GoodOldLeon

Hot on the heels of last Thursday’s 41.42 patch to the public IWBUMS 41 beta comes this Thursday’s… 41.43.
 
As we’ve mentioned before, we’re mainly concentrating on bug fixes and polish for Build 41 at the moment, and keeping our work on big features and more structural stuff for 42. The main intention for this is to make the MP Strike Force’s life a little easier, and to avoid added complications.
 
(Though with this said, there are a few coder side projects stacking up that we could potentially drop in to keep things fresh. We’ll see how we go on this one.)
 
With that all in mind, then, 41.43 contains:
 
Performance improvements. You should find areas of high zombie density more playable – so that’s stuff like Six Months Later, the prison etc. We still intend to bring in skeleton-sharing for zed animation that will further improve things, but this change to pooled objects will hopefully recoup some of the ground we’ve lost in performance over recent patches to 41. New controller icons for controller users. Improvements to zeds climbing through windows – if you’re closing a window and a zombie isn’t over the sill yet then it’ll no longer get in. Likewise if a zombie is halfway in, over the sill, then you won’t be able to shut the window either. An ‘Automatically drink water’ option toggle, and a ‘always leave key in ignition’ toggle – for those wanting to adapt their game to their liking a bit more. Re-enabled floorboard stashes. Increased accuracy indicated by the aiming outline going green. Greater chances of coming across annotated maps and survivor zeds, and more guns left with clips inside – or next to them. Many and varied other fixes, model tweaks and balance things.
While we flounce about and polish stuff elsewhere in 41 then, or muck around in the framework of 42, what’s happening with the MP kids? Strike Force report is as follows:
 
Yuri’s been continuing his work on syncing players, including combat animation. You can see a video of his latest progress here:
As ever, please note that this is all work in progress – you’re seeing all the moving parts being slotted together, but not them being tightened. Likewise you’ll notice at the end, that there are still a few kinks to work out of the combat syncing – with zombies not falling to the floor on both clients.
 
Andrei, meanwhile, has been continuing his investigation into memory issues on high population servers with our new virtual fake clients, which is proving a difficult thing to sort out. He’s got a few tricks up his sleeve to try and reduce the memory overhead and GC pauses, but work is still ongoing to figure out the snarl-ups that occur on Build 40 servers that we’d dearly like to see eradicated.
 
This week’s imperilled raccoon from FoXL33T. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. 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!

New patch and penisham is back? what a great day.

New patch and penisham is back? what a great day.

New patch and penisham is back? what a great day.

New patch and penisham is back? what a great day.

New patch and penisham is back? what a great day.

Our priority right now is getting MP into a workable state. We absolutely need to nail MP this time around. We can't just release something "just working". 
Right now, there is NOTHING for you to play because it isn't even "just working".
If you check the video from the blog we've released today, you see that this would be entirely unplayable and pointless for us to release, because we already know it's not playable. It's not in a state where we *need* feedback. 
Releasing what we have now would anger people needlessly, no matter how annoyed they are about how long it's taking. Instead, a broken release could possibly cause them to write negative reviews and ask "it took you this long to release *this*?".
 
You being annoyed as a player checking every single update is understandable, but you're doing this to yourself. Don't check the updates because MP is not coming soon. 
Check the blogs, that's where you're going to see what state it is in and if a release is near.
 
  
IT'S FUCKING WEEK OF THE PENISHAM

New patch and penisham is back? what a great day.

New patch and penisham is back? what a great day.

New patch and penisham is back? what a great day.

New patch and penisham is back? what a great day.

NEW
 
Added emote wheel, you currently press Q to open it.
- Emotes wheels binded to Q by default.
- Emotes wheel is now a long press to bring up.
- Emotes wheel includes different looking emotes if you are in stealth 
- Pressing Q (shout) while crouched will now have different text and smaller sound radius.
- Swinging your weapon in the air (not hitting anything) won't attract zombies anymore.
- Added new sets of anim for fishing with spears.
- Can now fish with a fishing rod while sitting on ground.
- Updated the MacOS application icons.
- Allow medical items to be dragged onto the list of injured body parts in the Health ui. Previously items could only be dragged onto the image of the body.
- Made right-clicking items on the ground more reliable by checking if the item icon is within a certain distance of the mouse pointer.  Previously, only items on the square that was clicked were detected.  If the item was near the corner of a square, the user had to hunt around to find the right place to click.
- Updated map to include recent fixes and Ben's Cabin
 
 
DEBUG
 
- Added a Reload button to the lua debugger file list.  It appears next to the file name of the item the mouse is hovering over.
- Added an in-game animation-clip viewer accessed by CTRL+F7 in debug mode.
 
 
TUTORIAL
- Quality of life changes and fixes
- Updated with new controller icons from Binky
 
 
MODDING
- Moved the code for clicking on curtains, doors and light switches from Java to ISObjectClickHandler.lua so modders can change this behavior.
- Added back code to IsoPlayer.removeSaveFile() to delete map_pN.bin savefiles to help Nolan on SuperSurvivors and other minor changes to make his life easier
- Added a new item property called Tags. Tags is a list of strings that can be used to specify what the item is used for.
 Instead of checking lists of item types such as Hammer/HammerStone or Saw/GardenSaw, the game can check for items
 that have certain tags. These tags are: ChopTree, ClearAshes, CutPlant, DigGrave, DigPlow, Hammer, Saw, TakeDirt. Also, digital watches have the tag Digital which affects how the clock is displayed.
- Moved recipecode.lua functions into a global table called Recipe.
 The functions are organized into sub-tables Recipe.OnCreate, Recipe.OnGiveXP, and Recipe.OnTest.
 This is similar to how vehicle-script lua functions work.
 For example, CutFish_TestIsValid is now Recipe.OnTest.CutFish.
 The old function names are still available to avoid breaking mods.
-  Error messages are printed to the console when loading a game if any recipe's OnCreate, OnGiveXP, or OnTest methods are undefined.
 
 
BALANCE
- Reduced crit chance of knives.
- Ignore the slowdown from injures, negative moodles, etc when closing or opening vehicle doors.
- Reduced the distance at which light switches can be clicked on.
- Ball-Peen Hammer can now be used for carpentry etc.
- Spears used for fishing lose condition when damaged, and don't disappear from the player's inventory.
- If you were about to do a close knife kill (jaw stab) forbidden when zombies are attacking - but your alternate normal attack will deal more damage. This avoids risk of unwanted jaw stabs when you have high small blade skills.
- Increased reloading/aiming XP gain when level is under 5.
- Increased minimum damage of M14 from 1 to 1.2.

ANIMS
- Hide left-hand items when reloading firearms.
- Hide any left-hand item when chopping down trees.
- Tweaked normal glasses UV's so the arms show, male and female versions.
- Tweaked drinking anims to be a bit more natural.
- Tweaked gun recoils, loading and racking blends to eliminate some popping.
- Adjusted recoil of handgun and rifle a bit.
- Tweaked Trousers.xml, Trousers_Black.xml and Trousers_NavyBlue.xml masking to avoid clipping.
- Tweaked Shorts_ShortFormal.xml to avoid clipping.
 
