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We released the Build 39 vehicles patch this time last week – release notes for which can be found here.
 This seems to have remedied the most pressing issues with Build 39 and 
(given that we also don’t want to add any major changes to the pot 
without enough testing) further tweaks and improvements will go into 
Build 40.

All of Build 40’s bigger features are already complete, if untested, 
so we’re hoping to get it into IWBUMS public beta testing within the 
next few weeks and for it to be a fairly quickfire version. As such a 
lot of work in the coming week involves bringing work done while we were
 polishing the release candidate for Build 39 into the main 40 build – 
stirring each ingredient in one after the other.

First off Yuri from General Arcade has done a lot of work on MP 
networking, vehicle clipping, floating cars, headlights, vehicle shadows
 and zombie reaction speeds – and then Stas’ new chatbox will also 
finally get its time in the sun. Finally Turbo’s work on the new climate
 system, improved rain/snow/fog and general ‘greater sense of season’ 
work will also be added to the mix.

As we’ve discussed in previous dev blogs, Turbo’s final hurdle was 
finding ways to make the new precipitation and fog visible through 
windows – initially in pre-made buildings, and then with the trickier 
proposition of player-made structures. Telling the game not to conjure 
up internal fog in a constructed base was a big issue.

As such, this week he has been finishing a system that can accurately
 detect player-made rooms and regions on each height layer – now the PZ 
engine can properly detect if an area is enclosed by walls, windows, 
door frames and fences. The system also checks whether said area is 
roofed, and then mask a feature like fog from that and all connected 
rooms. It practice it looks a little bit like this…
 

Having this functionality in the game will also make it far, far 
easier to prevent the occasional ‘zombie in my base!’ bugs that have 
been known to creep back into the game – and also be very handy for 
other independent zoning systems for farming improvements etc.

While the above features are being added to Build 40 other team 
members are blitzing through our internal task system – verifying 
reported bugs, fixing up legacy issues and generally sorting out 
long-term kinks in the game that have sat in the system unaddressed for 
too long. The advent of the new animations system, and the dev 
changeover to it, will bring a lot of new work and issues so the more of
 these 300-ish minor tasks we can strike from the record the cleaner our
 plate will be.

This sort of stuff deals with missing loot spawns, errant nutrition 
values, trait issues, places you can’t sleep but should be able to and 
other general irritations. In addition, meanwhile, we’re adding stuff to
 improve vehicles – like the ability to use metalwork skills to 
dismantle car wrecks and retrieve construction materials, and making it 
very unwise to drive your car while drunk.

Once we’ve cleared out these tasks we can also add in some more community suggestions,
 start to polish some of our more elderly game systems and also do some 
planned work on our current loot system to give us more power on what 
spawns where and by how much – which is also a requirement to get the 
best out of the new animation/models system as we’ll certain zombies 
spawning in certain locations, with certain loot around then.

The work on the animations system, and the AnimZed tool itself, 
continues with our friends at T.E.A. It’s relatively dry dev work this 
week, but all necessary stuff. Zac has been going through AnimZed 
changes following the feedback of our animator Martin last week, and 
will continue to supply new versions for him to check out. Grant has 
been working on the Game state hook-up, and compiling guidelines for 
coders and modders to follow with T.E.A.’s data-driven approach to 
animation integration. Mark has been investigating load/rendering issues
 with backpacks, and Gar is adding new masks/test textures for 
texture-based pants/tops which are coming in the editor.

Thanks so much for all your continuing feedback and bug reports on 
Build 39 everyone. It’s been great having so many new and returning 
players, and hopefully we’ve got some good stuff in the pipeline for all
 concerned parties.

This week’s night cruise from Cocoa. 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.
 

Short dev blog this week as we’re still patching up the vehicles build. The initial launch was pretty stable, and has thrown up some amazing tales of survival adventure, but there’s still a few nips and tucks required before it can be considered a final version. To which end…
VEHICLES BUILD
We’ve just released the first vehicles patch (Build 39.67.5) and you can read the full patch notes here. Issues that we’ve addressed include: broken VOIP, players riding shotgun being teleported, disappearing car keys and hopefully a bunch of ‘ghost zombie’ occurrences.
The patch also increases tool spawns, makes collisions with zombies a bit more solid, reduces generator fuel consumption and introduces a new item that can charge car batteries if you’re in an electrified area. There’s also a lot of general UI work done to improve playability on different resolutions, and to better support EnigmaGrey’s Big Freakin’ Fonts mod while we work on our own improved support for higher resolution screens.
We anticipate a few further patches before Build 39 is considered complete, but hopefully this will be the largest and most wide-ranging one. Please let us know of any further issues that we need to address in the bug report section of our forum, and thank you for all your amazing feedback since it launched too.
FUTURE BUILDS
Elsewhere we have Mark and the guys at T.E.A. working on our new animation system and dev/modding tool AnimZed – which Martin our animator now has in his hands to provide feedback on, and go over his work thus far.
“Whilst a lot of work has been done under the hood to make the new animation system work” he explains, “Any input from me, like new anims or clothes, has had to go through a programmer to get implemented. AnimZed allows me, a non-coding scrub, to add and tweak anims as well as add new clothes and combine these into outfits.”
“Right now I’m looking at movements (running, walking, strafing etc.) and looking to iron out any kinks with the tool and any of the animations. We’ve encountered some foot sliding which we’ll look at in the next week, for example, and in another case it appeared that bags/rucksacks were being shown inside out. It’s this sort of thing that becomes easier to sort through with AnimZed, and should become easier to fix within the tool too – with the guys on Mark’s team continuing to polish and roll out more features, making it ever more comprehensive and easy to use.”
As mentioned last week, while all this anims work is going on we’ve got also got a fair amount of new stuff that feels ready for public testing. For example from General Arcade there’s Stas’ chatbox update and a load of additional work and presentation fixes on vehicles from Yuri. Netcode improvements, better car shadows, less ugly clipping between player and car, improved headlights, fixed textures, non-floating cars, better zombie responsiveness and a lot of general tidy-up work all needs to be opened up to testers.
Turbo, too, is now negotiating what’s hopefully the last of the major challenges set against his new climate, fog and precipitation system. In previous weeks we’ve discussed how the ability to see fog/rain/snow through windows was tricky when it comes to the inner workings of PZ, but having worked this out he also had to figure out a way to let fog appear to envelop player-made structures that weren’t standard dev/modder-made entities on the map.
As such Turbo has been working on something that can detect sufficiently roofed and walled player structures to mask his fog, which we’ll likely be able to use elsewhere in the game too. Once this is in and working we hope to be able to mix it all in with General Arcade’s work and get it ready for wider testing.

