trombonaught

And opportunity to write names on graves,so we can always know who buried there? ( We can see name by clickin on the grave and picking option "See Name" or some kind )

This is a feature, not a bug. It's in case you need to bury a Human Centipede.

Lol?
 
 

Build 38 changelog:
 
[New]
New map area added! The town of Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club are now ripe and ready for exploration. It can be found west of West Point. [Foraging zones etc still need to be added, but survival can commence!] Added an easy way for modders to add columns to their scrolling lists. [MP] Added an UI for admin to manage player's inventory. [MP] When a server save will occur all client will be unable to perform anything (paused, server option). [MP] Got rid of TransactionID while it's bugged & it made server saving longer. [MP] Optimization to limit the amount of zombie placement and zombie movement data that’s shared between players. Released in preparation for the Wednesday community megatest. First Aid kits now spawn with sterilized bandages, rather than regular bandages. Can now sterilize cloth bandages in a boiling pot of water. Mattress can now be made using a suture needle as well as a regular needle.   You can now add spices as first item in pasta/rice (eg. marinara). Can use CTRL + A to select all items in a container. Command console in Debug now autosuggests functions and shows return types. Command console version now accurately reflects the current version of the game. Items used for fuel in campfires can now be used for fuel in BBQs. Sheet of paper can now be written on. Updated credits. Large piles of rotten corpses will make you feel ill and sad if you stay close to them for extended periods. You can now dig graves with a shovel. (Ability to bury multiple bodies in the same grave will come in 38.2) If you're carrying a corpse, you can bury it in an empty grave. Added new sub menu in carpentry "Misc". In "Misc" you'll find a wooden cross, acairn and a wooden memorial picket to go alongside the graves you dig. Changes in clothing: Clothing can now become dirty over extended periods, dependant on your activities. Fighting zombies will make your clothing bloody. If you're wearing dirty or bloody clothing over an open wound then chances of infection (normal infection, not zombie) will increase. Clothing now also has durability, every time you get hit you'll lose a little. Some clothing is more resistant than others. Added new sandbox options: Generator Spawn: Increase/decrease the chance of electrical generators spawning on the map. Generator Fuel Consumption: Impacts how much fuel is consumed by generators. A generator that needs no fuel should be set to 0.0. (Replaces GeneratorFuelConsumed server option) Randomized House Chance: Increase/decrease probability of discovering randomized safe house on the map: either burnt out, containing loot stashes, dead survivor bodies etc. Annotated Map Chance: Impacts on how often a looted map will have annotations marked on it by a deceased survivor. Zombie Construction Damage: Governs whether or not zombies can destroy player constructions and defences. Free Trait Points: Adds free points during character creation. Player-built Construction Strength: Gives player-built constructions extra hit points so they are more resistant to zombie damage. Day/Night Active Zombies: Governs whether zombies are more active during the day, or whether they act more nocturnally. Inactive zombies will be slower, and tend not to give chase. Nocturnal Darkness: Governs how dark it gets at night. Don't forget your flashlight Injury Severity: Increase and decrease the impact that injuries have on your body, and their healing time. Bone Fracture: Enable or disable broken limbs when survivors receive injuries from impacts, zombie damage and falls. Time Before Corpse Removal: Number of in-game hours before zombie corpses are automatically removed from the map. (Replaces former HoursForCorpseRemoval server option). Decaying Corpse Health Impact: Governs impact that nearby decaying bodies has on the player's health and emotions Clothing Degradation: Governs how quickly clothing degrades, becomes dirty and bloodied. (Can be disabled.) Added random selection on zombie's: Strength, Toughness and Cognition. Fire spread (previously No Fire spread on server): allow or not spreading fire. TV and Radio programmes now have an impact on the character's moodles. If watching an instructional show then an XP multiplier is received. [MP] Added a "Level Up" button on the player stats UI to quickly level up a perk without using global point. Changed how custom maps are loaded:
After selecting your mod, you now arrive on the "select spawn location" screen and no more "select map" screen to avoid confusion. Every map mods enabled is now loaded, including their spawnpoints. It means you don't need to code your own multiple maps mod to load more than one. Added a mod order UI, use it if you have conflicts (copy a cell over existing one) in your modded map! Changes on world view:     Building levels above the player are ONLY hidden for the "current building". "Current building" defined as the building you're inside OR if you're outside, the building blocking our view of the player character OR a building whose window you're look through. To peek through a window stand adjacent and face it. Building levels are also hidden when the nearest visible zombie is behind a building. So if your character looks behind the back wall of a building and there's a zombie there the building's floors will be hidden just as they would if you walked behind the building. Building exterior walls are no longer stencilled to transparent when you're outside unless they are actually blocking the view of your character.  
[Balance]
Increase player's constructions hit points. Removed starting year sandbox option. Increased a tad the nutrition values of fishes & berries. Sleeping outside in rain will wake players up, unless they are in a tent or under a player made structure with roof.  
[Bug Fix]
Fixed zombie memory "none" sandbox option not working. Fixed a bug with season making moon not afecting ambient lights at night. Fixed water pouring bug. Fixed lampost still active when electricity was down. Fixed being able to build thing inside player's safehouse. Fixed being able to climb through windows into a player's safehouse. Fixed bodies corpses zone sometimes overlapping. Fixed bodies corpse zone not being properly synced in multiplayer. Fixed bugs on the new riverside map. Fixed lot of UI non-working with a gamepad. Large amount of smaller items will now correctly fill up container space available. Book Reading is now interrupted when player aims a weapon. Fixed Characters losing fraction of xp on save. Added missing "spawn point" options in the server settings GUI. Added missing world filler. Fixed possible bug with alarm being reset. Fixed Rare bug with the craftingUI. Fixed Mod order button being missplaced. Fixed Bug with the getLightFoodMod() calculation. Fixed Evolved recipe drinks not being able to be drunk when an item could be added to it (the coffee bug). Fixed Crafting issue with Hot Cuppa.  
[Optimization]
Optimized Garbage Collection Added WorldReuserThread LightingJNI optimized Fixed surge in memory usage of 2-300 MB that can stall the game Optimized map loading Fixed: Voice Manager being enabled in SP. [Should give slight improvement in FPS, especially on slower systems]

