agreubill

Very simple suggestion this time (as i've run a game with Nutrition active for change) :
 
Add a Nutritionist book in game that learn you the skill (as "The Herbalist" or "How to branch a generator" magazine).
 
Also add to the description of this item some sentence like the following line : "Learn to know food values and how to reach the 1500 cal./day* you need to stay in shape."
 
* : it take me some research to exhume the 1500 cal. info (actually from a msg in Steam forum) that allow me to keep my characater near a stable weight... So, yes, it matters to know that particular info IG to stop gain/loss of weight.
 
I'm still not sure you need to keep geting 1500 cal a day, but you indeed need to go for that amount at some point to reach the stable state on weight balance (in PZ world)...

Very simple suggestion this time (as i've run a game with Nutrition active for change) :
 
Add a Nutritionist book in game that learn you the skill (as "The Herbalist" or "How to branch a generator" magazine).
 
Also add to the description of this item some sentence like the following line : "Learn to know food values and how to reach the 1500 cal./day* you need to stay in shape."
 
* : it take me some research to exhume the 1500 cal. info (actually from a msg in Steam forum) that allow me to keep my characater near a stable weight... So, yes, it matters to know that particular info IG to stop gain/loss of weight.
 
I'm still not sure you need to keep geting 1500 cal a day, but you indeed need to go for that amount at some point to reach the stable state on weight balance (in PZ world)...

Bonjour à tous !
 
J'ai contacté John en personne, cela fait un an environ que nous sommes officiellement les traducteurs de la communauté de PZ moi et mon équipe car nous avons reçu la passation en main propres (si je puis dire) de la part de Teesee (que je remercie encore pour son énorme contribution) via le forum Project Zomboid France que je vous invite à rejoindre pour plus d'infos : http://projectzomboid.fr/news/news.php . Je ne vais pas souvent sur le forum Indie, ce pourquoi personne n'était trop au courant que nous travaillions déjà sur la trad du Build 41 depuis le tout début de sa sortie en béta IWBUMS ! J'en suis profondément désolée x)
Nous allons unir nos forces afin de vous proposer une traduction du tonnerre
 
PS : Je m'occupe également de la traduction FR de Hydrocraft qui subit actuellement énormément de changements du au build 41.
 
A bientôt cher survivants
 
Bien à vous, 
 
Xianah ~

Hey all, hope this finds you well.
 
Following on from the release of 41.54, and then its 41.55 patch last week, we are planning on a fairly imminent small 41.56 release to put to bed a few final issues with the sound mix – specifically the ‘cutting out’ issues that arise around busy moments when there’s a lot of zombies, rain and puddle footsteps.
 
This should be released early next week, and this is the fairly miniature current changelist,, after which we will be full steam ahead on a bigger and more features-led build.
 
Whether or not that will be the full Louisville release is still in the balance, we’ve got a few other smaller things brewing that are closer to being ready alongside further noises dropping into the mix. Alongside updates to various game systems we’ll have drinking sounds from different sources (glass bottle, plastic, cups etc), filling sounds for different containers and all the more individual weapon noises ready before the new map is – most likely.
 
Let’s get on with it though, as it’s an MP work update blog this time around – so here’s Yuri from the Strike Force checking in with some details on where they are all at.
MP WORK
“We’ve spent the past month focused on improving player combat with zombies and PVP.”
 
“A lot of things in the animation system have been fixed and polished in the way they work in MP. For example, during zed fights various glitches could occur due to the animation system having incorrect transitions, or not having states in then. This works fine in SP, but causes some issues when it comes to multiplayer.”
 
“A good example could be simply when a player attacks a zombie, and it leads a zed reaction that’s a hit or a fall. In SP, at this point, the zombie can’t receive a second hit, since it manages to finish the animation before the player can hit a second time.”
 
“In MP, this sort of situation can become possible – and, for example, getting secondary hit from another separate player at the moment of the fall suddenly leads to the teleportation of the zombie back to a standing position, and a second reaction to the blow.”
 
 
“Elsewhere we have seriously improved the synchronization of many visual things: so that’s necessary stuff like displaying player damage, bleeding characters, pools of blood on floors and blood stains on the walls etc. There’s also work been done on synchronising many and varied different player actions on different players’ screens.”
 
 
“The game is getting more and more smooth at the moment. We have really cut down on bugs related to teleportation and the desynchronization of player and zombie positions. Now things are increasingly polished on our smaller scale test server, we can move on to testing the servers with more testers, fake clients and MP clients with split-screens next month without fear that we’re seeing unfixed smaller issues exacerbated by the higher playercounts.”
 
“There’s clearly other issues we’ve been working on too – like making some car improvements in MP. We’ve had bugs like incorrect car wheel displays, and strange collisions with cars that aren’t moving that needed some work. There’s still various other issues with the car physics we would like to address during car collisions with other cars and with players.”
LOUISVILLE
Meanwhile, on a separate internal test beta, it’s been a super exciting time for our map team who have had a group of excitable recruits poring over their work and reporting all manner of blocked doorways, wonky rooftops and errant furniture throughout our new city extension.
 
Now, before we go any further another reminder that our version of Louisville is exactly that: it is not a direct recreation of the real thing in terms of locations or in size, but will have some familiar elements. Likewise skyscrapers are absent due to both our game’s height limit of eight storeys and gameplay sensibilities.
 
With all that said, by the scale of our current map it is huuuge and includes many and varied new locations and environments to explore and survive in. Going from house to house and building to building and checking everything in the main body of the city took a whole week with work divided between three people – and there was a lot of cooing and excitement going on as they did so.Here’s a quick teaser video of some of the locations that were visited:
 
 
Alongside the bugs being discovered and fixed there are many and various things that have to be done for Louisville before release – we need a new zombie heat map to spawn the zeds, we need new businesses and areas properly zoned, we need new loot distributions and as a little treat for ourselves we are also going to be making some new fun outfits and clothing items for the zombies and wardrobes of some of the new different sorts of buildings and districts you’ll come across.
 
One fly in the ointment will be that the existing lore, which we intend to stick with and develop in future, posits that Louisville is initially barred to survivors within the exclusion zone. We didn’t want to jam in a needless ‘not-developed-enough’ obstruction in front of such a hotly anticipated map expansion.As such, for the immediate future, our current thoughts are that we will instead be dropping in a few day’s worth of ‘parallel reality’ news reports that reflect an earlier infection surge in LV for those who spawn there, or who make the journey there from the existing map.
 
Those who enjoy the existing lore will also be able to explore various locations described within it too – and maybe even meet the zombies of some of the people you’ve watched or heard.
 
Finally in LV thoughts, the rest of the map is getting a lick of paint too – there’ll be a few new locations popping up, general prettiness improvements to wilderness and bodies of water and of course Ayrton’s lovely curves. Here’s a quick look at those in action.
 
FORAGING/SEARCHING

 
Finally this week, a quick update on the improvement to the currently rather static foraging mode we have in-game. For those not in the loop this is going to be a more active system that has you moving through areas in a sort of ‘search mode’ – that represents your character scouring and focussing on the floor then finding scavenged/foraged items and trash.
 
We have also now bound this system to help find newly super-small (since 41.54) placed 3D items like car keys, bullets and small items of food. It will also come into play indoors when searching for floorboard stashes flagged by loot maps, and various other future in-game instances.
 
This week we have also been experimenting with some visual effects that will highlight both when the mode is engaged, and how wide your search radius is dependent on your foraging level, light/weather conditions and your speed of movement.
 