Thanks so much for all your continuing feedback and bug reports on Build 39. Please keep it coming!
This week’s gun shop heist from Prawnflakes. 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.

Ello, ello, ello – here’s some of the latest.
BUILD 38
The public Build 38 release is feeling increasingly imminent – although there are still a few fixes to the new roof rendering and player view system that are still in the oven. Today we released IWBUMS public beta 38.11 that focuses on transferred optimizations from the vehicles build – so improved garbage collection, optimized lighting, memory leaks plugged and improved map loading.
There’s also a VoiceManager fix gone in, spotted by BitBaboon Steve and remedied by General Arcade, that should provide an FPS improvement in SP – especially on lower spec systems. So if you see/feel/sense any improvements then please let us know.
The build also does various soon-to-launch jobs like updating community translations, alongside several of Connall’s Community Suggested tweaks: first aid kits now spawning with sterilized bandages, suture needles being able to be used for sewing like regular needles and the ability to sterilize bandages in boiling water. He’s also made aspects of tea preparation and drinking less frightful through the addition of a new recipe. Full changelist here.
VEHICLES
This week Yuri is moving onto commonly reported MP issues in the public vehicles beta in preparation for the wider testing audience when Build 39 goes into IWBUMS. As such stuff like vehicles disappearing on exit, precious loot removing itself from the boot (trunk if you’re American) and similar will all come beneath his steely glare.
He’s also, finally hopefully, zapped the ‘trapped in walking animation’ bug that’s been vexing our car testers for several builds now – with a fix due in Vehicle Build 19.
Vehicle Build 18, meanwhile, came out last Friday – and came with the much requested addition of making sure that the number of players that can fit inside each car model is accurate to the number of seats, and hopefully a fix to the strange lights on/off syncing issue that MP players have been reported. It also came with actual visible headlights appearing on vehicles (rather than just having the beams) and red brake lights to boot.
It brings a surprising amount to the vehicles when it’s all seen in-game, as you can hopefully see in this video. [Although Yuri’s coding music is a little… mellow (?) for our taste.]

We’ve also updated the Vehicles Build with the latest IWBUMS, so testers can explore the new town of Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club in relative leisure – as seen below.

39+ PLANS
Once Build 38 releases the current plans are for Build 39 to be a relatively quickfire release, essentially getting the existing experimental vehicles out to the public in as bug-free a state as possible – albeit on the current selection toggle. We anticipate improving on their current zoning/spawning alongside aspects of their optimization, but the meat of their maintenance will come in the following build.
We’re currently firming up the design docs – but the current plan is for vehicle damage, repair and car wreck player injuries to be a focus in Build 40, and then to turn to player-crafted improvements and realistic ‘apocalypse survival’ modifications in later versions.
As we’ve mentioned before, maintaining your cars will work in much the same way as our current medical system – covering stuff like dead batteries, burst tires and the more common engine issues as well as structural damage. Don’t expect My Summer Car levels of vehicular knowledge requirements [although we certainly hope the modding crowd will think towards this] but do expect the Mechanic profession to be a fun/useful one to have.
Elsewhere Turbo is making good progress with his Devices overhaul (this week reworking radios so it’s easier to find and tune into different player wavelengths), Bitbaboon Mark is fixing up the new skinned renderer in the now integrated model loader in the anims build and his colleague Steve is marking up various targets for optimization to ensure that vehicles run as swimmingly as possible when they’re released. Oh, and Mash is adding more detail to the wilderness areas around Riverside for those who venture into the back of beyond.
Today’s featured massacre from C.P. 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 Mondoids 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.

Current focus is getting 38 out of the door, while putting roots down for the initial vehicles release in Build 39 and beyond. And so…
 
BUILD 38
We’re fixing up and polish Build 38 for release, and want it to be as clean as possible so we can drop the vehicles build straight into IWBUMS beta testing afterwards as Build 39 – with the new map expansion that includes the new town of Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club.
 
This includes ironing the final kinks out of ChrisW’s rooftop rendering and peeking changes – as right now in the beta we’ve still got a few irritations like occasional see-through roof slants, canopies around the edges of buildings that never disappear and wonky player-built second floors. It’s ‘tidy up’ work more than anything, but we want it all to be as seamless as we can make it once it hits public.
 
As such, while this is done and in the build-up to release, we’ll continue to fix and polish RJ’s existing 38 work with graves, sandbox options and other stuff – alongside turning as much of the Bug Tracker from red to green as possible.
 
Yuri meanwhile, he of Vehicles Build fame, is going to transfer as many of his branch’s optimizations as we can into the IWBUMS version – so they’re not stuck in a holding pattern. He’ll also transfer his current work on improving gamepad controls and making sure that screens like in-game maps, foraging and sandbox game creation can all be navigated without a keyboard.
 
BITBABOON GANG
As regular readers will know we’ve now got Mark and Steve from Bitbaboon, both established Technical Directors from the land of AAA, bedded down with the team to help with animations (Mark) and MP/general optimization (Steve).
 
Steve’s first task is to optimize MP connectivity – and so we’ve set him up with a build so he can get some detailed stats back on bandwidth, cpu and memory for servers, and track what happens when latency rises. While he does so he’s also marking targets for when his role turns to more general FPS optimization.
 