That new building collapse/transparency system sounds awesome and looks good even in the little demo (although not seeing the other side of the street could be a concern)!

That new building collapse/transparency system sounds awesome and looks good even in the little demo (although not seeing the other side of the street could be a concern)!

That new building collapse/transparency system sounds awesome and looks good even in the little demo (although not seeing the other side of the street could be a concern)!

That new building collapse/transparency system sounds awesome and looks good even in the little demo (although not seeing the other side of the street could be a concern)!

Afternoon one and all! Here’s t’news.
 
Vehicles
The public Vehicles Tech Test continues, and its been fascinating watching testers adapting their PZ play-styles and spreading themselves out over the map. This week we even had our first retexture in the form of Lexx2k’s camper van, which bodes extremely well for the modding community.
 
Right now Yuri is reworking aspects of the physics model to fix a bug we’ve had with car bouncing, and simultaneously improving the slow turns on vans, and over-sensitive steer on the sports car. Once this has been done we’ll be opening up a specific feedback thread that’ll cover each different model of car on the TIS forum, so that it’s clear exactly what needs refinement on each different vehicle.
 
We’re also midway through some work on zombie collision. Currently holding down ‘W’ key while driving into zeds actually means they react less, and coasting into them without acceleration has a greater impact. As such zombie/car impacts should improve in the next couple of builds.
 
Finally, Yuri has been chasing down the occasional memory leaks that were popping up and causing stutter-mayhem – and, in particular, a tricky one that appeared when testers died and reloaded. We seem to be getting there with major performance tasks on the vehicles Tech Test, but fringe cases of game-breaking issues do occasionally pop up in player reports.
 
As such if you’re experiencing any super slowdown and juddering on the vehicles build then we 100% need to hear from you. So please leave your findings, and importantly the details of the system you’re running PZ on, here.
 
 
NewChris Stuff
NewChris has taken to the eccentricities of Java worship (following his former days in the church of Unreal) really well – and already has a backstage branch running showcasing his changes to the PZ building floor render code.
His first mission, to get him acquainted with PZ, is through rejigging the world rendering to stop the game from hiding the roofs and upper floors of every building on-screen as soon as you step close to any building.
 
Instead, the game will intelligently collapse just the building you are stood behind or are stood inside. It’s already clear from playing the test version that players will get a more immersive feeling, instead of having to view buildings that have been sliced up by PZ’s old ways of doing things.
 

 
The next step will be to look into implementing some more ‘Sims-like’ cut away walls to interiors, to eliminate the transparent walls we currently have, and provide a much nicer system for navigating inside buildings – while being able to see the floorplan layout much easier. It’s currently unclear whether these improvements will be going into the coming IWBUMS or the next, but good stuff is already starting to flow.
 
 
Anims
As mentioned previously we’re now working with our new/old friend Mark to get animations over the line. Mark was previously Technical Director at SEGA Europe, he loves PZ and he really knows his shit. He’s investigated the roadblocks we were facing, and we’re now working together with him to navigate it all.
 
