shitload of general fixes.
We would be hugely grateful if players could move over to 41.69 and report any oddness or hiccups, and likewise to inform the creators of any mods that have been broken.
 
We have done our best to bypass disruption, but in such a wide-ranging patch there will always be mod toes that the code has unavoidably trodden upon.
 
(Creators of radio/TV-related mods should especially pay attention to the MP VHS fix, as it may cause some issues.)
OTHER STUFF
Elsewhere work continues on Build 42 and 43 content continues, with RJ still focusing on farm animals, and also the introduction of some basic AI versions of wild beasts also. Please consider these WIP!

  Also coming to you today with a WIP tag (as we are working on far better player directional ‘strain and lean’ animations rather than a repeated ‘pull animation’) is a video from Aiteron showing his current work on the fishing update.
 
A lot of work these past few weeks has also been into making it work online, and our testers have been having some impromptu fishing competitions already.
 
Here, also, you can see:
 
Water splashes (visuals WIP) to show placement of groups of fish, ultimately we plan to move to a more constant surface disturbance to show the positions of fish at any given time, as well as use the current splashes instead when the fish is struggling on the line. Lines and hooks that can be changed on the fishing rod that have an impact on your fishing. A fishing net you can catch items in, and a new ‘generic trash’ item that can also become snared up in your tackle and provide you with a random item (not always a shoe!)
    In the land of MP meanwhile the Strike Force are currently working on vehicle smoothness, and rare strange physics during and after vehicle collisions. They also have some imminent plans for better hit-fall position prediction, which should make corpse placement much closer to how it looks in SP.
 
We are also partway through a longer term process of making the inventory system completely server side (or rather authenticated server side) to avoid any kind of item spawning cheats. This is something we really need to do to close up the potential for item hacks on MP servers.
 
It will not likely appear for a while, most like coming in a major build rather than an iterative patch as it is a major piece of work and will also come with the potential for mod breakage for mods that spawn items directly on the client.
 
(We’ll make sure to keep it unstable a good period to give mod authors a chance to fix when it rolls around, and will provide some method for modders to legitimately spawn items recognized by the server when needed.)
 
This week’s stand-off from Viиicius. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Hello! The last couple of weeks has had an unusually high number of absentees, by coincidental combinations of gaming conference attendees, long planned family visits, and even an unforeseen emergency hospital stay (that turned out fine, don’t worry) meaning we’ve been running on a somewhat diminished team of late, but that should be sorted out by next week and we’ll be running at full steam again! – so unfortunately, there aren’t any sexy vids or pics to show off. However still we have some super interesting stuff to talk about! However, it’ll likely take the form of ‘lotsa text’ so prepare yourself for that!
 
41.69
First, 41.69 (nice) build is still in progress, we’re testing a bunch of changes at the moment and are eager to get it out there, but are still weighing up the cost of disrupting the MP servers with the benefit of the goodies within, and making the call on when we’ll push to unstable and start the release process. We’ll let you know when we know more.
Here’s the changelist of 41.69 thus far!
 
https://pastebin.com/ZhRhKVZi

NPC Narratives
We figured a good way to give people something real tasty to sink their teeth into regardless of the lack of fancy vids or pics, would be to show off the text results of our Narrative NPC system that we discussed a few weeks back planned for Build 43.
 
As we detailed in our first NPC ‘meta’ system explanation, we have a powerful narrative event system that can be used to add context driven ‘storylets’ together into a somewhat convincing narrative for NPCs when they are away from the streamed-in world. These would define the goals of the NPCs, as well as evolve their situation so that when the player runs into them they have a convincing backstory, or events can transpire to affect those groups when they are not around for the player to witness. They will also drive events with npcs while the player IS present, leading to interesting generated story events for the player to interact with.
 
These events set flags on characters, move their virtual presence along road networks and between houses of which all the rooms on the entire map are accessible even when the tiles themselves have not been streamed in. We can add extra data and tags that change the NPCs states and allow them to experience simplified narrative events that will branch and trigger randomly, and each of these events can have numerous outcomes of which we can attach a line of dialogue recounting the event later, so the characters will be able to sit around a campfire and let the rest know their story, or group members can recount the events of an eventful trip the player wasn’t part of, or what transpired at the safehouse while the player was away.
 