Mark, meanwhile, is approaching the point at which the new animation system is merged into the main game code, but on a (development side debug) toggle. This means that it will always be integrated into the PZ build, allowing our coders to flick its various visual/gameplay switches ‘on’ as we go and start releasing test versions – keeping it in date with the main game much easier and allowing it all to co-exist with vehicles much more neatly.
 
VEHICLES
We released Vehicle Test Build 16 on Friday, which was something of a ‘wider IWBUMS testing’ preparation build as it put vehicles on a toggle accessed from the Game Select screen. It also corrected and darkened shadow positioning as well as, hopefully, prevented unrealistic car-climbing and bouncing on zombie corpses.
 
Next up Yuri will be integrating Mash’s redone burnt car models, an example of which is below, before moving onto a spot of optimization. This said, in amongst it all, there are a few other aspects we’d like to see integrated before/during the 39 IWBUMS: specifically clearer headlights, red brakelights, car horns, sirens and accurate numbers of seats for each car model. We’ll see how much we can fit in, basically.
 

 
WOLDREN MAPS
If you fancy holding out somewhere new and different than can we also suggest you check out the wide range of awesome maps that Woldren has created? Over the River, especially, is pretty awesome – as it creates a huge bridge over from West Point, with its own docked ship nearby, and a range of interesting locations for you to explore on the opposite bank. Definitely one to check out.
 
NOLAN GATES
Something we’ll need to be adding to the main game in build 39+ are player-built gates that’ll allow vehicles inside. In the meantime the lovely Mister Nolan has you covered with his new Log Wall Gate mod. Vid here.
 
Today’s featured image from Boop. 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 Mondoids 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, thanks a lot guys!
 
Doing ok now, this happend 2 weeks ago, didn't wanted to talk much about it, but mondoid mention with bit of his drawing will make my parentss proud
 
Don't worry though, i'm full back on coding since 1 week now
 
Really appreciate the thoughts, thanks again!

Hello, here’s the zed latest from in/around the Knox Event.
 
VEHICLES
The general plan with vehicles is for Yuri to continue fixing up bugs/issues in SP and MP, work on gamepad support for them (and simultaneously other areas of the game that need gamepad attention) and then create an ‘experimental vehicles’ toggle on the difficulty setting menu so the current vehicles branch is ready to become a Build 39 IWBUMS beta as soon as Build 38 releases to the public. Once all this in place then Yuri can again turn to look at optimization when it comes to vehicles turning impacting on FPS etc.
 
Last week Yuri released a build that made engines feel more natural – both in terms of keeping them revving once the player leaves the car (perhaps making them useful as a distraction), and creating more of an ‘acceleration curve’ that will allow us to put in simulated gear changes. It also had a speedometer and engine gauge to help things out.
 
We’re also currently working on the sound of vehicles and (while not perfect currently – this is slightly ‘angry racing lawnmower’) in this video you can hear the aforementioned gear shifts pretty well.
 
Yuri has also fiddled with stuff like increasing the chances of cars turning zeds into crawlers and made sure that players can only ‘shove’ at zombies if car windows are open. We’ll be releasing a new build tomorrow that addresses other issues like burnt out cars sometimes using a random texture. Our thanks to all our community testers, and especially to the efforts of Svarog, whose efforts have been greatly appreciated during this time.
 
38 IWBUMS
We’ve got a 38.6 IWBUMS running backstage that’s letting us guide ChrisW’s fixes for the new ‘see the rooftops’ engine tweaks when it comes to player-built constructions. He’s working on this right now, so it’s likely that we’ll have another 38.7 release internally before returning to the public channel. In the mean-time he’s also fixed a few annoying legacy bugs like hovering blood splats visible when you’re on a lower floor.
 
From this point RJ will be looking at bug tracker clearance and improvements to what’s already in the build rather than add new stuff, so as to get it all out of the door and experimental vehicles bumped into IWBUMS.
 
OTHER STUFF
As mentioned last week Mark R’s work (the Technical Director chap who rode into TIS town to help with the animations and is delivering a lot more besides) is currently being merged into the existing build. This means that dudes like this are an important step (of a multitude of assured steps, we know) closer to testing.
 

 
Finally, just a brief mention that as of the next IWBUMS we’ll be updating the credits to let people know that Project Zomboid is now dedicated to the memory of Romuald Dron – RJ’s brother – who sadly passed away in recent weeks. Our thoughts are with RJ’s family and friends at this time. RJ has also asked if we could share a little bit of his brother’s awesome artwork in today’s blog, so here you go:
 

 
Today’s featured image from Buttrix. 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 Mondoids 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. The CBOIT likes to spread the zombie love – so if you like games like ours then the plans for Dead Matter might be right up your street as well. Its Kickstarter lives here!

Sorry for the late repost. I am a disgrace to the german kind.

It should go without saying that without George Romero there would be no Project Zomboid. In fact, the entire face of video-gaming would have been very different without his vision. Since its genesis PZ has been about trying to recreate the feeling of Romero’s movies, and there’s no doubt that alongside legions of other video-games, books and movies we owe the man a great debt.
 
We were greatly saddened to hear of his death at the age of 77, and our thoughts are with his family and friends. The legacy he leaves behind is a brilliant and astonishing one.
 
VEHICLES
As mentioned last week the public vehicles build is going to keep on getting updates until the point it’s ready to have its stream crossed with an IWBUMS beta – so we can get an ‘experimental vehicles’ option into the main beta channel, get its optimizations into the main game and make tester life easier.
 
Tomorrow Yuri will be updating the public build with a few cool changes. Firstly while playing around with sound implementation we realised that the noise of gear shifts was fairly vital, but also that the behaviour of the cars themselves didn’t leave much room for this – and the inclusion of actual player-controlled gear shifts seemed a little too hardcore.
 
To give a feeling of gears then, to accompany the sounds we have brewing in an FMOD studio, Yuri has changed the way vehicles accelerate. Top speeds are now on a curve: acceleration slows in the last 25% of your potential full speed. This will likely need further tweaking, so feedback is welcome, but should allow us to space out RPM increase in sounds and implement the gear shift noises. It will also, hopefully, make high speed driving more rewarding.
 
