Skooma Skeeve

Okay, so TLDR after the last night’s Wednesday Night Test Session on the Build 41 MP beta is that the new MP is increasingly LOTS of fun, but there is still LOTS for us to do.
 
For those interested in the nitty-gritty, here’s the changelist for the week of dev-time that was being tested.
 
For those who would rather just see a few quick vids and screenshots of the developers, PZ server admins and modders we assembled to have a play of the current Build 41 MP, here’s some of the very same:
 
 

And, an example of one of the many bugs we still need to seek and destroy.


  And a few bits of tester feedback:

“The whole group of us met up around the campfire and then made a cross-Kentucky trek. As we lost more and more people the feeling of being in a zombie movie slowly intensified. We started out with like… a dozen people and then hordes split us, people got bitten, etc. All was extremely fun and engaging. Despite a few bits of lag/desync, it really played extremely well. Issues seemed mostly to be fussy visual ones.&rdquo

“It really was a blast, overall it’s very playable at the moment. There’s some desync with players sometimes, some slight tp’ing zombies and a bit of confused zeds when lots of players are around – but the overall experience is so smooth and SO PZ.”
 
So, what items are on the list for polish and fixing ready for the next Wednesday MP test? Well, among other things, the following are in the spotlight:
 
We’re seeing occasional black-boxing and car weirdness (as seen above) so we 100% need to crack down on this. Players can’t move after being shot We’ve got some item-duping on different events, like falls Player lighting (flashlights etc) isn’t synced Some SFX still aren’t matching up Lots of general improvement to connections, admin settings, chatbox etc.
  Other non-MP stuff done this week:
 
Zombies can now pathfind through destroyable objects. They prefer to go around, but if there is no other path, they’ll thump on walls and crates, etc.
  (We are aware that, coupled with the zeds crawling beneath cars update in 41.50 this will be making your lives even more difficult – and are testing this to see how it plays and will be looking at ways to compensate for it, perhaps increased wall and object health etc)
 
Some really promising optimization that should see a frame-rate and load time boost. General balance to: survivor zeds, loot spawn locations, item weights, some nutrition and whether or not you enjoy eating raw dead animals.
  SPIFFO’S FINAL THOUGHT:

Although everything is looking very positive with the MP stuff PLEASE note that we still have a very long ‘to do’ list before we can consider a public IWBUMS beta release and Community Megatests.

We are sorry for being such massive teases with this stuff, but we hope you’ll agree it’s better than radio silence.
Also, don’t walk on campfires.
A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Morning/evening/afternoon all. Let’s make our first stop today a check-in with the Multiplayer Strike Force as they continue their work in Build 41’s MP.
 
Yuri and Andrei are continuing their work on the multiplayer, and its getting super exciting to see the videos they are sharing. There are still issues to resolve but its getting there, as hopefully you will see.
 
Andrei has been syncing up actions such as climbing through windows, over fences and up and down sheet ropes. Here are the results this week.
 
 
A QUICK NOTE since some people misunderstood what these videos represent last week’. In these videos the left represents what player 1 sees on their own machine, and the right is what a remote player sees with player 1’s movement transferred over the network with simulated ping and packet loss, showing how the character’s movement is reconstructed and mirrored on other client’s machines.
 
First thing to notice is WOAH how nice and smooth it is. This would be a rubber bandy disaster on B40 and we’re extremely excited to see nice smooth and immersive MP experiences for all.
 
As you’ll probably also notice, the remote player climbing up the contraption’s AI/prediction stuff gets confused and delayed and thus ends up permanently lagging behind the character’s real position locally. This is going to be the next area the guys look into, trying to make sure that the system ‘catches up’ any characters that lag behind, without resorting to noticeable rubber banding or Benny Hill style skits to get them into the right position.
 
Next up is Yuri’s continued work on polishing up zombie syncing, vid follows – and explanation follows that.
 

Here Yuri is making sure that zeds are in the correct places on all clients, ensuring that adjustments to the system cater for differing zombie speeds, as well as making sure third party zombie combat looks right when both the remote player and the zombie could be slightly differing in position between clients.
 
The goal is not to make everything absolutely 100% accurate as it would need to be in an FPS competitive multiplayer, but to make it close enough to look believable, smooth and immersive on all clients, with little enough divergence between clients to not adversely affect gameplay.
Finally, from MP land, Andrei has been working on getting fitness and fishing synced up between clients too:
 
 
 
IWBUMS PUBLIC BETA PATCH 41.45 While the MP Strike Team busy themselves – polish, balance and general additions continue for the general IWBUMS beta branch.
Turbo mixed the new fog we’ve been showing recently into the internal test build this morning so, as long as it doesn’t break anything unexpectedly, we can probably look toward a patch release next week. (Fingers crossed)
Theres a lot of more general fixes and improvements in .45 too – alongside crowbar anims for tearing down barricades, fitness balance and polish, some decent optimization and UI polish.
Here’s what the new fog system looks like when it’s mixed into a tropical storm with a bit of added coloration. Pretty cool, non?
 
 
 

This week’s fog scene from Turbs. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Hello all! Welcome to this week’s Thursdoid. News flash: I’ve just had to edit out the ‘Hurray! Build 41.40 has just been released into IWBUMS beta!’ portion of the Thursdoid, because a last minute issue with auto-shoves not protecting from scratches or bites was discovered. Obviously this would not go down too well, so will need repairing. Happy days! This will be fixed as soon as possible and we’ll get the build pushed hopefully today.
 
Big things include:
 
JEWELRY! Many more character customization options with necklaces, earrings, rings and so on. Addition to animation system to allow better blending, to get rid of or be able to fine tune some pauses at ends of animations. Spear kill moves should be less dangerous now. May require some additional balances so let us know how things feel. Numerous combat fixes to get rid of some long standing issues with target choice for downed/attacking zombies, zombies over the other side of fences and so on. Added ability to refill water dispensers Zillions of fixes.
  To make up for the lack of a build at time of posting, Binky has kindly donated a WIP map tease screenshot of our rendition of Louisville:

MULTIPLAYER
Work continues on fixing up the last remaining issues with zombie syncing. As stated before, the multiplayer has been in large part completely rebuilt from the ground up for syncing characters and zombies, to provide for much better performance and less issues with lag.
 
