DresdenBBQ

Louisville is looking pretty cool I cant wait to explore this new city.

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

will be nice to not worry about falling thru the roofs anymore.
had a LOT of broken legs & ankles due to that 🚑
 
 
 
or maybe it was sloppy gameplay? 🤔

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

Excellent 3D models.  And will it be possible to interact with them, for example, to put coffee on the table?

🙀 I feel things 🙀

funny. all the good stuff in here, and the YES!!!!!! FINALLY!!!!
moment comes from something been waiting for years for.
 
the ability to refill the water dispensers.
 
drove me nuts every time i used one up and could not dunk it in a barrel or use a funnel to refill
the water container. thanks much

In case you didn't know, we're vastly majority white in the development team. If you took from that statement that we don't value our own lives and don't think our own lives matter, then am afraid you took the wrong thing away from it.
 
If what you say about Belarus is true then that is wonderful to hear and we could all learn a lot from Belarus. Sadly its not the case elsewhere, particularly in America where all this stuff is going down at the moment, as such that statement is something a lot of people are saying in solidarity and its unfortunate that its somehow so contentious to some.

Your post - as well as our previous explanation - was removed because you're misinterpreting the point of the Black Lives Matter movement with a line that is constantly used to trivialize and invalidate the idea behind the movement and we did not want this topic to turn into an education program for current happenings in the world.

While the things might not apply to Belarus and a large part of Europe, in America there has been a systematic oppression of the black community for more than 100 years. 
The current riots happening in the US are the escalation of this. 
The Black Lives Matter movement does not make a point that only Black Lives Matter. It carries an implicit "Black Lives Matter, Too" with it, because as evident in the US, not all lives matter to many people, especially not black ones. 

You're a fully armored player who has no wounds on him complaining that players who have lacerations and scratches are currently fighting to be provided with bandages after a large amount of that certain group of players has had their needs ignored systematically.  
You're shouting "everybody's injuries should matter!" to them without being injured, essentially.

This is why your statements display a stark lack of empathy and apathy for the people who are affected by things that you thankfully haven't had to experience.

