_Ghost_

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

Hey all, here’s a quick rundown on a few of the things currently in the internal testing build and due for a hopeful release early next week.
Visible wounds on the character New ‘vehicle zed stories’ to see on the road as you drive by (these being the car placements and zed clothing that suggests scenes of what was happening during the initial outbreak) Fuel timers for campfires and other fuelled items – showing how many in-game hours they have left The ability to tie a bandana either Rambo-style over your head, or to cover your face. Cruise control for cars – pressing Shift+W will increase the maintained speed, Shift+S will decrease it. Braking will turn it off. Stealth improvements – especially for sneaking up behind zombies and stabbing them. The player character will raise a hand to signal when he/she is close enough for a jaw stab from behind. Added ability to hold a flashlight in the player’s hand, and also for a visible umbrella to be displayed being held by the player too. Here’s a quick video that shows some of the above in action.
Finally today, here’s a quick look at Yuri’s work on fire spread. It’s not quite as visually appealing as the above, but hopefully it’ll be of some interest.
On the right you can see all the factors in-play: temperature, material types, weight, volume, surface area, heating energy, cooling energy etc – ignore the ‘weather’ tag at the top.
Then, on the left you can see a map of combustible materials, in this case trees. Each tile displays the temperature of a tree – the left the trunk, the right the branches. We then see a fire spread between them all – with the tree-tops lighting up, and their burning being passed on to surrounding trees.
This week’s rainy road from Цаплин. 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!

- Add "Finished" Sound to Washing Machine/Dryer
- Not being able to add/remove clothes to washer/dryer while cycle is active
- Change Moodle "Minor injuries, first aid required"
- Custom Sandbox Settings Don't Save as a Saved Preset if "/" is in Name
- Fishing SFX not synced
- Clothing Ensemble Bug
- Filling Broken Saucepan Bug
- Fixed uninitialized uniform index with TallFenceShader.
- Disabled TerrainRenderTiles_UseShaders in non-debug mode, set default=false.
- Fixed floor and wall shaders being recreated each time a game is started.
- Hopefully fixed rain puddle performance issues.
- Re-enabled the fridehum/window/door/etc ambient sounds.  Changed WaterDrip sound to only play on IsoFlagType.waterPiped
 sprites with water (so they won't drip after the water shuts off, unless connected to a water source).  Yuri found
 that when there are puddles on the ground, there are way too many WaterDrip sounds playing.  That was due to
 IsoObject.hasWater() returning true on squares that have puddles.
- Save hotbbar position to avoid weirdness at loading game with holster equipped.
- Adjusted some model position for attached weapons.
- Added double barrel shotgun. (anim + spawn).
- Fixed some weirdness with guns.
- Now reset the loot position when transfering stuff
- Can now pickup broken glass (warning, if no gloves you might get injured).
- Increased Soap spawn rate.
- Decrease soap consumption (*2).
- Various compatibility changes for future Super Survivors updates.
- Cleaning liquid can now be used to wash yourself/clothing (NEW cleaning liquid, previous one won't work).
- Cleaning time now depend on amount of blood/dirt on clothing.
- Clothing will be soaked after being washed by hands.
- Fixed exception when washing Socks.
- Decreased time to wash clothing.
- Added various recoil anim for guns/firearm, the more aiming level, the faster you'll shoot + less recoil from anim.
- Added switch Single/Auto for the M16.
- Fixed hotbar weight taking priority over equipped item weight.
- Tooltip now show correct weight if weapon is in hotbar.
- Balanced assault rifle
- Fixed: Zooming out over water results in black squares instead of water
- Fixed after-death text being rendered twice for players.
- Fixed rain-splash rendering bug in splitscreen. 
- Fixed typo with ISBaseObject.type. Capital-T Type is used in several places.
- Fixed player model being reset when swapping hotbar items.
- Fixed character-info avatar not updating when swapping hotbar items.
- Call ISHotbar:refresh() in update().  My previous commit added a call to triggerEvent("OnClothingUpdate") in
 IsoGameCharacter.setAttachedItem() which might cause refresh() to be called at unexpected times.
- Moved IsoGameCharacter.attachedModels to ModelSlot.attachedModels.
- Fixed error in ISAttachedItemsUI.lua when zombies have multiple items attached.
- Delay resetting a character's equipped and attached models until the next frame.
- Changed ISHotbar:update() to handle InventoryItem.getAttachedSlot() becoming invalid for some reason.
- fix text boxes not being destroyed bug
- Fixed hotbar exception after moving the first of two belts to a container.
https://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/26445-dirty-laundry-washer-bugfest/
 Change to ISHotbar:onMouseUp() is just refactoring.
- Fixed previous game's zombie population settings being applied to new games.
- Fixed Survivor.lua sandbox preset never being loaded.
- Rebuilt Linux libPZPopMan64.so.
- Lowered burnt house spawn rate.
- Fixed zombies being considered as on back when falling through window.
- Can now wash yourself without soap, but takes longer.
- Capped the time needed to wash clothing.
- Added holster icons.
 