Please take this video as a WIP! The system and the appearance of the circle is liable to be changed, receive polish etc.
 
 
We are also thinking about using various different applications of this ‘vision shader’ (variations of which can be seen in this earlier tech demo) to add new challenge/gameplay to traits, helmets and accessories that would have an impact on a character’s vision.
 
This week’s scenic zed nightmare from Yana. 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, we’re content locked on the 41.54 update to the public IWBUMS beta – but it needs a few items of fixing and polish before it’s out of the door.
 
Eris’ awesome new foraging system (as described below) needs some work in response to internal tester feedback, there’s various 3D items bugs, unwanted visual TV interference, and a strange item-wobble when you zoom in and out. Noiseworks bug fixes, level adjusting and various other sound issues are also ongoing.
 
Seeing as we’re concentrating on getting this out there’s not a huge amount of big ‘new’ stuff to discuss this week, beyond foraging, but there’s still a few things to cover that’ll make your life easier should you want to decorate your safehouse like this.
 

The ability to place and rotate 3D items from your inventory is a really fun new extra, while the items themselves are in future going to allow us to decorate scenes for starting characters etc to bring new levels of ‘mise-en-scène’ to PZ’s sometimes rather spartan gameplay areas.
 


This new feature, meanwhile, has also brought about its own new brigand of hilarious bugs – which are, we’re afraid, some of the things RJ and Rockstar Mark are quashing right now.
 
  And, finally on this matter, clearly the introduction of 3D items brings us a new MVP…
NU-FORAGING
Regular readers will know that we recently hired PZ modder Eris to work on the team, and that for her first trick she would be improving on our current rather static and UI-based foraging system. We wanted a more active experience and wider set of loot and rewards, and what she has currently integrated into the game is looking hugely positive and just what we believe was required.
 
Foraging is now an active mode that you switch on and off, and allows you to search areas to find items wherever you are on the PZ map. Your search is impacted by your skill level, weather conditions, your location and your movement speed – and loot changes depending on time of day and season.
 
Markers appear on your map showing items of note on the ground, which you must then approach to pick up. Forest paths will conjure up wild plants and firewood, sidewalks in towns will provide litter and lost items, farms might have rogue crops still growing in the fields…
Although it might not be a part of 41.54, one issue we have found with 3D items is that (clearly) small items like nails, berries etc are now far harder to see than when the game was using big, chunky inventory icons.
 
It’s therefore our intention to experiment with this new Foraging system to also make it a ‘look for small items on the floor’ mode – meaning that placed small items within the world will also be flagged by Eris’ cool new pop-ups.
 
Alternatively these small items could be given a white outline, which would be accessed from the same Foraging keypress. We’ll see what works best in testing.
 
Here’s a quick vid showing it all in action.
 
  As we mentioned before, we’re really knuckling down on polish of existing features in 41.54 at the moment rather than discussing/showing things that’ll likely appear in 41.55 or beyond – so apologies if this week’s blog is shorter than the last one.
 
41.54 will also contain the full Noiseworks PZ soundscape revamp, and reams of new narrative content in the form of Pat_Bren and Turbo’s new CD and VHS system – so it should be one that brings a lot to the Knox Event experience. We’ll let you know how the polish process is going on it over the next week or so.
    This week’s spooky set-up from koekto1000 over on Steam. 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! Big thanks to everyone playing, streaming and generally surviving these past two weeks!

And then, suddenly, fourteen days had rolled around once more…

41.51 IWBUMS BETA RELEASE
41.51 is pretty much cooked at this point, and the past few days we have been primarily addressing any potential incompatibilities on different / more elderly operating systems. We intend to release this early next week.
The latest changelist for 41.51 can be found here.

Some items of note:

As previously mentioned, 41.51 contains significant optimizations to our save game system. As such any saved games played in 41.50 will NOT be operational or loadable.
 
A separate Steam beta containing the previous 41.50 build will be provided so that you can continue and finish your current game.
Similarly, in a changelist as big as this some mods WILL become incompatible – especially those dealing with loot distribution.
 
We have kept the PZ Discord modding channels informed of the primary forthcoming change, but there will inevitably be a period of waiting before some of your favourite mods (and certainly mod packs) are fully operational again.
 
Again, if you enjoy playing modded PZ then the 41.50 beta will still be there for you to use in the meantime.
 
If you’re a modder who would like further information on what’s changing then please click through to this thread on our forum, where mapper extraordinaire TheCommander has also made a very handy forum post and easily understood infographic.
 
Please be patient with all the community’s modder crew while they find the time to update their/our beloved mods!

MP STRIKE FORCE
As discussed previously we are now updating on all things MP every month – for the reasoning behind that decision please click on through.
And so, here’s a run-down of what Yuri and Andrei have been up to over the past few weeks, followed up by a nice little vid that Yuri made for us.
First of all, we added FPS data to our statistics. Servers will now collect FPS data from each client and collect it their statistical data. Seeing as the introduction of local ownership may lead to performance degradation on clients, knowing client FPS will help us to improve performance and as such we can use this tool in load testing. We then spent some time investigating zombie desync. We noticed that our zeds were pausing after they changed ownership between clients. As such we’ve made a fresh implementation of how zombie behaviour syncs. Right now the zombies will continue moving to the target and restore their state on a new client after changing ownership. What’s currently in the build is an initial implementation – we’re going to test how it works before developing it further. We implemented ‘get up’ sync for zombies. This bug could lead to zombies that were laying down on one client, but standing upright on another. We synced zombie falling. Zombies in local ownership now calculate the position and rotation of their fall point, and the client sends this information in the hitCharacter packet. Now all clients will show the same falling anim, and desync where zeds dropped in different places for different places is avoided. This issue also led to players seeming to finish off invisible zombies while you were playing. We had a long think about how we can improve a fight between a zombie and more than one player. A primary issue was how a zombie should react to hits from other players, as often ownership change can lead to desync. We had the idea that zombies should react to hits from their target player, but hits from other players would only lead to splashes of blood and a decrease of their health without a change in ownership. We’ve made an initial implementation of this, but it doesn’t seem to be a full solution yet – as such we will debug it, and potentially think of ways to improve or replace the system. We’ve spent some time updating our tools, specifically the fake clients we use to simulate a full and active server. Now clients can process zombie AI, we needed to simulate the same in our fake clients. This will help no end in our future testing and edge-case scenario simulation.  
 
NOISEWORKS
Tomorrow (barring minor fixes) is the last day we have booked in for work with Noiseworks on their PZ Sound Revolution – although we are also making plans for a ‘Round 2’ to further improve the PZ soundscape, put some more work into the implementation of the procedural music system and respond to the feedback of the PZ community once it’s been released out into the wild.
 
As such the Noiseworks build shouldn’t be *too* far behind the release of 41.51 into the public IWBUMS beta.
 
The primary final polish that’s been put into Noiseworks over the past week or so has been on vehicles, music selection and general mix balance and bug fixing. Vehicles, especially, needed a little more love as gear changes / RPM and how the new sounds interacted with the existing PZ framework needed a fair bit of love.
 
The vehicles are now 10x better than the angry lawnmowers currently in Build 41, though we intend to come back to them in Noiseworks Round 2 when we have more time to make some code-side improvements to help them out.
 
Here’s a quick video of what they’re sounding like at the moment.
 
(Please note there will be improvements to zombie collision thuds, car door and trunk noises before we release!)
 
