DresdenBBQ

Hello! Here’s your weekly update on the internal testing of the Build 41 MP build. This week we decided that the build was stable enough with our usual group of testers, and wanted to push things a little further – knowing that this would likely shake a variety of new issues and bugs out into the open.
 
As such rather than the usual 10-15 players, last night the Wednesday Night Internal Test Session (WNITS) we had around 25-30 in peak times.
The results were encouraging, in that folks generally had a fun time, but also (as was foretold) a variety of new and annoying issues to fix and polish emerged from the gloom. Some big, some small.
 
As is now traditional, here’s a link to a changelist of what went in over the week before the test. (Slightly shorter than other weeks as there was a degree of overspill into next week with unstable stuff that couldn’t go in till after the test.)
 
Here’s also a quick vid of folks putting the build through its paces in vehicles.
 
 
Stuff we need to work on over the coming week.
 
We had a big server wobble after an hour or so of play, with server CPU use skyrocketing and extremely long update periods. Yuri is currently digging into this and has replicated the issue using his fake clients. Close-quarter teleport zeds. One we already had on our list, which Andrei is currently fixing up. A stuttering driving experience for some – which we’re hoping has been fixed today. Numerous instances of players turning invisible, and even a couple where players respawned with another player’s name. Various other niggly and annoying things that we’ll be polishing before the next test.
  Here’s a couple of new tester testimonials as well.

“My top three bugs were probably the teleporting zombies, occasional invisible players and flying cars. In terms of my general opinion: meeting unexpected people and seeing how it plays out… organizing rescue parties… It’s all I ever hoped for and then more.”
——————
“It was a fun to finally get to play with others. Sitting in the bar, organizing things for the party, and even getting to experience being put out of my misery in the worst way possible.”

“It’s 85% playable currently, I’d say. Relating to performance specifically, we had quite a few moments where the apocalypse experience of surviving as a group felt very genuine, and that was fortunately not surpassed by the sync issues that we did experience. It was a great time.“
 
 

NON MP STUFF DONE THIS WEEK
Other stuff that’s gone into the MP test beta that’s not directly linked to online play include:
 
Zac has made a 2x optimization boost to the animation system – which is one of several steps we’re taking to improve performance around hordes.
 
Another big one Turbo will be addressing next is fog performance.

Here’s a quick video Zac took of the game running on his rig with the optimization operational.
 

Turbo’s improvements and streamlining to the game’s save system also went in this week – meaning PZ’s save files should be a little less bloated and hard-drive-filling in future.
 
SPIFFO’S FINAL THOUGHT (AGAIN x3):
Although everything is looking very positive with the MP stuff PLEASE note that we still have a pretty long ‘to do’ list before we can consider a public IWBUMS beta release and Community Megatests.

Each time we open the internal tester pool wider we will be unveiling newer bugs and issues to sort out, and it’s a big tree to climb.

We are sorry for being such massive teases with this stuff, but we hope you’ll agree it’s better than some sort of radio silence.

We miiiight be having a secondary test on Friday evening, to catch the improvements that we’ve been putting in over the last two days. If we do we’ll be sure to tweet a few nuggets of interest from it. Thanks!

This week’s safe abode (but for how long?) from Exotic. 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!

After this is fixed, could keep as a secret cheat code / easter egg, like in the old doom game you'd type iddqd for invulnerability, here in Zomboid you could type something like flyofthezumblecars (just very random idea) )or something like that and for all vehicles it would enable this behavior / bouncy physics ahah
 

Thank you for your interest in our server, Dresden.  Even if you are colonial filth we welcome a fellow Foxhole player with open arms. Your spawn location seems fine just keep in mind most people will be allocated to the East.  I'll DM you closer to release, until then ill look for you on the field.

Okay first off I know y'all's kind cause I play Foxhole too and I've spent many hundred hours blowing your boys to the high heavens in a my Colonial battle-tank! Y'all's boys make for good target practice.  I'd be down to clown in an RP server, this is the first one I've heard of potentially coming up whenever Update 41 drops so I'll throw my hat in.
 
Character Name: Noah McSlide
Profession: Forest Officer at the Otter Creek Outdoor Recreation Area 
Preferred Allocated Spawn: One of the many farmhouses north of Muldraugh.
Hours: 600ish
Experience: I've got a few hundred hours over the years but it's been a while.

Hi all, here’s the latest from the internal test build of the Build 41 MP beta – which we’re working on and fixing up until it’s of a standard appropriate for wider testing.
 
Our current routine is for a playtest of 10, or so, players every Wednesday night – with a report the next day for the community. Which is where you find us today!
 
First off, here’s the changelist of everything that had been added for the seven days previous to last night’s test.
 
Second off, here’s a brief highlights reel from proceedings.
 