Context sensitive text scripting is used to modify these lines of dialogue to fit the situation. For example, a tag for a character’s name in the dialogue can be substituted with ‘my mother-in-law, X’ or ‘my nephew, Y’ tracking the relationship between the two characters, or even between the character being spoken about and a third character (‘X’s brother, Y’). Other things such as a town location can be substituted where necessary, and there can be variant lines which are picked based on the characters, their flags, or other environmental conditions. Or just raw RNG, to mix things up a bit.
 
Pat_Bren has been busy coming up with a whole metric ton of varied events and mini narratives, and Lemmy has been integrating these into the event system. There’s a lot more to add yet, but its starting to yield some cool results.
 
Here’s a few narrative outputs. Full disclosure: some massaging of the results has taken place here, it’s somewhat curated as the system is still capable of some very odd results and the pool is not yet large enough to avoid ‘arrow to the knee’ situations, if we just threw in the first 10 results it’d probably not be so impressive at this stage, so we’ve picked ones with the least overlap — though you’ll likely notice a few repeated statements (in most cases this also demonstrates the variants or alternate paths we have there to mix it up) – our goal is, ultimately, with progressive builds, to widen the library of narrative events and lines to the point where each story feels completely unique (easier to do without voiced dialogue, but we apologise profusely to our translators). 
 
Please be aware these are still work in progress, and we still need to do some work to make these flow as naturally as possible as if recounted later to another character — rather than as a straight log of events that can seem a bit terse and unnatural, so none of the text is remotely final and we still need to figure out a good balance of information that would feel natural to share to a third party potentially weeks later…
(It’s very important to note that, at present, these narratives are limited mainly to the meta, and while we talk about how they will impact characters the player witnesses, there is still a lot of work to do in that department. This is all very super work-in-progress, and while a metric ton of work has been done across the NPC codebase, it's still a big job to piece it all together to work as one.)
Breakdown of a narrative
Let’s pick one of them and break down how it works:
As is probably clear, this is all too self-consistent to be completely random. This isn’t just a bunch of random disconnected events triggering one after another, but rather a mini-narrative that is comprised of several related events, each of which has various ways they can pan out and also conditions that can lead to them triggering in the first place, leading to a whole host of other outcomes that will affect the group in different ways.
 
To show this, you’ll see another branching version of this same narrative in the list of outputs above, starting with ‘Just before the shit hit the fan, Joe got sick’. Though it sharing the specific phrase ‘shit hit the fan’ text was a coincidence, it could have equally started with ‘Just before things got really bad’ or ‘Before all of this’.
 
Narratives have natural end points that can end that narrative, or instead they potentially lead naturally into another if relevant. In other cases they can set flags on characters or groups that will lead to other events, or even other narratives, having a chance of triggering on them in future. This is the way the narratives can ultimately serve as larger building blocks to make longer character stories that flow into each other convincingly.
 
So back to this demo narrative above:
 
“Just before the shit hit the fan, my sister Annie got sick.”
 
As detailed before, we generate the starting NPC groups from various families, with some other elements to mix things up. In the first event of this narrative, we pick an appropriate member of the household to ‘get sick’. This will set the first constant within this narrative that will be referenced and used throughout.
 
Then the second event in the narrative is thus…
 
“We tried to take her to the hospital… but the highway was blocked with traffic.”
 
This event will trigger the characters of the group (however it was generated) including the unfortunate Annie, to set a goal to travel to the Louisville hospital. Wherever they are in the world, a path will be generated along roads to that location. Even though the characters, nor a vehicle, are streamed into the world, and they exist virtually in the ‘meta’, we can randomly assign them an appropriate car and start them moving at approximately car speed along the roads enroute to Louisville.
 
If the player were to cross paths with this virtual ‘radar blip’ of these characters, it would spawn in the car with them inside, moving in the correct direction at the appropriate speed, and the more direct vehicle controlling AI would take over with the same destination in mind.
This event can play out in various ways, hitting the military blockade, crashing the car, getting stuck amongst a group of zombies.
 