To accompany this Yuri has also added a speedometer (kmh) and engine gauge (revs) to the UI – although it should be noted that the visuals and read-outs for these are placeholder, and we’ll be converting to mph with an options toggle in due course. Yuri has also fixed a few bugs, so the people of Muldraugh have now stopped occasionally parking their cars on top of other cars.
 
IWBUMS BETA
RJ released Build 38.5 into the IWBUMS public beta with a rewrite of his ‘zombie corpse build-up’ code that tracks decaying bodies in a much more localized area than previously. Feedback appreciated as we can certainly tweak this system further.
 
We should be also be getting some ChrisW fixes to the new ‘rooftop exteriors’ engine code later this week – making players beneath supported roofs and overhangs look less broken – before moving onto player-built structure issues and any other issues the system raises in general gameplay.
 
OTHER STUFF
Mark R will be doing a big check-in of his anims code rewire and layers system (explainedhere) this week, bringing it all together and providing a new and improved base from which to get ‘em out to you. In the mean-time Martin the animator and model guy has been working on more military clothing, military vehicle wrecks and other stuff so we’re ready when the time comes. Mash’s map work continues, and will likely land in Build 39. It’s a spread out area that should be fun to explore with vehicles. There’s a bit of it that looks like this:  

Our composer Zach Beever is back (and graduated! Congrats Zach!) and will be experimenting with layered music that can be heard during play actively fits what’s happening on-screen – build-ups during lulls of non-zombies, more intense during confrontations etc. It’s all quite experimental currently, but its fab to have Zach back in the saddle.  
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 Mondoids 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. 

Greetings on a May Day Mondoid everyone, hope you’ve had a good holiday if that’s an international thing as well as in good old Blighty.
VEHICLES
We’re currently prepping a public test build for our crash/smash physics-enhanced vehicles that we can release on a Steam beta branch, so we can get performance feedback from the community.
To this end Yuri has been concentrating on the more obvious performance issues that would dominate forum feedback, as well as making stuff clearer for a wider test group – such as textual indications when engines aren’t starting while we don’t have engine noise, and keyboard control alternatives for the new UI so you don’t need to navigate menus just to turn the key.
We’re going to create a new internal build tomorrow to test out Yuri’s work on crash-quashing and his fixes for the performance dip when you zoom in and out. The plan is for him to continue addressing the strange performance cataclysm you get after 20-30 minutes of play and incidents of magical parked car pop-in this week (and hopefully other niggly stuff too) and then we’ll see where we are in terms of a tech build release on a beta branch.
In last week’s blog we showed you all an image of different styles of car textures that we were considering – and internally we were pretty split between the more metallic versions cooked up by Martin, and those painted over by Mash that used flatter colours and more baked-in shading. Feedback on the forum almost universally pointed towards the flatter and more neutral green-y olive car, and as such this is the way we’ll be going.
It’s doubtful that every vehicle will have been given the Mash once-over by the time the test build emerges, but once they’re all done they’ll look (more-or-less) like this:

 
MAP
As mentioned previously, Mash is currently being seconded onto vehicle textures – but her next map expansion is also nearing completion. While it doesn’t contain any urban conglomerations larger than Rosewood and March Ridge it does contains fun stuff to hold up in, explore (and drive) around – for example the Knox Heights Country Club, golf course and the clusters of posh houses that can be found around its greens.
This is another addition that can’t be found on the real world map, but we hope will add some variety and also some interesting places to appear into once our more detailed ‘character spawns’ plans are realised in post-anims builds.

 
ANIMS
Speaking of, new boy Mark has almost finished implementing Assimp in the place of our old and more troublesome animation loader – and the current animation system (which is now operating more pleasantly with vehicles, post-merge) is now waiting for it to be tied in. After this we can walk through all issues we’ve been up against during the long, long wait for the system together (starting with rotational root movement, most likely) and get you some solutions.
 
37 to 38
RJ’s week has largely been in fixing up issues that appeared once Build 37 went live this time last week – seen here in builds 37.9, 37.10 and 37.11. There will be another fix build going out over the next few days, then once we’re sure the dust has settled we’ll call time on 37 and update the version on GOG. In the meantime, for 38, RJ has been looking into greater Admin powers over player inventories [seen in WIP form here], some anti-hack bits/bobs and additional sandbox options.
 
This week’s PAWS-loving safehouse from Eddie. 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.

RE: map. The coming expansion isn't a 'big name' location-wise. It has a few interesting places to hold out for sure, but it's filling in the gaps before we reach those areas more than anything. It's a fairly spread out area though, and should be fun to explore once cars hit.
 
RE: vehicles question. One step at a time! Though clearly bicycles etc will require a ton more effort in terms of animation (and physics most likely if they were done well).

Thinking about it I need to add this to the tasklist. Cheers for the nudge guys

Hello! A public build release today, along with a general overview of where we’ll be at with different stuff in the coming weeks.
 
37 RELEASED
This morning we pushed Build 37.8 to Stable. This is predominantly an RJ build, apart from the Mash maps and some Yuri fixes, so our thanks to him keeping the wheel turning while work continues in our various other branches. It contains lots of fiddly longstanding fix stuff that can be read here, but the highlights run as follows:
 
Maps of urban locations within the Knox Event Exclusion Zone can be found in relevant towns, in particular spawning in gas stations. They look a bit like this.
You can make text and emblem markings on maps and share with friends and faction members in MP. In SP you also run a chance of discovering pre-annotated maps that’ve been marked up by deceased fellow survivors. These are mainly found on zombies and can lead you to stashes of weapons, tools and general places of interest. Loot at these locations could be hidden in cupboards, crates, bags left on the floor or even hidden under the floorboards. General improvements to cooking, cooking systems and food. Split screen co-op fixes. Gamepad fixes. Improved sleeping system for online servers who like to snooze. New forage UI to limit item build-up on the map. Portuguese Brazilian community translation by HiveFuse. Clearer moodle impact descriptions. New ‘version info’ box on main screen.  
 