 
FIXES
- Fixed non-empty containers sometimes looking like they had no items in them (in random toilet-paper-filled buildings).
- Fixed lua error with the "Rest" context-menu option when extremely tired and no bed/chair was clicked.
- Fixed being able to fish from infinite distance, you'll now need to be at max 6 tiles from body of water with a rod and 2 tiles with spears.
- Fixed various issues with moveables - primarily metal ones.
- Fixed vehicles not colliding with zombies after the engine shuts off while the vehicle is still moving.
- Fixed zombies sometimes attacking instead of playing their hit-reaction animation. (Difficult to reproduce, somehow this person had it happen twice in a row!
https://clips.twitch.tv/HonestMagnificentGaurKlappa)
- Fixed animation event garbage collection.
- Fixed ActiveAnimXXX events occurring every frame after a new node is started in the same AnimSet.
- Fixed two DebugLog.txt files being created during startup. One of these files was being closed via garbage collection, which has caused problems on Linux in the past.
- Fixed not being able to jaw-stab a zombie from behind when the zombie was playing the Zombie_DoorClaw animation.
- Fixed action animations (like reading) not playing when sitting on the ground after trying to attack while sitting.
- Fixed timed actions continuing while getting up from sitting after pressing a movement key.
- Fixed parts of clothing not being visible through a hole in a layer above sometimes.
- Fixed zombies playing their aggression sound after killing the player. It kept playing during the eating-body sound.
- Fixed multiple death screams playing sometimes when the player is killed by zombies.
- Fixed zombies sometimes playing their bite animation again after dragging the player to the ground.
- Fixed the player-info avatar animating more slowly at higher framerates.
- Fixed the animation-clip viewer animation running more slowly at higher framerates.
- Fixed not being able to interact with tents placed by the map-maker.
- Fixed rooms sometimes appearing unlit when the light switch was on. This happened when loading a part of the map with room light switches but no lamps or porch lights.
- Fixed wearing each item of clothing in a stack, when those items have the same name but different underlying types (like Jacket).
- Fixed favorited items being used for campfire fuel.
- Fixed a bug with reusing zombies which could result in a zombie trying to walk toward a sound it heard before it was removed
 from the world.
- Fixed the player info avatar not updating when hats and glasses are knocked off the player.
- Fixed the loot window not updating to show hats and glasses knocked off the player.
- Fixed the player-info avatar animating while the game is paused..
- Fixed the carpentry menu Door submenu appearing disabled when a doorframe can be built..
- Fixed food in a bag in a Fridge/Freezer not cooling or freezing.
- Fixed Big Garage Doors / Windows showing as doubled normal sized doors / windows in cutaways.
- Fixed logging out and back in with the "Winter is coming" challenge (and others) resetting the timer.
- Fixed some item weight discrepancies.
- Fixed not being able to start a BBQ with any other materials apart from paper.
- Fixed unlimited sugar being allowed to be added to a beverage.
- Fixed lockers not cutting away correctly.
- Fixed lunch box always spawning with fresh food even a long time into the apocalypse.
- Fixed pouring water from bottle to bottle not reserving empty bottle's favourite status.
- Fixed Filling up broken Saucepan repairs it.
- Fixed sandbox option "Infection Mortality" set to "Never" not working.
- Fixed placing and removing bait from a trap duplicating it.
- Fixed the crafting ui "Name Filter" entry and "Filter All" checkbox displaying different values in each tab.
- Fixed the fishing ui not being tall enough to display the caught items sometimes.

Ey all, we’re planning to release version 41.42 to the IWBUMS public beta in the middle of next week.
 
As we’ve mentioned before, at the moment what’s generally going into the Build 41 are bug fixes, balance, quality of life adjustments and ‘easy-win’ stuff that complements the game. While we wait for the MP Strike Force’s work to start dropping in there’s a ‘soft lock’ on any complex features being added. Other work for ‘post 41’ content is underway behind the scenes, which we’ll talk about once it’s closer and 41 is pretty much out of the door.
 
This is why more cosmetic stuff like the jewellery, watches and (next up) the new emote system have been appearing in the IWBUMS patches of late – they are all safe things to add that don’t mess too much with the fundamentals. Likewise, they’re all things that’ll benefit MP – and indeed SP content in general later down the line.
 
So anyway, here’s the latest on the emote stuff – which finally harnesses a bunch of animations that Martin has been sitting on for many moons now.
 
 
 
This radial lives on a long press of the ‘Q’ button, where the ‘Hey!’ zombie attractant shout function also resides. We’re also slightly adjusting this shout so a ‘press Q while sneaking’ gives a slightly quieter call out with a smaller hearing radius, while ‘Q’ during normal movement works the same as normal with the “HEY!” all in capitals to reflect its loudness.
 
Martin is now working on a few of the anims seen above, those relevant at least, so that they look okay while walking and also when sneaking around.
 
Also in 41.42 with this will be the following in amongst a bunch of other stuff :
New sets of anims for spear fishing, and seated fishing. Health UI polish More reliable right-clicking items on the floor, which previously could see you clicking around for the desired item way more than you should have needed to. Improvements to animations for reloading, tree-chopping, drinking and gun recoil. Fixes to infinite distance fishing, zeds occasionally attacking when they should be recoiling, unstabbable zeds when they’re clawing at doors, clothing not being visible through rips and bite holes, faulty light switches, and too much screaming and growling on death and after it.  
 
MP STRIKE FORCE
This week Andrei has been using his newfangled client bot ‘fake survivors’ to simulate a high load server to track the source of the server stalls we’ve so often experienced on live servers with high-ish populations.
 
He managed to replicate the problem, which made us all go “hurrah!” what with diagnosis being the first step to a cure and everything. By placing 64 fast moving players at long distances from each other, all moving at vehicle speeds, it was a true ‘worst case scenario’ to base our work around.
 
From this we could see and analyse how the server hangs for long periods and send intermittent packets to the clients: which would explain the Build 40 (and before)’s pausing zombies, black borders and other severe lag effects that have habitually plagued PZ MP – which the Strike Force’s ongoing mission is to remedy.

After debugging by Andrei and Yuri, it was discovered that the culprit was our age old enemy – who we’ve fought with since day 1 on Zomboid, the much maligned and disruptive Java Garbage Collector: which collects and frees redundant memory that’s no longer used, and pauses the game during the process.
 
Since high memory capacity given to servers (often 16gb) takes exponentially longer to clear out than the few gig used on single player, these periodic GC clearouts (which are more frequent the more players are present) can clearly cause the GC to frequently pause events for a long time.
 
Next up, then, is us figuring out ways to optimize memory usage on servers. This is something we’ve wanted to improve for a long time anyway, but unfortunately not as easy a task as stopping some server packet bottleneck or whatever else could have caused the issue. We’ve got a few ideas though, and investigations can run simultaneous to the more general MP work.
 
Speaking of which, in other areas, Yuri has been fixing up additional networking bugs found with zombie behaviour once active survivors were thrown into the mix – where zombies would spring to their feet after falling to the ground, and also making sure that damage and death of zombies always matches between client and server. Quick vid of ongoing work here.
 
Fanks all, see you next week x

 
This week’s homestead from Red. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. 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!

Hey all, let’s do some IWBUMS 41 public beta chat.
 
We released 41.41 to the beta last week, and 41.42 is starting to shape on the internal build – with the focus still being on fixes and polish rather than adding any complex systems that directly impact on the gameplay – while the MP Strike Team continue to hammer away at online stuff.
 
To this end there’s currently stuff like improved fishing anims, less clunky car entry and exit if you’re injured, tweaked gun recoils, less clothing clipping, some anims optimization, new gamepad icons and a fix for this tricky-to-replicate ‘bite on attack’ issue that somehow this poor streamer ran into twice in a row.
We will most likely be looking to release this next week at some point.
 