Getting stuck in traffic has various outcomes, including for example a car-jacking attempt, or the person being carried turning in the car. Some of these may lead to more generic events or narratives, or may continue the main mini-narrative to a further conclusion.
Assuming all this carries on within the virtual meta world, they will make their way until they hit one of the traffic jam zones on the highway, which in this case causes it to trigger the next event in the narrative.
 
“By that time we realised it was too late, the car was blocked in, there was no way out. We had to abandon the car and make our way on foot.”
 
Alternatively, it could be they managed to drive back home, or get through the jam and onto the next problem. But, in this case the narrative branches to this outcome. We flag they have lost their car, and are now on foot. 
 
We set their goal to still be heading toward Louisville hospital, however now they are flagged as on foot and the group’s ‘radar blip’ move at a much slower rate along the road. If a player intersected with their journey, we’d spawn the characters all on foot, and the AI would take over from there with the same pathing goal.
 
Now they are on foot, this opens the door for other events linked to this narrative to fire that wouldn’t be possible within a vehicle. One such event that can randomly trigger is a worsening of the health condition of whomever was chosen to be the sick one, which is what happens next.
 
“Annie was real bad, her fever was getting worse. Bryan, her husband, had to carry her.”
 
True, at this time we don’t have any way to ‘make this real’ should the player happen upon this group, since we don’t have support for characters carrying others at the moment. We hope to add this, and should we do this, then when we spawn the characters in the flesh we would set them up as appropriate to the event – but regardless, at the moment these narratives in particular take place way too early for players to actually intersect with, so we can take a few liberties in these particular narratives anyway.
 
Notice Bryan is referred to as ‘her husband’, which is automatically generated using Annie as the context character, and the code examining the closest relationship between these two characters. We could instead have an alternate line of dialogue using the speaking character (Annie’s sibling) as the context and it would instead read ‘my brother-in-law, Bryan’, finding the shortest link between the speaking character and Bryan was through Annie. We plan for this to be expanded in future to automatically modify based on all manner of things, such as character opinion, and/or character’s traits (My idiot brother-in-law, Bryan, for example) though this may not be present in the first iterations of the system.
 
So now, we have flagged that the ‘illperson’ is being carried, and is being carried by Bryan. This opens up the potential for new events to be triggered, and indeed that is what happens. Poor Bryan.
 
Again, some choices, what they do with the zombie Annie and Bryan, there could be a third victim in attempting to put them down. These branches are, relatively, painless to write, and can be expanded on far into the future. It means we can have many small narrative threads, ones that last days, or ones that last months, that thread in appropriate events to steer the story in believable directions, with written or designed outcomes that make sense and feel like a real story, in a manageable and expandable way.
 
The ‘quests’ that we have with our story generation will likely fit in line with this above narrative system. Is a character split from their loved ones, on their way to another town to find them? Maybe you can help? We’re hoping for a more organic structure of interaction and transaction with NPCs that emerges from this narrative system and leads to some really cool and believable stories being told with our NPCs.
 
Header Image pilfered from a previous blog out of laziness, sorry! Centralized Block of Text has nothing more to say today, bye bye!

Good point, IRL we have tags on animals to recognize them, IG we could place a tag on animals and when the mouse cursor is on them it shows their name and/or number
 
For the fishing mini-game, I hope you're going to put IG tips like you did with foraging since it seems to become way more complicated with all those kind of different fish and lures to catch them, don't want to check the wiki all the time.
 
As usually you're doing a great work and something nobody would expect.
TIS: "hey we going to add animals"
Players: "oh cool!"
TIS: "you will have to control all their needs (food, temp, security...)"
Players: "sounds realistic, it's good"
TIS: "we will simulate their genome and mutations"
Players: "woah wait, what? you don't have to make it this complex"
TIS: "if you survive for 1000 years you may see new mutations and new species appearing"
Players: "STOP ! THIS IS NOT SPORE!"
TIS: "10 000 years later they may become humanoids and enslave your characters, so becareful"