Ello ello. First thing first, the Steam Summer Sale is currently on – and it’ll likely be the last time you can get PZ in a sale before a price rise that will come alongside the animations build. So if you’re a bystander wondering about diving into the Knox Event, then now is probably a good time!
RUN SURVIVOR RUN
Since last week we’ve finally gotten sprint mechanics fully integrated into the game. The idea behind sprint is to differentiate between a ‘fast jog’ and a short term sprint at maximum speed. The two are being balanced as follows:
Fast jog: players will be able to maintain this for long periods, keep a level of control over their movement and stop quickly – but they will not be as fast as what you’re used to in terms of high-level PZ sprinting.
Short term sprint: a sudden burst at a maximum speed. With this the character will maintain a much greater pace, with the cost of more stamina lost, louder footsteps and a much wider turning circle.
In sprint you’d also have greater potential for accidents, particularly with clumsy characters if sprinting over/near obstacles or into walls. Those with high sprint/athleticism levels will be able to clear fences while sprinting – although clumsier and low skill survivors could well be advised to avoid this as a tumble/fall will be likely.
Please note that this has only been recently integrated, so the following vid is highly WIP! We’ll do a slicker presentation next week when it’s been more polished.
SIT SURVIVOR SIT
Next up: a progress report on a huge anim tech system that’s one of our ‘needs to be done before IWBUMS’ biggies. In this case, it’s pretty much been done now – albeit with one sizeable tech issue that needs resolving.
Anim masking means that when an animation is playing, it can be set to only play on certain bones of the character’s animation skeleton. The most obvious use of this being only upper body.
Before this tech, it was impossible to, say, play a reload animation while walking, or eat while walking. Martin would have had to animate ‘walking while eating’, ‘walking while reloading’ and also every transition animation possible. Now, however, we can play the reloading animation on the upper body while the legs continue playing the walking animation.
We’ve also done some reorganizing of the game code’s player states, to allow timed actions (those with a bar over the character’s head, used for everything including eating to reloading) to be able to be carried out at the same time as the character’s other major states used for walking, running etc.
As stated above, there’s still one big issue to resolve with this, which is a technical point relating to how the skeletons are organized within the game. The result being that items held in hands will not behave correctly in cases when the character’s hands have been made lower to the ground due to another anim – sitting for example. This makes actions like ‘eating on floor’ cause the item held in the hand to appear where it would be had they been stood up – which makes it look a bit broken.
There are still discussions going on as to the best way to fix this – a big chat between Zac, Mark and our gang is ongoing – but we’re currently looking for quickest way to remedy it when there’s such a vast animation set to get through.
Here are two vids showing some of these masked anims, with the usual “WIP!” warning lights flashing. Especially with the seated one. Reloading looks cool though, right?
And now here’s another vid that displays the floating-item issue that we’re currently working on.
Once the anim masking is 100%, the last big pieces to slot into place are hooking it all into MP and rotational blending – before polish and major bug fix duties. We’ve explained it before, but for clarity, this rotational system is required to allow:
Anims for characters to turn on the spot to any angle An anim for characters stopping while running and thrusting into a run at a different angle Anims for zombies hearing a player nd turning their head toward them, before turning and stumbling in their direction Any general animation that contains otation within them that needs to conceivably work at any 360 degree angle, and be able to blend between the base compass position animations provided by Martin. These are especially important to the game as right now the character turns with a turning circle like they are a vehicle, which makes them extremely awkward to move precisely indoors. It’s not obvious from the videos, but you’d find it annoying to play.
IN OTHER NEWS
ChrisW is still working with us, and is improving his cutaway system so it’s clearer where doorways and windows are – and are no longer big scary black lumps of probable doom.


 
EP has had a bit of fun, and has used the new anims and models system to create mannequins that can be moved into safehouses and dressed however a shopkeeper’s (or survivor’s) might like them to be dressed…
This week’s Terror for the Autons from Sasha. 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!

Hi!
 
First, sorry for my bad english. Then, i know that NPCs are planned for future builds and that a mod already exists but I want to bring my vision to the game.
 