 
Something else we intend to release with the Noiseworks build are the 3D items that Rockstar Mark and RJ have been working with, but that’s not 100% at the moment as they’re working out the best ways to scale/rotate items in their export process. This is the way that a box of jars currently appears in-game, which isn’t… ideal?
 

  VCRS
We want to shake up the current ‘spend the first week watching TV’ meta, while also introducing some new and typically 90s loot, and as such Turbo has been working on the PZ entertainment systems.
 
This will be a simplified media playability version of the Devices branch that Turbo has had as a side project for a long time now, and will include retail CDs and VHS tapes – with common, rare and exceptional spawn changes depending on the recording. Clearly, some of these will also be the shows shown on the television with XP and skill bonuses. There will also be unique home VHS tapes, which will either be shows recorded by the people of the area or camcorder recordings, that have a 1 in 5 chance to attempt to spawn instead of a blank tapes.
Clearly all this will be textual, just as the current TV and radio channels are, but we hope it’ll be a nice way of adding some more flavour to the world. There will be lots of new movies, TV shows and general new writing content.
 
The ability to record material will not be in the build however, and will have to wait until Turbo’s fully fledged Devices side project (which includes computers and security systems) comes to fruition.
 
Here’s a quick video of its current implementation, along with the ways that recordings can impact on your player’s skills and moodles if we so choose.
 
PLEASE NOTE this won’t be how it ends up in the game proper. Being terrified by a horror movie to such an extent that it would leave you vulnerable to the zeds probably wouldn’t be much fun – so please consider WIP!
 

LOUISVILLE
Work on our version of Louisville continues, which as discussed in previous blogs is now visible in the mid-distance.
 
This week we won’t be showing any new chunks of the map, as our map team continue to be quite protective of their giant sprawling baby, but maybe we can have a quick look at some of the new brands and locations that the more urban environment will bring.
 

  This week’s featured image from Rexiem. 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!

Hate d'avoir le multi pour relancer le jeu !!! Bon courage et j'espère que ca arrivera bientôt 

[DISCLAIMER] I didn't play with Hydrocraft (far way too many things in it for my taste), so some ideas may be alrdy existing in this mod.[/DISCLAIMER]
 
Some suggestions to help this skill to get more lüv. Frankly, i'm not sure that any of these suggestions isn't more of bug report or highlighting some broken/unfinished business. If that's the case, fixes could sincerely be welcomed and appreciated  
 
1) Experience on ALL recipes tied to Electricity (at least in the craft menu)
So far, only dismantle (mainly radio, talkie, TV and some others) and making radio/talkie give exp.
 
Noise maker don't ; Remote (trigger and controler) don't ; Timer don't ; creating a handmade battery support for lamp don't.
 
It's pretty disappointing and sad...
 
Patch 40+ => Many electicals things could now be dismantle now and really help your skill up. Not sure on the creation side, but it's now far more decent
 
2) Slighty up the loot ratio of TV remote & Home Alarm
TV Remote are really too rare*. Unfortunatelly, this is a key component for a part of recipes (all the remote controlers).
 
Patch 39.67.5 => Increased the spawn rate of remote control. (Ty Devs) ; still need to play on that patch to see the difference.
 
Home alarm (the item, not the noise event) can't be found anywere. I'm still not sure if it's implemented/actually in game or not (never found one...), but it could be really good to make them more noticeable in houses where they're supposed to be (said : houses with alarm). Unfortunately, this is a key component for motion sensors (which you still can find time to time...).
 
3a) Directly get battery from dismantled Radio/Talkie.
So far, we had to put them in the world, click them and manually remove the battery OR equip them in main hand and manually remove the battery... It's tedious.
And basically, that also say the battery just disappeared when you dismantle the damn object.
 
Solved since 38.26 IWBUMS. (Ty devs)
 
3b) Give us a "remove battery" for radio/talkie in inventory
Basicaly, same stuff and line of command as we actually have for flashlight. Right click on radio/talkie, to get the command line "remove battery 1 / All".
 
Solved since 38.26 IWBUMS. (Ty devs)
 
4) Electrician profession
Mention in the occupation description (at character creation), it also give you most of the electrical recipes.
 
5) Additionnal item
Add item "Wiring tools" in the game
 
6) Alternative connection to house powergrid
Allow us to connect a moved lampost/lamp to a house powergrid
 
Recipe
=> Need Wiring tools & Screwdriver [Equiped in main and secondary hands]
+ electric_wire (2 units) / Aluminium (2 units) / Electronic Scrap (1 unit) / Adhesive tape OR Glue (1 unit)
 
Electricity Lvl Required
5 (to be in range with the Elec lvl required for batconnector).
 
New connected lamps will be lighted if/when the house is powered (before electricity  shutdown and in a house powered by a generator).
 
It's an alternate method (for BatteryConnector thing) to bring light to your safehouse. But you can't light it off (but see point 8 below).
 
7) New Take/Place/Rotate option
 
Allows us to Take Switch (using screwdriver) in houses and get "Switch" item (Base.Switch) from it.
Electricy lvl 1-2 (?) maybe required.

8) Additionnal recipe
Allows us to connect "Switch" to a (eventually moved) lamp-post.
 
Recipe
=> Need Wiring tools + Screwdriver [Equiped in main and secondary hands]
+ Electric_wire (1 unit) + Aluminium (1 unit) + Electric_Scrap (1 unit) / Adhesive tape OR Glue (1 unit)
 
Electricity Lvl Required
4
 
This will basically allows the Context_Command Light on/off for the said lamppost.
 
10) Add little Electricity XP when you repair a generator (suggested by JayM)
 
11) Fix the Screwdriver priority
Small QoL modification ;
 
Build 39.XX => Game still take a new Screwdriver (if one is available) in your backpack when you disassemble/assemble something tied to Elec.
 
12a) Ability to reload Battery (not car's one)
 12b) Ability to craft a hand-made battery reloader (i'm not Electrician myself, so it's maybe not really possible to do that). Elec. lvl required ofc.
 
13) Option to Attach a noise-maker (using Duct Tape) to other launched bombs (Pire, Incendiary, etc.) ; i undrstd this feel very L4D, but why not ?
 
14) Recipe to craft a hand-made Car's Battery reloader (still not Electrician myself, so it's maybe not really possible to do that). Elec. lvl required ofc.
 
15) Up the loot ratio of Watches
For a game set in 1993, the loot ratio of watches is really toooo low.
 
16) Ability to attach A remote Trigger (using duct-tape, as usual) to a lamp/lamp post/Lamp on pillar to be able to light it on/off from range (the said lamp must be connected to some source of power [ie : power grid (usual or generator's one) or some connected Battery) with the usual adequate remote controler (V1 to V3).
 
17a) Ability/Recipe to make a Timer V2 (using watches or cloak) and "program" it to be active from Time A to Time B (in Hour/Min). Elec lvl required ofc.
17b) Ability to attach said Timer V2 (using duct-tape, as usual) to a lamp/lamp post/Lamp on pillar. Said Lamp will be lighted from Time A to Time B (as long as it have access to power).
17c) Same could occur with Fridge.
 
=> Good way to manage your power (limited) supply.

Maybe you also could make bench presses and treadmills usable? They're already in the game.

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!