Hello everyone.
In the coming week Yuri and Andrei will explore the ‘light ownership’ of zombies on clients that we discussed in the last blog. The intention for this is to create zero latency for any nearby zombies directly chasing or attacking the player.
Work over the past seven days, meanwhile, has been a continuation on making sure that zombie movement transmission is as smooth as possible on clients – even with high levels of latency and extremely sparing transmission of positions. The endgame of all this being to minimize network traffic with hordes.
In Build 40 and earlier, when zombies move the server calculates their movement via the same AI routines the single-player uses. All positions, animation frames, angles etc are transmitted to clients that are in range of that zombie. Zombies only ever move on the server, so their movement is always inherently at a lower framerate than in SP.
On top of this, due to the latency and ping between server and client, by the time that information is received on a client it’s always out of date. The zombie will always be further along its path depending on the delay in the packet, what you (the client) see is inherently a representation of the past.
Finally, and most importantly when dealing with the zombie menace, if any lag occurs in causing lost packets or delays – then that has no bearing on the zombie’s AI. A bite can occur on the server without a single positional update ever reaching the client being bitten.
So let’s look at how the MP Strike Force have been looking to remedy this. In the following video the blue circles represent the zombies position on the server,while the green line and circle represent the zombies’ current target for movement.
(Please ignore some animation oddities when they transition from standing to chasing at the moment)
Look at the rarity of movement of the blue circles (especially on zombies far away from the player) – and also the inaccuracy as to where the client zombies are appearing. This shows that zombies on clients have a ton more agency to decide themselves how to move, instead of relying purely on information passed down to them by the server.
Zombies far from the player now have a second or more between updates from the server, instead of updates every server tick – which would have been something like 15 times every second. Despite this, zeds are able to move around convincingly using a combination of prediction, interpolation and extrapolation and leveraging the client zombie AI states for moving.
The end result of all this should be, for the most part, smooth zombie movement even in hordes and with high pings or server stress.
Will it be perfect? Well, clearly the differences between the blue circles and the zombies position shows that they are often in inaccurate places on the map – you can see them try to correct themselves as player positions get transmitted after delays and inform them that their predictive client-side shambling has been in the wrong direction. This is something that Yuri and Andrei will continue to improve upon, however ultimately these inconsistencies shouldn’t matter too much.
Once client ownership over zombies is in-place it will only be zombies at a distance and those not interacting with players on a certain client that would have these inconsistencies or deviations from their true server position. In these cases having believable approximate behaviour of the zombies that reasonably mirrors their actions will suffice. Having increased visual fidelity of their movement at an extremely low cost of network traffic, is much more important than extreme accuracy of position and direction of zeds that aren’t directly in harm’s way or chasing your own particular survivor.
Ownership of zombies that are of relevance to the player at hand will be transferred – so the client impacted by the zombie in gameplay terms will have zero latency authority over the zombies actions. This will mean then that their combat should hopefully be identical to that of the single player experience. This then, is one of our key next milestones.
There will undoubtedly be additional challenges ahead. For example, we have to make combat effective when attacking a zombie that’s chasing a friend.
That zombie will be at far higher risk of suffering from latency, and will be using client side prediction and cover-ups based on delayed information. Likewise, there’s the issue of making sure a remote player attacking a zombie that’s chasing you look believable with these similar latency issues.
However, whatever issues we face, even we find solutions that aren’t 100% perfect the end result will be VASTLY preferable to our current MP issues and frailties. The war on lag bites will hopefully have been won, and we will have seen the end of running through hordes of zombies that pause in sync every second as the server struggles to keep up.
NEXT IWBUMS BETA PATCH
We’re on track for a release for the next patch early next week, as we currently have a completed tutorial that industrious internal testers are doing their utmost to break – after which RJ cleans up their mess.
Other interesting nuggets that have gone into the patch this week include:
Polished English language UI text from a new starring role from community member Faalagorn and Nasko. Ability to wash blood from cars. ‘Fill all’ option when filling up bottles of water etc. Better cutaway behaviour with fences A new ‘reloading’ radial menu Fannypacks and flip-flops FINALLY AND IMPORTANTLY
It feels strange for the development blog of a zombie survival game to pass comment on the news of the day, but due to unfolding events it becomes imperative to underline:
Black lives matter.
We hope that in its own small way our game and community can, and will, reflect this basic fact and right.
 
This week’s rogue katana from Debugging Sucks. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Hey all, hope everyone is well on this sunshine-y pandemic day. A few ‘where we’re at’s on Build 41 will now follow.
IWBUMS BETA 41.38
There won’t be a patch for the beta for another week or so, as the main body of work on it is an upgrade/extension for our current tutorial that Will, RJ and newly TIS branded mapper Xeonyx are currently working on. 
In future we will most likely look to other avenues for explaining and tutorialising the game, but for the time-being we need the current tutorial expanded to cover aspects like stealth, sprinting and the weaponry hotbar – and indeed for a multitude of bugs and breakages to be removed from the existing framework, and for it to work with gamepads.
While not very dazzling or sexy to you our existing players, we also hope we’re making it entertaining enough (and have enough little secrets in it) for experienced survivors to have 15 minutes of fun with it too.
Elsewhere for 41.38, while the tutorial update is being worked on, EP has been on something of a bugfix overdrive while Martin has
tweaked the female mesh and skin weights to improve the posing of lady survivors and differentiate them a little from the men.
Zac and Martin have also together tracked down a strange pause in some links/chains of animations (most notably in spears, which was where the trail began) and we suspect that a forthcoming fix for this may well improve a bunch of anims flow game-wide. It’s seen here in super slo-mo.
Other fixes and improvements recently committed for the next patch include less buggy tripped sprinter zeds, unfixable firearms, invisible salad, the inability to climb over short fence doors while holding E, log walls that can now use the cutaway system and various other things.
Right now we primarily want to fix and polish what’s in 41 rather than introduce any complex new stuff – so as not to add extra complication or disrupt combat while the MP Strike Team does their thing.
MP STRIKE FORCE
We started the week with a big meeting between Grand MP Overseer Bitbaboon Mark and the rest of the Strike Force – as Yuri has been moved over from working on finishing the new fire system to the MP Strike Force and needed to be brought up to speed on plans.
Since then he and Andrei have sparked up a fruitful working relationship and have been sharing videos and info from their work on client-side data interpolation (predicting and interpolating the coordinates and rotation of zombies on your PC rather than the server itself) with the wider team.
Yuri has also created a debugging interface to display the actual zombie coordinates on the server, the previous predicted coordinates on the client and the current predicted ones.
With this interface Andrei and Yuri can see that their predictions work well when the zombie goes in a straight line – the zombie is always in front of its last known position on the server (blue circle). With the current implementation, however, when the direction of movement of the zombies change then the predictions becomes out of whack. This, then, is going to be a focus of their work next week.
TURBO STUFF
Okay, we hesitate to show this again as it’s a coder side project that’s away from our other mainline features (and certainly not anywhere near ready enough for nearby version currently) but Turbo’s latest work on the top of his ongoing Devices project is looking pretty fun.
It’s been a relatively dry blog this week, so please have this by way of apology.
This week’s creative use of sheet ropes from Jimmi Mongoose. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Wait I know. We have Books, we have TV, and radio. Soon we will have working PCs... We can now perform proper social distancing. 