One big part in getting these last issues fixed has been in generating diagrams to help debug what is taking place over time between server and clients in order to make sure they both match close enough to provide a believable experience comparable to that of single player. Yuri has managed to sync up thumping and fence falling perfectly using the animation state transitions using this additional power. Though is still debugging a few edge cases where the system fails. (Look out for it in the video)
 
Lastly, just wanted to add a few candid words about the ongoing MP development – We know people are frustrated at the long wait, and are seeing more and more frustrated comments about MP’s absense from B41 as the weeks go by.
 
We’re sorry that it’s taking so long – however it is what it is, and is what it is for numerous reasons – not only the immense task of building a strong and capable multiplayer architecture, ripping out the old systems, creating multiplayer that will see the game succeed and help build up a larger multiplayer following on B41’s full release (something we’re not willing to compromise on, as B41 going live fully will be the most crucial opportunity for Zomboid to grow in popularity since the game’s initial release, and squandering that opportunity with flaky MP could have a hugely negative impact on PZ in the future), but also with only a limited number of the team able to undertake the work that needs to be done, along with the various additional challenges from fun and unavoidable lockdown/childcare related issues within the team that come from the ongoing COVID-19 situation. It’s definitely been a slog and will continue to be for a while.
 
As with many other dev teams, we’re not necessarily firing on every cylinder right now – but even if we were, this is and has always been a lot of work to undertake, something we’ve tried to stress again and again – and while it’s taking a lot of time in less than ideal circumstances, the results are extremely exciting, and progress is definitely picking up.
 
It’ll take however long it takes though – we’re never ones to give ETAs at the best of times, but as stated these are not the best of times, and all we can promise is we want it out there as much if not more than any of you, and will continue to work tirelessly on getting it out there to you all as soon as possible – and if you want a silver lining, if we went with our original plan you’d still be playing B40 while we worked on this. The whole reason we released B41 into IWBUMs as single player only was anticipating we’d be wading in MP guts for some time, though we didn’t know quite how long it would end up taking, so we’re thankful that people are getting to experience all the work we put into B41 now, along with improving B41 alongside the community while the MP work is underway – and finally we want to thank those who are showing patience and understanding about what we’re trying to accomplish here, and have shown support in the community. It helps keep us motivated a lot!
 
Once B41 is finally out there, we already got lots of real exciting stuff to show off for what’s coming next. We’ve long learnt from our mistakes of the past, and now only show stuff pertaining to the current build in development in the blog updates – but that doesn’t mean we don’t have plenty of extremely juicy stuff piling up behind the scenes we’re dying for people to see.
 
Thanks for reading!
 
This week’s fireside shot from Rei Ayanami. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

😐
 
 
 

Does this have update have Multiplayer functionality yet?

Hello survivors and welcome to this week’s Thursdoid! A few things to discuss.
IWBUMS BUILD 41 PUBLIC BETA
This week we released 41.35 and 41.36 (to fix a few things hot style)
Changes in this were manifold, but the primary items were visible bags in hands, a make up system, a nerfed carmageddon meatgrinder exploit (further balance to come) and a rebalanced night to encourage flashlight use. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think, and what needs tweaking on the forums.
Currently in the works for 41.37 meanwhile are:
Fixes for zombies heads clipping through walls when they fall over, which in turn makes zed head smoosh attempts awkward. Rockstar Mark’s new pass on car textures, which uses a second UV channel to vastly reduce video memory usage of the game – and also will let us get vehicles bloody. This is still underway, but progress looking very good. MP WORK
In the MP camp, or the #multiplayer_strike_force slack channel as it’s more accurately called, things are starting to warm up nicely. General Arcade’s Andrei, a new addition to the team, is up to speed with the codebase and is at work getting the clients animation state for players transmitted over the network and synchronised. Still lots to do, but Andrei and Zac have been back and forthing and pumping code into the repo all week and it’s been exciting seeing it all roll in. 
It’s still unclear exactly how long until we can start doing some tests, there’s still a lot to chew through, but hopefully we’ll be able to see stuff in action before long. For full details on our MP improvements, and our reasoning why we’re going for such a huge overhaul compared to older builds, please check out this earlier Thursdoid if you missed it previously.
FIRE
Elsewhere, in some of our branches, other coders continue to work on some cool things.
Yuri is continuing on with the fire overhaul, tying in the fire effect with the ‘meta’ map of combustible materials you may have seen in earlier blogs.
Long story short, the system allows for fire to spread more realistically, but also for it to spread in areas of the map that are unloaded. (Don’t worry, we have measures in place to avoid the entire map burning down)
The system uses more detailed modelling of combustible materials, which include: wood, cloth, grass, soil and brick. It can add materials for items from wood, tables, chairs, counter-tops, sinks, doors, curtains, sinks, trees, soils and floor tiles.
Here is a video of Yuri experimenting with some debug fires and some useful timestamps:
00:00 – Yuri shows the spread of fire in an area far from the character. This area is not loaded into the combustible materials map and game map. Then he loads the area. 00:14 – Yuri sets fire to a tree, also enabling the unloading of non-burning tiles.  1:36 – Yuri teleports to an area that is on fire, and sees the fire and the aftermath of the fire (calculated despite the tiles not being loaded during the fire!). 3:40 – Yuri sets fire to a couple of houses to watches the spread of fire. 6:02 – Yuri sets fire to the grass and watches the spread of fire. Please note this is still very much in development and will likely undergo a lot of balances and tweaks to make sure it sits well with the gameplay, but what’s underway is super cool and impressive, and along with the much improved visuals, we think fire will be much more interesting in future.
DEVICES
Turbo has been continuing work in his long-time passion project of a comprehensive ‘device’ system for Zomboid.
For those unaware of what the system is going to do, if you’ve played something like tech modpacks on Minecraft you’ll probably instantly ‘get’ the inspiration behind it.
It is a comprehensive and generalised system for handling devices of all kinds and communication between them – which should open up a metric crapton of doors both for systems and devices in-game, but more crucially provide a base for some pretty in-depth mods for those creative types.
In this screenshot you can see that a walkie talkie, instead of just being ‘a device’ specifically and uniquely programmed, now has modules such as speakers and a microphone attached.
This modularisation and generalisation of devices inputs, outputs and communication on one level will give us new and easily adaptable ways of setting up our radios, TVs, VHS recorders, and security gate systems – but it is also a system that we/modders can allow to run deep.
It will also provide us the option of doing stuff like wiring things together into circuits, having an in-world computer running as a functioning lua programming device (you’ll have to pretend lua was in general use in the 90s) that can be programmed to create security systems, CCTV, and all manner of cool stuff for late game zombie fortress use.
While it’s not something that’s within the remit of Zomboid base game (at least to this level), we can fully imagine modders adding automated production chains and all that Factorio/Technic style goodness in mod overhauls.
This is likely all very much far future stuff though, so don’t be expecting it in the next build or two, but we’re excited to see it develop and the potential it will bring in all manner of ways!
This week’s medical emergency from $ℏìᶄ. 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!