EMOTES
In MP-land meanwhile, a system we’ll be needing that shouldn’t impact too much on general gameplay balance is the emote system – which RJ and Martin are working together on.
 
Emotes will be accessed via a vehicles-style radial menu, and you’ll be able to customize which ones you’d like to have easily accessible (including those that have been modded in) via a window also accessible via the radial.
 
Emotes we’re currently hooking up include clapping, beckoning, follow requests, nose-holding, shakes of the head, polite refusals, nervous pulls at the collar, surrenders, saying thank you, waving goodbye, waving hello and yawning.
 
There will be no dancing, however, as we’re not Fortnite – you guys will have to mod that in via AnimZed once it’s released if you want it!
You’ll be able to do emotes in SP too, as we’d imagine it’ll make for some fun screenshot-taking. Likewise emotes will also be triggerable via the MP chatbox.
 
Super work-in-progress video of RJ and Martin’s current work seen below! Icons, placements etc all due for change.

 
MP STRIKE TEAM
Andrei has been continuing work on the client bot system. For a quick refresher on this, this is a debugging tool to allow us to simulate large population servers, to provide us with information we’ve never had access to before: both to allow us to see where we can optimize network traffic in the Strike Team’s current work, and to debug why our high population B40 multiplayer servers often grind to a halt and suffer terrible lag spikes, black borders on map streaming, stationary zombies etc etc
 
Andrei’s fake clients currently spawn in a random spot in the middle of the map, and move in a random direction at greater speeds than a normal player is capable of. Here are a bunch of them in their first WIP blink-in-and-out-of-existence form.
So, these little automatons will then separate and force the server to send the data for the map and load up simulated zombies: purposefully straining the server as much as possible so it can be debugged to discover where the choke points and bottle necks are.
 
Right now Andrei is optimizing the memory and CPU requirements for client bots, there’s still some way to go with this but he’s  managed 60 of them to run on a single machine now – but in the meantime here’s a fun little video showing 10 of the little fake lads and ladies in action on the PZ map overview.

Yuri meanwhile has been working on syncing player states across the network, with a side salad of fixing up zombie network issues when they crop up.  There’s still lots to be done here: character animations are not yet translated between clients, and there’s still some slight glitches to resolve with zombie behaviour not matching, but it’s great to see it all starting to take form.
 

This week’s secured streets from Greedy Dwarf. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. 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! The CBOIT also wishes the Dead Matter team success and high infection rates during the launch of their closed alpha this week.

 

Hello all! Turns out a UK heatwave combined with severe post-Covid viral fatigue aren’t a good combo, so usual Thursdoider Batsphinx has had to take a bit more extra time. As such, another hastily put together short Thursdoid this week, sorry folks! Hopefully he’s feeling better soon. A few things to point out, like oh what’s this?…
 
IWBUMS 41.41 release
It’s just been released now, changelogs can be found here. Highlights include:
Sleeping anywhere available (say on floors) when extremely tired Performance option for corpse shadows. Performance options for blood / holes on clothing/weapons. Sandbox option for disabling zombie lunge behaviour after climbing fences / windows. Fix to FPS compensation, will stop time passing further than about 1/4 of a second during the game pausing from severe FPS lag. Should stop the weird deaths on stairs reported last week, as well as unfair lag bites / car crashes etc in single player, since time will not progress during a spike. And many more.
  MULTIPLAYER
Yuri has been continuing with his work fixing up issues with syncronization with zombies, meanwhile Andrei has been hammering out the first versions of his client bots, capable of simulating a player client so we can stress test the servers and find out where they stall or become overloaded. He’s been working on optimization to try and reduce a client’s footprint so we can easily chain 60 of them together on a single machine.
 
Once this is in, he’ll be coding the fake clients up to quickly move between and around towns, forcing the server to load up areas of the map, simulate zombies, and generally process large areas in the same way as a live server. This will help greatly in figuring out ways of improving server performance and stability significantly over B40.
 
And that’s it for this week, enjoy 41.41, byeee!
 
This week’s Christmas surprise from parky302. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. 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!

This is the problem, as soon as there is any even broken multiplayer the interest in PZ will explode, there are big streamers waiting for it. Itd be a mess and then they would move on and unlikely return once we have solid MP. People treat IWBUMs as the official version once it's there. We can't risk having non functional and unreliable MP and it needs to get to a set level of performance and polish before it goes out in any capacity or it may mean the difference between millions of future sales and eeking by.
 
B41 is the most important update so far and a real opportunity to break the game into the mainstream and if we don't land it right it would be devastating. As explained in the Thursdoid.

Hello all! Welcome to this week’s Thursdoid. News flash: I’ve just had to edit out the ‘Hurray! Build 41.40 has just been released into IWBUMS beta!’ portion of the Thursdoid, because a last minute issue with auto-shoves not protecting from scratches or bites was discovered. Obviously this would not go down too well, so will need repairing. Happy days! This will be fixed as soon as possible and we’ll get the build pushed hopefully today.
 
Big things include:
 
JEWELRY! Many more character customization options with necklaces, earrings, rings and so on. Addition to animation system to allow better blending, to get rid of or be able to fine tune some pauses at ends of animations. Spear kill moves should be less dangerous now. May require some additional balances so let us know how things feel. Numerous combat fixes to get rid of some long standing issues with target choice for downed/attacking zombies, zombies over the other side of fences and so on. Added ability to refill water dispensers Zillions of fixes.
  To make up for the lack of a build at time of posting, Binky has kindly donated a WIP map tease screenshot of our rendition of Louisville:

MULTIPLAYER
Work continues on fixing up the last remaining issues with zombie syncing. As stated before, the multiplayer has been in large part completely rebuilt from the ground up for syncing characters and zombies, to provide for much better performance and less issues with lag.
 
One big part in getting these last issues fixed has been in generating diagrams to help debug what is taking place over time between server and clients in order to make sure they both match close enough to provide a believable experience comparable to that of single player. Yuri has managed to sync up thumping and fence falling perfectly using the animation state transitions using this additional power. Though is still debugging a few edge cases where the system fails. (Look out for it in the video)
 
Lastly, just wanted to add a few candid words about the ongoing MP development – We know people are frustrated at the long wait, and are seeing more and more frustrated comments about MP’s absense from B41 as the weeks go by.
 
We’re sorry that it’s taking so long – however it is what it is, and is what it is for numerous reasons – not only the immense task of building a strong and capable multiplayer architecture, ripping out the old systems, creating multiplayer that will see the game succeed and help build up a larger multiplayer following on B41’s full release (something we’re not willing to compromise on, as B41 going live fully will be the most crucial opportunity for Zomboid to grow in popularity since the game’s initial release, and squandering that opportunity with flaky MP could have a hugely negative impact on PZ in the future), but also with only a limited number of the team able to undertake the work that needs to be done, along with the various additional challenges from fun and unavoidable lockdown/childcare related issues within the team that come from the ongoing COVID-19 situation. It’s definitely been a slog and will continue to be for a while.
 
As with many other dev teams, we’re not necessarily firing on every cylinder right now – but even if we were, this is and has always been a lot of work to undertake, something we’ve tried to stress again and again – and while it’s taking a lot of time in less than ideal circumstances, the results are extremely exciting, and progress is definitely picking up.
 