Hey all, here are a few updates from various members of the PZ team chipping away at the edifice of the zombie survival mountain.
IWBUMS PUBLIC BETA 41.37
We’ve got a patch for the Build 41 beta pretty much ready to go, just waiting on a few minor corrections before we put it out of the door. It’s more of a fix and balance affair rather than anything feature-packed but does contain a few nuggets of interest:
Fix for non-openable double doors (sorry about that one) Prevention for prone zombie heads clipping through walls and obstacles. Falling and prone zombies will now slide away from walls. Added guitar case and flight case. Added a “Delete All” button next to “Loot all” button for trash can/bins, clicking this will permanently delete items from the container. (Please note: this is quite ‘gamey’ currently, and is a first iteration. We will improve on it as we go along.) Made many previously unmovable objects movable: benches, bunk beds, carpets, canopies, bar stools, counters etc. Helmet attacks change: before zombie attacks could potentially make helmets fall and also you get a hit. Now if the helmet falls, the current attack won’t connect but the next one will. Once a timed action is done (reading book, cooking, crafting..) it’ll auto-cancel fast-forward. Cancelling a timed action via ESC will also cancel fast forward. Various other fixes to lighting on water, vision cones, lunch boxes, bags, reloading and other stuff. XEONYX JOINS LV TEAM
We’ve come a long way with Jamie Magnuson, one of the preeminent map creators in the PZ community, ever since he first blew everyone’s minds with New Denver.
More recently he’s been building one-off challenge maps for us, like the film set and the Kingsmouth holiday island in the build 41 beta, but we’re now pleased to be able to say that he’s now joining us full-time and will shortly be joining Binky and RingoD in the design and creation of our long-term Louisville project – which is our PZ rendition of an in-game city.
Xeonyx will initially be adding a lick of paint and required changes for our current tutorial map, given as a tutorial revamp is next on the cards for RJ to do, but then will be responsible for fleshing out downtown areas and picking up the gauntlet from where Mash left them off before she moved over to more general art duties.
Binky and RingoD are working on the suburbs areas meanwhile, and feel the occasion warrants a quick rare look into a gigantic game addition that’s still a few publicly released versions away at this point.
So, to give you a quick idea of the scale of the Louisville map – here’s a quick look at some streets in the urban residential outskirts, and a wider overview of where they fit on the overall (detail free, cos spoilers) wider city. Please note that this area will be *very* dense in terms of zombie population levels.
We always say this but, beyond even our most anticipated additions, Louisville is not something that will be appearing any time soon – but now with three people at the coalface we’ll hopefully be picking up some extra speed internally.
41 BETA MP WORK
It’s another dry/techie MP update we’re afraid, but the mood is pretty positive between the MP Strike Team chaps who reckon what’s being done is being done well. Zac reports in with the below:
“This week has seen upgrades to the packet structure used to sync characters across the network. The IsoZombiePacket now includes the AnimState and ActionState names. In order to save bandwidth, it does not transmit the names as raw text. Instead, it uses indices into a table of names. Since state names are data-driven, there is no way to pre-generate these tables.”
“As such, a request-response method was implemented to construct the tables, and keep them in sync between server and clients. A new state can be loaded at any time. If a client encounters a new name, it sends a request to the server for a new id. The server generates it, adds the new entry to the table, and notifies all clients.”
“Up next, we are working on synchronising more and more game states. The idea is to steadily add to the feature set, then test and observe results, all the while using the fresh learnings to drive the design.”
FIRE
Here’s Yuri’s latest fire video.  Here you can see WIP versions of molotov cocktails, generators and burning characters – on top of everything being shown using the hidden map of combustible materials to calculate fire spread and combustion. 
(A few notes: we probably need to improve the way the fire looks on ‘more busy’ tiles like the long grass, maybe have a ‘wilted, browning long grass’ tile for them etc. Likewise all the effects visuals are a WIP, next up Yuri will be looking into fiery effects for faulty generators, metal objects in microwaves, burning zeds, fuel explosions etc.)
That’s about it – we’ve just taken delivery of Rockstar Mark’s new car textures that should fix 41’s memory bloat and get it running on some people’s rigs – as well as provide us with vehicular blood splats. So we’ll give that a tweet tomorrow so you can check it out if it works in-engine first time. Cheers all.
This week’s emergency call-out another image from $ℏìᶄ., can they make it to three in a row next week? A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Congratulations to XeonyX!!! I remember when he helped me out back in the day when I was new to creatin' buildings and tryin' to figure out the maps. He was a real help and I've always been purdy grateful towards him for it. He's a fantastic mapper and I'm sure he'll do a great job helpin' with Louisville. Keep up the good work y'all!!! I hope to get my girlfriend into the game when build 41 multiplayer drops! >:D 