Fair amount to get through this week, starting off with us flagging that this week we have released two patches for the IWBUMS beta of Build 41: namely 41.26 and 41.27.
We’ve spoken about the 41.26 contents a fair amount in recent blogs but the overview is that it contains:
A revamp of our modding framework Saved outfits on character creation Tweaked washing A better ‘walk to’ system Better vehicle headlights Zed bandages A better colour palette for clothing Improved zed-choosing during stomp/melee combat Quality of life fixes for foraging Cutaway polish Lots more Something else that this contained was an attempt on our part to nerf ‘animation cancelling’ in combat – but it had a few side effects, especially with axes, so the next day’s 41.27 patch reverted this while we work out a more elegant solution.
The next patch (likely next week, but probably reliant on work in Zac’s Zoom branch, as detailed below) is far from fully formed yet – but likely will contain Turbo’s Xmas side project, the automated military radio channel. We will also be looking into making sure that stealth is working correctly, as recent fixes might have knocked this off-balance.

An updated video of Turbo’s automated radio station can also be found below:
ZOOM
Truth be told, some of us were ready to throw in the towel on Zac’s work on the ‘zoom’ build – the aim of which was to try to get as many lower-spec people as we could (the Intel crowd, generally) an uninterrupted non-crash game experience by removing the memory-hogging FBO and simultaneously granting all PZ players sharper visuals on character and zombie models alike.
Zac had one last day on it up against seemingly unsurmountable issues  before it was placed on the shelf, and all seemed lost… but then… like Indiana Jones rolling under a door and reaching back for his hat. He triumphed.
As such, we currently have a test beta running for this optimized branch – although it hasn’t been updated with latest 41.26 and 41.27 content so if you do try it out PLEASE back up your saves.
Details on how to test out this build can be found hiding behind these words.
Feedback from this beta has been HUGELY encouraging, with some people who have had major problems running 41 reporting far, far less crashes – and others liking the crisper visuals too.
This said, there are still some kinks to be worked out of it: a recurring error causing framerate issues, white square zed bodies, nights that are too bright, a blurry UI and oddly coloured cars and weapons on zoom out.
All annoyances, rather than the huge hurdles that Zac scaled on that fateful Friday last week – so fingers crossed it can enter the main beta soon.
Multiplayer Anims
As mentioned last week this year we’re delighted to have TEA/Bitbaboon’s MarkR available again to help with the great big multiplayer hook-up. We’ve had a lot of chat this week about where we are, what’s still to do, and where we want to get to – which is basically as a high a bar as his talent and experience can take us. The following, then, are what you’ll hopefully be hearing a lot about in future blogs:
Dead reckoning: 
Having a synchronised clock on server/client instead of using ping round-trip times, and using client prediction and interpolation to move the characters on the clients. This will allow the animation system to take that movement and apply appropriate animation onto it that will avoid most (tho likely not all) foot sliding.
The dead reckoning will make the character movement in MP a ton more realistic and solid than it currently is, and will hopefully improve/remove the frequent rubber-banding issues PZ often faces. It might sound a lot, but a lot of the groundwork for this has already been done in existing work and the way that the animation system in 41 has been rebuilt to prepare for it.

Zombie Clients:
Not ‘our’ kind of zombies – but an actual coding term! With this we will be working out ways to simulate high amounts of players on a server: moving around and doing simulated gameplay actions so as to stage all the actions of a busy server.
This will then allow us to debug current issues with server lagging due to high player counts. We’re setting ourselves a high bar with the player count – though we’re superstitious enough to not tell you all what it is.

Horde traffic optimization:
Also on the menu are clusters and islands – these are ways of reorganizing horde data to vastly minimize the amount of traffic sent to update zombie positions, hopefully with little visual or mechanical detrimental effect to the online experience.
We’ve also been discussing splitting the horde into the zombies most relevant to different players to augment how they are synchronised to each client which, along with dead reckoning should drastically reduce those famous moments when you’ve all been bitten by a laggy/invisible/distant zombie.
In short though: we’ve got big plans for all this stuff, but we want to get it right so everyone has the best experience possible AND so it’s ‘done and stable’ for the entire future of PZ.
MP functionality for the anims build won’t suddenly be back next week, but we will keep you updated in the blogs – and when it does return it will have had insight and coding from some very talented people we’ve brought in especially for it, and will have been worth the wait.
This week’s ‘oof, right in the kisser’ from Airpex. 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!

I've been really enjoying the new build so far, massive kudos to all the devs! 
 
Only a couple issues I had in my playtime so far: The pharmacy in Riverside seems to have items you'd find in a gas station/convenience store, and no medical items. Also the big 2-story bar in Riverside has an outdoor deck on its 2nd level, which is missing its floor. this structure:

Should fix a lot of 'crash on loading into game' issues!
 
- Increased memory allocation for 64bit zomboid that could potentially avoid crashes on some systems loading into game.
- Fixed shader issues with clothing overlays and holes which affect some GPUs (big source of hangs/crashes on game load / leaving spawn house and probably the same cause of some mac issues reported)
- Added options for transparency / visibility of iso cursor for combat.
- Render thread will now throw out better error messages for diagnosing future problems.
- Fixed zombies playing their death sound sometimes when stabbed (but not jaw-stabbed).
 This happened when bCloseKill=true but CriticalHit=false.
- A zombie dies as soon as it is jaw-stabbed, not after falling to the ground.
 The KnifeDeath animation is played in the falldown state, not the hitreaction state.
 The KnifeDeath hitreaction doesn't happen now because the zombie is dead before falling.
- Fixed zombie number issue on Survival
- Fixed pathfinding failing when moving on the same square when that square is blocked in all directions.
 This worked before luautils.walkAdj() was changed to not call AdjacentFreeTileFinder.isTileOrAdjacent().
https://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/26223-stuck-in-one-spot/
- 

I've been really enjoying the new build so far, massive kudos to all the devs! 
 