It’ll take however long it takes though – we’re never ones to give ETAs at the best of times, but as stated these are not the best of times, and all we can promise is we want it out there as much if not more than any of you, and will continue to work tirelessly on getting it out there to you all as soon as possible – and if you want a silver lining, if we went with our original plan you’d still be playing B40 while we worked on this. The whole reason we released B41 into IWBUMs as single player only was anticipating we’d be wading in MP guts for some time, though we didn’t know quite how long it would end up taking, so we’re thankful that people are getting to experience all the work we put into B41 now, along with improving B41 alongside the community while the MP work is underway – and finally we want to thank those who are showing patience and understanding about what we’re trying to accomplish here, and have shown support in the community. It helps keep us motivated a lot!
 
Once B41 is finally out there, we already got lots of real exciting stuff to show off for what’s coming next. We’ve long learnt from our mistakes of the past, and now only show stuff pertaining to the current build in development in the blog updates – but that doesn’t mean we don’t have plenty of extremely juicy stuff piling up behind the scenes we’re dying for people to see.
 
Thanks for reading!
 
This week’s fireside shot from Rei Ayanami. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. 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!

Hotfix, August 3rd:
 
- Fixed not being able to knock down zombies by shoving with a knife-like weapon equipped.

___________________________________________________
 
NEW
 
- Added jewelry that can be worn on player: necklaces, earrings and rings on fingers.
- Added ability to refill water dispensers
- Drainable items now change their weight depending on how full they are
- Updated credits
- Added bracelets, watches, dogtags etc to zombies. NOTE: OLD WATCHES ARE DEPRECATED. YOU WILL HAVE TO FIND NEW WATCHES.
- Added SetMeleeDelay animation event that can be used to set the delay between attacks. This is basically the same as RecoilDelay which is used to set the delay between firearm shots.

- New thing for recipes.txt: 
    Normally a recipe source contains a list of hard-coded item types. 
    This doesn't work well with all the new clothing items. 
    Now a recipe source of the form "[function]" specifies the name of a Lua function that will be called to get a list of items that can be used as a source item. 
    See DismantleDigitalWatch_GetItemTypes() in recipecode.lua for an example.

- Added context-menu tooltips showing the percent full of water-containing items when taking or transferring water.
 
- Added IsoRoofFixer.java to prevent falling through roofs not placed by the mapping tools
    - can attempt to fix roofs for falling player per tile or on a per room space below basis, defaults to latter
    - locations are stored in meta data save so it doesnt attempt to fix it twice when player removes these floors (per room mode only).
    - optionally can place floors that match the roof style, or invisible floors
 
- Added some more system specs printing in console logs
- Display item icons in the "Items List" debug ui.
  
 
CONTEXT MENUS AND HOT BAR TIDY UP
 
- Added an optional way of interacting with context menus. 
    - Instead of displaying child menus to the left or right of the parent menu, the parent menu is hidden and the child menu is displayed in place of the parent menu. An extra menu option is added at the top of a child menu to go back to the parent menu. This behavior can be enable or disabled for each splitscreen player in the  Accessibility options. This works well with a controller. Mouse users may or may not prefer this method.

- Attached items (i.e. hotbar items) may emit light, not just items held in the player's hands. Currently the game does not have any light-emitting items that can go in the hotbar, but this could be used to equip a chest-mounted or head-mounted light.
- The "Equip/Turn On/Off Light Source" key will toggle a light-emitting item in the hotbar if present, instead of equipping the item in the player's hand.
- Pressing a keyboard shortcut for a hotbar slot will activate or deactivate an item instead of equipping it, if possible.
- A hotbar slot is highlighted red if a dragged item cannot be equipped in that slot.
- Non-weapon items may be dragged to the hotbar.  Non-weapon items could already be added to the hotbar using context menus and radial menus.
- The left d-pad radial menu (which previously only showed equippable weapons) now also displays the best light-emitting item in the player's inventory.  This can be used to equip and toggle a flashlight when using a controller.
- Added an animation to context menus when displaying them with the "Single Context Menu" option when using a mouse.  There was already an animation when using a controller.
- Prefer to display tooltips to the right or left of context menus instead of on top of them.
- When using the "Single Context Menu" option with the mouse, short submenus are positioned under the mouse instead
 of at the parent's position.
- Allow items to be dragged to the primary and secondary slot icons to equip them. Dragging two-handed items between the two icons equips the item in both hands.
- Display all known seed types in the farming context menu, so mods don't need to override ISFarmingMenu.lua.
- Display the type of container selected in the loot window. This was already done for bags, but will now also show icons for clothing driers, washers etc.
- Added a radial-menu option to smash a vehicle window when outside the vehicle. This option was already available in the right-click context menu.
- Added "Toggle Models Enabled" keybind, F3 by default, so people can change the key that hides/shows models in debug mode.
- Added "Toggle Animation Text" keybind, F6 by default, so people can change the key that hides/shows animation-related text in debug mode.
- New "Wear" submenu for garments that can be worn in different ways: Baseball cap, Poncho, Fanny Pack, Hoodie etc.
- Changed the On/Off button in the Set Alarm dialog to a checkbox.
- Added an option to toggle aim on and off by tapping the Aim key. Holding the Aim key for more than 1/2 a second aims without forcing aim on, so aiming stops when the Aim key is released. Running will turn off forced aim.
- The "Attach" menu for attaching items to the hotbar adds "(Replace XYZ)" if the item will replace an existing item,
 when clicking on an item in the inventory window.
- The vehicle radial-menu option to lock and unlock doors also locks and unlocks the trunk when using a controller.
 Players using the mouse can already do this by clicking the trunk icon in the vehicle dashboard.
- The Attach menu options show the item to be replaced in a tooltip instead of the option name, to match the Wear menu
- Added tooltips to the Eat submenu to show how much hunger/thirst/unhappiness will be changed, as well as displaying a warning about uncooked food and food that is better hot or cold.
- Added "Cooked in microwave" warning to Eat submenu tooltips.
- Don't wrap long lines in wear-item tooltips (the ones that display the bite/scratch bonuses)

 
TUTORIAL
- Added code for Turbo's new objective markers
- Added homing marker objective marker
- Added improved item highlights
- Improved Spiffo tutorial window placement
- Added (incomplete) work on controllers with tutorial 
- Added zombie alert when player opens curtain to see feeding brothers
 
CORPSES AND GENERATORS TIDY-UP
- Filling a grave is now a separate action from burying the 5th corpse. It still happens automatically after burying the 5th corpse.
- Burying a corpse no longer plays a shoveling animation. This was broken since the shovel couldn't be equipped while the corpse was still in the player's hands, so the shovel might appear in the player's hands and on their back.
- When equipping an item in the hands, corpses and generators are dropped first in a separate action. Dropping a corpse or generator used to happen instantly as soon as the item was equipped.
- Items in the hands are unequipped in a separate action before picking up a corpse or generator. This looks better when the equipped items are in the hotbar.
- Right-clicking on an equipped corpse or generator says "Drop" instead of "Unequip".
- Fixed "Grab One / Grab Half / Grab All" being displayed for stacks of corpses in a container.
 
CAMPFIRE AND FIREPLACE TIDY UP
- Charcoal may be used as fuel in campfires and fireplaces.
- Each use of charcoal adds 30 minutes of fuel to a bbq/campfire/fireplace, instead of using the entire bag.
- Charcoal barbeques can use the same fuel and starting methods as campfires and fireplaces.
- Only clothing with FabricType defined (stuff that can be torn) can be used as fuel in a bbq/campfire/fireplace.
- New "Add Fuel" and "Light Fire" tooltips show the amount of burn time for each item.
- Stopped rain reducing campfire fuel twice as fast, as it looked like a bug.
 