VEHICLES
The internal tests and updates of our new physics-enhanced vehicles continue, if you haven’t seen it then our latest vid (made by Mark.exe) can be seen here. The current focus is in fixing up what we have now so that it’s all in a state that could be considered for wider testing. We will need, after all, performance feedback from as many PC set ups as we can.
 
This week, then, Yuri had been looking at the build’s most glaring performance issues and glitches. There’s an oddly catastrophic slowdown that hits after twenty minutes of play that’s being looked at right now, for example, while vehicle and tree pop-in also needs addressing. Likewise frame-rate stutters seemingly tied to zooming. In recent days we’ve made good progress on reported (non-vehicular) crashes and garbage collection hang-ups, so we’ll keep on ticking off the list. Likewise, it’d be nice if we could solve some clipping and draw order issues.
 
As a general ‘where we’re at’ overview, right now we have pick-ups, station wagons, ambulances, sports cars, small cars and vans in-game (although they’re yet to have different handling stats). They spawn in relevant places, and according to the affluence/role of area on the Exclusion Zone map. They crash and roll, and they really, really attract zombies – potentially a little too much. They have working headlights and are generally found locked – although keys can be found on zombies or in houses. Every car has storage in the boot, and have a handy glove box too.
 
We’re also looking at two (subtle) different ways of colouring vehicle textures – so answers on a postcard if you can tell us your opinion of which if these vehicles fits in best with the PZ game world.
 

 
What vehicles haven’t got is much ‘Zomboid’ gameplay tied to them right now – mechanic profession, maintenance, damage, player injury and other vital stuff isn’t in yet. Likewise they have no engine sound playing, the info panel UI is temporary and collision with zeds and survivors needs work. The focus right now, however, is getting their operation as glitch-free as possible – so all this will come in future weeks.
 
 
ANIMS
We mentioned it last week but now have an extra body on-board in TIS Towers, in the form of Mark – a man who comes with a wealth of games industry experience and battle-hardiness.
 
He’s going to be jumping into the trenches fairly imminently to help us sort out various other technical issues surrounding the new animation system, as well as tie up any other loose ends or missing bits that are holding back the release.
 
In the meantime he has been implementing Assimp as our default model and animation loader, this will allow models to be loaded in in a variety of common formats that will not only aid modders in being able to easily expand the game, but will hopefully unearth a few issues with the existing loader that have prevented the rotational root motion system from being finished off.
 
Mark’s experience in animation systems could then lead onto other improvements once everything is in-game, but we’ll leave expanding on that until we finally have the basic models in testing. In the mean-time it’s now clear that vehicles will release before animations, so we’re continuing the work required to let them make the best of each other.
 
Work in and around animations will provide some advantages to the vehicles once they land, such as the elimination of the old system of off-screen textures that are rendered every frame in 3D and drawn in place as sprites, being replaced with the game actually drawing the 3D models directly into the screen at the correct position in a more accurate ISO perspective. This will hopefully improve things such as zombie like vehicle collisions, and make multiple vehicles integrate into the scene together better.
 
 
IWBUMS NEXT
With the release of 37 work begins on the more general features and improvements for 38. Its overall contents are currently under discussion but the new map expansion is pretty much certain to be in 38, alongside the MP Discord integration. Hopefully Turbo’s devices code rewrite will also be ready in time, as well as some of the improvements it can provide.
 
 
MOD SPOTLIGHT
We ran an interview with prolific PZ modder Nolan the other week, but forgot to give it a Mondoid flag. Do check it out though, as he’s a very interesting chap.

This week’s last stand from Isnah81. 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.
 

You're doing an awesome job at reporting but that little bloopy or that thing from years ago might not have a big impact on the playability. There is a lot on our plates right now, so bear with us, please. We'll get to it, eventually. 
There is no need to bump old bug reports at all, unless you have found something new to them (new way to reproduce them, additional impact somewhere else, etc). 
We don't sort them by what's on top
 


 

Hey all. Simmering in the background the fundaments of our vehicles and animation branches are being tied closer together, Martin’s car and truck models continue to pop into the communal directory to surprise/delight, and the map continues to expand. And while all those cogs and gears are whirring, the following bizness is occurring:
 
BUILD 37
Build 37 should be out this week, it’s content-locked but we’re also having a real bug purge at the moment – and are dead set on getting a clean version out for our upcoming bigger features to then build on.
 
This is extremely boring and frustrating (we know) but we’ve had a bunch of persistent bugs in the main game build for a while now and they needed attending to. It also does feel good to have put some regular villains to the sword, all of whom have been really tough to track and duplicate.
 
As such, much as it all sounds like a terrifying cheese dream, we think that bugs like saucepan rain, self-opening de-synced co-op curtains and windows, several server crashes and a myriad of gamepad/split-screen eccentricities have been fixed in the next IWBUMS public beta build.
 
Additionally, while fixing the persistent black screen flicker you experience in MP when another player wakes up or falls asleep, we also used the opportunity to fix up some sleep mode logic requested by servers that prefer to keep player-sleep active – meaning that players can now wake up independently of each other, wake up if they press the move keys and have a visible sleep clock. This may well need some more polish, but we’re intrigued to see how the system fares online.
 
 
NU-TOOLS
The maps and annotated maps of Build 37 were made possible by a tool made by TurboTuTone – and in amongst his current devices work in the main game CartoZed has now been revamped.
 
We hope its additions will be of a benefit to our map makers, and to aid the creation of in-game maps for the many community-created custom maps that PZ players survive on.
 
It’s now easier to use, scroll and pan, allow mouse selection of specific areas and can be used with user maps. So, for example, here’s a top-down of some of  Xeonyx’s New Denver.
 

 
Meanwhile CartoZed will also now export an isometric version showing cells of 300×300 tiles, should you crave your own downloadable chunk of the overall PZ map or your own map creation.