Only a couple issues I had in my playtime so far: The pharmacy in Riverside seems to have items you'd find in a gas station/convenience store, and no medical items. Also the big 2-story bar in Riverside has an outdoor deck on its 2nd level, which is missing its floor. this structure:

Lots of fixes in this one. Though big apologies to some of the crash people out there. We're really working at trying to solve your issues, and have tried a few things, but with no errors or crash traces being reported by the build, they are somewhat a mystery and hard to puzzle out. We likely haven't fixed everyone's issues, but we'll get to the bottom of it eventually and you're not being forgotten.
 
NEW
Renamed playstyles for clarity and to emphasise dev intent for how they should be played. Brawler becomes Survivor, Survivor becomes Apocalypse.
- Added anim-less transitions for sneakWalk -> strafe, sneakRun -> strafe, sneakWalkLow -> strafe, and sneakRunLow -> strafe
  - Eliminates the odd turning arc while transitioning to strafe.
- Removed strafeToWalk animation from strafeSneak -> walk/run/etc.
  - Reduces the amount the character jumps while transitioning from strafeSneak to said states.
- Implemented SFX for lower impact car collisions
- Added falling-zombie state.
- Added context-menu tooltip for opening/closing curtains to display keyboard and mouse shortcuts.
- Added VERSION=1 to keys.ini. Remap C to L when VERSION is not present or is less than 1.
- Added state transition from lunge to falling for zombies.
- Added climb over fence transition to falling (when there's no floor on the other side).
- Added Height map texture for puddles. This texture should increase performance when drawing puddles.
- Added Logs/ZombieSpawn.txt to record zombie spawns.  Should record zombies spawning inside of buildings, not so much outside.
BALANCE
- Toned down zombies and zombie spawns a little in Survivor (formerly Brawler)
- Reduced the delay after climbing through a window or over a fence before the player can move.
- temporarily disabled body temperature change to help people survive winter
- Made hit detection on body parts on downed zombies a little tad more generous
- Bare hands in multi hit can now shove up to 3 zombies - on Survivor mode (formerly Brawler)
ANIM AND MODEL CHANGES
-tweaked several turn anims
-reversed mccoy van logo
FIXES
- Fixed shoving the first zombie within range, rather than the closest zombie within range.
- Fixed incorrect path to Ambient Piano
- Attempted fix for Mac issues via rebuilt Mac 'lighting' libLighting.dylib
- Fixed zombification from tree scratches.
- Fixed RenderThread jobs sometimes being reported as finished before they are invoked.
- Fixed "Random" button in the Customize Character screen resetting the player's profession.
- Fixed molotovs and broken weapons not being removed from the player's hands.
- Fixed item icons on the ground being twice normal size when "Double sized textures" = No.
- Fixed issues saving the player to the vehicles.db database.
- Fixed unicode filenames are not supported by animation/model importer.
- Fixed not being able to open/close windows via the context menu when the player is already standing at the exact
 center of the square.
- Stopped zombies dragging down a god-mode player to their death.
- Lowered outside passenger positions of SportsCar (fixes a camera glitch).
- Rip Clothing and Craft Sheet Rope work on all selected items (if they're valid).
- Removed PerformanceSettings.modelsEnabled and PerformanceSettings.support3D.
- Lowered the number of asset-loading threads from 4 to 2 on systems with 4 or fewer hardware threads.
 i.e dual-core with hyperthreading, or quad-core without hyperthreading.
 - Fixed missing trait icons when using the Turkish locale. (Prone to Illness, Illiterate, etc).  Anything with a capital I.
- Double-clicking tutorial and playstyle labels in the new-game screen proceeds to the next screen.
- Fixed issues attacking while in a vehicle (infinite ammo, can't shove).
- Try to fix exceptions in ClimbThroughWindowState.  Don't store IsoWindow or IsoGridSquare in StateMachineParams since 
they may become invalid due to map scrolling (for zombies on the edge of the loaded area, not the player)
- Fixed lua error in DebugChunkStateUI
- Fixed displaying LMENU as LALT.  Display RMENU as RALT.
- Fixed clearing a keybind displays it with no name instead of NONE.
- Fixed some weirdness in the fastforward cancel when near zombies.
- Fixed items floating off the ground when dropped from inside a vehicle.
- Fixed multiplying generators after using "Equip in both hands".
- Set generator ConditionMax=100.
- Set some vehicle part ConditionMax=100.
- Fixed parenting the player's inventory to a zombie after a knife gets stuck in the zombie's head.
- Fixed Bare Hands not being counted as a favorite weapon, except when stomping.
- Fixed "Untie Hair" option being available for already-untied hair after loading a game.
- Fixed player not dying properly after falling.

The public ‘I Will Back Up My Save’ beta for the long-awaited Build 41 is now open for testing by the Project Zomboid community.
HOW?
The IWBUMS beta is accessible to anyone who plays Project Zomboid. Right click Project Zomboid in your Steam library and hit “Properties”. Then, navigate to the betas tab and select the “iwillbackupmysave” branch from the dropdown menu.

