DresdenBBQ

Thorough. Clear. Reasonable.
 
Please hold master classes in this kind of communication for all other developers!!! Get some publishers and board members in your classes too 👌
 
VERY excited for that Noiseworks drop.

I'm coming back here only to express my full support to the team. I love your game, and I still find amazing how much the game evolved in the good way since the first releases. The evolution is slow, but massive and so pertinent. So, I don't care about the delay, I really don't care even if I wanna play with my girlfrind to the 41 :) Take your time, be strong and know that I, and many others, just love your work for many years and are happy to still love it in further years :)
Cheers from France !

Everything will be fine, you guys are the best!
Hello from Russia!

Long time lurker and player, and whilst my group have been looking forward to Build 41 MP dropping for sometime the decision made by the team is absolutely the right one and I appluad it.
 
I'd much rather get my hands on a complete and stable build than one riddled with bugs and issues that could potentially put people off and whilst I love the Thursday updates, being an analyst myself I understand the pressures of having to constantly release project updates taking time and resources that could be better spent doing the work required.
 
Great decision by a great team. So glad I backed this game from day 1 and looking forward (6 months or more if it takes it) to get my hands on the Build the team feel ready to release. Keep up the good work it will absolutely be worth it in the long run!

I mean, that sounds perfectly rational. It's disappointing but I for one as a consumer do appreciate that kind of transparency and honesty, it's def not common in the gaming industry these days. I obviously don't speak for anyone but myself but I don't really mind a wait, plus the announcement of Louisville is actually cool, I'm curious to see how well my computer could handle it. 

I mean, that sounds perfectly rational. It's disappointing but I for one as a consumer do appreciate that kind of transparency and honesty, it's def not common in the gaming industry these days. I obviously don't speak for anyone but myself but I don't really mind a wait, plus the announcement of Louisville is actually cool, I'm curious to see how well my computer could handle it. 

Happy Thursday all. Things are ticking on okay over here, hope things are well with you.
 
MP STRIKE FORCE
For those out of the loop, the last few weeks of dev-time on the Build 41 internal test build has been centred around moving control over nearby zed placement from the server over to the client.
 
As you’ve seen in previous dev blogs the previous system was allowing 32 players to run around and have fun smoothly, but instances of zombie teleportation were still present – along with their game-ending and game-breaking bites. As such the transplant was made, and for the past two weeks the team have been stitching the new organ in.
 
Last week’s test started out bright, but soon turned into a bit of a mess-on when players congregated in the same area. This week, after a week of pruning, a small scale Wednesday Night Test felt much better.
 
Over the last week Andrei has been fixing up some problems involving players seeing different inventories on zombies, as well as some odd naked zombie behaviour when they are being run over by cars, and some fixes to combat desyncs involving more than one player.
Yuri meanwhile has been working solely on the zombie desync issues, improving the code that teleports desynced zombies into their correct positions to try and do this when the zombie is not visible to a player.
 
Last night enough bug fog had been cleared to reveal other smaller-scale issues, but we feel like we’re steadily closing the net around them, and the testers seemed a lot more positive in the playability.
 
Early indications are that the client driven zombies have the potential to work well and the system seems to be for the most part operational, however all the situations where this can go wrong need to be isolated and fixed up before any true benefits can shine. As before, we’ll be scaling up player numbers as each thrice/twice-weekly test goes by – each time flushing more and more gremlins out of the system.
At the moment the transferal of zombies between clients when multiple players are present is sometimes rather bumpy (resulting in pathfinding complications, ‘Force Push’ zed deaths and disappear/reappearances) but its getting better as every day of work goes into the new system.

The server is now no longer taxed at all, which is hugely cool, and means that when we nail this and release 32 player servers, they should require a lot less in terms of cpu and memory to run, and our upper limit on player counts after that are undoubtedly going to benefit from it.
Here’s a quick vid of the testing from last night.

OTHER STUFF
Nothing huge of note to show you visually (or audibly) this week, everything is very ongoing, but perhaps just a quick rundown of ”who else is on what” for a few PZ workers when it comes to builds in/around the vicinity of the mptest build will be handy – so you know what else is in the works in terms of nearer-future zed survival.
 
The Noiseworks continue there complete overhaul of the PZ soundscape. Our amaze-o composer Zach Beever has supplied them with our whole soundtrack, including files for each separate instrument, and right now they are nose-deep in elegant new ways to mix it all together and match to the action. They will also be delivering the first batch of new vehicle sounds tomorrow, which we can’t wait to hear as (let’s face it) our current ones are prettty shit.
  Turbo’s chatbox improvement project continues – giving you more customisation options, improving legibility and improving (fixing) its implementation with in-game devices like radios.
  Fox and Aitor, our graduate coders, are working on better in-game item categorization and fishing QOL improvements respectively. We’re big fans of the Crashed Car Mod here at TIS towers (as indeed should you be, do check it out) and it’s made us realise that we have our burnt out wrecks on the road, and we have our low quality/dented cars, but we have nothing in-between. Having write-off car wrecks extremely common over the entire map doesn’t fit our current or planned lore, but having a few fender-benders and t-boned cars certainly will.

As such Martin is taking a break from a new range of ‘taking cover’ animations that he’s been working on for a future build, and has started doing a range of front, right side, left side and rear ‘smashed up’ variants of each PZ vehicle. These will then be later used as more atmospheric ‘vehicle stories’ in which you might come across (for example) a front-damaged sports car that’s piled into a side-damaged police car in a barricade – alongside all the relevant zombies.
 
Finally, wrap your ears around this tribute to the PZ theme from Exxhy. Amazing work mate, really cool stuff.
 


This week’s emergency service call out from IU.A.TI Cave Troll. 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!

Every sound in the game is being replaced.

MULTIPLAYER WORK
We’ve had a full complement of coders back on the internal 41 MP build since Tuesday, following the Russian May public holidays. Last night’s traditional Wednesday Night Internal Test was a bit of a washout due to a completely unrelated bug relating to an XP change not being compatible with MP. This has now been fixed, and we’re doing a Thursday test to see how things have improved, and things seem to be going well so far! A few issues but definite improvements. We’ll be doing more fixes and a bigger test tomorrow, so hopefully we’ll be in a good place for improvements for next week.
 