MODDING AND COMMUNITY TRANSLATION
 
- Added a fix/function for radio modding, to allow for timing sensitive stuff like voice-over mods.
- lines in WordZed can now be prefixed with "${t:xx.xxx}" where x is the amount of seconds. This will override the standard line triggering limitations in the radio system and use the supplied amount seconds before moving to the next line.
 
- Removed the hard-coded list of languages so mods can add new languages.
    Languages are loaded by looking in the media/lua/shared/Translate folder for the game and any active mods.
    In each language folder, a new file called language.txt specifies the name and character encoding.
    The old "Language" enum is now a class.  This shouldn't break mods (unless they were calling an unimplemented method).
 
- media/lua/shared/Translate/XX/language.txt files may have a line "base = YY," where YY is the name of another language to use for missing translations, before using the default language EN.
    - For example, a mod that wants to override some French translations could use this language.txt file:
    VERSION = 1,
    text = French Mod,
    charset = Cp1252,
    base = FR,
    
- Added map description.txt and title.txt translation files to the media/lua/shared/Translate/EN/<MAP>/ folders. These are now read for the English language so they can be overridden by mods.
- Fixed untranslatable text "Delete 'preset'?" in the sandbox options ui.
 

BALANCE
 
- Tooltips for freezing or thawing food displays freezing time.
- Cooking time is no longer displayed for frozen food (because it can't be cooked).
- Added a recipe for emptying a Griddle Pan.
- Changed Empty Paint Bucket to store water.
- Only digital watches show the date in the time display.
 

ANIMS

- Enabled EarlyTransitionOut for 1HDefault and SpearDefault.
- adjusted the female bash mesh to look a bit more natural
- tweaked hand positions of 2h strafe left and right
- added style option to Rachel hairstyle and tweaked some other style options.
- added masks to eating actions to improve blend between upper and lower body
- adjusted Bob/Bob_StrafeAimSpear_Right.X and Bob/Bob_WalkBwdAim2H_Heavy.X as weapon was not anchored in hand
- adjusted 2H_heavy attacks to end in correct pose
- Fixed a bone-reparenting issue that caused weapons to slide around in the hands, most noticeably when fast-forwarding.
- Declared IsoLivingCharacter.bareHands 'final', and fixed duplicate allocation.
- Reduced MinRange for various stabbing weapons to 0.61, which is the same as other stabbing weapons. Now that attacks take the zombie's head position into account, and the head is usually closer to the player
 than the body, MinRange doesn't need to be so large. The ranges can be viewed by enabling the Character.Debug.Render.AimCone debug option.
- Fixed stabbing weapons without CloseKillMove defined getting jaw-stab attacks.
- Fixed the shove animation restarting when the player starts or stops moving.
- Fixed the player hitting vehicles they aren't facing.
- Fixed the player's bit-while-sitting animation looping forever.
- Removed duplicate transition in zombie/walktoward/transitions.xml
- Updated transitions and anim variable sets and conditions to work with EarlyTransitionOut
    - All transitions are now listening to ActiveAnimFinishing instead of ActiveAnimLooped.
        - Using <m_time>Start<m_time> instead of <m_timePc>0</m_timePc>
        - Using <m_time>End<m_time> instead of <m_timePc>1</m_timePc>
    - This allows us to fire the event at the point of EarlyOut instead of at the very end.
    - Prevents infinite loops caused by waiting for an event at 100% that never comes.
     - This should work just fine with all existing anim states, while fixing all infinite loops.
    - To enable an EarlyTransitionOut for a node, simply add <m_EarlyTransitionOut>true</m_EarlyTransitionOut>
 
 
MAP UPDATES
 
- Fixed lack of generators in Kingsmouth and added new 'Hangar' room def
- Fixed non-cutaway wall on Studio
- General improvements to both challenge maps
 
 
FIXES
- The player will ignore zombies standing on the other side of a fence if there is a prone zombie on the near side of the fence.
- The player may target the head, waist or feet of prone zombies, instead of only the head. Targeting the head still does the most damage.

- Fixed weapons having an extra 0.5 range. 
    - This extra range was only supposed to be used before an attack starts, to see if a prone zombie or lunging zombie should be hit.
    - This shouldn't affect weapon ranges though, because now the position of the  head of standing zombies is checked, and it tends to be 0.5 units ahead of the body when a zombie is lunging.
    - In theory, this will increase the range from 0.5 to 1.0 when choosing to attack a standing zombie instead of a nearer prone one, +0.5 for the head relative to the body, and +0.5 for the "extra lunge range".