Those who test IWBUMS beta builds must be aware that what they’re playing is a work in progress.
If you're having problems with IWBUMS, it is advised that you try verifying the steam cache, and if that doesn't work, completely uninstall and reinstall the game (while also deleting or renaming the installation folder as well as your userfolder in C:\Users\YourUsername\Zomboid). Steam is awkward at times
The beta is put out for public consumption for player feedback and bug reports. Please direct gameplay feedback to our forum beta release thread, and bugs to this section of our forums.
For further details on what IWBUMS testing entails, please check here.
WHAT?
Build 41 is the most fundamental and wide-ranging update that Project Zomboid has ever had. We intend it to be a stable foundation for us to build on for many years ahead. For this reason too,however, we anticipate a fairly long public beta while all the various issues presented to us by community testers are spotlit and remedied.
Some key features, primarily MP, are initially disabled in the IWBUMS beta build – and will be turned on during the testing process.
Build 41 currently contains:
New gameplay styles: Builder, Brawler and Survivor More deadly ‘Survivor’ (Survival) gameplay balance – player can be dragged down by horde and feasted upon etc. New survivor abilities: sitting, sneaking, sprinting, jogging, racking, reloading, climbing, fence-jumping, collapsing and much much more. New combat, new weapons, new difficulty balance. New character creation – many, many different new clothing options both on spawn and discoverable in the world as loot or on zombies. New zombie behaviour: feasting on recent corpses, lolling against walls, falling over fences etc. Blood system that progressively bloodies bodies and clothing of survivors and zombies New injury system – movement and combat visibly hampered when injured. Lacerations now possible, an injury state that lies between bites and scratches. Improved gunplay: green/red aiming outline, new guns, improved racking and reloading, increased gun loot spawn. Zombie Death Scenes – zombies discovered in the situations in which people died. Prayer meetings, sports-viewing parties, survivor zeds wearing backpacks etc. Situational zombie type/clothing and inventories – cop zeds in police station, firemen zeds in burnt buildings, Chef zeds in restaurant kitchens, bride and groom zeds at a wedding ceremony in church etc. Clothing protection: different clothing provides different levels of protection from zombie attacks. Visibly ripped and damaged clothing. New Sims-style cutaway vision system. Vehicle handling improvements, resizing and appearance tweaks. Updated, remastered and improved Kentucky-themed soundtrack. Original music still in rotation, and also accessible through game options. New SFX: weaponry, zombie moans etc. New water visuals – including visible flow direction. New puddle system during heavy rain. Broken glass and related injuries. Garage doors may be opened / closed and shake when hit. New Challenge maps: Film Set and Kingsmouth Vacation Island 3D Store Mannequins – can be dressed however you like Working washing machines and driers Server-side saving: MP save system now in a server-side database. Offline SP-side, also means no more lost cars via irl power outages. New game cursor New level-up sound, and tweaked levelling system. Faint isometric aiming cursor that shows where you’re aiming in iso space. New loot balance and loot balance system: houses and stores now have loot in the containers you would expect from real life – and not in a jumble. Two tiers of loot priority – allowing for more realistic ‘filler’ loot amidst the more valuable gameplay items. Many, many general fixes including remedies for: floating cars, farming issues, inaudible house alarms, erosion shrubs blocking vehicles, desensitized survivors being panicked by crawlers and much more. VISIBLE BACKPACKS! Build 41 and is the first (biggest) step in our overall plan to bring more life, variety and activity to the Knox Event. From this build onwards we will be adding in (and improving) our existing AI work layer-by-layer.
Build 42, for example, will use the power of the Build 41 animations build to introduce animals and wildlife.
We will also be releasing AnimZed, our animation tool, to the community during the IWBUMS beta process – meaning that modders will receive a huge boost in what they can create within PZ.
WHAT NEXT?
During the IWBUMS beta process for Build 41 the following features will be re-enabled and/or improved.
Multiplayer – alongside significant MP Networking improvements Improved visual fidelity of survivor character and zombies Further optimization to improve performance on both low and high end systems. Sprinter Zeds Fire visuals Tutorial Zombie skin appearance/decay Ability to repair ripped clothing WHAT ELSE?
Due to the extent of engine and gameplay changes in Build 41, existing savegames will NOT be compatible.
At the time of the full build release, for those wishing to continue playing on old saves, a Steam beta branch of the current Build 40 will be available – and will continue to be available at all times.
This will be known as ‘PZ Classic’, and will also allow people to continue to play with their favourite mods until such a time as they are updated.
Click here for a sneak vision into the future beyond build 41!

 

After last week’s big vid bonanza it’s something of a ‘techie’ behind the curtain blog today, but hopefully there’s enough to keep your proverbial up.
CROWD RENDERING
With the animated rotation tech front largely under control, we are now working on the next big ticket item we’ve been wanting to get in pre-IWBUMS.
Any good apocalypse needs a good healthy horde of ravenous undead. That said, please ignore the fact that all the above ones are bald. Call it a comeback I guess, or more likely a bug.
Zac’s current challenge is to be able to draw large quantities of articulated, walking, shambling, crawling, eating, and swarming zeds at a reasonable frame rate. Right now it’s okay-ish on a decent system, but wouldn’t stand up to a huge amount of zombie horde herding – which we know is a favourite pastime of PZ players.
Crowd Rendering is a collective term that involves a number of techniques that take advantage of the large numbers of crowds to make the process much more efficient.
To know where to aim, however, it’s a big help to have intimate knowledge of just how the PZ engine is performing, and where the hot-spots are. Toward this end, we are adding a Performance Analyzer module to AnimZed.
Instead of a general list of hot-spots from a broad sampling of the running game, this will allow us to see a sequence of frames and the story of each rendered frame from start to finish.
We will know what happens in the RenderThread and the UpdateThread, from start to finish, and will be able to measure the cost of each step, and validate the benefits of any optimization technique on a step-by-step basis.
Or, at least that is the hypothesis. The initial implementation is the bare bones required to get us some useful data. If it proves useful, it will be allowed to stay and get improved as we go along through the builds of the future – not to mention help us optimize in other areas of the game.
COMBAT IMPROVEMENT
A big aspect in build 41 has been the combat balancing. We wanted to make the one on one combat feel a lot easier, where fighting with groups would be much much more deadly.
This however has been too successful if anything, and we ended up with groups being SO deadly it was actually near impossible to survive a few fights with small groups, which ended up way too punishing even for ours, the most masochistic of gaming communities. (Sorry)
As such, due to the new animation system’s ability to allow animations to play only on the top half of the body, RJ has made a change that allows you to strafe while shoving and swinging your weapon.
The upshot now is this has added a whole new element to combat, instead of being rooted to the spot for the duration of the swing, the player has more tactical options for positioning. It still needs some further bug fixing and balance (we may consider applying some malus to damage when moving during a strike if it’s necessary) but overall it’s working really well.
OTHER STUFF
We’ve clearly got a lot of internal testing going on at the moment – and it’s spotlit a few issues we need to clear up. (Although they’re arguably not IWBUMS-delaying at the minute, so don’t worry about that aspect of it). A prominent one is looting not playing nicely with rotationals, and causing a ‘Robocop turn’ at the end of player pathfinding to cupboards, lockers etc. Elsewhere we’re polishing a lot of the changes between movement states and bickering about keypresses, toggles and other aspects of player input. All the fun of the fair. Yuri is back on his work on improved fire visuals. This won’t be a part of the initial IWBUMS release, but we probably will want to be integrating it during the IWBUMS beta process – as it’s the last graphical overhang from the earliest days of PZ and currently looks ugly as sin on the new models. Internal testing of the extremely WIP (many builds far distant) Louisville map went really well, with a good variety of buildings being felt and general city size seeming expansive. It has, however, also been fruitful in showing us that to ‘feel’ built-up then things have to be tighter on-screen – so we will be removing a lot of the parking lots we previously had in downtown areas, so it all feels more compressed. Radio silence, bar the very occasional screenshot, on our version of Louisville shall now recommence! This week’s boardroom meeting from VOVKA. 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, let’s go for a quick trip around the various continents of PZ development and see what’s been done in this, the week commencing 18th March.
Romain has been busy continuing work on adding new zones and costumes, adding work costumes for various franchises and shops found in the game, from Gas2Go, Fossoil, PileOCrepe and many more, as well as integrating more of Martin’s anims, including 3 new variations of zombies thumping on objects.
He’s also added support for characters to lower and raise hoods on hooded clothing, for example hoodies and certain coats, and several new idle animations used when the character has injuries. Please note we will likely add more variation in future, as well as anims specifically for more serious injuries as the one shown..