For example, Mark is implementing some good ideas for handling rotational root motion from his experience on other games, and this week will also be working on a new tool that will make anim state xml handling easier for both the wider team and the community. He’s also going to be adding in some optimizations for how our existing system handled hair that’ll save on skeleton processing, and to allow for us to improve the way we were integrating the new animation system with the existing state machine that the rest of the game logic relies on.
It’s all good and necessary stuff that’s given us renewed momentum backstage, and hopefully that’ll become clearer front-of-house too in the weeks to come.
 
 
IWBUMS
We’ll likely be opening up a new IWBUMS for Build 38 over the next week or so – featuring RJ’s corpse management discussed in previous blogs, bloody clothes increasing wound infection risks, graves, pyres etc. It will also feature General Arcade’s work on MP Discord integration that we’ve had stacked up behind the scenes for a while, potentially some of the NewChris work described above and hopefully some Turbo stuff and Stas MP stuff too.
 
 
Bedford Falls
A quick note to say that the in-game maps of Build 37 have now been joined by one for ourRingoD-curated community map Bedford Falls as well, as designed by Ringo himself. He’s now working on some stash maps for it too, as well as writing some guidance for the community on how they can create their own.
 

 
This week’s car frenzy from (ЗлОй_КаКтУс). 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. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.

That's not how shadows work in game: It's just the inverse of a single texture applied to the screen in the shape of a circle. Shadows under objects are just a single circle texture. You'd have to either do by hand gradients of every shadow angle or procedurally generate them somehow, such as redoing all elements in the game with 3D models to cast the shadow from.
 
Lots of light sources murder performance. That's why so much of it is cached in the map files. (Delete a house, it's shadow remains.) Malls, big buildings with lots of windows, you'll see FPS tank near them. Likewise if someone uses a lot of lamps / torches on a pillar.
 
Colored overlay to hint at sunrise/sunset/weather though? That'd be cool. There's two or three texture mods that make a stab at overlay effects in the workshop. (A black and white shader for nonvisible areas would be really neat, as well.)

New version!
 
Fixed memory leaks when the player died.

I am sort of surprised this thread has not been locked by now. 
 
If you do not like Early Access then do not participate. It is for people who want to invest both their money and their time/ideas into helping make a game. Wait for the 1.0 if you do not want to be a part of that or if the value of what you receive doesn't meet your expectations.
 
This conversation always seems to pop up on every EA games forums/discussion group. It's not a new concept and should be well understood by the gaming community by now. If you don't get it, you are probably a casual gamer that is better suited for 1.0 releases. Stomping your feet and crying about not having what you want, to me at least, is very much like my toddler.
 
For everyone else who wants to show additional support; word of mouth is probably the most helpful you can be. Tell your friends, leave some reviews, etc. No one is asking for more money from TIS, but if you bought an additional copy, I'm sure they won't argue and will appreciate your continued support.
 
As of right now PZ has cost me about $0.02/hr of entertainment. You won't hear me complain! Many of my suggestions and ideas have been incorporated into the game, I have helped test and develop new features, and I have witnessed TIS hire dedicated testers/modders to permanently work with them to finish their game. This game is literally being built by the community, and that to me is awesome! 
 

Can't help but feel that this thread has gone waaaaay off-piste since I gave an official response back in March. As CaptKaspar has already pointed out a lock is probably a bit overdue.
 
If peeps want a (civil) Early Access chat then please open up a new thread.

Be warned that it may not be working well at this time, it hasn't been updated for two or three years. A new version will be arriving soon.

Correct me if I'm wrong but we are still not able to claim player-built safehouses, correct? Has anyone seen or heard discussion on developing a safehouse system for carpentry-/metalworking-built buildings?

My understanding is that there are different people working these different features, and I imagine that if they thought moving all people onto one feature would improve progress, then they would do that.
 
Developing these features concurrently is probably the more advantageus route anyways because they can better prepare to integrate these things as they go, instead of making one system and then realizing they need to redo it all using a different system in order to make future features work together best.

Really only need two classes of vehicles, one of which can maybe function as a sledgehammer at full speed. Whether it's a sledgehammer car or not though, full speed impact should mean destruction of car and "2nd story fall damage" for characters (unless we want seatbelts to reduce that).

So i tried to kill a ton of zombies to exploit looting them. Well its really hard to loot when you have huge amounts of zombies just re poping in your face lol. Love the mod big thumbs up.
 
Would it be nice if they poped off screen but close yes. But this is still a great mod i like how you think

Let us know if you find a way to spawn them a bit futher from the player (+ a small delay), this is really good ToastedFishSandwich!

I'll try to make a new version just for you then. It shouldn't be too hard.
 
It was surprisingly hard. I'll keep at it though.

I love how people complain about the content, see constant weekly updates of the game then continue to complain.
 
Also cars were just released. How is that for content updates?