- Fixed being unable to equip a corpse or generator from a container if the player was carrying too much. This prevented the player grabbing a generator from a vehicle, for example.  It had to be dropped onto the ground first. The player was always able to equip a corpse or generator from the ground regardless of weight.
- Fixed a lua error using the farming context menu to plant seeds without waiting for the previous action to complete.
- Fixed chance of success and chance of damage sometimes being less than 0 or greater than 100 when installing or uninstalling vehicle parts.
- Fixed cutaway fences looking jagged at the bottom
- Fixed all of fences not cutting away
- Fixed Bite/Scratch protection from Tailoring and TV shows XP gain producing floating values
- Fixed situations in which Rip Sheets should be called Rip Clothing
- Fixed interrupted 'Pour tainted water' into an empty container action resulting in drinkable water
- Fixed Butchered caught animals not showing some weight and calories variation
- Fixed many clothing items that couldn't be ripped
- Fixed freezing and thawing times of food increasing as day length increases. I set the times to approximately match the existing durations at the default 30-minute day:
 Freezing:- 4 hours. Thawing: 15 minutes in an oven, 1.5 hours at room temperature, 3.0 hours in a fridge.
- Fixed the radial menu used to switch the furniture-moving mode not working.
- Fixed unnecessary counting of options in ISContextMenu.lua.
- Fixed lua error in ISMoveableInfoWindow caused by empty overlay sprites on furniture. Could add a "none" sprite to the overlay editor.
- Fixed the player's model lighting changing sometimes after equipping or unequipping items
- Fixed the UI flickering sometimes when offscreen rendering is enabled.
- Fixed languages not loading on Linux and MacOS.
- Fixed the appearance of the mods ui when there are no mods.
- Fixed carpentry materials not being removed from the player's hands after crafting.
- Fixed the OnTickEvenPaused event not being triggered when the game was paused. It was checking GameLoadingState.bDone=true, but that is set to false when loading finishes.
- Fixed the container buttons in the loot window not being updated after picking up or placing furniture.
- Fixed floating run animation after the player gets up after running into a zombie.
- Fixed corpses and zombies on the ground not having shadows.
- Fixed actions using the amount of puddle water on river/pool squares.
- Fixed the clock not being displayed with the new worn watches.
- Fixed the list of lights touching a square not getting cleared when moving to an area without lights.
- Fixed CurrentCell.roomLights.contains(i) instead of contains(roomLight).
- Fixed shadows going haywire on fast-forward.
- Fixed being able to take dirt from a square with a farm plant on it.
- Fixed being able to dig a furrow on an existing one.  There is already a "Remove" option.
- Fixed being able to place dirt/gravel/sand on a farm plant.
- Fixed leg-twitch while attacking with 2H weapons. The turning state did not have a way of exiting while an attack was happening.
- Fixed zombies failing to climb over fences or through windows sometimes.
- Fixed Disassemble context-menu action equipping a welding mask in the hand instead of wearing it.
- Fixed zombies sometimes walking slowly into walls when they are approaching the player.
- Fixed zombie-crawler/hitreaction/Default.xml animation being looped.
- Fixed missing "Campfire Info" option when clicking a campfire behind a carpentry wall.
- Fixed not being able to start bandaging wounds while moving, even though moving is allowed after starting.
- Fixed the inventory-window and loot-window selections changing as timed actions removed items.
- Possibly fixed multiple zombies getting jaw-stabbed by a single attack.
- Fixed the Wear submenu not showing bite and scratch defense bonuses. The Wear tooltip shows which items will be replaced, instead of the context-menu text being "Replace X with Y". This was done because sometimes several items are replaced, such as when putting on a Spiffo Suit.
- Fixed duplicating fanny packs and other items.
- Possibly fixed the player attacking after finishing the stagger-back animation. Needs feedback.
- Fixed bite and scratch defense always being green in the Wear tooltip.
- The Wear tooltip shows the item-to-be-worn's bite and scratch defense as well as the +/- change, the same way item tooltips do.  "Bite Defense: 0 (-10)" for example.
- Fixed the "Render Rain When Indoors" option not being changeable.
- Fixed "Dismantle Digital Watch" recipe not working with new watches.
- Added back "Craft Sheet Rope", "Rip Clothing", and "Rip Sheets" recipes.
- Fixed available recipes not being sorted to the top of the recipe list when the "Filter All" checkbox is checked.
- Changed some usages of Stack to ArrayList. Stack is synchronized which is a bit slower.
- Declared some fields and classes 'final'.
- Removed HandWeapon.directional
- Fixed some lambda-related gc
- Fixed the broken appearance of wrist-watch models caused by masks.
- Fixed text overlap in the Disassemble context-menu tooltips when using larger tooltip fonts.
- Fixed tutorial lua error when not using a controller.
- Stop creating a new inventory-window tooltip every time a tooltip is displayed, just reuse the existing one.
- Fixed the display of rotten-food hunger values in evolved recipe tooltips (too many numbers after the decimal point).
- Fixed inventory-window tooltips not being hidden when context menus are visible, when using the "Single Context Menu" option.
- Fixed lua error with context menus when not using the "Single Context Menu" option
- Fixed zombies crawling over furniture jumping upright when hit by the player.
- Fixed lua error right-clicking on items in the hotbar while the game is paused. Hotbar context menus are no longer displayed when the game is paused.
- Reuse ISContextMenu objects instead of creating new ones each time
- Fixed "... and 0 more" text in recipe tooltips when exactly 10 source items are possible
- Hide "Condition" in jewelry tooltips (any item with Cosmetic=TRUE).
- fixed bug in RichText Panel and Layout where drawTextLeft was called.
- Fixed "Rip Clothing" recipe not producing dirty strips from dirty clothes.
- Fixed not reusomh context-menu tooltips instead of creating new ones each time. The carpentry and metalwork menus together created 60+ tooltips.
- Possibly fixed the "Game Paused" message not being rendered after quitting to the main menu.

- Fixed some issues with the zombie climb-over-fence crawling attack.
    - The zombie's movement was restricted.
    - The angle to crawl wasn't always calculated correctly.
    - The test for the attack hitting wasn't quite right.
    - The player's immunity to these attacks didn't handle different framerates (IsoGameCharacter.lungeFallTimer).

- Fixed item.RequireInHandOrInventory being treated as DisplayName in ISInventoryPaneContextMenu.doEatOption() instead of an item type.
- Fixed DisplayName for Necklace_Choker_Amber and Necklace_Choker_Diamond.
- Fixed "Medium Silver Looped Earrings" being named "Gold".
- Rebuilt UI2.pack to add a few missing item icons, and the blood/hole/patch textures shown in the inspect-clothing ui.
- Fixed the Metalwork menu tooltips using the old DisplayName translations.

- Fixed Lua errors when adding fuel to a barbeque/campfire/fireplace from a stack of items before the previous action completes.
    This is an old issue where the same item is used by multiple actions in the action queue. After the first action completes, the item is no longer available for use by subsequent actions. This type of issue can be avoided by using the new ISContextMenu.addActionsOption() which adds a placeholder action to the timed-action queue. When the placeholder action starts, it calls a function to add the actual actions to the queue.
    The new actions are inserted into the queue immediately after the placeholder action.  The function that is called can find available items of the proper type, so the items to use are determined when the action starts, instead of when the context menu is first displayed.

- Stop invisible-player attacks creating noise which attracts zombies.
- Fixed grass/vegetation showing over interior walls when wind makes them sway

- Fixed traps exploit by placing window frames near them making them indestructable.
    - traps can no longer be placed near windowframes/hoppables
    - if a windowframe is constructed near the trap after placing the trap first, the trap will consume bait but never catch anything

- Fixed fossoil sign infinite pick up / acting as lightswitch. This will be fixed for new worlds, however existing worlds will have the problem remaining due to saved data
- Fixed unnecessarily creating copies of clothing model textures that don't have blood, dirt or holes. This mostly includes bags, hats, jewelry and watches
- Fixed the "zombie surprised player" sound not playing. This broke when we started spawning zombies in houses before the player entered the house. They used to spawn as soon as the player opened the door to a room.
- Fixed text width of "Hair" and "Beard" translations in the character-info ui not being taken into account when aligning text.
 
 

Howdy all, bit of a short Thursdoid today since the usual writer is away this week, however still a few bits to share!
 
BUILD 41.40
We’re feeling very close to getting 41.40 out, and given the short Thursdoid was hoping we could squeeze it out today to compensate, however really we need a little more time to test the latest changes which went in last night. We’ve made combat balance changes and early indications are that it's improved the combat imbalances that the animation changes talked about the last couple of weeks have been added, however this isn’t something we can be lax on since bad balance on combat could upend the game quite badly.
 
As soon as we’re confident things are back close to how they were, we’ll look to get the build out for everyone to play.
 
Other cool changes related to this have been added to the build by Tim, which should resolve a few long standing frustrations.
 
The player will ignore zombies standing on the other side of a fence if there is a prone zombie on the near side of the fence. The player may target the head, waist or feet of prone zombies, instead of only the head, though targeting the head still does the most damage. Fixed some issues with attack range calculations. This should make the character more likely to attack a standing zombie instead of a closer knocked down one if they are likely to be a threat to the player.
  MULTIPLAYER
Not much fancy to show, but Yuri’s been putting the more boring under the bonnet finishing touches on the zombie networking, in preperation for moving onto player syncing. Earlier work meant all the zombie animation state xml were duplicated, and he’s been optimizing this so that multiplayer and single player action states for animations can coexist together.
 
This will help going forward, and once the player stuff is synced, we should be able to get some much more interesting videos to show off of players interacting on MP servers. After that will come diagnosing and fixing the issues that cause high traffic servers to grind to a halt, and we’ll be looking to start our first tests of the servers. It’s still a way off but there does seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel now!
 
…aaaand that’s it. Sorry for the short Thursdoid, hopefully things will be back to normal next week!
 
This week’s house party from xclickitx. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. 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!

Afternoon all, welcome back to your regular programming of IWBUMS 41 Public Beta news.
 
We’re going to try to release patch 41.40 onto the beta channel next week, although this will be dependent on getting the gamepad version of the new tutorial finalised.
 