SOUNDS
Work from the Noiseworks sound design crew continues to arrive for our assessment, with Michael from Noiseworks plugging them all into the mainframe. It’s become increasingly evident that some of the NW gang are becoming quite partial to our game (even playing it for fun!) and as such ever more interesting and well developed sound design keeps on appearing. This isn’t always the case when you get separate teams in to work on existing titles, and makes us really appreciate having such solid (can we say ‘sound’?) chaps working on PZ.
 
Noiseworks stuff is being done separately from more general dev duties on PZ. Other departments aren’t being held back by this
    CURVES
Kukrapok, creator of the Cherbourg map and a member of the boat mod team, has been part of the official PZ team for a few months now – so we thought it might be an idea to let folks know what his initial task is. (Not least because it’s a real ballache of a job, and he could probably do with a little community cheerleading!)
 
You may have noticed that the roads that criss-cross the Knox Event zone aren’t exactly standard issue – 90 degree turns result in many car/tree incidents, broken bones and worse.

As such, Kukrapok’s current task is to provide for both official and community mappers when it comes to better and smoother curves and corners.
 
“After I was taken on by TIS, I was quickly tasked to create new tiles in order to add 45 and 22.5-degree angle roads.” explains Ayrton/Kukrapok. “This should prevent players from crashing into a tree too often when they encounter a sharp turn. Even though, I’m sure there’ll be still plenty of opportunities for each of us to wreck our newly fixed cars. (I see you Speed Demon thugs!)”
 
These angles are not just restricted to the corners themselves. It should also allow us to have much more natural roads between towns, instead of a network of long 90 degree roads, we could have more interesting angles and smaller turns during road trips to make the world feel and look more natural to drive around.
“The task is a long one, as it requires a certain number of tiles to be created in order to have proper transitions in between all new angles and this applies to street curbs, terrain blends, traffic lines, etc.”

“However, the result will improve the whole map eventually, and many modded maps, while also providing a smoother driving experience and a more natural feel to the map. Below is an example of 45-degree transitions of street curbs.”
Overall this task has involved the creation of 1133 new tiles (!) with most of them providing a mathematical brain ache to complete also, so many thanks to Kukrapok for his devotion to the cause!
 
This week’s foggy scene from Stean on Steam. Trying saying that five times with your mouth full. 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!

Wow that sound design is phenomenal, the audio will be somethin' else once it's released. Everyone will be able to tell since sound is such an important part of this game, I like the touch with the different sounds for boots/sneakers. 

As noted last week, we’ve been a little hamstrung by the Russian May holidays (over a week off, you lucky Russians!) and as such improvements and fixes to the client-side zombies we were testing last week will predominantly be on next week’s menu.
 
Client ownership should be the last largescale technical hurdle the guys face, and details on what’s being done and why can be found here.

As such, this week’s Thursdoid will be a Noiseworks SFX special – which will be of relief to those who aren’t interested in MP, but of irritation to those who are. Our apologies to anyone put out, but hopefully you’ll still share our enthusiasm for some of the cool stuff that’s being laid out below.
 
As we’ve mentioned before, Noiseworks are operating separately from the main team – with only occasional requests for us to put new hooks into the game where there weren’t any previously. None of this is slowing anything else down, so don’t fret on that account. Our thanks to Michael and Matteo from Noiseworks for their help with this week’s blog.

FOOTSTEPS
Right now in the game versions you’re playing there are around 72 different sounds available for an individual footstep.
When the Noiseworks overhaul is merged in there will be 3044.
 
Why so many? Well.. the game will take into account what surface you (or your friends) are walking on.

There are ten main surface types: Concrete, Grass, Gravel, Puddle, Snow, Wood, Carpet, Dirt, Sand, Ceramic and another surface category that’s essentially ‘footsteps heard upstairs’.
 
On top of this the new sound system will also take into account what sort of shoes you are wearing – if any. There are different sounds for each surface dependent on whether you are barefoot, wearing boots, or wearing more standard sneakers/shoes. 
 
Then on top of *this* each footwear type has been recorded in four different performances: a Sneak footstep, a Walk footstep, a Run footstep, and a Sprint footstep.
 
And in amongst all of the above? Well there’s also dry and wet versions for external sounds that depend on the RainIntensity values, and likewise surface modifiers for walking on glass and through puddles.
 
When you mix it all in with the rest of the SFX (like additional water drop impact details on harder surfaces like concrete) then it truly is, as the kids are told we say, ‘immersive af’. 
 
Here’s a vid!
 
Please note this is ALL work in progress, being heard without the full soundscape, will have volumes balanced, has an occasional audible ‘double footstep’ bug that will need a fix etc. etc.

WILDLIFE
We previously shared an ambiance video in which the natural world of Kentucky can be heard in amongst the various weather and world effects. What we didn’t say, though, was what was being heard and how.
 
Here it is reposted in all its glory. 

Essentially here we have a range of different mammals and bird species, all residents of Kentucky, that can be heard through the world. Their unseen location is completely dynamic, and spawned around the player randomly.
 
Each species sound has a different chance of playing that’s based on when you’d hear them in real life – so it depends on the season, the time of day and which ‘map zone area’ you are in: forest, deep forest, town, vegetation/field, close to water etc.
 
On top of this each different map zone has different ‘insect noise’ sound beds that depends on the time of day, while there are also random birds that will be heard in particular randomly assigned trees that are appropriate to your location.
 
Right now animals and bird sounds will start to peter out when the weather changes, or the wind picks up – and in future we would like the noise of gunfire (for example) to prompt noises of birds taking flight.
 
(Beyond this too, we would clearly like these sounds attached to real/seen birds and beasts – but we’re clearly not at this point yet.)
Right now Noiseworks have sourced around 70% of the bird/beast noises we need (some might be harder to find than others) but hooks are already present for all of ‘em.
 
Here’s the current bird list so you can get an idea of the breadth we’re aiming for: Wild Turkey, Grebe, Pigeon, Cuckoo, Sandhill Crane, Gull, Loon, Heron, Hawk, Eagle, Owl, Woodpecker, Eastern Phoebe, Kingbird, Shrike, Vireo, Bluejay, Lark, Swallow, Nuthatch, Winter Wren, Kinglet, Thrush, Catbird, Mockingbird, Sparrow, Grosbeak, Longspur, Bunting, Oriole, Warbler, Quail, Crow and Raven.