I'd say cars being received so well goes a long way to restoring faith that the community can handle less-than-perfect content, Oprah. Likewise with the more frequent (if tiny, buggy) fixes released last week to the public build. It has went pretty well

1. Make a campfire (don't light it yet).
2. Put as many bodies on it as you can.
3. Light campfire with a clothing item from one of the zombies.
4. ????
5. Profit.

Looking forward to seeing Mash's new cars once the Mac test build is ready.
 
Corpse disposal is something I'm glad is being looked into. In my current play-through, there's 3 big piles of bodies near my house that I'm too scared to set fire to incase it spreads.

Hey all. Many thanks for all the vehicles thoughts and feedback over the past week. More of which below…
 
CARS
Last week we released our Vehicles Tech Test build (details here) and the community has been giving us loads of technical feedback, spotlighting bugs and useful ideas for their future development. We’re going to keep this beta branch open and updated for the foreseeable future. It seems that most testers have been having a lot of fun with them, and are pretty enthused so: yay!
We released a new version on Thursday that gives vehicles placeholder sounds and also addressed a physics bug that was causing FPS degradation – but some choppiness remains for some systems. As such Yuri is currently looking into further rendering optimizations and also investigating the way draw order currently operates.
 
In the mean-time Mash has finished her pass on the more neutral ‘PZ’ colours for car textures, and this new art style will be added into the game fairly imminently for testers to check out.
 
Getting the tech working well for everyone is currently the 100% priority (this, and then physics improvements, will be the focus for the next little while) but it’s probably a good juncture to respond to common queries that have been raised since the release.
Overall we’re planning for car maintenance to work (and look) a lot like the current player health/medical system – everyone can use it in a basic sense, but those with specific skills and professions will be able to identify what’s wrong with an engine. We also plan to cross-pollinate some aspects of ‘vehicle work’ with relevant existing professions that are already in the game.
 
Zombie attraction levels to car noise, and the radius it’s heard within, is currently set really high in the Tech Test. This is partly because we wanted to push systems fairly hard, and partly because it’s better when balancing to drop things down in terms of difficulty rather than raise them up. As such Zed vehicle-love will be dropped as we go until we hit a sweet spot. This said, down the line, vehicle noise will depend on what’s being driven and engine condition – as well as how easy it is to start the car, backfiring etc.
 
 
BUILD 38
Barring a few necessary fixes to Build 37, RJ is now in full-flow on Build 38. A key component of it is likely going to be the necessity of body disposal should corpses stack up around your safehouse.
 
The current method for corpse-riddance (gas + flame) is fairly inelegant, and the punishment for decaying corpses around your home is more through it looking untidy rather than it having an impact on health, infected wounds etc. In a real zombie apocalypse this would be a bigger issue for a survivor than it currently is in PZ.
 
As such we’re going to be looking into more effective corpse management (body pits, graves, perhaps pyres and wooden crosses / memorials for RP) as well as some gameplay encouragement to do so.
 
 
STAFFING UP
As regular readers will know we now have Mark with us on the long-promised animations system who, in another life, a few of us knew either from his long-ago time at Reflections (‘Driver’ games era!) or in his more recent technical roles at SEGA Europe. He’s currently going great guns in creating a new model format for the animations (now pretty much complete) and providing a new exporter to streamline it all and circumvent a bunch of the issues that have routinely been blocking us.
 
This week we’ve also had another coder join us from our triple A pasts, another Chris from the wilds of northern England, but we’ll introduce him in more detail in future once he gets settled in. We’re also delighted that General Arcade will be also be providing additional support in MP and Engine optimization for the next few months too. Speaking of…
 
 
STEAM INVITE ISSUE
Something weird has happened with Steam Invites and the guys from General Arcade, who built us the system, are looking into it. Basically: in most cases when Steam invites are sent from a host, they’re not being received.
The issue currently doesn’t seem to be tied to any particular PZ update or patch, so it seems likely that it’s something that’s changed somehow in Steam’s workings. In any event, Detective Sergei is currently on the case.
In the mean-time a workaround to the issue that has been working for some people, as highlighted out by Onkeen and further investigated by Nasko on the PZ Discord, runs as follows:
 
As Host: make sure your friend/friends are [Allowed] on the invite menu As Not-Host: make sure the game is shut down As Not-Host: in Steam right-click on the Host’s picture in the “Friends” panel and click “Join Game” (this will launch the game and connect you right away) Play together. Avoid zombies.  
 
WOLDREN’S MEDIEVAL MAP
Have you ever wondered what it’d be like to survive a zombie apocalypse in would be like in ye olden days of yore? Well wonder no more…
 
This week’s featured news van from Retro. 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 now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.