Once it hits we will likely need some gameplay difficulty feedback from you the playing public, Zac’s recent anim smoothening has made combat feel a lot better in most cases (especially spears and knives) but the added finesse *might* have made things slightly easier in these cases. We’re going to be addressing this internally during the interim, clearly, but that’ll be the feedback we’ll be looking for overall.
 
Oh, and Public Service Announcement: when we patch your current watches will be made redundant. Sorry, you’ll have to find a new one to tell the time and how long you’ve survived for.
 
But, on the plus side, you will be able to customise yourself a little more – as one of our testers did last week.
MP WORK
Multiplayer work for 41 continues apace, Yuri has been continuing his work on fixing up issues where zombie behaviour on clients doesn’t match that of servers.
 
A specific issue within this was when zombies are climbing fences, as well as other such behaviours that would desync clients from servers. As such he’s been going through all the different animation states to make sure they behave properly on multiplayer.
For now he’s duplicating zombie animation states with multiplayer specific versions, but he will also have to explore how he could combine these into the single zombie animation data set to avoid replicating data in the game, which may be difficult to maintain as the builds and patches go by.
 
Here’s a video of it running. Note that zombie combat is pretty much indistinguishable from single player here – throughout all this our intention has been to establish this even when there are higher pings to the server to deal with, or when the server is lagging or stalling. So far, so good – on that. We, like you, cannot wait to get to the testing stage.
Next, after a bit of polish, will come the player character syncing – covering animation to clothing, blood and the various other things that have been added to build 41. Alongside this we will be investigating the server via the fake client bots we discussed a few weeks ago, which will allow us to simulate 60 player servers in a test environment and figure out what’s causing the severe lag and server stalls on high player counts. While there’s still some distance to go, it feels like things are taking shape.
41.40 NEW PATCH STUFF
In addition to stuff mentioned in previous weeks’ blogs:
 
An optional way of interacting with context menus. Instead of displaying child menus to the left or right of the parent menu, the parent menu is hidden and replaced by next one. This gets rid of cascading waterfalls of submenus, and was initially designed for split-screen and controller players. That said, we’re really starting to like it for keyboard and mouse too. For now, it’ll be found as an Accessibility Option. General menu and hot bar tidy-up. You can drag equipment between primary and secondary, clearer indicators of what can be equipped in which slot, you can finally unlock a car trunk with a controller etc Fixed not being able to start bandaging wounds while moving New “Wear” submenu for garments that can be worn in different ways: Baseball cap, Poncho, Fanny Pack, Hoodie etc. Accessibility option that can toggle aim on and off by tapping the Aim key. Holding the Aim key for more than 1/2 a second aims without forcing aim on, so aiming stops when the Aim key is released.  
Also likely to be a part of 41.40 is some exploratory work from Turbo, who has been looking into one of our most longstanding issues that we’ve never really cracked – and weren’t sure how to crack without adding in months and months of extra mapping work.

This issue was players falling through non-solid rooftops – due to the way our mapping tools work the back sides of unseen N and W rooftops, glass rooftops and sloped rooftops can still currently result in broken limbs and death.

Turbo’s code solution for this is to automatically create floors beneath the player’s feet in these instances, and right now is working out how to universally apply this to edge-cases and make it look more visually appealing.
 
This week’s escape to victory from Anatolii. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. 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!

Welcome, welcome to our new PZ website. We like it very much – and there’s still some additional work on it to come too. So please feel free to chip in with any constructive feedback you might be able to supply, and we’ll bring it to the attention of the marvellous design people at Redwire.
 
Clearly once Build 41 is fully multiplayered up and released, we’ll also be draping screenshots and trailers showcasing the game’s newer look all over the site. For now, though, the normal Build 40 screens remain.
 
In terms of Build 41 blog-wise this week – it’s a bit of ‘work is in progress’ affair.
 
MP-wise Yuri is continuing to polish off the light ownership system and squashing bugs along the way – making sure that the server zombies behaviour match that of the client, and that the correct information is passed up and down to make sure they stay in sync.
 
(Nothing that can really translate to a cool video like in previous weeks though, sadly.)
 
IWBUMS BETA PATCH 41.40
 
There’s a lot of general polish and tweaks going into 41.40, some of which was listed last week, and on top of this we’ve also got RJ deep in the guts of the tutorial – making sure we have a variation of it that works with a gamepad.
 
While RJ is down in that particular dungeon though, we’ve also been making the most of the opportunity to smoothen out some of our more jarring issues in the overall animation system.
 
Martin recently noticed a way to move between our anims more seamlessly, and with less of an evident pause in certain cases.
 
To this end, Zac has added a flag that allows animation states to transition before the animation blending is complete. Previously, to start an attack after another, the second would have to wait until the previous had 100% blended out into the aiming pose before the logic would transition states and allow for another attack to be initiated.
Now, with the early out flag, the character’s arms can still be completing the last stage blend back while the code transitions back into the aiming state. This allows for another swing to be started that ‘crossfades’ into the end of the previous one.
 
Around the rest of the anims, this will allow us to avoid awkward pauses between actions, allow us to chain animations together much more fluidly, and generally make the animation system a lot slicker and give us finer control over timing of consecutive animations.
 
In particular it should solve the problems with the spear finishing moves causing the awkward long pauses that get some players killed. It won’t just be in combat either – among many other examples you can also expect slicker stumbling, falling, getting back up and vaulting over fences at speed.
 
However, the kicker to all this is that it’ll bubble up a lot of balance ramifications backstage for us to sort out – so in the coming week we’ll be doing a pass over the combat to see which areas have been made too easy and address each in kind.

To get an idea of the speed/slickness we’re talking about here, have a look at this Before and After in which Zac is wielding a hammer.
 
 
 
 
We won’t have a firmer idea of when the patch can be released to the IWBUMS beta until we’re a little deeper into the balancing discussed above and the tutorial polish is complete.
 
In terms of other stuff added to 41.40 added in the past week, though, you can find a few bullet-points below.
 
Corpses and Generators tidy-up – automatically filled graves after five corpses, more consistent rules around carrying corpses and gennies and general polish. Radial menu option to smash a vehicle window when outside the vehicle Fixed freezing and thawing times so they’re standardised, and not impacted by day length. Improved consistency of player lighting – which was bugging out when you swapped equipment previously. General fixes for UI flickering, crafting objects not being removed from hands after carpentry and a bunch of other stuff. Corpses and downed zombies now have shadows – which helps to ground them in the scene a little better than previously.  
 
This week’s graveside lament from 拉姆达lrh. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. 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!