WEATHER
Next, we go over to Noiseworks’ Sound Designer Matteo Lupieri for the lowdown on how weather ties to the new soundscape.
“The weather system was an interesting one to work on!” explains Matteo. “We needed to take into consideration that as weather intensity changes with more wind and more rain, the whole world surrounding the player should be heard to react.”
“So when in a forest, the rustle of grass and trees can be heard increasing with wind intensity – and raindrops hitting the canopy will get louder and busier as the rain gets heavier. You will also hear trees creaking, and branches snapping and falling during storms.”
“We’ve also thought of the equivalent sounds in urban areas – so in towns you’ll hear metal signs squeaking and creaking more and more based on the wind intensity. Similarly, lakes and rivers will get agitated and start to form audible waves with stronger and stronger winds”.

OTHER NOISES
Next time we do a Noiseworks update we can inform on the current car noises (which we haven’t heard ourselves yet), the zed noises themselves (which we are being very annoying and prima-donnaish about) and the situational music revamp (which amaze-o Zach Beever is back in touch about and supplying original multitracks for).
 
It’s all super exciting and, we hope, interesting enough to warrant a blog while Yuri and Andrei are off on their Russian holidays.

 
This week’s Zeddy Mercury from TM_Monkey on Reddit. 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 Zomboid mod scene is currently in full bloom, and as such we started to feel a bit bad that the last official modding content on the PZ website was from a long time ago indeed. And so, Mod Spotlight is back! At the writing helm this month, and hopefully months ahead too, is writer and zed fan Patrick Brennan. Over to you @Pat_Bren_Writer…
————–
Aquatsar Yacht Club
Ahoy, mateys! With cars now a well established part of PZ’s world, you may be wondering when other forms of transport, like boats, will follow. While large bodies of water play only a minor part in our base map, acting as a border to keep you inside the game world, many custom maps feature areas of water and even open sea that, without boats, remain a mostly useless big blue blob. Until now, that is!
 
Riding high in the Steam workshop is a mod that adds two types of boats, a motorboat and a larger yacht. On top of this there are also boat trailers you can find throughout the world and tow over land with your car, and the ability to move through the water yourself too.

Man the crow’s nest and unfurl the mainsail, we’ve sighted Aquatsar Yacht Club!

The founders of the club (or, to put it in more boring terms, the primary authors of the mod) are Aiteron, Kukrapok, and iBrRus, and their mod is not for mere landlubbers. The cars of PZ inspired the authors to take a realistic and non-arcade approach.
 
Along with the challenge of finding a boat trailer and getting it to the water in the first place, players have to contend with the new danger of drowning and the impact of PZ’s realistic wind simulation system on both their sails and the waves.

Don’t have a crowbar? Then you won’t be able to get into the yacht’s cabin and find an oven, fridge and enough storage to keep you afloat for weeks. Head overboard for a swim during a storm? Uh oh, your boat’s drifted away and you’re stranded in the middle of the ocean. Unfortunately, the Coast Guard don’t seem to be around for some reason. Oh, and remember to dry yourself off after your swim if you don’t want to catch a nasty cold.

The mod came together over the course of hundreds of hours. Kukrapok, a Frenchman, worked alongside the Russians iBrRus and Aiteron with the help of Google Translate and several helpings of divine maritime inspiration. (Kukrapok outside of this, also created the massive Cherbourg map, and has recently been hired by the team to work on the official PZ map.)
 
What plans do the authors have for the mod’s future? As refreshingly simple as a sea breeze: more and different boats, including smaller ones for river gameplay. We spoke to the three authors and found out more about their backgrounds and how this in-depth mod came together.
 
————–
Aiteron
Who are you in real life?
I am a student in an IT related specialty. I’m really fond of game development and take part in game dev competitions, and would one day love to get a job in the industry.
 
What aspects of the boat mod are yours?
I made the initial prototype that showed it was possible to create transportation on water. After that, I helped with various features like the swimming.
 
How did you first discover PZ? Why do you like it?
I saw PZ videos on Youtube, loved it, bought it, and here I am… It is very interesting to survive in a harsh world. I also like that the game is constantly updated and has an active community of like-minded modders. I advise everyone to start creating their own mods and to not be afraid! We’re a friendly community ready to help you create what you want.
 
What made you want to play around with physics?
At one point, I wanted to collect a fleet of cars, but realised that in order to do so you need to walk across the entire map for new cars. So I decided to add towing to the game. I love when mods add things to the game that increase realism. At first I thought it was impossible, but I love doing impossible things! Step by step, after several weeks of planning and then development, I implemented towing with a flexible hitch, and then a rigid one, all based on real physics.
 
What were the biggest challenges in creating the boat mod?
Making the boat move with the force of the wind in a realistic way, I think. There were also many bugs that had to be dealt with, such as the spawn of vehicles on water, strong undulations on waves and much more besides.
 
What do you hope for in life outside of the wonderful world of PZ modding?
Get a job in a game development company and give people joy with my work!
 
————–
iBrRus

  Who are you in real life?
I was born and live in Bryansk, a provincial city in Russia. I work as an APCS [Ed. Note: Automated Process Control Systems] engineer. In my spare time I love to take apart and fix cars, and also do lots of 3D printing and programming.
 
How would you best describe the boat mod?
This is a mod that will make you suffer! It adds new features to the game (boats, sailing), introduces a new way to die (drowning), does not give any clues and wants players to think and google if necessary – for example, to learn how to operate real sailboats.
 
What aspects of the boat mod are yours?
I was mainly engaged in programming and improving the interfaces and functions on the boats themselves, writing new templates for spare parts and interior items, working out physics, and introducing controller support, as well as adjustments to models and sound conversions.
In addition, I tried to coordinate the work of our team members, mainly by asking them boring questions: “What did you do today? When will it be ready? I have an idea. Do it a little differently. Here, you need to redo this!”
 
How did you first discover PZ? Why do you like it?
I first learned about PZ in college when I downloaded an early version with a very small map and no multiplayer. I deleted it after playing a little, but pleasant memories remained. I returned to the game on June 22, 2014, the day that we, with our large company, purchased several 4-packs on Steam.
 
From that day my real adventures in the world of PZ began. This game has the best realism of any zombie game, and the most possibilities. Even after 1000 hours, I still haven’t learned everything. That’s why I love this game!
 
What aspects of PZ game code does the mod use, and improve upon for its gameplay?
The most important aspect of the PZ game code that we utilized was the weather, namely – the wind. It’s amazing how well-developed this part of the game turned out to be on the inside. To be honest, at first I did not plan to implement the reaction of the sail to the wind but one day it was done by Aiteron, when he simply wrote to me: “I’ve added wind physics.” Although the physics required some work, overall it worked! To make it easier to understand how to set up the physics correctly, we’ve created the first “wind clock” and after that we were able to choose the necessary formulas and set the logic of the sail.
 