Last night’s test had a Prison Break theme, with a cross-country dash intended to test vehicles. It was a lot of fun, and again very valuable in terms of exposing bugs and showing what’s improved – and would could do with further refinement.
 
Key areas we need to focus on are:
 
There are still some occasional zombies that we have dubbed ‘superzeds’ that tend to teleport straight in front of the player and attack. Some players seem to get this more than others, irrespective of their own personal ping. Vehicle sync, player sync within vehicles and ‘player name drift’ during transit are all improved – but not completely. Physics bugs (video seen below) are also still present, but not quite as insane. Yuri is also still looking into ways to improve memory use and optimize map loading, as we suspect ‘traffic cone blockages’ on new map chunks will become more of an issue on higher population servers. Zombie death and corpse placement is still an issue – which Andrei will hopefully put in a fix for in coming days. We need to tighten up players in your local area, as sometimes the teleport we’re using to ‘catch up’ is too aggressive. This works fine, but will cause issues for PvP.  
Here are a few screenies from last night too:
 
NON-MP STUFF DONE THIS WEEK
Shift+double click can now be used on clothing items in the inventory to wear the item Newest earned skill level is now highlighted when the skill panel is opened New hair styles and hair functions Improved movables system – movables can now be dismantled from within the inventory.  
SPIFFO’S FINAL THOUGHT (AGAIN, AGAIN):
Although everything is looking very positive with the MP stuff PLEASE note that we still have a pretty long ‘to do’ list before we can consider a public IWBUMS beta release and Community Megatests.

We are sorry for being such massive teases with this stuff, but we hope you’ll agree it’s better than some sort of radio silence.

As an apology here’s an amusing compilation of the vehicle bugs that we’ve been stamping out recently.
 
 
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!

Hi everyone, here’s another report from a week of work from the 41 beta MP Strike Force and the weekly Wednesday Night Test Session.
As with last week, as it’s probably of interest to some of y’all, here’s the changelist of what was being tested that was new since the last Wednesday session.
As before, the PZ server admins and modders we assembled to have a play of the current Build 41 MP took screens and video for bug reports – so here’s a quick highlights reel of the stuff that wasn’t too broken.
 
 
Overall the test went really well again, and encouragingly had our longest distance player yet (playing from California, on a server in France) fully able to play along without too much inconvenience. Here’s some testimony from some of the players on the changes they felt since last Wednesday’s test.
 
“There have been definite improvements when fighting zombies with multiple people, though there are still issues with synchronizing player positions and zombie death positions as well.”
 
“It gets smoother with every tweak they put in. Combat and fighting still do have various issues here and there with synchronizing, but it feels like they are being ironed out quickly. This includes all various ‘general’ animations too – more and more of them are getting fixed so we can see them working properly in action. It’s quite a funny scene walking into base to see multiple players chilling out, reading books, eating, drinking & working out. It really shows how immersive multiplayer will be in my opinion.”
 
So what’s on the development menu for the coming week on the MP Strike Force?
 
All players in the test last night reported less ‘black boxing and cones’ – which is when an impassable border can appear when map hasn’t been loaded in for a car passenger, blocking off the road ahead for the whole car. However, this a problem that we want to get 100% addressed, especially when we are anticipating busy servers. As such, Yuri is continuing to dig into further solutions. Andrei is working on corpse position syncing, quite a big task, to make sure that dead zeds are placed in the same position as where they were seen to fall. This will go a long way in ‘tidying up’ hectic scenes of battle. RJ has been syncing missing anims, fixing crashes, hidden models etc. and next week plans to continue tidying up situations in which multiple players are fighting zeds.   It should also be noted, clearly, that we are currently only testing with 10-12 people on the server at any one time. As we scale up tester numbers more and more bug and bandwidth gribblies could start coming out of the closet, but for now lower server population counts are working pretty well.
 

 
 
NON-MP STUFF DONE THIS WEEK
EP has continued to work on zombie pathfinding, making them more able to get through (bash through) complicated patterns of barriers, items and parked vehicles that players put in their way. We are taking the opportunity with the natural break in build releases to update certain aspects of the java systems that the game runs on, and may also mix in the more streamlined save system that Turbo has waiting in the wings. Seeing as our plans for a farming overhaul are still quite distant, we also spent a little time streamlining what’s currently there. Previously to seed/water/harvest you needed to right click on every plant and select an action. Now once you have selected seeds, water or harvest, you’ll have a cursor to perform all farming actions on multiple plants easily.  
SPIFFO’S FINAL THOUGHT (AGAIN):
Although everything is looking very positive with the MP stuff PLEASE note that we still have a notably long ‘to do’ list before we can consider a public IWBUMS beta release and Community Megatests.