EP has been doing a lot of work on zombie behaviour, stopping the zombies all piling up when moving toward sounds, and various other pathfinding issues that have existed for a long time but now look and feel more problematic now we have the shiny new animations.
Zac has been continuing work on expanding the toolset and systems to provide more functionality to the rest of the team. His work on masking out different parts of clothing items has resulted in several extremely useful features.
First, it now allows us to wear pieces of geometry clothing on top of other geometry clothing – as opposed to being a texture drawn over the character’s skin. This used to be impossible: the clothing worn underneath would always poke through the geometry of the clothing on top, especially when moving.
Our old solution to that was to only draw underclothing as textures directly on the character model, which unfortunately led to the side effect of them looking like body paint and lacking the bulk of real clothing. Now we can easily turn off areas of the clothing that are covered, so we are provided with many more options.
Zac has also used this masking support to allow for rips and holes in clothing. This said, it’s not quite finished yet, as he needs to apply the inverted mask to the underclothing and to make it visible inside the hole. As such, at the moment, we have a kind of Invisible Man effect when holes are used.
In the meantime he’s also fixed the bug that was causing several of our weapon textures to draw incorrectly, which was down to pesky non ‘power of two’ sized (256×256, 512×512 etc) textures causing issues, so now support for those have been added.
This picture sums up all of the aforementioned things.
(Please note: the trousers used in this instance are still of the skin-tight texture variety!)
Mark meanwhile has been at work smacking down a few of the low level blending issues, and it looks like he’s finally tracked down the cause, which was an old optimization that wasn’t sitting well with the animation system overhaul. It’s been removed now so we will be discussing other TEA approved optimizations to help keep us running at a decent speed in potato land. Now the blending issues are fixed, we’ve gotten rid of all the little snaps and jumps in the character’s movement, which should make things look all the better!
Finally, ChrisW’s Sims-style cutaways have been merged into the main build and have been working really nicely – and EP has also smuggled in some oft-requested niceness in that garage doors can now be opened.
(Cars don’t fit in them yet, and the sound is not quite right yet, but that’s a battle for another week!)
This week’s pic is by Vampel!! 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.

Hello folks, time for another short Thursdoid, busy times and still a Thursdoid writer down, but this time with a bit of videoey fun to make up for it!
This week everyone has been busying themselves as usual bringing the animation build up to full functionality.
Numerous new animations have gone in, from grave digging, foraging, idles, cleaning up blood and other activities. Martin has been working on animation variants for the player defending against zombie bites, as well as adding new costumes and branded logoed shirts for various locations. TEA have been continuing in their bug fix and tool improvement. We’ve finally gotten ChrisW’s wall cutaway system into the main line, but there are still a few issues to work out before its 100% operational. Yuri continuing work on fire, adding texturing and other effects. Meanwhile RJ has been concentrating on creating all the zones for clothed zombies around the map. Here is a video demoing some of the zoned zombie stuff. And yes, if there’s an obvious glitch (like zombies falling out of windows) we’ve already noticed it and will be fixed before release!:
  Oh and we just had to share this pic, made by Xeonyx, of New Denver fame, who has been working with us on some future challenge maps, and has done something pretty special with the internal anim build:
and that’s it for this week! Thanks everyone!
This week’s amazing pic is by Xeonyx! 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 everyone! Time for today’s Thursdoid! This time will be another rather hastily put together one I’m afraid. And to boot the internal development build decided to break today shortly before I was due to record a video, so hurray! After a few hours of trying to get something together I’ve had to go ahead without.
As alluded to more vaguely last week, fearless leader and Thursdoid writer Batsphinx was last week unable to Thursdoid as he and his wife were busy delivering their new daughter Samantha onto their bathroom floor at 4am (shout out to Nick at the 999 emergency services who talked them through the ordeal!) and as such for the next few weeks he’s getting some rare but well earned Zomboid-free time to be kept awake all night and be milk sick upon. Congratulations Will from everyone in the team!
So it’s left in the meantime for myself, coder and much less organized Thursdoid writer to take over.
Usually I’d be bribing you with an awesome montage gameplay video with new Zach music to take your mind off the piss poor rushed together Thursdoids, but since that’s not happening, I’ll try go into some more details on what’s going on in the team this week! There are still some neat tech videos to show off.
TEA TOOLS AND TECH IMPROVEMENTS
Zach continues his great work adding more tools and features, this time to allow Martin and the other devs to quickly add and test new costume pieces through the AnimZed editor and preview them in game.
  Meanwhile, Mark is getting to the bottom of some low level blend bugs which have resulted in various issues and snapping that has been causing problems for a long while. We’re hoping future videos will have that extra smoothness and polish to the character motion because of it.
FIRE IN THE DISCO
General Arcade side, Yuri has been continuing his visual effect work, this time turning his attention to the outdated fire effect. He’s really in the very early experimentation and getting his particle system up and running, so the results are FAR from complete and extremely experimental. We were going to hold on showing until we had textured particles and blurring and further balancing done, but since our gameplay video fell through I thought we’d show where it is. So please no assumptions about size or colour or detail or untextured squares, any other aspect being final, as we already know this is far from complete but are excited to see how the tech is progressing:
GAMEPLAY
The team continue to work on tying the new animations, clothing and models into the game. Romain has been working solidly polishing up the combat and other in-game actions, I’ll let him speak for himself because ‘yum free Thursdoid words!’:
And that’s your lot! Actually didn’t turn out as bad as I was anticipating. Thanks again and apologies for the video letdown, we’ll try get something sexy for next week to make up for it!
This week’s pic is by us! 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.