First, an MP update from the Strike Force.
Andrei and Yuri have been working on the client ownership of zombies this week. For those unaware this is a system that’s designed to remove all latency from zombies chasing the player.
Gameplay on current Build 40 servers currently has two big problems:
1) On a populated server, if players are all separate from each other in the world, the server needs to keep track of sometimes potentially thousands of full AI zombies. This can get extremely taxing on the server.
2) Compounded by the first problem, zombie AI has to then be transmitted to the clients to show the zombie positions. Zombie movement and bites are done on the server and thus only travel to the clients with latency, meaning clients are viewing zombies slightly in the past and thus, especially if the server gets clogged or data packets are lost on the way to the client being chased, they could see an unfair death due to a lag spike.
The system being worked on now means that the server determines ownership for each zombie. The server is owner for zombies if the zombies are standing or idly walking, which means it will keep track of their movement and position using its own AI routines.
With Yuri and Andrei’s latest work, the client now has ownership transferred to it under certain circumstances and becomes the owner for zombies.
The server will eventually check to make sure the zombies are behaving normally to avoid cheats, but otherwise zombies that are chasing or attacking players will be processed entirely on the client of whom is being chased, and transmitted back to the server.
Eventually the decision will be made whether to process zombies independently on all clients, to maintain smooth movement in critical situations, or whether a chasing zombie is only processed on the client its chasing and not on other clients witnessing that. This is a decision for another day.
In process of developing this feature, Yuri and Andrei have coded it so if the zombie lunge to player or attack player, the client they are attacking will take ownership of the zombie. 
Notice the triangle under some zombies. This is to show that the client is owner of this zombie, and thus all AI is being carried out on the client – thus happening without any latency whatsoever. Otherwise, the server is owner of the zombie.
You can see that the server is owner for a zombie if said zombie is far from the player. The client becomes the owner of the zombie when the zombie comes close, before reverting again when the player runs away.
In this video you can also see that zombies are often updating their targets. This is an adjustment of the target using “ZombieUpdateTarget” packet. The video last week, while a huge improvement on zombie movement than b40 multiplayer, was updating the target point a zombie runs to extremely infrequently, which resulted in sudden turns instead of the smooth player tracking players are used to.
Balancing may still be needed to find a sweet spot between traffic and precision. We’ll see how it goes!
There’s still plenty of work on the table for the MP Strike Force, but week on week hopefully everyone can see the improvement, and level of quality we are aiming for, with the new multiplayer architecture.
IWBUMS BETA 41.38 IMMINENT
The 41.38 patch is pretty much ready to go, our apologies for it not being earlier in the week but new tutorial glitches kept on jumping out of the woodwork. It’s the end of the Euro working day now though, and we’d like folks to be on-hand for any hotfixing that needs to be done – as it’s a patch with a lot of content that’s built up over the month. So we’ll be putting it out as soon as we’re able and at our keyboards, basically.
The TLDR is that it contains a refreshed and expanded tutorial, a reloading radial menu, briefcases, flip-flops, fanny packs, blood build-up on vehicles, tweaked female models, new hairstyles, a fill-all option, improved community translation support, crawler improvements and about a bazillion fixes fresh from the EasyPickins furnaces.
You’ll also notice that homes appear a lot more ‘lived in’ from some lovely little additions from Mash. Hope you enjoy it when we flip the switch, and as ever report any bugs or issues on the forums and we’ll try to get everything fixed up for you ASAP.
This week’s last stand from Battlemints. 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!

Hello everyone.
In the coming week Yuri and Andrei will explore the ‘light ownership’ of zombies on clients that we discussed in the last blog. The intention for this is to create zero latency for any nearby zombies directly chasing or attacking the player.
Work over the past seven days, meanwhile, has been a continuation on making sure that zombie movement transmission is as smooth as possible on clients – even with high levels of latency and extremely sparing transmission of positions. The endgame of all this being to minimize network traffic with hordes.
In Build 40 and earlier, when zombies move the server calculates their movement via the same AI routines the single-player uses. All positions, animation frames, angles etc are transmitted to clients that are in range of that zombie. Zombies only ever move on the server, so their movement is always inherently at a lower framerate than in SP.
On top of this, due to the latency and ping between server and client, by the time that information is received on a client it’s always out of date. The zombie will always be further along its path depending on the delay in the packet, what you (the client) see is inherently a representation of the past.
Finally, and most importantly when dealing with the zombie menace, if any lag occurs in causing lost packets or delays – then that has no bearing on the zombie’s AI. A bite can occur on the server without a single positional update ever reaching the client being bitten.
So let’s look at how the MP Strike Force have been looking to remedy this. In the following video the blue circles represent the zombies position on the server,while the green line and circle represent the zombies’ current target for movement.
(Please ignore some animation oddities when they transition from standing to chasing at the moment)
Look at the rarity of movement of the blue circles (especially on zombies far away from the player) – and also the inaccuracy as to where the client zombies are appearing. This shows that zombies on clients have a ton more agency to decide themselves how to move, instead of relying purely on information passed down to them by the server.
Zombies far from the player now have a second or more between updates from the server, instead of updates every server tick – which would have been something like 15 times every second. Despite this, zeds are able to move around convincingly using a combination of prediction, interpolation and extrapolation and leveraging the client zombie AI states for moving.
The end result of all this should be, for the most part, smooth zombie movement even in hordes and with high pings or server stress.
Will it be perfect? Well, clearly the differences between the blue circles and the zombies position shows that they are often in inaccurate places on the map – you can see them try to correct themselves as player positions get transmitted after delays and inform them that their predictive client-side shambling has been in the wrong direction. This is something that Yuri and Andrei will continue to improve upon, however ultimately these inconsistencies shouldn’t matter too much.
Once client ownership over zombies is in-place it will only be zombies at a distance and those not interacting with players on a certain client that would have these inconsistencies or deviations from their true server position. In these cases having believable approximate behaviour of the zombies that reasonably mirrors their actions will suffice. Having increased visual fidelity of their movement at an extremely low cost of network traffic, is much more important than extreme accuracy of position and direction of zeds that aren’t directly in harm’s way or chasing your own particular survivor.
Ownership of zombies that are of relevance to the player at hand will be transferred – so the client impacted by the zombie in gameplay terms will have zero latency authority over the zombies actions. This will mean then that their combat should hopefully be identical to that of the single player experience. This then, is one of our key next milestones.
There will undoubtedly be additional challenges ahead. For example, we have to make combat effective when attacking a zombie that’s chasing a friend.
That zombie will be at far higher risk of suffering from latency, and will be using client side prediction and cover-ups based on delayed information. Likewise, there’s the issue of making sure a remote player attacking a zombie that’s chasing you look believable with these similar latency issues.
However, whatever issues we face, even we find solutions that aren’t 100% perfect the end result will be VASTLY preferable to our current MP issues and frailties. The war on lag bites will hopefully have been won, and we will have seen the end of running through hordes of zombies that pause in sync every second as the server struggles to keep up.
NEXT IWBUMS BETA PATCH
We’re on track for a release for the next patch early next week, as we currently have a completed tutorial that industrious internal testers are doing their utmost to break – after which RJ cleans up their mess.
Other interesting nuggets that have gone into the patch this week include:
Polished English language UI text from a new starring role from community member Faalagorn and Nasko. Ability to wash blood from cars. ‘Fill all’ option when filling up bottles of water etc. Better cutaway behaviour with fences A new ‘reloading’ radial menu Fannypacks and flip-flops FINALLY AND IMPORTANTLY
It feels strange for the development blog of a zombie survival game to pass comment on the news of the day, but due to unfolding events it becomes imperative to underline:
Black lives matter.
We hope that in its own small way our game and community can, and will, reflect this basic fact and right.
 
This week’s rogue katana from Debugging Sucks. 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!

"Falling" in this instance is used as an intransitive verb, and makes sense if they intend it to imply falling in the most general sense.
 