Turbo has also updated ItemZed to version 1.2 using feedback from the modders who’ve picked up its mantle, which can be found here.
 
 
BUILDING HERO
A quick shout out to the redoubtable Blackbeard06 who has gone about the laborious task of polishing up, fixing up and categorizing hundreds of user-created buildings that were left with errors after 2x sprites became part of the main game. He’s clearly put a lot of work in, and this means that there are now even more potential new industries and abodes to be added to user maps.
 
 
REDBOID REFORGED
There seems to be a bit of a spurt of new PZ servers appearing at the moment (and if you’d like yours to get some spotlight then please get in touch) but just a brief mention for that hoary old stalwart Redboid – the server of the PZ subreddit. Now under new management and with a few rule changes amidst the familiar faces, it’s a major organ in the online contingent of PZ and it’s good to see it continue to flourish.
 
 
A BRIEF NOTE
In terms of general PZ output – we are listening, wanting to get the ‘good stuff’ out to you and are (hopefully) improving both behind the scenes and in terms of release frequency.
 
Our recent collaborations with General Arcade in the vehicles branch have shown us how fruitful it can be to have fresh faces working at our many different coalfaces, and as such are looking to expand our bank of coders with AAA or indie game dev experience.
 
We already have an iron or two in the fire, but if you have a good, established programming CV in the games industry and enjoy our game (and especially if you’re in NE England) then feel free to give us a shout.
 
 
This week’s ‘Cheers’ vibe from Duncan. 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. Please also note that the CBOIT will be back mid-week with the return of our Mod Spotlight blog on the main PZ site, with a wheel-y good guest star.

Not every dev blog is going to be sexy. Development is therefore accurately portrayed.

Hello all. It’s been a good week at PZ towers following the overwhelmingly positive feedback, and excellent pointers from the community, over our vehicles testing video last week. It feels really good to have one of our key 1.0 features being fed into the cannon, especially given the extended wait for the animations that they’ve been brewing alongside.
In terms of the vehicles branch, this week has seen a lot of effort being put into getting the build seen in last week’s video prepped for internal stress testing and bug hunting. Initial testing found a degree of stuttering cropping up on the long drive between West Point and Muldraugh, for example, that’s now hopefully been fixed – while it’s also clear that driving through densely forested areas also ramps up the memory usage due to the number of nearby physics-enhanced tree objects.
The focus of General Arcade’s Yuri when approaching our own EP’s work on vehicles and in-game physics has been in the communication between in-game threads, and in expanding the margins of the map area that’s streamed in around the player to avoid those big black areas of nothingness that can sometimes appear when your survivor outruns the PZ mainframe.
Another change, meanwhile, has been in moving away from this ‘streamed-in area’ being related to player position – and instead shifted to being proportioned according to player speed. As such, this helps to load chunks in time when player is moving around faster than they usually do. In terms of smooth running it has also become clear that applying this approach to the player as well as the vehicles will improve everyone’s experience – so that’s another current focus of Yuri’s work for the test build.
Martin, meanwhile, keeps the vehicle model pipeline open and makes regular deliveries like this one that appeared this morning. Hopefully next week we’ll be able to have a few more vids/reports from them in motion.

Meanwhile alongside anims work and ongoing map expansion we have RJ back from paternity leave so he’s going great guns to clear as much of the bug tracker backlog (lovingly curated by Butter Bot) as he can, while also feeding extra ‘loot maps’ into the mainframe in preparation for the public release of Build 37.
Turbo too is buried in the main game and streamlining and the way we universally have devices coded- so that’s radios, walkie-talkies, TVs, handheld games, forthcoming tape recorder, forthcoming VHS and the like. He’s implementing a universal module system that’ll govern power usage, transmissions, media reading/writing, storage, audio settings and the like for everything we have in-game, and for everything we add in future.
 This week’s featured image from Guenni. 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. Also, please be reminded that the great PZ statistical surveys remains open.

Hey everyone! Welcome to Mondoid. This week, and we’ll cut straight to the chase with some video goodness! (Remember: work in progress, some bugs visible! More work in implementation and visuals to come!)

So, what are we looking at? Physics-enhanced vehicles in Project Zomboid, both online and off, and some hefty improvements on map streaming and object processing to handle it all. You enter a car with ‘E’, control with WSAD and have various vehicley-options open to you through a radial menu when you’re in the driver’s seat.
We’ve had the vehicles branch on the boil for a while (alongside the usual anims branch, standard build branches and a few others) but this year’s work in melding of EP’s car physics and framework with General Arcade’s special sauce has seen great things occurring. Progress has been good this past week too (as you can hopefully tell from comparing this video with one recorded five or six days ago) and we’re really excited about how the vehicles look and feel to drive. There have already been tests in multiplayer that went very well, with the new map streaming changes working niftily and boding well for future optimization.
So what’s still to be done amidst the general bug fixing? Well, in amongst others and the tidying up of zombie collision visuals – the following:
Firstly, and most importantly, we need to make sure that we’re not introducing a new breed of indestructo-tanks to Project Zomboid. We have to make sure that survival times aren’t hugely extended by cars, and that their use carries as many negatives as positives for the players. Also we need to figure out a good balance between zombie squashing fun and the realism Zomboid tends toward, avoiding the vehicles being too OP and sturdy against groups of zombies, while still providing the satisfaction of mowing down zombies in bigger vehicles. There’s an issue to resolve with how cars are drawn into the scene, sometimes resulting in weird draw sorting bugs with ground grass or zombies drawn in front of the car when they should be blocked by it. This is due to the fact that currently 3D models are drawn at the same time as the tile they are ‘stood’ on. This doesn’t cater for larger 3D objects very well, so we’ll need to think on how to handle this and make sure they all occlude each other correctly. The current sounds of the vehicles are 100% placeholder, and we’ll be working on these before release. More cars! This video is fairly packed with ‘speciality’ vehicles, and Martin is currently in the process of making more vehicles to provide more variety and/or Kentucky normality. Balancing: Each vehicle type needs balancing not only on their rarity, but in terms of handling, top speed, and all the other factors to make them feel different to drive. Right now, apart from their size and wheel positions, they are all functionally identical. Wrecks and pile-ups: At the moment all cars spawn in parked locations, neatly parked in car parks or outside homes. We need to add wrecks, abandoned vehicles, pile ups and other more apocalyptic set ups of cars while also keeping in-touch with what Will’s set up in the PZ lore. OTHER STUFF
RingoD has patched up the faults in the TIS-curated community map Bedford Falls that were introduced through the 2x revolution. It should now be fully playable and can return to general PZ MP server use. Download here. Turbo has updated his modding and dev tool ItemZed, along with some fresh easier-to-read instructions that explain how you too can play around with recipes, items, looting locations and lots lots more. Mapper Cardenaglo’s crazy/awesome Gaia is out in its first form. Do check it out! This week’s image is by us. 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