Yes, its that most festive time of the year where we put out the laziest possible Thursdoid as we sit here bloated on sprouts and Toblerone.
The majority of the team are currently off relaxing with families after a very busy year, but fear not, as due to the convenient nature of different cultural holidays not all overlapping like adverts on TV channels, we are still lucky to have Yuri and Stas beavering away in Russia as the rest of us take time off. It’ll be their turn for their much earned break soon!
That’s all for this week, normal business will resume next. All that remains now is to pick a suitably Christmassy header image.

Howdy almost-yuletide survivor.
PATCH 40.40 RELEASED
Today we released our final (sort of, read below for more on that) patch for Build 40. Full patchnotes can be found here, but this covers stuff like:
Improved darker nights, and less washed out night-time interiors. Car headlights and flashlights will be more of a necessity now. Sandbox settings also updated, so you can adapt it to a brightness you desire. Improved appearance of weather effects when in a building. Moon calculations re-added to game to govern night brightness. Extended disassemble ability to many more items,including: fridges, ovens, more chairs, washing machines, lockers, fitness equipment, metal barrels and some missing shelves. Some balanced player actions related to injuries, sleeping, window-breaking and bandages in a saucepan. Fixed whisper problems in the new chatbox, stair teleports, rain rather than snow in Winter is Coming, community translation font issues, plumbed sinks not working in MP and various other issues. 40 MP NETWORK STUFF
While the rest of the team move into the animations build and version 41, we’re leaving optimization specialist Bitbaboon Steve investigating what easy-win MP networking improvements we could potentially still patch into 40.
The first of his discoveries, the removal large number of empty and unnecessary data packets being sent over the server, has been released in 40.40 and should be a mild salve for current lag issues but his investigations also came up with an idea we thought it’d be wise to test out with a forthcoming IWBUMS beta and Community Megatest.
Essentially, Steve has been working on some server configurable optimizations for zombies in multiplayer. Since vehicles, performance in multiplayer servers has seen added strain (particularly in handling zombie hordes) and we’re hoping this might improve matters.
In essence, we’re about to release a test version in which there are several configurable options to allow server owners to fine-tune how much zombie data is sent to their players.
There will now be two ‘player client zombie awareness’ circles: the first a smaller radius that defines at what tile-range zombie positions are sent to clients with a high precision in every frame, and then a second larger radius in which the zombie location information can be sent to clients less frequently. Server owners will also be able to play with how much time there is between the low frequency updates.
On low population co-op servers these values can be set pretty liberally, so the players are getting all zombies in the visible area smoothly. But on high population servers that experience lag issues, server operators can sacrifice the smoothness of zombie movement in the distance (or even cap zombie visibility completely over a certain distance) in order to VASTLY reduce the amount of internet traffic they produce when lots of players are involved.
We think this will sharply decrease the amount of work the server needs to do and should lead to a much better player experience with a little bit of visual compromise toward the edge of the screen. Distant zombies might pause a bit or appear to teleport slightly between updates, but these movements are also something we’d hope to blend better (and make far less noticeable) with the added functionalities of the animations build. Server operators can decide on their own level of compromise too.
This work is pretty much done, and as such we will add it into the IWBUMS beta as soon as it’s clear there’s nothing from 40.40 that needs hot-fixing. Please keep your eyes on the forum if you want to participate in a special Yuletide Megatest.
41 ANIMS
This week in TEA-land Grant has improved things dev/modder-side with live texture reload, through upgrading the Filewatcher mechanism. It now watches the media folder instead of polling individual files, and is much more efficient. Upon a texture filechange, the game now reloads it live and in-place. This should make iteration times on textures much easier and faster.
Zac, meanwhile, has fixed up AnimZed for Animator Martin to the extent that he can now get a lot more variation on different individual outfits. Take these cops for example:
Martin has also been creating a better range of skin tones for player characters, to allow for better customisation should people desire it.
OTHER STUFF
Stas has just updated the Gamepad Test beta with a lot of fixes, for our lovely select bunch of gamepad testers. If you fancy helping out with this part of PZ work, and earn yourself a free code, then enquire within. RJ has been tinkering with in-game loot, and has occasionally been popping into the PZ Discord to look for willing testers. The overall plan is to have more information in the game code in terms of what’s a desirable item, and what’s junk – so we can then fill containers with a lot more realistic junk items even on higher difficulty levels. He’s also experimenting with having more specific containers in homes for more specific items (all the cutlery in one drawer, male clothes in one wardrobe, female in another etc) but the jury is currently out on whether it actually detracts from the looting gameplay. ChrisW’s work on in-building Sims-style cutaways and the abolition of the dithered circle view stencil continues. As seen here both with, and without. Today’s warehouse horde from Frank. 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 PZWiki 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! OurDiscord is open for chat and hijinks too.

**** REQUIRES BUILD 39! ****
 
Hydrocraft v10.3 has been released!
 
Which includes ...
 
- Fixed Loot Spawn for Grocery Storage (should fix other spawn areas)
- Fixed some typos.
- Added Potted Plant Update
- Added Loot for new spawn zones
- Fixed  Assemble Welding Torch
- Removed HC CarKey, HC Tire Iron, HC Muffler, HC Shocks and HC Tire
- Added Auto Parts to Junkyards
- Replaced Tire recipes with new tires
- Converted HC Car Battery to " Car Battery with Clamps"
- Can cut Double Head Wrench into Wrench
- Fixed Toy Army Man
- Can Recycle New Car Parts
- Mech Skill books added to random books
- New seeds added to mystery seed packets
- Possible fix for repairing items
- Applied Mech skill to recipes
- Bags you push or pull changed to 100% weight reduction
- Added Alfredo Sauce and 3 Pastas
- Added Corn Syrup
- Added Pizza Delivery Bag
- Added Auto Repair Textbook
- Thanks to everyone who helped!
 
Enjoy!

When my friend use the car and leave it with the key, and me take out the key, the key just disappear

Hydrocraft v10.2 has been released!
 
Which includes ...
 
- Can carve wooden spatula, spoon and fork.
- Added Hunting tab on Crafting Manu
- Added 7 shipping crate props
- New art from purple hat.
- Fixed making black paint
- Can recycle some toys
- Can make pool cue into charcoal
- Jagermister now called "Herbal Liqour".
- Fixed male armadillo art
- Fixed fine wood floor
- Fixed cat food
- Fixed orange carpet and yarn
- Fixed monkey tail pot
- fixed plastic knives and fork boxes
- Fixed Bronze spiked mace
- Fixed make soap shards
- Fixed black yarn.
- Added 8 Fishing hooks
- Added Skull pile, wishbone and bone marrow
- Added Cougar all the ways to processes it
- Added Iron Crank
- Added Plastics Textbook
- Thanks to everyone who helped!
 