What do you think people like about having boats in PZ?
What I like and, perhaps someone will agree with me, is that boats and sailing add another drop of realism for PZ as well as several new ways to develop character stories. As for the players, I think that some of them still have not been able to find a boat, others have not been able to get into the cockpit… and yet some more have not figured out how to operate a sailing yacht. As I said above: at the beginning pain is in store for all players, and pleasure comes later!

 
————–
Kukrapok
Who are you in real life?
My name is Ayrton Orio, and I’m from France though I’ve lived most of my life abroad. I work in the film industry, doing VFX for music clips, documentaries, and short movies. I also direct, edit and write, and am currently writing a feature film and in pre-production for two short movies. Doing the 3D models for the boat mod was a breath of fresh air as I normally focus on photorealistic VFX which can be a very tedious process. Trying to copy PZ’s style is really fun.
 
What aspects of the boat mod are yours?
The 3D modelling and texturing of both boats, and most of the artwork on the boat interfaces. I also took care of most of the new sound effects and coordinated the music development with David Ree, the composer.
 
What do you think is most alluring for players when it comes to boats being part of PZ via the Aquatsar mod?
Like any good simulation, the pleasure you get from playing it in PZ comes from the difficulty to run something that would be made much more accessible and arcade in another game.
 
Cars are a good example, you need to get good enough to hotwire it, fix the cars after finding the parts and reading the proper manuals, find gas and… drive it. Until you break a wheel by driving too much on zombie corpses.
 
The same design idea led to the creation of the boat mod, so I think the players are enjoying all the minutiae that is required to make the boat work, to understand how to sail it etc.
 
Once it all works, there is a feeling of freedom that is quite fantastic. Also, sailing a boat for the first time is both a breather in the hectic survival journey you take, and also a promise for a new adventure.
 
What was it like adapting to the PZ look?
Actually a bit tough because it’s far from my experience in doing photorealistic effects. I had to limit the amount of tools I normally use and focus on a more pixel-per-pixel approach. For instance, I reused existing wood assets from the vanilla tiles to do the boats’ teak deck which was very straightforward. I was also able to use advanced tools for some effects, such as substance painter to bake lights and ambient occlusion onto the model, as well as rust leaks.
 
Lastly I wanted to give a shout out to David Ree, the very talented musical composer who wrote and recorded the music you hear the first time you set sail. I have worked with him several times on other projects and he had a lot of fun composing for a video game for the first time!
 

  Thanks to our modding friends for taking time to answer our questions. You can become a member of the Aquastar Yacht Club by subscribing to the mod here! Our thanks too to Sasha M for all her help with translations for this blog.

Hi all, something of an intermediate dev blog this week as the work outlined in this coder-speak blog to remedy zombie teleportation in the internal build of 41’s multiplayer is still underway.
 
The tldr of this is that we’re moving the ownership of nearby zombies to the client rather than have it governed by the server – and in the following vid you can see the work-in-progress functionality of this.
 
Here you can see two clients connecting to the server, the server determining which client owns the zombie, and then the server changing the ownership between them. When it swaps the first client sends its prediction of the zed’s movement to the server, and the server then sends this information to the second client.
 
It seems to be working well, but has also has bugs that need addressing like incorrect ownership changes, some static zeds and some attacks not causing damage. Yuri is pleased with the progress so far though.
 
This isn’t part of the main internal MP test build yet, it’s being fixed up elsewhere, so we haven’t been doing any high population tests this week – so no Naruto run videos today we’re afraid.


Elsewhere Turbo has been further improving our chatbox – picking up the baton from General Arcade’s Stas a few years down the line. Quoth the Turbo:
 
“I’ve been restructuring the underlying chat system to accommodate for the various new features that have been suggested by testers: this includes a different way of handling the streams, adding new features, and fixing up some things that were broken such as radio.”
 
“The chatbox UI is getting a complete overhaul, most UI elements are new and tailored specifically for it – for example the text pane is now a javabacked UI element specialised in handling chat messages.”

“This new pane has fast paginate and caching methods so it can more easily handle a big history of chat messages then its lua variant. It also has new features such as text selection, links, timestamp indentation to name a few. I’m also adding various options to let folks customise how they want it.”
 


Meanwhile SFX development continues apace over with Noiseworks, with tying new noises to footsteps currently on the agenda (each different depending on what footwear you have on, and what you’re walking on). RJ meanwhile continues to work on the player-vision systems and stealth described last week.
 
Finally, as it has been a little bit of a drydoid this week while we wait for the new client zed structure to be ready for the main MP test branch… our mappers have reached a point with our version of Louisville where it would be sensible to do some more testing for feel, bugs, look and performance.
 
It’ll be a big task both testing and zoning (adding foraging/zed story/etc areas) the map, so we want to be doing that simultaneous to its construction rather than in one big lump at the end.
 
And for testing, really we need zombies – so this week we extended the current map’s zombie heat map to make sure they can spawn. The whiter the area, the more zeds will appear.

(USUAL CAVEAT: Our version of Louisville is still heavily in production, and isn’t going to be releasing any time soon. That said, it is now in the middle distance – rather than just peeking over the horizon)
Here’s also a nice little gif nasKo cooked up for us to show the existing map underneath better.


Thanks everyone! And, again, a big welcome to all the new players who’ve been getting into PZ recently.
 
What’s more a MASSIVE massive thank you to all our existing survivors who have been so supportive and helpful in providing hints, tips and answering their many questions. Times like this really underline that our community really is rather special.
 
This week’s renovated motel from Razor. 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!

It's a breath of fresh air to have actually transparent developers of a video game. 

It's a breath of fresh air to have actually transparent developers of a video game. 

It's a breath of fresh air to have actually transparent developers of a video game. 

Hey all, welcome to this week’s Thursdoid!
 
MP NEWS
Our weekly Wednesday test went a teeny bit worse than last week, which was a little disheartening at first – however don’t fear too much, as it transpired this was mainly down to the last of the new features required for the MP release going in this week that were still a little untested and broken, and not down to any new issues with the net code. The initial version of the stealth system that will allow players who are hidden in dark corners or behind fences to have a chance to remain hidden to other players went in, and there are still many goblins to exorcise, leading to players being unable to spot players next to eachother. Likewise, changes to the safehouse system had various issues that slowed things down. And yes, bloody teleporting zombies! We’ll get into those in a minute.
 