Hey all, last week we released IWBUMS public beta 41.34 – so this week we’ll be looking at some of the stuff that’ll be going into 41.35, while elsewhere Andrei from General Arcade joins in with the effort to bring the MP online. So what will be featured next?
41.35 CONTENT
Following on from the addition flashlights and umbrellas held in one hand while you wield a weapon with the other next up we have… 
Bags! These are going to take some effort to look 100% right with all bags at all player speeds, we didn’t initially think it would be possible without a bunch of extra tech, but RJ and Martin have been going great guns this week to make it all look good.
Next up, we also have the addition of make-up that can be added to your character’s appearance if you find it in-game – though when released you’ll need to have access to a mirror to apply it. We’re fairly zoomed out in PZ, it’s true, but this was an easy and fun thing for RJ to have as a side project – and hopefully will be great for RP purposes too.
Also on the list for 41.35 are darker nights to encourage flashlight use, and an increased likelihood of car damage if you’re one of those cheeky scamps who do things like reverse slowly over hundreds of zombies to kill them all.
We’ll, most likely, be releasing 41.35 next week to the IWBUMS beta.
OTHER STUFF
After some investigations from BitBaboon Steve, he concluded that we’re using way too much texture memory for the vehicles currently. The need for damage and rust layers that are unique per car has lead to a bloat in texture memory usage and at present all these textures are loaded in at game load time.
We plan to look into streaming these textures in when required, but are also working on a more general fix.
MarkW, a 3d modeller and friend of TIS, is doing a pass of all the vehicles in the game, adding a second UV channel that will allow us to map a single reusable generic rust and damage onto cars, which will cut down on the amount of unique textures dramatically.
It’ll probably require some work from modders to get their own cars working, but we’ll try and provide details on how to do this prior to release.
These fixes should hopefully help those who still have issues running build 41 due to GPUs with limited memory. Plus, into the bargain, we’re looking into adding an additional blood overlay to allow your ride to get painted red when mowing over zombies.
Finally, here’s another video featuring Yuri and his fire spread system.
In this video you can see how the process of fire spreading is calculated.
At 3:08 Yuri shows where the character is on the map, after which he shows a map of combustible materials is set up for an area far, far away – and unloaded in his character’s game. After this he turns up the heat energy in the distant unloaded area, and fire begins to spread out. When the character is then teleported from a great distance the fire, and how far it has spread, is seen in-game.
Here also is a Yuri’s latest combustion debug map. This displays the temperature of the materials on the tile in color, while the amount of unburnt material on each tile can also be seen on each red burning square.
This week’s uncancelled school day from Colic2005. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWcASV2sey0