Enjoy!
 
Note that this was made for build 38. I have done nothing special for build 39 with this so i you are still using the build 38 branch it should still work. Just wanted to get all the stuff i had been working on before the update out before making any build 39 changes.
 

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.

Hey all, brief Thursdoid this week while we polish the vehicles build, prep release videos and such-like. So here’s the news in brief.
• We just released public IWBUMS beta 39.55. This build is aimed at alleviating some common bugs and issues in MP – and in particular stops MP players from driving into areas the server hasn’t loaded yet (shown in grey on your screen). It also fixes aspects of door unlocking, running over corpses, graphical glitches, panic and sleep in vehicles, zeds attacking invisible players and some sounds from player actions that weren’t attracting undead attention. The full changelist can be found here.
If you fancy playing some MP over the coming days then it would really help us if you chose our Spiffospace test server – the more people we get on there, the smoother the full release will go. Many thanks if you choose to jump in.
• Last week we showed you a narrated video of the latest version of AnimZed: the tool that Bitbaboon Mark has been working on as a part of his push to the point at which we switch over to the anims codebase. This week we can reveal that he’s no longer alone in his work, having formed a company called The Eccentric Ape (TEA) alongside some of his former colleagues from his time as Technical Director at an Australian development house.
The initial plan is to have tools-whizz Zac tidying up AnimZed, Grant looking at blending bugs alongside him, Schnitz hooking up states to game variables and Gar sanity checking all the above processes – and leaving Mark free to do the more complex Technical Director-y work in-between. As well as celebrating how remarkably Australian so many of their names are, we’re really excited about how this will make much shorter work of the animation build (from integration, to testing, to release and beyond) and hope that we will be working alongside the TEA boys for many builds to come.
• Map work continues on Louisville, and although she’s famously tight-lipped on content – sometimes Mash lets an image or two through. So speculate away on a minor detail…
• Elsewhere Turbo continues to work on the new weather effects and realistic weather/cloud/precipitation simulation – and tomorrow will be going through the shader effects he’s integrated for different times of day, weather systems and seasons (and all of those mixed in together) with our art team.
GA Stas continues work on improved gamepad support, Bitbaboon Steve is crunching numbers on improved network connectivity and we’d also like to welcome ChrisW back to the fold to renew his work on internal Sims-styles house cutaways and remaining polish to the roof occlusion system.
This week’s zombie communion from Laykan. 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.

Got pointed here by your Thursdoid and saw the server is in an earlier build than my game. Any chance this could be updated?  

IWBUMS 39.56
 
[New]
Added option to control whether vehicle radial menu is toggle or a 'hold' - let us know which you'd prefer as default Added numerical keyboard shortcuts to the switch-seat UI. Server now loads ServerCells nearest to clients before more distant ones. Server can cancel loading parts of the map that are no longer near clients. Clients are now prevented from driving into parts of the map that aren't loaded on the server. Traffic cones are drawn in front of the "grey zone" that indicates what's currently unloaded. Player must face doors when locking/opening/unlocking. Increased max java heap size to 2GB on 64-bit clients. Added car seats as loot table. Host screen now displays an error and prevents launching servers with unsupported WorldVersion. Sprites added to IsoObjectPicker.ThisFrame now limited to those near the mouse. Updated server tool box invite player message. Added ability to place one oversized item (item bigger than floor capacity) on the floor. Added get/setter methods for ClientControls in CarController.  
[Balance]
Optimized map loading a little. Increased map-download timeout from 30 to 60 seconds while connecting. Client now downloads 20 chunks at a time while connecting to avoid timeouts. Significantly increased vehicle loot spawn. Decreased item spawning bonus via loot modifier on easier difficulties. Increased pain gained from using hand to remove a glass shard.  
[Bug Fix]
Server GUI fixes. Fixed keyboard shortcuts in the switch-seat UI being visible when using a controller. Fixed unnecessary call to glClear(). Fixed -Ddebug not being passed to coop server if host is in debug mode. Fixed TriggerHook("HookWeaponHitCharacter") -> TriggerHook("WeaponHitCharacter"). Fixed new MP players spawning with extra loot from lower difficulty levels. Fixed new Sandbox games using whatever difficulty was last selected. Fixed graphical glitches when player enters/exits a vehicle. Fixed one-time delay preventing clicking buttons in the MainScreen while in-game. Fixed 'exterior' flag not being removed for squares under roofs when loading a fresh chunk. Fixed being able to lock/unlock doors that require a key by right-click while under a roof. Fixed vehicle door sounds not being 3D. Fixed players with Deaf trait hearing vehicle sounds. Fixed sound not working in split-screen when player 1 has the Deaf trait. Fixed sounds of some actions not attracting zombies. Fixed Server not terminating early if WorldVersion is unsupported. Fixed ISBarricadeAction using the wrong perk to determine the amount of noise made. Fixed right-clicking on things being glitchy in split-screen. Fixed server not preloading areas of the map while clients are connecting. Fixed thread glitches with the new MP map-streaming system. Fixed switch-seat UI being available for burned vehicles. Fixed driving slowly on corpses can making your car fly. Fixed items spawning on front left seat. Fixed zombies attacking invisible players. Fixed world not redrawing when the window is resized. Fixed wheels on prone zombies not raising up as they do for corpses. Fixed erosion spawning plants on water. Fixed WorldStreamer requesting only a few chunks at a time sometimes. Fixed fake-dead zombies flickering when under vehicles in multiplayer. Fixed / tweaked a couple of things in WorldStreamer. Fixed BaseVehicle using obsolete playSoundImpl methods. Fixed hitting zombies not slowing vehicles. Fixed null pointer with Stove. Fixed Deaf people hearing radio or TV. Fixed visual weirdness of progress bar over player head during inventroy transfer. Fixed read option being available while sleeping. Fixed frozen food being usable in recipes from crafting menu. Fixed layout of the Reloading options Fixed confirm-sleep dialog (when in a vehicle) not working with a controller. Fixed NumChasingZombies being incremented for the wrong player in splitscreen. Fixed sleeping players panicking from seeing zombies. Fixed players appearing outside a vehicle when they're inside on the server. Fixed server -gui flickering when multiple players are connected. Fixed zombies not attacking players sleeping in vehicles.