Here are a couple of highlight videos from the test session!

Andrei and Yuri are still working on the systems that we hope will vastly improve the zombie experience, and eliminate all zombie teleporting that could potentially impact the player, however these did not make it into the Wednesday test and its possible may not make it into next weeks yet.
 
As we draw closer to the finish line, it’s becoming clear that just saying ‘we’re still fixing teleporting zombies’ isn’t enough to get across the work ahead, why it’s taking so long and so on. We hear the frustration and so thought we’d go into a little more detail.
 
This week we thought we’d go on a bit of a deeper dive into what our goals are for fixing the zombie movement and providing a near single player experience in zombie combat, as well as the general problems we and any multiplayer game face. Hopefully after it you will appreciate why this is such a tricky puzzle to solve and why ‘teleporting zombies’ are currently a thing, and how we plan to mitigate it, as well as some comfort that this effort will lead to something pretty special when we finally pull it off.

 
ZOMBIE SYNCRONIZATION CONUNDRUM AND CHALLENGES
The first thing you need to know about with latency, is it’s impossible to know where a character is in a game-world NOW on a PC that is running in another country. The latency means there’s always an inherent delay and thus often in games there needs to be a bit of illusionary duct tape applied to ‘make it all make sense’. You take a headshot at a character in an FPS, well the other player is NOT at that location by the point you take the shot.
 
But you have to pretend they WERE still at that location, to make the experience make sense for the shooter. This is why for example you have peeker’s advantage where a player can run around a corner and shoot someone before they even see that player run around the corner. It’s also why you may run around a corner out of line of sight of an opponent and still get shot. It’s a pain in the ass but its just an immutable law of online gaming.
 
There’s this idea of ‘truth’, where things are truly said to ‘be’ within your game world, and while this is often the server’s responsibility, sometimes it needs to be determined on the client. Of course this is also where hack vulnerabilities come from, since clients can be altered.
 
Things get a bit worse when you consider the scenario where you have hundreds of entities moving around. In old B40 multiplayer, the server was always the source of truth for where zombies were, and clients were always looking at out of date information. They never attempted to ‘guess’, using client side prediction, where zombies were GOING to be, which would have helped a bit.
 
There’s also the issue of server load, one that players on b40 servers will be all too aware of. Imagine 50 players, all in different areas, in different towns, with different areas of the map loaded up. Now your VPS server is suddenly tasked with running the AI, pathfinding and logic for 50x the amount of zombies a single player client has to be, as well as other tasks of updating the world, streaming, altering and saving the map data. This is in a nutshell why our servers operated so poorly compared to many other multiplayer games.
 
Even Left4Dead, a game that people marvelled at the zombie counts, variety and consistency in multiplayer, had a static map and only 4 players, all of whom were usually in the same area and experiencing the same zombies. Further more one zombie being in slightly the wrong place wouldn’t lead to an insta-death situation because the players were immune to being infected. So yeah, an isometric indie game we may be, but this is a humongous challenge and a big achievement when we get there.
 
So yeah, lots of challenges to overcome, and approaching this problem we’ve made various steps, with the current work hopefully being the last piece of the puzzle.
 
STEP 1) Not just client prediction, but client simulation.
So first we thought: Instead of just sending positions the zombies (or players) are in, why not say where they are GOING and let them go there themselves, using the client’s own AI algorithms. Periodically checking in with the server to make sure the server hasn’t ‘changed its mind’, and teleporting the character or zombie if they deviate too much from the server’s ‘truth’?
 
This is a great first step, as it’s resulted in the complete removal of the juddery, flickery, rubber bandy movement of every zombie and player, marching in lock step with positions a struggling, overworked server is managing to spit down to clients in its busy schedule. It’s why in general zombies and particularly the much less predicable players movement was so janky in B40 MP. Now our characters are butter smooth in their movement at all times, moving very much as they would in SP because they are, effectively, running the same code.
 
PROBLEM 1) So that’s great, but now we have a new problem. It’s very possible for characters to end up, due to unexpected events that have not yet reached the client, in very different positions to where the client believes them to be. What does this mean? Well, we need to teleport zombies to where they ACTUALLY are. So whenever one of these butterfly effect ‘divergences in the timeline’ happen, we have to detect that has happened and correct the record so the clients agree again on where the character is.
 
Why do these divergences happen? Well it all comes down to latency again. Imagine two players with 200 ping each. Player A shoots a gun. It takes their gunshot 1/10th of a second to reach the server, where it registers and dice rolls are made to determine if zombies respond to it. A zombie responds to it. Meanwhile, on Player B’s client, that zombie is happily walking toward Player B. It takes a further 1/10th of a second for that zombie responding to the gunshot to reach Player B’s client, where it is told instead to walk toward Player A. Problem is now the position it is walking from is different. Either we teleport the zombies every second to keep them in as close to the right position as possible, or their positions will begin to veer further and further from the server ‘truth’ and we have to do a big teleport to adjust. It’s a bit of a catch 22 situation.
 
So this is the problem we’ve been trying to overcome since then.
 
STEP 2) CLIENT (soft) OWNERSHIP
A big thing we wanted to fix was the potential for lag bites, this is instrumental to making such a harsh game where a single bite can end your character work in a multiplayer environment. It should NEVER be the case that a lag spike results in a zombie teleporting next to you and having bitten you twice between two frames of your game.
The solution we came up with for this is for the client to ‘call the shots’ about zombies that are close to them AND chasing them. This means for all intents and purposes, a single player on their own on a multiplayer server, when engaged with zombies, will have a COMPLETELY single player experience with that zombie. There’s no potential for lag bites.
 
Of course, this does open the door to client side hacks, and this is something we’ll touch on later in regard to our plans, but given PZ is generally a more PVE oriented game than say DayZ or any other game which is a more solidly PVP experience, we feel this is the sensible route to take, and we can deal with protecting from hacks in another way.

PROBLEM 2)
So this works, and makes a huge difference. There are two problems it causes or exacerbates, however: Firstly, the moment that a zombie becomes ‘owned’ by a client causes one of these aforementioned teleports, to get it into the correct position the server says it is before the client can start accepting the zombies position on the client as its own ‘source of truth’. The other problem is when multiple players are present, we now exacerbate the problems with clients disagreeing on zombie positions.
 