We are sorry for being such massive teases with this stuff, but we hope you’ll agree it’s better than some sort of radio silence.
 
 
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!

Y'know, since you guys are adding lots of "Cool but small" new features while the MP Turkey is done cooking, would it be possible to add more SIgns to paint? Just want to have more options (and maybe an option to paint it higher in the wall, so it can be visible if you place a box in front of it) than just the skull and the arrows. Don't think that'll be too hard compared to bigger dishes like the new Fitness system, or the new Trailers.

Towing is something I've been hoping for since the moment that vehicles dropped so, wow, holy shit this is not something I expected to come in the build 41 package! Hell yeah I'm glad it's getting official implementation, hat's off to you @Aiteron and the dev team!

Lag Fightin'

How do all, let’s start with the team coding MP for Build 41 first this week.
MP STRIKE FORCE
This week Yuri and Andrei have been working on improving character movement in high ping scenarios, using a tool to simulate different levels of lag. This tool can simulate ping, lost packets, packets that appear in the wrong order, duplicated packets and throttled packets. Every different sort of errant packet, basically, and mixes of each one besides. 
 
Anyone who has played B40 multiplayer will know quite how laggy, teleport-y and nasty high ping situations could previously get with PZ. As such, tackling this issue has been a very high priority for us – and we’re really glad to have seen some good improvement over the past week of dev.
 
First, just for reference, in this first video you can see what the situation was in last week’s build. 

(In case anyone in our audience has trouble envisioning what a ping represents in real-world geographic terms, 300 ping is about what you’d expect from Australia to Europe.) 
 

Now, here’s a video from this week after many improvements – though please bear in mind that there are still issues to resolve here.
 
 
 
So, known issues: at 3:50 if the ‘climb in window’ packet happens to be lost it can cause the character to get really far behind. There clearly still needs to be some improvements to allow characters to catch up better if they fall behind.
 
Otherwise though (even with 300 ping with an extremely unreliable connection that’s throttled and losing packets left and right) in our testbed situation the experience is much smoother and much more immersive than we could ever have dreamed of with the current public Build 40. We’re sure it will continue to improve up until release too.
TRAILERS AND TOWING
We’ve been playing around with our physics library, off and on, for a while now – primarily multi-wheel support and other differently shaped custom vehicles for future addition: tractors, military stuff, trucks etc. 
 
Now, a little while ago an amazing modder called Aiteron appeared on our forums experimenting with car towing.
This prompted us to realise that (before we got to the military etc) moving some of this background experimentation into expansion of the current car physics system would also be a relatively low risk (yet cool!) thing for our non-MP devs to add into Build 41 while we wait for the completion of the multiplayer rebuild.
 
In IWBUMS beta patch 41.46, you will be able to attach other cars and trailers (initially one trailer model, with a ‘covered’ and ‘uncovered’ variant) to your own vehicle and tow them around. How well you tow them, however, will be dependent on weight and the power of your vehicle. Likewise you’ll be able to tow other vehicles as well.
 
(PLEASE NOTE: vids are WIP)
 
 
 
 
As mentioned previously, this also includes added support for multiple collision shapes on vehicles – primarily to support the trailer hitch extending forwards of the trailer’s body. This should also benefit modding greatly, we hope.
We’re also currently also experimenting with a three segment physics rope, that seems to be working well at the moment – and likewise some other future trailer variants.
 
Again, absolute mad props to Aiteron for showing us just how cool this function could be in-game. We’ve been talking to him this week, and he seems a really cool guy with some great future mod ideas to boot.
 
Likewise, in towables, we have great new potential here for both devs and modders alike – as already shown by this amazing companion mod to Aiteron’s own towing mod that appeared a few days ago. This has been created by IBrRus, and features oil trailers and caravans you can live out of nomadically. (Features like these won’t be the sort of thing we’ll be including ourselves, for a long time anyway, so we’ll be sure to help Aiteron and IBrRus get their mod contents adapted over to our own updated game physics systems before we release 41.46 into the IWBUMS beta.)
 
We didn’t get enough testing done on the current internal build of 41.46 to consider a release this week (and likewise some of this still needs polish/work) but intend to put it out at some point in the next.
MODDING MODELS
As many PZ modders will no doubt be aware, there is currently no clear path available to mod skinned meshes for Build 41 – ie. meshes with animations, limbs, walking etc.
 
Internally, we use expensive software that’s not really accessible to modders so until now we’ve held off releasing our source models – so people haven’t been able to model their own completely unique characters, clothing (outside texture changes), or create extra animations. (It may be some clever people out there have found a way regardless though.)
 
Over the past few weeks, then, we’ve been massaging the pipeline of getting a PZ character into Blender and then out into the game with relative ease and lack of fuss. The challenge then: to have characters exported using blender’s export tools, then renderable and animatable within the game itself.
 