Greetings zed-watchers. Quick blog today but it’s accompanied by an update to the IWBUMS Build 41 beta.
Version 41.34 is out now, and amongst other things it contains:
Added a full decay for zombie corpses: they go from stage to stage until disappearing totally  Adjusted melee anims. Added a new slow when swinging (only when going backward) for 2 handed, 1 handed & knife Added visible wounds on upper torso of character  Added new vehicle stories Added fuel timer to campfires and other fuel items Added ability to tie the bandana RAMBO style  Added ability to use bandana as a mask Added ability to hold umbrella Added ability to hold a torch/flashlight in your hand Added Garden Saw. Cruise control. Press Shift + W to start/increase it.  Shift + S to decrease it. Braking will stop it, and Shift+W will resume the set speed.  Stealth improvements: Increased range for jawstab of some knives. Player will raise their left hand if close enough to jaw stab. New jawstab from behind (player & zombie). Hair dyes. Regular color will be found in bathroom, some others in a hair salon. You can dye your hair & beard separately , just right click the hair dye bottle. Added “Font Size” Display option. Buffed the current flashlight, and added torch which is a lighter version of the current flashlight.Battery now weighs 0.1 instead of 0.6. Increased torch/battery spawn rate. Balance: Tweaked junk and clutter loot. Increased painkillers active time. Added option to Wash clothes with a full Bucket/Cooking pot and Soap in inventory Fixes to: day/night active zombies. Zombie spawn in large structures like the mall. Mannequin rendering. Spawning in dangerous safehouses. Zombies auto-turning. Bloooo. Fishing with traps not giving XP. Challenges running on Survival settings. Winter is Coming not having enough deep winter. A bunch of other stuff. In team news we are also delighted to be welcoming General Arcade’s Andrei to the team on this coming Monday, who will be aiding Zac and the ‘MP Godfather’ Mark in their quest for Build 41 anims integration. We believe that an extra pair of hands will be hugely beneficial in the process of finally getting MP into the hands of our survivor community and also kicking the final polished Build 41 out of the door to public.
Oh, and here’s a quick vid that Yuri made of him debugging fire spread in his branch.
Many thanks everyone, and please keep safe in these difficult times.
This week’s warehouse base from Jimmi Mongoose. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

41.34 Changelist
 
NEW
 
Added a full decay for zombie corpses: they go from stage to stage until disapearing totally (they can become skeleton before disapearing)
Adjusted melee anims. Added a new slow when swinging (only when going backward) for 2 handed, 1 handed & knife
Added visible wounds on character (not done the lower body parts yet).
Can now remove visible blood from health panel debug menu.
Added new vehicle stories
Added fuel timer to campfires and other fuel items
Added ability to tie the bandana RAMBO style (will also be added with a ripped sheet soon).
Added ability to use bandana as a mask
Removed long press of E to remove keys from car's ignition.
Added ability to hold umbrella
Added ability to hold a torch/flashlight in your hand
Added Garden Saw.
Added a Loot Generator UI in debug context menu to track loot spawns better
 
Added cruise control, press Shift + W to start/increase it, Shift = S to decrease it speed, breaking will stop the cruise control (Shift + W to resume it to its set speed), accelerating won't break it, after you release accelerator speed will be resumed to set cruise speed.
- The controller X button toggles vehicle cruise control on/off.
- Holding the controller X button and pressing D-pad up/down changes cruise-control speed.
 
Stealth improvements:
 
Increased range for jawstab of some knives.
Player will raise their left hand if close enough to jaw stab.
Added jawstab from behind (player & zombie).
 
Hair dyes:
 
Added hair dye (regular color will be found in bathroom, some others in a hair salon).
You can dye your hair & beard separately , just right click the hair dye bottle.
Added "Font Size" Display option.
Fonts are loaded from 1x/ 2x/ 3x/ and 4x/ media/fonts/XX/ language-specific subdirectories, if present.
 
BALANCE
 
Tweaked junk and clutter loot (increased them, added new loots in there)
Increased painkillers active time.
Lowered flashlight weight from 2 to 1.
Added option to Wash clothes with a full Bucket/Cooking pot and Soap in inventory
Weapon magazines are now affected by Ranged weapons sandbox loot modifier option.
Buffed the current flashlight, the handtorch is a lighter version of the current flashlight.
Battery now weight 0.1 instead of 0.6.
Increased torch/battery spawn rate.
 