This is where we are at currently, and now we’ll go onto STEP 3 which is currently in the works, will likely take a little while as its the biggest and boldest strategy yet, but hopefully once it’s in and balanced we’ll be looking at a much smoother online experience, and the remaining issues to resolve will be much more minor by contrast and we’ll be gearing much more toward sending this out there to you lovely people.
 
STEP 3) COMPLETE CLIENT OWNERSHIP
Again, this will likely lead to further vulnerabilities to hacks, which we’ll address later. However, the ramifications for this are huge.
 
First off, it has to be said that on an internet with more than 0 latency, getting rid of any corrections of character positions is impossible. We’re not looking to eliminate teleporting zombies completely, that’s a fools errand. It’s just a case of making it as mild and inobtrusive and non-immersion breaking as possible, and removing any potential for these corrections to lead to a player’s death.
 
The current plan is for zombies to be completely simulated by clients, and clients alone. With the server acting more like a caretaker who looks over the zombies in a much broader sense. When a character moves into an area of the map, and zombies are spawned, they will simply run on that client. The server will simply dish out where these zombies are, and leave the client to it. This will mean to that client, there will be no teleports, no lags, the zombies are identical to single player zombies, end of story.
 
The further beauty of this is that the server no longer needs to stress itself to high heaven trying to process the AI for all these zombies, all it needs to do is a much lower effort tracking of zombies to make sure no naughtiness is taking place and zombies aren’t behaving in an odd way that suggests they are being fiddled with on the client via hacks. Suddenly, you have a server with say 64 players, the server is now handling AI for 0 zombies, instead of potentially thousands or even tens of thousands. Who knows what player counts we could entertain as a possibility without having to worry about the exponential rise in zombie processing per player as we have done historically.
Outside server load, this also means that players enjoy a completely single player experience, at least if solo. There are still a few complications when it comes to multiple players witnessing or interacting with the same zombies however.
 
If player A) is being attacked by a zombie, and player B) then hits that zombie in the back. It’s very possible that player A and player B will disagree where that zombie is. However, now, the ‘truth’ is where player A) says it is.
player A is being attacked, so the zombie is player A’s zombie. player B) hits the zombie in the back (perhaps not being stood directly next to it since player B thinks the zombie is half a tile away). So the zombie turns around and attacks player B). Now in our current version, with the soft ownership, what would happen here? The zombie would teleport to where player A believed the zombie is, meaning it would teleport on player B)’s client, the player who tried to rescue his friend, and potentially teleport to their side and take a bite out of their neck. That’s broken and awful.
However, the new system will always choose the client that is targeted or influenced by the zombie as the ‘source of truth’. So player B’s ‘incorrect’ position for the zombie will now be considered ‘truth’, and player A in this circumstance would be the one to witness any teleporting. This doesn’t matter however, because player A is in no danger from the zombie, the small fade in / fade out position correction has zero chance of negatively impacting them or leading to them getting bitten.
 
So ideally, there’d also be less of these teleports in the first place. This all comes down to improving the prediction and allowing clients to be closer in their ‘guesses’, but its just not possible to ever get rid of any teleporting without reverting to the much uglier laggy, jerky and rubber bandy movement from yesteryear, our goal is just to minimize it as much as possible, and as described above, organize it so that when it happens it’s always in case where it will never negatively impact a player that it happens to.
 
There will be also considerations made to lag, so a player with an extremely high ping will never be responsible for zombies that aren’t directly impacting them if a lower ping character is close by.

 
MP INITIAL RELEASE PUBLIC SERVERS
So the gist of everything above is, once we do get the first IWBUMs out there, we’re going to strongly recommend it purely as a co-op or whitelisted server experience. We’re not going to be able to adequately protect from shady behaviour without delaying the build even further after implementing this stuff, but we strongly feel giving players the ability to run co-op games or closed servers with friends, is more important than holding out and delaying for something which will be cast-iron protected from spoil sports who like to ruin fun on public servers. We hope everyone agrees with this decision, but we will of course do all we can during development of this system to add safeguards in there and expand that after the first release.
 
The benefits outweight the cost massively.
 
So that’s all for this, quite different, Thursdoid. Don’t get used to them as they take a lot of programmer time to put together, but we just figured that with the mounting hype and frustration at waiting for MP, a deep and detailed insight into what this ‘teleporting zombie’ stuff we keep talking about is all about and quite how high the bar we’re hoping for the zombie combat experience will be.
 
Thanks again for all the support we’ve seen from streamers and their communities, as well as of course our own. It’s been a tremendously exciting few weeks and we hope to get MP out there to you all as soon as possible! Love you all.
 
This week’s mourning cowboy courtesy of grenskei 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!

If you ain't interested in multiplayer the singleplayer aspect of build 41 has already technically been released to the public! It's not all but a definite majority of the content, you can find it by going into your Steam library and finding Project Zomboid, right clickin the game and going to properties, then the betas tab and switching to the IWBUMS version of the game then let the game update. 

Also it's nice to finally see some sort of definitive milestone to reach before release of multiplayer, a stable 32 person server. With that said will 64 player servers not be available until build 42? Or will we see them reintegrated in the form of a patch/small update once they're ready and stable. PZ multipayer is fun, but I think the statement 'the more the merrier' definitely applies to Project Zomboid. The more people in the world the more full the game world seems, so the bigger the servers the more fun the game'll be. (In my humble multiplayer maniac opinion.) 

What is the reward for surviving long periods of time when most of the content is focused on surviving the first months?
 
Get weapons, get food set up a base and start growing food this is easy for veteran players but after that what is the challenge?
 
Weapons can be farmed from zombies, even katanas will be quite common that I don’t even bother to keep collecting them at high populations settings, drive 5 minutes and get the military backpack, drive another 15 and get 2 more. 
 
The most important event is on day 7, helicopter and then random gunshots.
 
Wiring cars is on the first levels on mechanics and electrical easy to get in a few days once you have the books. Then you can level up mechanics skill, but why torture your self, just get another car.
 
Winter is just a visual experience, crops keep growing and trapping works enough just to sporadically touch the can food, clothes have a high insulation above real concepts that wearing all the layers will melt your character.
 
Dissemble dozens of TVs and Radios to move a stove and washing machine?
 
Grinding metal work to built metal walls requires so much work on learning the skill and gather the materials, that benefit from having doesn’t match the effort.
 
So what can be done to improve late game experience that is challenging and equally rewarding?

A bit of a three steps forward, two steps back week on the MP front. After a largely successful 20-tester Wednesday Night session last week, and a moderately successful smaller/unplanned affair on Friday Night – last night was fairly disrupted.
 