Ello all. PZ Dev news time for progress on the ongoing IWBUMS public beta for version 41 of Project Zomboid. Let’s start where it matters most 41-wise.
41 BETA MP WORK
This week Yuri has been working on dynamic packet rate customization. The plan is for us to be able to tailor amount of traffic the zombies use based on the situation, the server load, the player count and various other factors.
So, for example, players on a co-op server will have much more bandwidth available for keeping track of  the zeds, as opposed to a server with 60 players that’s under strained which can then automatically pull back the number of updates and rely more on prediction and light ownership on clients.
Likewise with light ownership, the range at which this system kicks in can also be modified on the fly to deal with high traffic situations. Currently they are using 150 ms interval for target packets and 200 ms for info packets. In this case that means that they have ~50 Kbps(6-7 KBps) for ~250 zombies, which we’d say is about a third of the maximum budget per player to reliably run a 60 player server.
Meanwhile, Andrei has been laying the foundations and making plans for the ‘bot clients’ or, nudge nudge wink wink, ‘zombie clients’!
Bot clients will allow us to easily simulate 60 players running around the map within a test environment, something we’ve never managed to do before, and will allow us to finally be able to close in and circle the situations that seem to cause huge lag spikes and servers grinding to a halt, map streaming failing and all the rest.
PZ multiplayer previous to 41 has always performed fine with a few testers connected, but unfortunately as soon as so many players in the community join a public server (which we don’t have the ability to poke in the guts of to debug) then we always hit severe problems with server reliability and speed.
This will finally provide the ability to simulate these environments from a single PC. The bot clients are one of our ‘big things’ that needs to be done for multiplayer, along with the revamp to the zombies and the players net code to work with animations and AI prediction, so we are excited to see it starting to flower, though recognise it’s a big job for the Strike Force to push through.
41.40 patch content
There are two primary things we need wrapped before we can release 41.40 to the public IWBUMS beta – the first of which being the gamepad version of the new tutorial, alongside the addition of the new objective markers and general polish that’s been put in.
Another element that we want to get in and well tested / experimented with is a fix to a strange kink in the animation system that Martin spotted, and that today Zac has managed to fix.
This was a very slight pause that could appear after one animation ended and second began – most especially noticeable in things like spear combat. Zac has now gotten to the bottom of the issue, but the fix’s impact will be felt throughout movement and combat game-wide so we need to keep an eye on balance how it all plays before we push it out.
Other stuff that’s gone into the internal test build this week:
Watches, rings, bangles and chains. (Rings slightly hard to see, we know but should be great for RP and noticing a poor dead zed was married etc. Added ability to refill water dispensers. (We know! Thanks to Casey-Jo on Team Tanglewood for this) Many more drainable items now change their weight depending on how full they are. More ‘container type’ icons for the Loot window so it’s clearer what you’re putting where. Added the ability for mods to add new languages separate from the hard-coded language list – which also means we can have more versions of existing languages. We can now easily have a UK English translation alongside the current US English translation – an addition that has recently become a necessity what with the addition of the Fanny Pack (aka Bum Bag). Some fixes for the Challenge Maps from Xeonyx  – including more places for generators to spawn in Kingsmouth, and some fixes for non-cutaway walls in Studio. Also lots of general polish on both. Better fence cutaways from Fox on Team Tanglewood, and hopefully a fix for the strange looking ‘white single door outlines’ on garage doors etc brewing ready for next week. ROCKSTAR MARK’S MISSION
This is one of those ‘we’ll mention it now, but won’t mention it again for a while’ blog nods – but it’s something we’ve alluded to in the past so it’ll be good to pass it by you all.
There are two primary visual things in the game that we’re not super happy with these days – the first is fire (which Yuri has been working on), and the second is the way that we still use inventory icons to show items that have been left on the ground.
‘Rockstar’ Mark Wright (so-called as he *used* to work at Rockstar) has therefore been chewing through all our items and rendering them as 3D models that’ll one day be used to pretty up our environments, and your own object-strewn bases.
This probably won’t be in Build 41 as he has a lot to go through and we’ll need some engine jiggery-pokery to make it all work okay – but he’s done such a good job on the first batch we thought we’d share.
This week’s invasion of the naked dead from Jeka. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. 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!

Greetings from balmy blog-writing Britain. Let’s start with an update from the MP Strike Force, where Yuri and Andrei continue to do God’s work for the online cause.
41 BETA MP STUFF
As we reported last week, the Strike Force have been working on light ownership, allowing zombies interacting with players to be simulated on the clients of the players they are interacting with, to remove latency from zombie combat.
Work continues in this regard, with plenty of bug fixes and tweaks to the system.
Yuri has prepared a video showing it all in its current status with large crowds of zombies, to show how the system performs with around 180 zeds that he picks up along the way.  Stick around till the end for some lovely graphs showing the network traffic.
As you can see, at this point, there is very little if at all separating the zombie movement from single player, which is highly impressive given the zombie counts.
Next up, the guys are going to continue tuning the system, and look for a nice trade-off between smooth player tracking by client zombies, and getting as low traffic as possible by tuning the frequency of zombie target updates and light ownership ranges.
41 PATCH 41.40
We released Build 41 Public IWBUMS beta versions 41.38 and 41.39 this past Friday and Monday respectively, and already have a few things in the pot for 41.40 in a week or two’s time. Items of note are as follows:
Hotbar improvements, including the ability for items that aren’t held in the player’s hands to emit light – allowing for flashlights attached to the person, as a part of a helmet etc. ‘Clutter’ jewellery, both existing and new items, can now be worn. This includes necklaces, earrings and nose jewellry. Examples as seen below. A change from Turbo to the way that the radio and WordZed operates, to help out this awesome mod project that’s looking to record audible radio broadcasts from PZ’s various doomed media outlets. Deets on the mod in question can be found here.  A fix for the longstanding issue of not being able to directly grab heavy items like corpses and generators out of vehicles. OBJECTIVE MARKERS
In the development of the new tutorial we weren’t altogether satisfied with the toolset available to us in terms of directing the player around the map – and we’re more than aware that it’s something we’ll need to improve in future builds when more solo content is being built.
As such, Turbo went off to his rendering labs and came back with the following.
(It’s work in progress still, but we feel it looks pretty good already!)
Alongside this we are also looking to improve general item/container highlights, and RJ is currently tying them into the new tutorial as a part of its general polish for 41.40.
Plans are also afoot for a more involved and open secondary driving/skills based tutorial, which will also let us get more and more foundations like this in place for when we bring back Kate and Baldspot in the builds that lie beyond 41.
AND FINALLY CONGRATS TO…
We’re big fans of anyone and everyone who chooses to stream and youtube Project Zomboid, and will happily toot their horns upon request.
A horn that we’re giving a BIG unrequested toot to today, however, is Ambiguous Amphibian who recently hit the big 100k subs. Well done mate!
This week’s Silent Hill-scape from Harbinger. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. 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 blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

NEW
 
translationProblems.txt lists missing ItemName_xxx instead of the old DisplayName_xxx. Removed the true|false debug console spam. Added buttons to access the Attachment Editor, Chunk Debugger, and Vehicle Editor to the debug menu. Added DebugType.Mod for controlling the display of mod-related debug messages to the console. Updated latest Community Translations  
 
FIXES
 
Used Docker to create libjassimp64.so and libLighting64.so with a version of GCC that will not cause issues with some Linux setups Fixed the vehicle editor not selecting the correct vehicle in the scripts combobox. Fixed the tutorial breaking at the zoom in/out stage when not using double-sized textures. Fixed rendering error when the Bucket Hat is on the ground. Fixed a vehicle shader not compiling on some systems. Fixed GameTime.getMinutesStamp() having a resolution of 2 minutes instead of 1. Fixed weapon models not being updated after removing weapon parts (scopes, etc) when the weapon is attached to the player. Fixed the HuntingRifle (MSR788 Rifle) scope not being displayed. Fixed not detecting when multiple active mods use the same tile definition file numbers. These file numbers are specified by "tiledef=" in mod.info files. Fixed being able to pick up a propane barbeque without removing the propane tank. Fixed the animation editor not setting the Reverse checkbox when selecting animations. Fixed the animation for removing a magazine from a firearm. Fixed lua error when fishing and the last lure breaks. Fixed incorrect instruction in tutorial re: tall fence Fixed (hopefully) the last of the 'red dot on tiles' issues
 

Love the "lived in" look and the smoother target updates- the latter of which is definitely worth the wait if it means no more/much fewer invisibites.