I love the Nolanri mod that I have been using for a while. But I find it incomplete. So I decided to create my own mod.
What will he do more than the Nolanri mod?
Better AI. Explore, loot, eat, drink, sleep. Better survivors spawn handling. Better management of groups (yes with S) Talk with NPC. Become friends or.... ennemies Quest! Not a priority but i work on it. And more...  
Currently the mod is only at its beginning but I already have a screenshot to show you!

 
At left bottom of the screen you can see the interaction window. The available dialogs are below (yeah i have a deubg dialog lol) and the conversation history above. Still above is the status of the relationship. With "Let me see your equipment" (that changes in future) i can see the inventory of NPC in the window at right. I can drag and drop item like a normal container.
The dialogs are like tree and each branch can contains other branches.
 
I'll give you soon more news about development

Quick flag for y'all to say that, in preparation for the vehicles release, the PZ map has been updated with Build 39's countryside additions between Riverside and Rosewood.
 
https://map.projectzomboid.com/
 

 
Our thanks to @blindcoder for his work on this (especially when he has his hands full with happy small child life stuff currently!) and to @Kirrus for helping out with all the various clever stuff required server-side.

The Build 39 Vehicles build (playable in public IWBUMS beta) is essentially ready to go, but we need to be sure that a couple of issues have been solved by today’s release of Build 39.57: one that saw crowds of zombies pinging vehicles off roads in MP, and another on some dedicated servers that had zeds attracted to a vehicle’s previous position that we also think was to do with the physics interpolation. [So please let us know if you encounter either!]
39.57 also improves the way vehicles are arranged in parking stalls by adding directional pointers to the mix, addresses issues with watch alarms, adds extra options to help you tailor/toggle world degradation (erosion) in the game and some tweaks to help modders with the change to the vehicles build. Amidst a lot of under the hood stuff to keep stuff ticking over. EDIT: A complete changelist will appear here in the next day or so, but due to last minute issue with the latest code we’ve released a build that was already in testing and thus we’ll have to recompile the changelist to suit.
In the mean-time let’s go round the houses and find out what other PZ types are up to:
ANIMS
Last week we announced that we’d teamed up with a gang of renegade coders called The Eccentric Ape – ably led by our current anims-focussed Technical Director whizz (Bitbaboon) Mark. This past week has seen them getting up to speed with PZ, and right now they’re getting their hands dirty in the codebase. The plan is for them to do a big push on the animation system, and overall intention is that we’ll be working alongside them on many of our big features going forward.

So, for the next little while TEA’s Grant is fixing up remaining issues with layer/node and blending code, and then adding in the common state conditions that animations will ‘trigger’ – stuff like collision being on/off for combat and swings. Snitz, meanwhile, is setting to work on movement, idle and swing states to remove anything still hard coded and tie them instead to the new in-game variables.
Finally, Zac and Gaz are working on AnimZed, making it more user friendly, filtering and sorting the anims into the first set of released animations and focussing on it from the end user perspective. By the time this push is complete the system should be in a state where Animator Martin, and ultimately modders, can dive in and start layering new anims for the remaining states with very little required coder intervention.
WEATHER
Turbo’s big challenge at the moment with the new precipitation and fog that go hand in hand with his simulated climate system is how to handle it when you look out of windows – in the current game rain isn’t visible outside, and this bug will become much clearer with better rain and fog effects. Particles currently get drawn after the world has been drawn, and the weather is drawn over this final image – so we need a solution for this so you can check the weather outside your safehouse without walking out into it.
We anticipate that looking out of a window when hearing the noise of, for an example, an approaching thunderstorm (thunderclaps at the correct timing, taking into account to your distance away on the map from lightning and the centre of the storm) will be a much more common occurrence with this new system – likewise with checking out the fog. As such it’s something we need to fix up before release.
While he puzzles this all out alongside our other coders, Turbs is also creating a new sound bank for ambient sounds to signal seasonal change. He’s currently got a supply of forest zone sounds, insect noise, rain effects for both indoors and outdoors, extra SFX for heavy weather, birdsong and indoor/outdoor wind effects.
He intends to have it so that, for example, on a hot summer afternoon with little to no wind you can hear the crickets chirping – and for birds to become silent when heavy weather hits. It’s intended to be soft background noise, but if implemented well should really improve your sense of the time of year – and the current weather state created by the simulated climate system. After a meeting with the PZ art brigade Turbo is also going to add some more direction to his ‘clouds overhead’ effect, as currently they look a little too smoke-like.
OTHER STUFF
Bitbaboon Steve is finishing off our updated internal build system, while Connall is investigating ways to help our community translators keep up to date with translation strings that are updated from build to build. Mash continues with Louisville, while RingoD is building a wider roster of house and apartment buildings that she can drop into residential areas when she moves into the suburbs.
When they return from Russian Victory Day vacations General Arcade’s Yuri is working on MP network physics, and Stas continues his work to improve gamepad and mouse settings/bindings. ChrisW is also back with us and will work on giving final polish to his existing rooftop occlusion system when it comes to player-built structures, before returning to his work on Sims-style interior cutaways in houses.
Due to a necessary forum upgrade we’re also having to decommission our current Bug Tracker, which is annoying but has to be done unfortunately. We’ve harvested all the longstanding issues that were present in it, so if you see any of your reports disappearing – please don’t worry as they have a new home in our internal system. We’ll work on getting a decent replacement in the weeks ahead.
This week’s 911 call out from Ghost. 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. The CBOIT would like to apologise to Mark for calling T.E.A. ‘The Educated Ape’ last week instead of ‘Eccentric’, although that would also have been a good name for his new company.