Some of the testing apparatus caused memory issues on clients and crashes, freshly discovered server instabilities created lag and map-load cones, and this spilled out into being a generally less fun experience for all participants.
 
This also meant that we couldn’t really get a decent grasp on whether the improvements we’d added in since last time were firing correctly, incorrectly or not at all.
 
So, good news! We’ve got data on all this stuff and know where to look to fix it! This is the way the process goes, and it isn’t unexpected especially when we’re doing these as stress tests after all!

Bad news: it makes for a prettttty shit Thursdoid blog. Sorry.
 
Here’s the changelist of what we were testing last night.
 
Here’s a vid of stuff going right:

Here’s a vid of stuff going wrong, in amidst the crashing.
 

NOISEWORKS
Okay, we said we wouldn’t do this – but also didn’t want to post a blog with a bum note.
 
As mentioned in previous weeks we are working with some friends of ours at a company called Noiseworks to completely redo the PZ soundscape. The fruits of their labour are starting to trickle in, so we thought we would share the following.
 
This is a 24 hour cycle focusing on the world sound including weather, wildlife, wind etc. They are also adding more details into the world like different surface rain details, the world reacting to wind, more bird sounds and other bits.
 
We are also going to cut back on the change in sounds that occur when zoomed in vs. zoomed out – as we want zoomed out to feel just as intense as when you are close-up.
 
Play with volume up, and be sure to catch all the different sections!
 
Please note: this is all set up and playable in Noiseworks’ build – but it remains a work in progress, and hasn’t been playtested yet at all. Intensity of sounds can/will be dialled back, certain wildlife noises might be held back if they lead to too much player expectation that they are about to see a moose when there currently is no moose etc.
 

This weeks ambulance sex zombies from KPKPlays on the Discord. 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!

Evening all, here’s a quick rundown on a lot of the things we’ve been up to in the past week. As mentioned last time round there’s been a degree of getting the Noiseworks team onboard so they can get their teeth into the PZ soundscape – but clearly getting MP fixed, improved, done and out is our current main priority.
 
The stage we’re at is that increasingly a server of 20 people is stable and fun, but peppered with some moments in which it very much is not.
Yuri has been strapping various recording instruments to the server to learn more about what’s causing the server to occasionally wobble – and then spelunking the data caught in these nets from our internal tests. It’s currently thought that players joining the server are giving it headaches that can get increasingly severe.
 
Andrei meanwhile continues to fix up issues of zed teleportation, and RJ adds in stuff to fix/improve gameplay and PvP. We’ve also had a new bundle of QoL improvements come over from our part-time graduate coders in Team Tanglewood, details below, while Zac’s optimization mission has continued unabated.
 
Here’s an abbreviated changelist of what was being tested last night. (Shorter than normal as we also had a test on Friday night and over the weekend)
 
“We’re all enjoying an improved experience as one test moves to another, but definitely still do experience bugs and issues that lead the dev team deeper into the code. The play testing for our group is getting more fun as more of these issues get ironed out.“
—————
“We had a couple loot runs worthy of zombie movies: decision making moments, everything going wrong, loads of supplies, loads of brain matter splattered around… it really was this game at it’s best. That said I now understand why it hasn’t had a wider release yet, we had quite a few major bugs that were to be expected but wouldn’t really work for anything beyond a limited test.”
—————
“From unplayable to mystical. Last night’s test, from my personal experience, was an unbelievable improvement. Last weekend, playing on a French server from Canada, I couldn’t play. It was too rough, I would get surprised by invisible zombies and it was overall quite a painful experience.

Last night however, was a comparison I can’t really express: it was so smooth for me that even dancing to the same beat with another player was spot on. There was no difference in movement, and zombies were SP-level good to fight one on one as well. Problems arose when two players fought zombies at the same time, but nowhere even close to the last test I was part of. Last night provided me with a joy of video games that I haven’t had since first discovered them.“
—————
So what’s next? Well, first of all we probably have to underline that we didn’t pay that third tester any money to say nice things. He appeared to say it of his own free will.
 
There are however server issues and zed teleportation issues still to address that mean that not everyone is getting the same service he clearly did last night. To fix these up is the current mission.
 
Once said mission is feeling a little more complete we will be widening the test pool to 40, and then this dance of terrifying bugs coming out of the woodwork and then being squashed over the course of a few weeks will begin again. After which we’ll try to go higher still, and so it goes… and so it goes…

Clearly the bigger numbers we’re talking, the more likely it is that keen Zomboid players will get a slot via Community Megatests – but we’re not there just yet.
 
Again, as ever, we’re sorry for tantalising folks with these weekly reports – but it’s better to write these each week rather than adopt a radio silence.
OTHER STUFF
We had a few other neat things drop into the build this week, with a few neat things from our graduate coders over at Team Tanglewood that are quite fun.
 
A new clock! As well as having a handy button that will allow you to turn off a beeping alarm, the clock now shows the date more clearly, different colour options and appear bigger on your screen. Thanks for this one Fox. A new ‘saliva only transmission’ sandbox option – meaning that scratches won’t zombify.
  Clearer condition icons (stars) for weapons so you can tell their quality more accurately.
  Optimized fog that should be much kinder to your frame-rate. It will also look better when it comes into proximity with walls. Generally looks the same, with less of a drag on your system though. Finally, there was also some clever performance stuff from Zac that will help us track down the performance wobbles that you send into us that we can’t track down ourselves. Here’s Zac explaining it. (When he says ‘the engineers’ it’s a posh way of him saying ‘me’.)

“The new upgrade to AnimZed will allow testers and players to package up a performance recording and send it as a single file. This will allow the data to be gathered on all kinds of different hardware, and the engineers can then pore over the key details and find out where the performance bottlenecks are. This should make it much easier to optimize Project Zomboid to run smoothly on all different kinds of hardware, and not just the ones that the team codes and tests on.”
  That’s all for this week in terms of Build 41 stuff. Thanks so much for reading, and sorry I posted it a bit later than normal today.
 
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!

Let’s start off this week with something exciting that’s not piped straight out of Build 41 MP testing.
 
Long-time readers of this dev blog might recall that our writer / creative director / dogsbody Will wrote for renowned horror sci-fi game Alien: Isolation a few years ago.
 
Alien Isolation is widely seen as a cult classic for a variety of reasons, but its BAFTA award winning sound design is one of the most compelling. The noise of the creature in the vents, Amanda’s trainers treading and squeaking on the floors of Sevastopol, the way you’d strain to hear where it might be approaching from, the subtle beeps and whirrs of the machinery around you etc.