Hello everyone! Welcome to this week’s Mondoid. It’ll be a relatively short one this week, yet we got some cool things in the pipe to show non-the-less.
Vehicles
A big milestone today as vehicles officially went into closed testing, which is a big step toward getting them out there to you all. They aren’t completely finished yet–There will undoubtedly be bugs to fix reported by our testers, and at the moment there is only a test model, a blue pickup-truck with an oddly placed wheel on the bumper, in the game. The cool vehicle models Martin has been pumping out still need to be implemented, and on a cosmetic level some additional work needs doing on the lighting to make them appear less uniformly lit and a bit more metallic in appearance, we may bump up their size a little too, but they are getting close and all the heavy lifting has been done.
Feedback so far shows that the streaming seems to work extremely well, and the vehicles controls and handles surprisingly well considering the isometric perspective. You use a radial menu to start the car, rolling down windows, turn on the heater, change seats, or play with the car radio.  It’s also extremely fun running over zombies–as you can imagine!
We’ll save on the videos until we get more cars implemented and feel an IWBUMS is more imminent (also, as cool as it looks already it’s a bit odd to see neighbourhoods of blue pickup trucks!) but here are a few pics to whet your appetite.



Thanks again to General Arcade for their amazing and tireless work getting the system working over the net, and getting through the remaining technical roadblocks that complicated and delayed their completion, and of course to EasyPickins who put a monumental amount of work into the vehicles prior to that, alongside his day to day work on PZ updates.
RJ has spawned
That’s right, always a productive one, our very own Romain has gone and co-created a tiny person, whom he has dubbed Victor, who was born literally yesterday. He is very cute, and as per his contract with TIS we have given RJ two weeks to get him up to speed on java so he can be put to work in the TIS code mines. Here is a picture of him alongside the Eternal Leader Spiffo:

Will, usual Mondoid writer, father and sentimental one of the bunch is away at GDC advancing the cause of The Indie Stone in the U.S, but if he was here I’m sure it’d he’d say much more eloquently that we’re ecstatically happy for RJ, Celine and their new son, it’s wonderful to see the Zomboid family grow, and we wish Victor every future success against the zombie hordes.
That’ll be all for this week, see you all next week after we see how the closed testing goes!
This week’s image is by us. 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.

Greetings citizen. Here’s all the latest from the latest isometric dips into undead anarchy…
BUILD 37 PUBLIC BETA
In keeping with this year’s focus on getting regular builds out rather than sitting on ever-growing changelists, today we’re releasing what’s currently in the can for Build 37 out into an IWBUMS public beta. You can find out how to join in and test here.
Edited highlights run as follows:
Lootable Map Items. Maps of urban locations within the Knox Event Exclusion Zone can be found in relevant towns, in particular spawning in gas stations. Current maps you can find cover Muldraugh, West Point, Rosewood and March Ridge.
Using the new map UI you can zoom with the mouse wheel, add your own notes and a bunch of provided symbols in four different colours – if you have the relevant coloured pens. Annotated maps can be shared with friends and faction members in MP. Last week’s vid here. Improved ovens and microwaves. You now have access to a new oven/microwave settings UI upon which you can change the temperature, and use the timer dial. Ovens will ‘ding’ when the time is up, microwaves will turn off. Metal in microwaves can cause fire.
Some food will become less edible when microwaved, increasing character sadness. Eating food hot/cold will have relevant impact on character happiness/sadness. Smaller stuff: ‘Always run’ toggle added to Key Bindings Screen. ‘Version info’ button added to menu screen. Bug fixes: Rosewood player spawns resetting spawn region remedied. Evolved recipe cooked food additions bug fixed, weapon reload in normal/hard reloading difficulties fixed. ANIMERTRONICS
Renewed work on the SP anims release continues, intermingled with a successful and fun day last week melding minds with Animator Martin so that he could get to work on an issue that we felt could vastly improve the capabilities of our reanimated zeds.
Right now, in every build of the game, zombies can only move backwards and forwards. This is fine, but severely limits what’s possible in the long run. Proper turning animations have never been possible (survivors and zeds slide in a circle unless they’re moving), and likewise zombies stumbling in a realistic way and being able to move from side-to-side as well as their traditional PZ bee-line.
As of last week, then, we managed to work out a way to implement rotational root motion and Martin could return to his animator’s den and get to work on the visual side of it all. In more technical terms we’ve now opened up the opportunity to have deferred rotation within anims, which in turn means that animations will be able to drive a character’s rotation just as much as movement.
Behind the scenes Martin has been working on a bunch of the other features/visuals that the animations system will open up to us, and this expansion will give him even more options from refinements and improvements (extra wall-hugging stealth stuff fr’instance) while we continue to get the SP anims branch into operation for testing back at TIS Towers.
TOOLS N’ TUTORIALS
To accompany the exciting new set of mapmakers that seem to be springing up on the forum, and clearly the old hands too, this week EasyPickins released the latest versions of the PZ map-making tools – alongside a full tileset updated with stuff from Build 35’s March Ridge and Rosewood. As such, aspiring map-makers can find the latest versions of TileZed and WorldZed here.
RingoD has also compiled and collated a comprehensive guide to map modding using TileZed on our forums – taking you from initial dabblings all the way to uploading onto Steam Workshop. It has also been hosted on Steam, while Paul will also generally be tidying up the relevant sections on our forums in the coming week.
While we’re on the subject we also wanted to flag up PZ community member Blackbeard06 and his extremely in-depth video guide to how to make a PZ map. It’s worth noting that the Workshop channel on the PZ Discord has become quite active of late, and if you’re thinking of making your own Zomboid mods or dipping your toe into map-making it’s definitely a great and useful place to hang out.
Featured image from Joe. 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. Also of interest: Atoxwarrior’s cinematic Spiffo shenanigans.