Your comment makes sense if you intend it to imply yo mama ain't teach you no manners.

Oh dude, you’re not one to talk. How about just asking for clarification politely instead of turning it into an insult?
 
It means zombies that are being knocked down to the ground by the player.

The vast majority ARE finding it enjoyable and playable though. Almost every review, or comment about zomboid outside this community is 'you need to play 41 it makes the game 10x better' type stuff, I appreciate people in this thread's perspective but if we tightened up the controls to 40 level, we'd end up with horde killing and the game being too easy (as well as kill off the visual improvement the animations bring), which would make the game worse for orders of magnitude more people than are finding issue in this thread. We've already tightened up the controls before and during IWBUMs as far as its humanly possible to without reverting the animation system, to the point that it seems to hit the spot for the vast majority of people, but we can't go further than this without hurting the game severely in other ways for what is a minority of people who still take issue with the responsiveness
 
(responsiveness I should point out that must be like 5-6x faster response time to input than some AAA stuff like RDR2, we've already squeezed as much out as possible and compared to us RDR2 is the one where a character moves like driving a boat)
 
A lot of this stuff has been suggested without the knowledge that we HAD this stuff in testing, and purposefully removed or nerfed it. The 'Should be able to walk backward faster' thing is fair enough in principal to assume we need to add. But we literally had 100% unrestricted strafing during combat, and that seemed great until I realised I could kill 100-200 zombies with zero effort purely by holding backward and hammering LMB. Just doing that you could disperse about 200 zombies, the only consideration and risk being looking around every so often to make sure you don't back into a zombie. That's not a combat system, that's broken and would have been an exploit everyone used, people would be surviving years and have zero fear of zombies, combat would be boring and broken, and so we added the slow down during swing purposefully to fix that. This applies to most of the suggestions in here, it's the way it is for a reason after the months of testing the game has had prior to these posts, and for the majority it seems to be in a good place minus a few bugs.

Hello all, here’s a quick dev round-up from TIS headquarters.
IWBUMS BETA 41.30
We’ve currently got the next patch being tested on an internal branch, and with a fair wind it should be released early next week. It contains the following.
A fix that should resolve intel GPU crashes we’ve been seeing since the zoom branch was merged into IWBUMS Zoom improvements that provide a clearer image on different levels of zoomed-in and zoomed-out, as well as various fixes to seams and lighting Spiffo’s Secret Special Sauce. Some small but extremely meaningful changes and tweaks to general gameplay that we’re keeping quiet on. Primarily due to our love for the dramatic, and an undercurrent of sadism. New and polished animations for: washing yourself, examining vehicles, adding/removing gas, installing and uninstalling parts/tires, multi-stage building and more. A cursor to help in blood clean-up duties. Cutaway improvements from Team Tanglewood, including a timer to stop cutaways and other visibility/hiding effects flickering. Fixes for Last Stand, foraging, fishing lines always breaking, vehicle headlights, stuck zombies, swimming pools with shorelines and (finally) Fox got to the bottom of our famous too-boring sandwiches. And there was much rejoicing. Also: other stuff. Improved body temperature stuff from Turbo. We also intend to get some stealth polish/balance in, but that’s dependent on making sure that Spiffo’s Special Secret Sauce has been accurately deployed.
MP
For discussion and explanation of current 41 IWBUMS beta MP work please check out last week’s blog.
As discussed though, Bitbaboon Mark is currently prepping the code for the implementation of a true synchronized clock to make all our future MP endeavours go a lot more smoothly. Zac, meanwhile, is laying down his plans for decoupling the animation deferred movement so that it can work in reverse – where movement can also translate to appropriate animations, instead of animations driving movement.
Once this is done, no matter how a character moves due to client interpolation and approximation, we’ll hopefully have appropriate animations with minimal foot sliding to account for it. These tasks will then lead to us hooking the animations in wholesale, and we’ll be rolling full speed on the track to full MP compatibility.
If you want to play Build 41 SP and want to switch between it and 40’s MP functionalities, by the way, then SeskaRotan’s guide is extremely helpful.
FIRE
Here’s the latest from the Yuri fire department – as ever with the usual WIP warnings. This shows camp fires of different sizes with different amount of fuel, an improved molotov effect and some early examples of flaming zombies.
Please note a) we know we need to improve the appearance/physics of thrown objects, b) we know more body parts of the zeds need to be on fire, c) we intend to improve the burning tiles so they have edge blending – they look very square at the moment.
GOODBYE CONNALL
In more bittersweet news one of our devs, Connall, who anyone involved in community translations will know very well, has had a too-good-to-pass-up opportunity down in that there London and will be moving on to pastures new at the end of February.
He’s not publicly said where he’s heading, but we know and it’s cool as all hell – and while we’re sad to see him go, we’re extremely proud that someone who has been an integral part of the Zomboid story, from literally being a young lad to having a manly goatee, has gone on to do such cool things. We were there for his first legal drink, and now he’s heading off to the big city to seek his fortune!
In his own words on twitter (https://twitter.com/ConnallTheCoble/status/1227604245832179712😞

“Hey, I will be leaving TIS at theend of February. I’ll still be around in the community and also in the translators section of Discord for the time being. Don’t worry, I’m leaving on great terms, It’s just I have an opportunity in London I can’t ignore.
I am immensely grateful for my time working for The Indie Stone. It’s been a blast and I owe those folks so much. I been a part of this community for just under 10 years now, I got Project Zomboid when I was 15 and I’m almost 24 now!
I have been a player, community member, wiki contributor, wiki administrator, forum moderator, administrator, website developer, tracker developer and programmer. I have met and been hosted by community members in their homes!”
Having good localization and community translations are really what keeps Zomboid a popular game the world over, it’s an often overlooked and undervalued part of game development.
We want to thank everyone in the community for their efforts, as well as of course Connall for organizing and facilitating all our translators getting all those lovely foreign words into our little game! And of course all the other ways he’s contributed over the years.
On the up side, as Connall says, he’ll still be around. No one is ever really gone (unless they get a bite, of course) and he’ll still be around to help and be a part of the community when his new life allows. We wish him all the luck down on that there London gravy train! ❤️
Today’s featured image is probably one of the best we’ve ever had. What an amazing screenshot Tughril! 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!