 
Will really got on with both of the main sound guys on the final approach to the Alien project’s release, Byron Bullock and Sam Cooper, who both very generously allowed him to hold their BAFTA on the night they won it.
 
While Sam remains at Creative Assembly, Byron went on to start up a company called Noiseworks with another Senior Sound Designer from the CA Total War team called David Phillipp.
 
Ever since then we have pined for Byron and the Noiseworks team, dearly wishing that Project Zomboid could one day have soundscape with the same stratospherically high quality bar as Alien: Isolation.
 
And so…

   “We are excited to be working on Project Zomboid and can’t wait to craft an immersive and compelling sonic landscape for all of its survivors!” said Noiseworks Creative Director Byron Bullock when requested for blog content.
 
“We plan to re-work the entire sonic landscape and have plans for some pretty awesome zombies, detailed and highly-dynamic world audio and an overall exciting soundscape that helps immerse players in the world of the Knox Event Exclusion Zone!”
 
We currently have a roadmap plotted out for Noiseworks over a period of many months, and their work will not be appearing (or mentioned in blogs) for quite a long time.
 
What with their Technical Sound Designer Michael already in the guts of our new FMOD project, however, and us deep in discussions with Byron about how zombies should sound, foot-steps, the ambient sounds of Kentucky nature etc etc we wanted to share the news so you know about the team-up.
 
We know we rarely discuss stuff that won’t be a part of our current build, but in the instance of teaming up with another group of experts and widening our skillbase we thought we’d make an exception. Exciting times!
 
41 MP TEST NEWS
Now back to your regular programming. We had a small W.N.I.T.S. (Wednesday Night Internal Test Session) last night, with the intention of holding a wider one on Friday.
 
Overall we had improved (but not fixed) zed teleportation issues, but we also had some annoying server instability that suggests more work ahead – we need to investigate this and that some of the work we’ve been doing on map-load / driving issues need a good, thorough debugging.
 
When there was less than five players a generally improved experience was reported, despite one super-distant player reporting some lag issues early on. Hopefully the latter was caused by the aforementioned instability, but we shall see.
 
Here’s the changelist for what we were testing last night, for those intrigued by the nitty-gritty.
 
And here’s a quick fun video of what went down. As you can, hopefully, see the close combat with zeds is really starting to come along now.
Friday’s test will again shake fresh issues out of the bug tree though. There’s still much to be done.
 

OTHER STUFF
Zac has been wringing out a few more chunks of performance gain from the 3D animations. His shared SharedSkeles eliminate the need for 99% of updateModelTransform calls on IsoZombie (blog writer does not understand this I’m afraid) which should give a 33% boost to overall animation performance on IsoZombie crowds. A video, with before and after!
 

Meanwhile in MP land RJ and Martin have been working on PvP and new PvP animations, while Tim has also added some improvements to controller detection – which will hopefully improve a lot of gamepad compatibility issues.
 
Turbo meanwhile has been optimizing his fog and mist which, as has been reported by the community on several occasions – thank you, has a tendency to tank FPS at inopportune moments.
 
Finally for inclusion this week: ‘Rockstar’ Mark Wright is now nearly at the end of his mission creating 3D models for all our inventory items – so it’ll all look more realistic when seen on the floor. (Just as weapons currently appear when placed down)
 

  Thanks all, more next week – with rolling updates on the Twitters.
 
This week’s base from intvkng. 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!

We will in the future.

It’s been an up and down week in terms of MP development for Build 41. Last week’s moderately successful Wednesday Night Internal Test Session (W.N.I.T.S.) was followed by another on Friday (F.N.I.T.S) – which was… not moderately successful.
 
People had fun, but issues (now fixed) with Turbo’s new more compressed savegames made life difficult. Meanwhile, several of Andrei’s additions to the code have now had to be taken back into the garage for further work and testing – as we were seeing far more desync and zed teleports than we have had in previous test sessions.
 
The good side of obstructions like these, though, is that it gives you more evidence of what’s going wrong – and where to fix it. Andrei has already fixed aspects of what was running haywire, and has debugged the core zed teleportation issue to get it fixed today.
 
The memory leak we mentioned last week has very likely been making our life harder too, and this week Yuri has tracked it down to the server working its way through masses of packets that have been queued up outside it, causing delays and a build-up of negative server energy.
We imagine this is one of the core issues that’s plagued us with high population servers throughout the life and times of PZ MP. It’s basically a ‘cascade’ effect, one moment of high stress and load and it will get clogged, and being clogged just makes it worse and it gets more clogged. A vicious cycle until it all falls apart.
 
As such Yuri has spent much of this week installing ways to track this event and protection / filters around what’s fed into server at crisis moments – which currently amounts to potentially hundreds of different perceived ‘bugs’ in the MP game that are really just ‘the server isn’t able to send out replies to keep the clients synced’.
 
Our hope is that once we open the server to a wider tester audience again we will have far more stable foundations to play on, and this certainly does feel like the way the wind is blowing. So, hopefully more happy-sounding news next week.
LAST NIGHT
Although it was a relatively low playercount we had a deliberately smaller W.N.I.T.S. last night (putting up with the irritating zed teleports) and had a lot of fun.
 
Here’s the changelist of what had gone into the game over the seven days that preceded it.
 
Items of note include a killer optimization from Zac that gives a 2x boost to the animation system itself (so the anims, not the game entire) which is especially helpful around zed hordes.
 
Overall on the smaller server it was clear that general work on melee combat and PvP has come along leaps and bounds. RJ is also putting in some improved hit reactions from Martin to help with the PvP over the next few days.
 
So, fingers crossed, this will be replicated on larger tests once Yuri and Andrei have smoothed over their current respective entanglements.
Here’s a video highlights reel.
 
That’s about all this week though in the background we have also been doing some tidy-up work to improve it when folks plug in/out peripherals and controllers, and also setting things up for a future big improvement to our soundscape – news of which we’ll let you know about in due course.
 
Finally, if you haven’t already, please check out Aiteron, iBrRus and friends’ AMAZING boat mod: the AquaTsar Yacht Club. It truly is a thing of wonder and a massive addition to the community’s modding scene.
 
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!

Is there any focus on PvP being consistent?
 
Im not too worried about PvP since its sort of a secondary aspect of the game, but I hope its functional because it would allow MP to be a lot more interesting and dynamic.