This has been, to put it mildly, a pain in the ass. Blender’s exporters don’t play too friendly with our engine.
 
As such, Zac has been spending time trying to bash our engine into a state where it can alternately load these blender exported files and play them. There’s been good progress, with each iteration looking vaguely more human and less disturbing, though there is still work to be done until the characters match perfectly or even look like they obey the laws of physics, but its clear we’re getting closer.

Close enough to be able to show you these videos of Zac’s progress anyways. We’re hoping that this will be licked at the start of next week.

 


 
This week’s work out and mannequin Spiffo image from Mr Sunshine. 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!

I'll say, I'm really looking forward to the towing. Does this mean we'll ever have the much-requested Trailer/RV? I actually have a few ideas on how one of those could work without the player actually having to "walk inside".

Residential solar panels have been around since the early 90's but the technology wasn't wildly explored due oppressive taxes which make them more expenses, landlords who've outlawed them on their buildings, and their heavy production price due to a lack of mass production seeing as the renewable energy market simply cannot compete with the already well established fossil fuel industry. However they still did exist but the problem with solar panels is that the solar cells in the panels deteriorate over time and need to be replaced after a certain amount of time or your solar panels will cease to work. While this isn't a problem for us in the year of our lord 2019, our global market easily has the ability to produce these solar cells (If it would actually choose to do so instead of fracking and mining more), it's still a more cost efficient and waste efficient way of producing energy than coal or gas. However in 1993 solar panels weren't exactly popular so getting new solar cells for your panels would be extremely difficult in rural Kentucky in 1993, not to mention the solar power at the time was more unreliable and had a faster deterioration rate. Wind power has been around for longer but I'd like to point out that wind power isn't what I'd describe as "silent." It still makes noise depending on the speed of the wind and I do think it the amount of sound it generates could be incorporated into the game since I believe a weather overhaul is planned in the future? It would also allow for different watts of electricity to be produced dependin on the strength of the wind. That or either give them a lower overall power production rate so that you'd have to have more wind turbines to equal that of a generator but make them slightly quieter so they can seem like a more end game item to craft/steal. Or make them have overall *more* noise because after all, you don't have to constantly fill them up with gas and can leave them to do their own thing. I don't really think solar panels are feasible, but with the right amount of balancing, wind power would definitely be a cool end game addition to the game. 

love the camping zed scenes I cannot wait to find these locations and I also like those gun attachments visuals.

...petitioned for ideas on twitter... -____-

It's freaking gorgeous. And a great showcase of things like the windblown trees, evolved cutaway system, zombie anim and sound enhancements, weather development in general, etc. Sad that the new players who jump on when MP hits will have missed the really cool ride of seeing it all come into place.

Honestly how are you guys making such an amazing game. This is a dream come true and im super excited to jump in now in 2020, buy it for all my friends, see all the amazing progress this game has come through and now we are at the verge of multiplayer after a year! you guys are amazing im going to be recommending this game to everyone because it needs to be mainstreamed. Its a masterpiece.

Good job Yuri and Andrei, the MP improvements look awesome. I'm getting ever more excited as MP reintegration looms forward. Much love to everyone at TIS!

You've got a long tongue

MP is so close we can almost taste it now...

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

I know the devs have toyed around with the idea of having underground areas before that are *genuinely* underground but as far as I'm aware there's some sorta wonkiness with the engine. It just doesn't behave when you try to create "Underground space" that cuts through the world. It's possible to get around it (Foxhole, another indie game had a similar problem that they eventually worked around.) but from what I understand with my complete and utter lack of knowledge of game design, it's labor intensive and not high on the priority list. 

Attempt to make a bunker.

The emotes look awesome! I have a question though; will certain ones be triggered automatically (like your character yawning when they're tired, or holding their nose around corpse piles)? I think it could be quite cool for giving the player feedback about what their character is feeling like.

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

Yooo the idea of being able to squish whatever type of item I want into shelves is like, an organizer's dream. No longer will there be the days of the books on my bookshelf turning out to be bullets once the loot menu is open! Also just what aesthetics you can do with stacking items (Cans, pots/pans, boxes, etc) would allow bases to feel so much more personal. It also might legit incentivize people to not just dismantle every bit of furniture they find as they can use it for organizational space instead.

Welcome back and I guess that makes you now immune to the Covid? Looking forward to all the tweaks and fixes and hoping that enabling power to player made rooms that are added on to exiting houses is in that mix. The 3D items look great and can't wait to see them in the game....in the future.
 
Cudos to the whole Dev team. I've only been playing for a couple of months but with all the hours I've logged, it feels like a year or so. Loving this game enormously. So much for my obsession with Dinosaurs.