Hey everyone! First off, for various reasons we’ve decided we won’t be doing an organized stream this week. We know this may be disappointing to some, but comes for several good reasons – not least because a now days-long internet outage at one of our dev locations.
(And, not ideally: the one hosting the build machine… which has made it more difficult to quickly get builds to internal testers this week. Though it hasn’t impeded development in any other way, thankfully).
Since we feel we’re very much on the cusp of the 41 IWBUMS too though, we don’t want to overshare and for everyone to get too familiar with the build before it goes live, and streams themselves while extremely useful to us and exciting to those waiting can get in the way of development and add an extra stress to the team on top of all the existing scrub, fix and polish.
INITIAL IWBUMS CONTENT
There’s now a complete feature and balance lock on what will make it into IWBUMs, and what will drop in later on during the public beta process.
As we’ve discussed before: this first build will be completely SP only, and MP support will be turned on during testing while we Community Megatest some more more robust multiplayer support with less rubber banding and stalling.
Unfortunately the high res zoom stuff didn’t make the IWBUMS cut-off, there were few too many remaining issues still meaning it’d be safer to drop in at a later date once IWBUMs releases.
Other things like split-screen, sprinter zeds, the tutorial, some challenges and various other elements outside the main game will also be disabled or diminished – all of which will need work to bring them up to date with the new animation system and systems surrounding it during the beta.
Likewise Yuri’s new fire system (currently getting various new VFX effects created for them by a specialist in Canada) will also drop in during the pubic IWBUMs beta period.
ZOOM
Regarding the aforementioned high-res zoom system, shown off notably toward the end of the DrunkOnLife stream, we’ve seen some confusion as to how this will impact performance. Despite the fact it is ostensibly called ‘high-res’, and improves the clarity of characters at full zoom, we actually seen evidence that this will lighten the rendering load a great deal, especially when zoomed out significantly.
The new zoom system gets rid of the highly inefficient FBO supersampling that was used for zooming out (often rendering at 4k resolutions on 1080p resolutions) and instead simply scales all the textures it draws on the 1080 viewport.
This causes various artifacts and issues, however, seams between the tiles when zoomed and such – which is the thing we wanted to fix before IWBUMS but just didn’t have enough time.  Once these are sorted, the only visual ‘side effect’ will be the higher resolution models.
We will also look into ‘faking’ low res rendering via shaders, for those who have an issue with characters being higher res than the environment, but we anticipate the majority will enjoy the extra character detail. Initial reactions to it have been very favourable.
ZED ROTTING
Meanwhile, while all this is kicking off, Mash has been looking into improving the detail across character models. At first we looked into doubling the resolution of the textures to provide more fine detail, but as it transpired even on high res max zoom, this extra detail would be lost –general improvements however have still been made.
One key thing she’s been working on is improving the zombie decomposition, and providing extra visible stages for decomposition over time.Here is one of the zombie skins, and the first three (WIP) states of decomposition:
Obviously these too will drop in during IWBUMs, but along with additional ‘dead rotting juices’ overlays for clothing alongside holes and desaturation, we hope to make zombies progression as they decompose a lot more interesting and gross – especially in later builds when players boot up games and scenarios that occur later in the PZ timeline.
MOVEMENT
There’s been a lot of balancing and discussion in response to the streams and tester feedback over the past week, trying to get the last kinks worked out of the system. Big things include finally nailing a thorny issue we’ve had with the character taking a small step toward a zombie when attempting to quickly run in the opposite direction.
This was responsible for several streamer deaths over past weeks, and in the words of the anonymous tester whom has been very concerned about these issues for weeks now: “Reaction to control is excellent, and the character’s turns are delicious.” – which was music to our ears after weeks of concern about tightening up the character movement.
Other areas we’ve been tightening up are knife attacks, making sure that stomps and floor swings never seem unfair in the hit box detection, and so many others that have led to rather impassioned discussions and various tests behind the scenes.
MAC VERSION
We were very relieved to see that the Mac build, something we expected to be on fire, seemed to work fine for the most part. However,there were a few issues related to the character shader system making the character look rather odd with some clothing combinations. Investigations are ongoing.
NEW SPIFFOS
New Rimworld-esque game-style options mean new Spiffos: huzzah! Here he is in all his glory.
This week’s image from an excited Frenchman again. 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!

The public ‘I Will Back Up My Save’ beta for the long-awaited Build 41 is now open for testing by the Project Zomboid community.
HOW?
The IWBUMS beta is accessible to anyone who plays Project Zomboid. Right click Project Zomboid in your Steam library and hit “Properties”. Then, navigate to the betas tab and select the “iwillbackupmysave” branch from the dropdown menu.

Those who test IWBUMS beta builds must be aware that what they’re playing is a work in progress.
If you're having problems with IWBUMS, it is advised that you try verifying the steam cache, and if that doesn't work, completely uninstall and reinstall the game (while also deleting or renaming the installation folder as well as your userfolder in C:\Users\YourUsername\Zomboid). Steam is awkward at times
The beta is put out for public consumption for player feedback and bug reports. Please direct gameplay feedback to our forum beta release thread, and bugs to this section of our forums.
For further details on what IWBUMS testing entails, please check here.
WHAT?
Build 41 is the most fundamental and wide-ranging update that Project Zomboid has ever had. We intend it to be a stable foundation for us to build on for many years ahead. For this reason too,however, we anticipate a fairly long public beta while all the various issues presented to us by community testers are spotlit and remedied.
Some key features, primarily MP, are initially disabled in the IWBUMS beta build – and will be turned on during the testing process.
Build 41 currently contains:
New gameplay styles: Builder, Brawler and Survivor More deadly ‘Survivor’ (Survival) gameplay balance – player can be dragged down by horde and feasted upon etc. New survivor abilities: sitting, sneaking, sprinting, jogging, racking, reloading, climbing, fence-jumping, collapsing and much much more. New combat, new weapons, new difficulty balance. New character creation – many, many different new clothing options both on spawn and discoverable in the world as loot or on zombies. New zombie behaviour: feasting on recent corpses, lolling against walls, falling over fences etc. Blood system that progressively bloodies bodies and clothing of survivors and zombies New injury system – movement and combat visibly hampered when injured. Lacerations now possible, an injury state that lies between bites and scratches. Improved gunplay: green/red aiming outline, new guns, improved racking and reloading, increased gun loot spawn. Zombie Death Scenes – zombies discovered in the situations in which people died. Prayer meetings, sports-viewing parties, survivor zeds wearing backpacks etc. Situational zombie type/clothing and inventories – cop zeds in police station, firemen zeds in burnt buildings, Chef zeds in restaurant kitchens, bride and groom zeds at a wedding ceremony in church etc. Clothing protection: different clothing provides different levels of protection from zombie attacks. Visibly ripped and damaged clothing. New Sims-style cutaway vision system. Vehicle handling improvements, resizing and appearance tweaks. Updated, remastered and improved Kentucky-themed soundtrack. Original music still in rotation, and also accessible through game options. New SFX: weaponry, zombie moans etc. New water visuals – including visible flow direction. New puddle system during heavy rain. Broken glass and related injuries. Garage doors may be opened / closed and shake when hit. New Challenge maps: Film Set and Kingsmouth Vacation Island 3D Store Mannequins – can be dressed however you like Working washing machines and driers Server-side saving: MP save system now in a server-side database. Offline SP-side, also means no more lost cars via irl power outages. New game cursor New level-up sound, and tweaked levelling system. Faint isometric aiming cursor that shows where you’re aiming in iso space. New loot balance and loot balance system: houses and stores now have loot in the containers you would expect from real life – and not in a jumble. Two tiers of loot priority – allowing for more realistic ‘filler’ loot amidst the more valuable gameplay items. Many, many general fixes including remedies for: floating cars, farming issues, inaudible house alarms, erosion shrubs blocking vehicles, desensitized survivors being panicked by crawlers and much more. VISIBLE BACKPACKS! Build 41 and is the first (biggest) step in our overall plan to bring more life, variety and activity to the Knox Event. From this build onwards we will be adding in (and improving) our existing AI work layer-by-layer.
Build 42, for example, will use the power of the Build 41 animations build to introduce animals and wildlife.
We will also be releasing AnimZed, our animation tool, to the community during the IWBUMS beta process – meaning that modders will receive a huge boost in what they can create within PZ.
WHAT NEXT?
During the IWBUMS beta process for Build 41 the following features will be re-enabled and/or improved.
Multiplayer – alongside significant MP Networking improvements Improved visual fidelity of survivor character and zombies Further optimization to improve performance on both low and high end systems. Sprinter Zeds Fire visuals Tutorial Zombie skin appearance/decay Ability to repair ripped clothing WHAT ELSE?
Due to the extent of engine and gameplay changes in Build 41, existing savegames will NOT be compatible.
At the time of the full build release, for those wishing to continue playing on old saves, a Steam beta branch of the current Build 40 will be available – and will continue to be available at all times.
This will be known as ‘PZ Classic’, and will also allow people to continue to play with their favourite mods until such a time as they are updated.
Click here for a sneak vision into the future beyond build 41!

