trombonaught

Ugh so tantalizing 🤤
 
Any chance of a two-stage MP release I wonder, maybe with a hard cap of 10-20ish players for the first stage of the release? 🤔

Ugh so tantalizing 🤤
 
Any chance of a two-stage MP release I wonder, maybe with a hard cap of 10-20ish players for the first stage of the release? 🤔

thanks for not going radio silence, at least i have something to read every thursday.

Please for the love of Zombs tie it to exhaustion rather than fatigue if it needs future nerfing 🙈🙈🙈

I would feel confident in saying that with a AAA BAFTA award-winning sound design studio this shouldn't need to be worried about anymore now it's in their hands lol

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!

As someone who's been around the PZ Steam forums before, I honestly think it ain't worth it.
 
The Steam Discussion has become what can be best described as a "Sprawl for the Banned"; every time someone comes here screaming "REEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! NPCS REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! MULTIPLAYER REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! GIMME GIMME FULL GAEM NAO!!! I PAID U MONEIS!!" and it gets banned from this forum, they go to Steam Forums with a "Oh! The PZ Devs are evil fascists! I was just asking questions and they banned me for not agreeing with them. Don't go there, and don't play this game. The Devs have turned it into a cult, and only those who praise everything they do and don't point out their bad decisions get to stay." sob story, often including edited screencaps of their posts to make them look innocent.
 
This is pretty much the same for every game that's been long in Early Access, even big name titles like Hades and Factorio got that kind of people whenever the devs banned someone from their own forums; I'm sure that's what nasKo meant by "The feedback wasn't worth it.", and I honestly can see why.
 
So I say, let them be. Just release big updates once there's plenty of stuff that can bedazzle them into not saying anything.

I personally overcome the boredom of the end game by starting the game out with a monument goal in mind. Of Course these are self imposed rules or goals but it definitely solves the late game boredom problem. For example, if I am playing with Hydrocraft on, my go to challenge is solar park. I have to set up my base in the first week of the game. Thats my permanent base and i cant spend the night outside of my base two nights in a row until i make the solar park. This proven to be impossible challenge for me since once i survived 4 years and still hadnt been able to make the solar park. Another example is the vagabond challenge, this has nothing to do with any mods, you just cant set up a base you have to leave your current city every 7 days. Or pilgrim challenge; start out on one side of the map and you cant set up your base until you get the other side of the map and once you get there you cant stay more than a season before you have to leave it. No burn challenge is also fun, you cant burn zombies ever, ect...   Also even if you dont have any goals you start out with, cabin fever is the number one killer in pz. Boredom will make you slip up and get killed eventually which is literally the purpose of this game, the story of how you didn't survive the zombie apocalypse. So in a way the game is working as designed...

You can already do something similar by setting the player spawn coordinates to whatever it is you'd like, which will then cause new players to spawn at those exact coordinates.
 
As far as pre-existing players though, that might be an interesting thing.

Hey!

It's still worked on. We're currently in closed testing, so should be too long.

Quoting from our latest blog:

 
 

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
 

I think this kind of events should not spawn on offroad, especially in forests 

It seems that player-built Composters are not Thumpable class, meaning they are ignored by Zombies. Being surrounded by them makes zombie unable to see you at all, even if you can attack them with ranged weapons or kill them with melee when they are close enough. They react to sound (so more came from neighbour), they attack windows and doors but ignore player totally.

This is one part of the game that I hope gets a little more love/attention in the future. 
 
Right now if you get bit, and you start to get sick, you can just end the game right there. With NPCs, this might get a little spicier in that you'll have to monitor your companions to see if anyone is hiding a bite from you. This would help to give dying more significance to actual gameplay.
 
Not sure how to make the player's side of infection more interesting though. I like the idea of the old Romero zombies, where a bite just means you light a smoke and wait for the inevitable. But I also think this needs to be more interesting in terms of gameplay... like maybe if, after zombifying, you get a whole new phase to the game where you must now hunt and kill the living (albeit with highly reduced senses)!

Yes whit an off more it will become abit to mutch easymode but good option if you gona do some endgame testing or game testing in general. But if you are able to set the risk to 50-75% or so it give you an reaon to keep strugling for survile and not just ragequit/give up dring bleech or run out naked in a horde and start an new run.

• New hair styles and hair functions
Are there plans to improve (Obese) & (Skinny) body customization as well as face for various ethnicities and just not to be all clones ?
It would be pretty stylish to have a character that looks like Bob & Kate, and for later when implementing the NPCs, to have different NPCs on the face.

Ah and another question, is this a mistake, a homemade spear (0.4weight) is heavier than a tree branch (0.2weight), when you prune it to be sharper.
 

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!

For some reason, the sound when filling a pot in the river is that of a water tap. I think you plan to change soon, but anyway, I show my discomfort in this topic.

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!

It was my bad. I emailed them after uploading but had a typo in the mail adress, with the "this mail could not be sent" landing in my spam folder. 
Offline installers are now available on GOG.

Click and HOLD your E button, or whatever key you bound, will allow you to jump through window instead of the slower right click menu method.

Yeah a good few of us are British including 3/4 of the directors, so we were aware of this it's set in the US so US colloquialisms rule and it is just extra funny to be called a fanny pack anyway, it seems a rather tame thing in a brutal dark zombie apocalypse to worry about tbh. We've resisted renaming pop to soda still I guess though we'll get to it!

Hi,
 
With alibuyuktatli we managed to create a fake helicopter function.
 
What it does
When you call the function, it simulate an Helicopter by calling the sound, faking arrival/hovering/leaving with incremental/decremental sound volume, and using addSound command to call the zombies around. The Fake Helicopter function needs a (player) argument, so you can call the Helicopter right on top of chosen player !
 
What for ?
For example, if you call this function in a OnCreate function in a recipe, the crafting of the recipe will call this fake Helicopter on the player who crafted the recipe (and not at a random player location).
Here is a demo of the function in a video : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dwrieE7Archble93cpB--_8zS1JC-JT6/view?usp=sharing
In this video, the function is called with an OnCreate function added in the custom recipe.
 
Can I use it in my own mod ?
We share the code for the coders community, feel free to use ! But please leave the credits.
 
How I use it ?
All is explained in the .lua file with the credits in the first lines. If you have trouble using it, feel free to ask here or in PM.
 
Who coded that ?
All credits of the code to alibuyuktatli !
 
Other credits
Some of the icons/spites you can see in the video are used with the courtesy of Hydrocraft Mod.
fakeheli.lua

Aye, they posted some on Twitter too, the "last remaining survivors" screenshot is my favourite one. The outfits really personify everyone, and the weapon models too. The animations and models were one thing in SP, in MP it's no longer "look at that guy with a vest and pants".

And the female models back in B40... Dear lord.