Really excited about the maps

I know it's still a WIP version but I think it might be more intuitive to have the mouse pointer turn into the symbols when you select one. I feel like it would be more clear where you're placing it that way.

Anyway, great Mondoid as always! Excited to hear about all the things in the works right now

Howdy survivor. Hope your apocalyptic nightmare scenario is going well. Here’s some news from the land of zeds…
IN-GAME MAPS
For many PZ players the alt-tab to Blindcoder’s map has become something of a ritual, but for a long time we’ve needed a way for players to get their bearings in-game. Using the power of Turbo’s CartoZed tool we now have the power to create top-down maps, which means that we can now also feed them to our resident artist Mash to create lootable in-game items like this. [Still somewhat work in progress – town slogan to change!]

These maps won’t track your position, but you will be able to get you bearings and make markings on them. After all, what’s a map if you can’t mark safehouses, the homes you’ve looted and whatever other vital survival locations on it? Using this initial March Ridge template map RJ has been implementing mouse zoom, the ability to mark notes and also a ‘symbol stamping’ system that will let you annotate the maps that you find with skulls, house images, crosses etc. You can even choose your own text and icon colours. Please note that the following video is a work-in-progress!

Importantly, too, the work has been done to make sure that these are transferable between co-op and MP players. This is a fully moddable system too, and the .png files could be expanded to faction leaflets, community maps and various other world-building materials.
Right now the system is in place, but it’ll take a little while for maps of each major town area to be produced – West Point and Muldraugh are sizeably bigger than the March Ridge test case after all. At first, meanwhile, we will only be concentrating on urban areas and avoiding any areas that are still in-flux or could potentially change in the main game.
IN OTHER NEWS
Turbo’s development and modding tool ItemZed has just been released in beta form for community testing. It lets you easily play around with loot locations, item attributes, recipe contents, spawn rates and all that jazz. For further information please go here. Work at the anims coalface continues, as mentioned last week we’re turning our focus back to getting an SP build out in a Steam beta branch. We have General Arcade on the case with improving PZ’s netcode and map streaming to pave the way for EasyPickins’ vehicles work, again as discussed last week, but now also have an extra body from the Russian Mothership in the form of Eugene for the next few months. He’ll be working on engine and quality of life stuff and we’re super-excited to have him with us for the next little while. Our apologies for the delay of the recent build releases on GOG. The new versions are with the GOG guys, and should be going live very soon, if not already. COMMUNITY MAPPAGE
A quick shout out to Z3759xy on our forums who has had to step away from some, quite frankly, incredible PZ map-making projects due to the amount of spare time he has on his hands – and we dearly hope that someone else picks up his .tbx baton, or performs a team-up operation. Some really great stuff in here!
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. Today’s image of desolation and destruction from .exe. 

They're already working on this, so hopefully it's not too far a way. Not sure how X-Mas will interfere with it as it has to be inspected and uploaded by GoG once it arrives on their end. 
 
ETA is "estimated time of arrival." Effectively a bullshit guess for when you think something is done -- it's meant to be non-binding.

I don't think that it's fair to always complain about such things.
 
I really don't care about what's missing in an update or what was promised and didn't make it in the update. At this moment, I have 170+ hours on my GOG-clock for PZ and I'm far away from feeling bored. I just can't wait to see all the new stuff in Build 35 (when it's released to non-steam platforms) and I'm really excited about it.
 
Let me add something about the discussion: I spend 13,79€ on PZ and played it 170 hours (and I'm far away from being done with it). I have really no reason whatsoever to complain about. TIS is slow in development? I couldn't care less. A few features are in delay? I really don't care. I just focus on the progress they make and I'm absolutely satisfied with that.
 
And guys, I play PZ with my cousin and for a few weeks now, with my girlfriend too. We all love this game and will keep on playing it. 
 
Maybe this is kind of off-topic (and maybe you want to call me stupid because I ask), but: what is 'ETA'? I read it all the time and have absolutely no clue!
 
Keep on with this great work!

You've not seen that we've had months and months of people complaining at us that the game isn't done yet. There's not a single mondoid now without a comment of 'NPCs?' or 'Animations?' on it. It's morale destroying just for the mod team (Hello!), let alone the devs working on the coalface.
 
 

So it isn't done tomorrow or even next year. Ask yourself this, since you claim to spend a great deal of time playing it - "Do you enjoy that time?" If so, why are you bitching? You are getting what you paid for. I've been on board since late 2014, sot that's two years, now. Do you know how many games can actually keep my attention for 2 years? Outside of the Civilization franchise, there are probably fewer than five, I certainly could not list five.
 
Now, over that two years there have been a handful of new patches released. Each one feels like an expansion and renews my vigor and excitement for the game. And I get all this for one low price paid a number of years ago. Quite frankly, if the game takes until 204X, I would not be disappointed, because I would have a game that I have played for 25 years.
 
-- Gosh, and my wife thinks I'm too cynical.
 
Let me add, that if the Dev. team stopped work on PZ tomorrow, it would be sad news, but I would certainly feel I got my money's worth. To the Dev. team: Please don't stop. I love this game, appreciate your hard work and look forward to playing Build 36 and beyond.