Evening all. Some good vehicles stuff today as they approach their public release, and info from the animation coalface.
BUILD 39 IWBUMS BETA
As stated last week, we’re in the final IWBUMS beta build(s) before we get vehicles out to public. This week we discovered an annoying map streaming hitch in MP (previously slightly obscured, but made more visible by last week’s improvements to chunk loading) so have this week been ironing it out – which hopefully means that today’s public IWBUMS beta play more smoothly. It has been released today as a part of Public IWBUMS Beta 39.52.
Also included in Build 39.52 are improvements to vehicle collisions with zeds. In essence there’s now a far higher chance of turning zombies into crawlers, and your speed is now tied to the amount of damage you do – and whether you’ll be rewarded with a blood splat.
Vehicles now also bump slightly when driving over corpses and, while there is a ‘boost’ bug associated with this that we need to deal with – illness on the team has meant we couldn’t fix this in time for the release today, but hopefully you can forgive the occasional car-catapult.
Elsewhere loot in cars has been brought in line with what you’d expect from the loot in nearby houses, fixes have been made to zed pathfinding, XP from broadcasts has been increased, the mass of car wrecks has been reduced and outdoor generator use has been enabled in all game modes by default. Full changelist here.
ANIMATIONS
As regulars will know, we have Mark from Bitbaboon working on our new animation system – and he’s using his knowledge from his lengthy experience as a Technical Director in the world of AAA game publishing to make the implementation of new animations (for both the PZ modding community, and PZ developers) as modular and intuitive as possible.
The primary dev and modding tool that facilitates this is called AnimZed, and this week Mark thought it would be fun to give you a video tour around some of its functions – while he continues to prepare AnimZed, and the PZ codebase, for the point post-vehicles at which we can all jump in.
There’s just one quick item of note: in the video when animation stances change in AnimZed they suddenly flick to their new position – this is because in demonstrating the tool the ‘blend time’ was left at 0 seconds meaning instant switch between one pose and another. In the game they would clearly be blended so they look smooth and natural.
(Oh, and our apologies for the robo-voice in the vid, but Mark thought it better than his own gruff Brummie accent.)

This vid gets quite technical, but hopefully explores and explains the breadth and scope of what we’re aiming for a little better than dry boring text.
WEATHER
Turbo’s weather system – a realistic representation of temperature, weather patterns, precipitation, fog, snow and ice melt has been taken for a few spins backstage in the recent week to spotlight the key areas that need fixing/improvement before it can be integrated into public test builds.
Tester feedback has been pretty positive, outlining especially that you can really feel the passage of the time of day a lot better now – and people also seem to like the way that a storm will gradually roll over a map in a way that it would in real life.

We are also treating this as a way of killing two birds with one stone, as up till now there are areas of the game where visibility has been a problem due to our current shaders – and as such Turbo has been experimenting with many and various time of day and seasonal settings.
His side mission being to get the right balance so PZ’s visuals don’t become over-saturated, and on the other side making sure the winter months aren’t *too* drab and dreary. Please note that the following are super WIP – some are a little too garish still, but do look quite good at the correct time of day.

For now however Turbo is concentrating on the system’s bugs – like the way, for example that fog disappears completely when you enter a building, making the area around the house visible.
OTHER STUFF
Elsewhere in PZ-land Stas is getting to grips with our improved gamepad functionality and set-up options, while long term Louisville construction continues, and Bitbaboon Steve is on hand to go deeper into the optimization of our MP game.
In terms of the Build 39 vehicles release then Blindcoder is also currently working on the update to the official online PZ map that’ll reveal/spoil every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse that’s new in the upcoming release.
This week’s trailer park massacre from Sergeant Giacomo. 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.