 

Happy Thursday all. First things first:
PROJECT ZOMBOID 40% OFF, NOW AND ALL WEEKEND. TELL YOUR FRIENDS. ALL YOUR FRIENDS. Etc. Etc.
(Sorry about all this.) 
So anyway, it’s been a week of fixing stuff on the animations build generally this week – and usually we’d be doing a ‘sorry, dull blog today’ blog.
HOWEVER some of you might find the deeper elements of the animations system interesting, and we’re also secretly hoping that a fair few of you will be interested in digging into the dev/modding tool yourselves once AnimZed is released alongside Build 41.
Sooooo… Zac has kindly written something up for us that’s a bit more technical than we usually talk about – but thankfully RJ has also provided a quick vid of something fun he’s implementing before we get into the nitty-gritty.
 
LIMPIN’
What you can see in the vid below is our first pass on the various animations that can impact on your walking and running – all of which will get some balance love before any test release.
First off the video you see a scratch cause a light limp – and a limping run. Burns will also have the same impact, alongside cuts – a new injury type that’s somewhere between our existing scratch and deep wound.
After this: a deep wound that triggers heavy walk limps. You can still try to run, but it’ll be slow – on a par with the walk speed with a light limp. Finally in the vid: a fracture. This is currently a heavy limp, but it will forbid a run. This will also be the case if you have glass shards, bad burns or a leg bite.
Okay, with that all explained: here comes the science.
Over to you Zac.
THE ANIM PROBLEM
The Animation system needed a big quality pass. Plagued by dozens of tiny issues with snaps and odd transitions, the system was functional – but a rough diamond in need of refinement.
 
THE ANIM OVERVIEW
So, basically, the Animation system is divided into three layers: the AnimState, AnimNode and AnimTracks.
The AnimState handles the big picture: what the character is currently doing. For example, the character is standing idle, walking, sneaking, and so on. The character can only ever be in any one state at a time.
Next layer down is the AnimNode. These handle the middle-detail of what the character is up to, like walking while holding a crowbar, sneaking while walking sideways, etc. The state determines what nodes should be active, and assigns a weight to each. As nodes come and go, their weights are faded in and out.
Finally, the bottom-most layer is the AnimTracks. These are the fine-grained animations that get mixed and applied to the character’s bones. Tracks are also weighted and transitioned, similar to nodes.
One of the common issues we had was visible snapping between nodes. For example, when a character goes from strafing to sprinting, while holding a 2-handed weapon, the weapon would go from being nearly vertical to suddenly snapping to being horizontal, in under 3 frames.
THE FIX
The first step was to refactor the code itself. From the ground up, the code was tidied and tightened up to be cleaner and more efficient.
Next, it was a matter of finding out exactly what the weightings were at the time the issues were occurring.
There was no easy way to make the game stop and show us the data. There was no crash, no exception, no stackdump.
So, a recorder was written up to take the values of weights and times, and dump them out to the console in a comma-separated format. Next, it was a simple matter of putting it into a spreadsheet, and having a close look at the various curves.
It was immediately apparent that the curves were not smooth. The blending algorithm needed some work.
So, we needed to use math(s).
THE MATH(S)
A set of quadratic tweening functions were written up, called EaseOut, EaseIn, and EaseOutIn. A square-root function was also written, but turned out to be too CPU-intensive for what it was intended.
The AnimNode weight transitions were upgraded with these easing functions, and pretty soon we had some nice and smooth transitions between nodes.
The AnimTracks got the same treatment, and transitions between tracks became much smoother as well. The number of snapping issues greatly decreased, and much joy was had. However, a few issues continued to stubbornly evade us.
Deciding to focus on one issue at a time, we chose the crowbar strafe->run transition. A video was taken, alongside the recorded weight data for states, nodes, and tracks. The individual frames were then painstakingly arranged alongside the generated curves, and then closely examined.
Once the track weight curves were stacked and normalized, a problem became visible. There was a rogue Idle animation sneaking into the mix. Its weight would reach barely 40% before it disappeared, over a period of just 10 frames. This made us intrigued, but also sad and weary.
THE SOLUTION
With this clue, the field of possibilities was greatly narrowed. The cause was soon found. As the strafe node was transitioning out, it was still processing its blend-field. Even though the character was now in the sprint state, its strafe state was still active, and it thought that the character was standing still.
So, in its few last dying frames, the strafe state would blend in the Idle animation, just before snapping it off again.
With the root cause discovered, the solution was simple. Stop any transitioning-out nodes from applying their blend-field. The fix was made, and the last remaining snapping issues were conquered. HOORAY!

  LESSON LEARNED
There were a few lessons learned. Firstly, Math(s) is great – even when we got down to brass tacks and went old school on this issue.
The second was how helpful it was to observe, reproduce, and document every known issue in a visible list. Then performing a ground-up service and tune-up, systematically fixing each issue one at a time.
Finally, that it is important to have visibility on the internal workings of the system. Instead of relying on stop-start debugging, we need a mechanism for recording all state data as it changes over time, and present it in a human-readable format.
Thing was, the spreadsheet and curves were incredibly useful, but were slow and cumbersome to use.
So! We are now building a fully-fledged recording viewer as a part and parcel of the AnimZed dev and modding tool. Huzzah!
We’re sorry this has been such a technical Thursdoid, easily the most involved one we’ve ever done, but in amongst all the cool vids we’ve been showing in past weeks we wanted to spotlight some of the work that’s been happening that’s not quite as sexy. (Well, not mainstream sexy anyway.)
We also know that there are some among you who really dig this sort of thing – but apologise whole-heartedly if you’re not. We’ll be a lot less clever-clever next week, and that’s a promise/inevitability. 
This week’s winter that’s coming from eHxAtoMiic. 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!