FIX
 
- Fixed day/night active zombies sometimes sprinting when they should be inactive.
- Fixed zombie spawn in large structures like the mall
- Fixed Bare Hands counting as a favorite weapon in non-English languages.
- Fixed mannequin rendering bug (related to the weather fx mask).
- Fixed spawn buildings being randomized.
- Fixed exception when the item type specified by ReplaceOnRotten doesn't exist.
- Fixed not releasing vehicle database memory properly in rare cases when exiting a game.
- Fixed being able to turn during fall down anim.
- Fixed zombie auto turning toward player when close killed.
- Fixed (AGAIN, AGAIIINNN) having to wash 'Blooo' it
- Fixed fishing with the fishing net trap not giving experience in fishing skill.
- Fixed leaving Winter is Coming game resetting the Winter timer
- Fixed metal Floor requiring 0/0 Welding Rods and Blow Torch uses
- Fixed occupational outfits spawning on mannequins
- Fixed Scrap Metal not being used when building fences
- Fixed problem with masking female character's hair.
- Fixed multi hit sandbox option being turned on for challenges.
- Fixed models with capital I not loading when using the Turkish locale.
- Fixed player not finishing turning around before climbing through a window that is behind him/her.
- Fixed missing BreakSound on some weapons.

Your fingers are beautiful, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

So you're telling me it was my fat ass fingers that were removing the keys from the car mid drive THIS WHOLE TIME????

Well, what a week. We’re seeing many returning players, but we wish it were under better circumstances.
The development of an isometric zombie survival game is rather insignificant in the scheme of things, but a few people have asked if this will impact on PZ Dev in the coming weeks.
Short answer: hopefully not much. Long answer: the bigger ‘core’ features like MP should progress internally at the same rate, the more patch-to-patch additions might be a little slowed by childcare juggling.
Clearly everything is changing day-to-day, and everything is unpredictable, but right now we’re going to chug along like normal. We have some excellent self-isolaters already on the team so feel quite well-prepared.
We hope you’ll forgive the shorter blog today, and proffer up as an apology the release of IWBUMS beta patch 41.32. The patch notes can be found here. Many thanks to KoRnBrony on Reddit for giving us a laugh with today’s featured image.
Normal service will be resumed next week, one would hope.
Keep safe, Kentucky.  

Map fixes!
Tripping by zombies tied to stats!
 
Very happy this is getting addressed. Thanks a lot!

So glad I never bought it

Hello all! Very brief Thursdoid today, our usual Thursdoider Will is away on a well deserved break from the 41 grindstone, and we’re all hard at work at our various things. A few brief points however:
NEXT BUILD WHEN
Lots of nice fixes are going into the next IWBUMS build of build 41. However, Steam has been playing silly buggers with our build system and some 90% of builds strangely fail to upload to the steam branches. Not only does this make it a more risky endeavour to do a build as it will mean it may not be possible to patch any problems quickly, but as we’ve had very few builds successfully go to the test group to make sure it’s behaving, the build has been tested a lot less than usual builds and so we’ve been cautious on doing the release discussed last week.
Steve is currently investigating the issue, seeing if we need to make any changes to the build system or whether we need to go knock on Valve’s door, and as soon as we feel confident in our ability to both test the build and also to administer prompt hotfixes, we’ll put the build out there!
MP PROGRESS
Now he’s cured of the zoomies, the commits channel of code going into the game has revealed a stream of ‘getting to know you’ refactors and polish from Zac on the multiplayer codebase. While there’s nothing to show at this point, its clear he’s been doing some substantial poking under the hood, doing his usual process of cleaning house, moving furniture and dusting the dustier pieces of furniture, adding fancy debug switches and functionality to make the MP work go a lot more smoothly.
Exciting stuff!
That’s it really, sorry its a really sparse Thursdoid, normal business will resume next week!
Love,
TIS
Picture courtesy of Harkwood on Steam. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Is this a bug: whenever I kill certain zeds their clothes disappear?