Given as we’re starting from a slightly blanker slate with Build 41 than we usually do, and combat by necessity is changing to match the improved visuals, this week we’ve been making some experimental balance changes to the game.
The primary goal of this is to bring Zomboid further into line with the fantasy of living in a zombie apocalypse – and making the zed threat as real and as valid as those you’d see in a Romero movie or The Walking Dead.
So, for example, one of our intentions has been to make sure that combat adheres to the more classic zombie philosophy of threats coming not from the front, but from behind – with zeds more likely to take a nice chunk out of your neck or shoulder.
Here’s a quick video with explanatory subtitles, but once you’ve viewed it please check out the extra-explanatory text below too.
(We think you’ll also agree with us that Mister Beever has excelled himself with the new music here too).
Soo… here comes our current thinking on this.
Although PLEASE NOTE this is very much our current thinking and NOT the final product. Some content will settle during transit. Player feedback, both within and without, will be sought when the time is right.
We’ve currently got it so one-on-one combat (from the front) feels much easier. One single, solo zombie will be unlikely to cause you too much of an issue if you’re armed with an effective weapon – and even without you should be able to deal with the situation. We’re not going to be that kind to you though. In the new build difficulty will come from two sources: unseen zombies which get close to you, and groups of zombies. Zombies to the side, and even moreso behind, will have a much greater chance of getting hold of you –  and from that a much increased chance of landing a bite. From the front you’ll always have options to knock zombies back, push them and generally defend yourself with your arms. From the back, however, you’re much more likely to ‘get got’. Zombies currently go for the neck a lot more, as from the back it’s a much easier target for them. Neck bites have been much increased in severity of blood loss, and someone with a big chunk torn out of their neck is unlikely to survive longer than 10-20 seconds at most, perhaps even less. (We plan on some clothing to mitigate this risk once protective stats on clothing are working.) In real life (kinda) a group of zombies all attacking at the same time will divert your attention in many different ways – and compromise your ability to avoid them or push them away. To simulate this, each zombie attacking you now gets a boosted chance of laying a scratch or bite on you if there are a bunch of them attacking, and this boost goes up per zombie. So if you’re surrounded, don’t expect to be stood there 15 seconds, get lucky and run away with just a scratch. It’s not implemented yet, nor has Martin made us the anims for it yet, but it’s worth saying that we plan on having an ‘upper limit’ of zombies surrounding and attacking you that will trigger them to pull you to the ground and start to feast on you. There comes a point at which you’re simply overrun and overpowered, and the game currently does not allow for this. We may include multiplayer ways for a player to be saved from this fate before the bites start coming, and sandbox options, but for all intents and purposes we don’t think we can be considered a valid zombie survival simulator if there are 8 zombies pulling at you from every direction and you’re walking out of there alive. It’s not perfect yet in the build, and should be considered as ultra-experimental, but we’ve now got it so that swings at zombies on the floor do a hit test between the end of your weapon and the zed’s head. This means that you can no longer stomp or swing at a zombie’s pinky toe and the game will understand it as smashing its brains in. This has long been an irritation in a game where aiming for the head should be of paramount importance. As such, the player will need to position themselves so their bat will (approximately) aim at the zed head – with a hitbox that’s hopefully generous enough to compensate for inaccuracy of the viewpoint and controls. Due to feedback from the community on anims vids, and our own internal testing, we’ve also upped movement and combat speeds a tad to try make things a little less sluggish. This may get toned down depending on how it affects long term difficulty – and also overloaded, unfit and tired characters will clearly move more slowly OTHER STUFF DONE THIS WEEK
Polish for zeds eating, them noticing and rising to attack you – and the ability to attack them properly while they feed. As part of the gameplay balance mission we’ve been messing around with stomp damage, (barefoot vs. shoe-wearing etc) and fixed zeds staggering back and sliding after attacks too. We’ve also done stuff like increase knockdowns chance when pushing a zombie – which is a lot more dependent on character strength now. Martin has added animation so zeds can bite seated player characters, and better bite reactions from the bitten. Likewise he’s made zombie head hit reactions whilst they lie on the floor, whether on their front or on their back. Tim has fixed a prevalent issue with footsteps – in that they weren’t playing and needed tying to the new animation system whether you’re sneaking, walking or running. He’s also fixed loads of issues around melee attacks in vehicles, reloading and flipping corpses. Zac has been working on fixing blending issues, and done super-well with it to the extent that the first video above runs without a single one – bar a minor one that’s rooted in data rather than the anim system itself. (Boring to read, but a big ‘yay’ for us.) ChrisW has committed a bunch of improvements to the new cutaway system – which is working well, but needs a fair amount of polish work and gremlin chasing. It’s already working really well in-game though, and complements the new animations nicely. Thanks all! Cheers for coming to our little Thursdoid info-nugget.
This week’s misty moment from Computerheadguy. 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 PZWiki 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!

anims still aren't to the point the first vehicle build was - multiplayer is completely non-functional, the game difficulty balance of the game is completely fubared, it will run like an asthmatic dog with high zombie counts, and anims have been hyped for years longer than vehicles were, so we have to make sure first version doesn't piss people off cause there is 100x more 'it's taken them X long to do' expectation. We're also very much hoping that anims going public will coincide with a sales increase that will pay for all the significant extra resources and money we've put into getting them out there asap, and pushing them out in an underwhelming state would be dangerous to risk muting the excitement and attention it would get. Sadly as much as IWBUMS is a testing beta branch, a huge amount of people take it as the defacto build as soon as it goes public in any way.

As much as testers are positive about them, they just aren't ready for IWBUMS before a few key things, particularly the rotational blending and MP support, as well as some SERIOUS optimization to not cut off the bottom half of our players. But that day is definitely getting closer. We won't keep it in private testing longer than i needs to be, but a few minutes of video simply doesn't tell you the whole story.

All that feels good and the sitting zeds are fine addition ; hope to see also more corpses around in cities areas. So far, the Apocalypse seems to happens in a really "clean" way.
 
One thing cacth my attention...
 
 
FINALLY !

Thank you! The map will be released at the end of this month, I found a great collaborator to help me on some aspects. Hopefully you will like it!

I heard adding cows to an isometric game tends to lead to problems

Hey all, some Thursday dev updates from anim-land.
CHARACTER MODELS AND LIGHTING
Last week we discussed the issues we’d been working on around how character lighting is handled – which caused characters in the anims build to glow, not get lit properly by their environment and have a blander two dimensional look.
We have now fixed this, and done a bunch of balancing to the lighting and shader coloration that everyone will hopefully find much improved.
During this process we also focused on another prominent issue: that the character pixel resolution when zoomed in was extremely blocky and lacking in detail. Due to the ways that our initial zoom system handled things, characters were too harshly pixellated. This caused them to be extremely jaggied compared to what it was in the old days, when we were rendering characters to an off-screen sprite before placing them into the world.
So, this week we’ve been doing some significant work on changing how the game handles the zoom, which in addition to fixing this issue should ultimately lead to slightly more optimized rendering of the game – as well as providing the character models much more detail to play with.
As ever, please keep in mind that we’ll continue to balance/tweak to make sure characters fit their surrounds as well as possible – as well as adjust the models themselves seeing as you can now see individual facial features much more clearly. These caveats notwithstanding, however, we’re pretty happy how they’re looking.
The branch with this system on it isn’t complete – navigating indoors presents issues, mouse input hit-testing isn’t fixed up yet, and we’re having issues with seams between tiles when zoomed out – so it’s not quite ready for integration into the main test build. Here’s a quick video of us running aimlessly around zombies under lights to show it off though.
(Along with some new Zach Beever musical accompaniments!)
OPTIMIZATION
This week Zac has been back on optimization duty. Here’s the latest vid of him doing his routine optimization test of sequentially spawning new ten-strong crowds of zombies.
Next up, here’s a video showing further optimizations to multi-threaded rendering and Mouse Input handling where zombies are cycling through their behaviours using the new dynamic state system.
FALLING OVER
Finally, over to RJ at the ‘tying it all together’ animation coalface.
“Right now I’m working on combat animations, weapons and blood– adding stuff in and fleshing things out. One thing that’s new and that people might be interested to see in action, is an effort to make sure players can’t dash through hordes without getting slowed down.”
“As seen in the video below, we’ve now added bumping against zeds. Colliding with one or two while you’re running isn’t dangerous, you’ll just get slowed down, but try running through a horde and you’ll stumble and fall – leaving you temporarily exposed to the encroaching zeds. We might add in a few more different sorts of animations for nudges/pushes, but right now it looks like this:”
“Elsewhere this week, I’ve also been making sure that zombie behaviour is working correctly – fixing bugs with them following, thumping the environment and also behaving as expected when acting as crawlers. I’ve also added a better way for zeds to react when you drive over them and knock them over, and have added my ‘clutter’ improvements to the loot spawning system to the internal test build.”
This week’s trip to the mall from Kate. 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.