thejoker954

zeds attacking windows is fine.  between reflections  of light and movement and the possibility of curtains moving due to wind getting in somewhere, I think zombies triggering is fine.
 
doors are iffyier.  any door with a window (due to above reasonings) or that's open  (could move in the breeze and hinges could squeak) no problem, but a closed solid door with nothing making noise behind it  shouldn't attract zeds except once in a blue moon maybe when a roamer stumbles into one somehow and creates a feedback loop of noise that attracts others.

zeds attacking windows is fine.  between reflections  of light and movement and the possibility of curtains moving due to wind getting in somewhere, I think zombies triggering is fine.
 
doors are iffyier.  any door with a window (due to above reasonings) or that's open  (could move in the breeze and hinges could squeak) no problem, but a closed solid door with nothing making noise behind it  shouldn't attract zeds except once in a blue moon maybe when a roamer stumbles into one somehow and creates a feedback loop of noise that attracts others.

zeds attacking windows is fine.  between reflections  of light and movement and the possibility of curtains moving due to wind getting in somewhere, I think zombies triggering is fine.
 
doors are iffyier.  any door with a window (due to above reasonings) or that's open  (could move in the breeze and hinges could squeak) no problem, but a closed solid door with nothing making noise behind it  shouldn't attract zeds except once in a blue moon maybe when a roamer stumbles into one somehow and creates a feedback loop of noise that attracts others.

I find the game is almost designed to be played on multiplayer. Sure, solo play is fun. But being in a persistent world with other people driving around on the roads, leaving wrecks and shooting at each other. It turns the game into a whole different beast. 

Oh boy, this argument comes up a lot, so lemme break it down piece by piece so my answers makes more sense.
 
 
And this is literally the case for 300% of all survival games. Because after that amount of time, you usually are already set up with enough stuff to survive forever. Stranded Deep, The Forest, NeoScavenger, Flotsam, The Long Dark; no matter the title, after that kind of play thru, if you haven't figured out how to become self-sufficient or looted enough places to have a big stash of canned goods, then you really haven't been playing the game right. It is simply the way all survival games are, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. Complaining about it is like going to a vegan restaurant and complaining about the lack of beef in the menu.
 
 
I'm going to assume you've never found yourself in a pinch, had to rip some bloodied clothes to make bandages, and had the wound get infected which causes your health to tick down. Because you CAN and WILL die of (non-zombie) infection in this game. No idea of how you have not seen that.
 
As for base building, the whole "Ladders Out" thing, while it works (and many have petitioned for some solution for it), it now comes with the risk of the zombies ripping up your ropes (and boy they do it A LOT) and basically locking you out your base and all your hard-earned loot, so there's that.
 
 
 
Until, after eating nothing but cabbages for a few months, you find your character so underweight you can barely take a hit or carry a backpack loaded with loot. Or the other way around, if you began eating every single thing you found and turned into an obese whale that can barely run or climb a fence. It's all there, but you will not see it with just a couple weeks of in-game playtime. It takes a while to make a difference, but it IS there.
 
 
Sadly, you were focused wrong; this game isn't really about killing Zombies (showcased by how stealth is a thing, and how a fight against a big horde usually ends in death). Fighting zeds is a means to an end; you're killing all the zombies in this building so you can loot it in peace, not to make the area safer for future runs. That's simply not how you play PZ, unless you disable respawns on the Sandbox.
 
 
That's the thing; Sandbox IS the experience. Or at least it'll be until the Story Mode drops in. Part of what makes PZ so good is that it's very much a "Build your own Zombie Apocalypse" Kit where, even without mods, you can basically use it to create whatever experience you're aiming for. Almost anything can be tweaked, disabled or customized, and by not making use of those tools the game comes with, you're doing the equivalent of going to a buffet table, eating nothing but entree bread rolls, and then complaining about the quality of the food after you leave.
 
 
Here's the thing; you don't "win" in PZ, there's no victory state. If you're only playing the game to "beat it and win", then you're really not playing the game right, or it's simply not a game for you.

Ok now you bashed this game, what's your point? Are you going to provide constructive criticism or is this just one of those useless random-ranting-posts to keep yourself annoyed by this game and tell the world? Because then I think I can help you - stop playing it. It's easy you know, just deinstall it and if it makes you angry just by looking at it in your steam list - you can even hide it so you won't be bothered anymore. Delete your account in this forum and go find another game to play that satisfies your needs.
 

Being playing this game for a while. Have maybe 70-100 hours on a playthrough which is the first time I've survived for 5+ months. Quickly discovered that there is no "endgame" to this game. This isn't a "survival" game because survival is trivial. There is no difficulty in getting food, you can get infinite food from a few cabbage seeds and survive on cabbages alone (so much for the "nutrition system", so much for "fishing", "trapping", all useless and redundant skills, farming is pointless to level up), there are no diseases that pose any threat, you cannot die from infections, base building is pointless as all you need to do is knock out stairs to have an invincible base. 
 
I've had the immediate goal of clearing my immediate surrounds, which I've quickly found a fool's errand. For literally two weeks plus, I have been going out every day, killing hordes of zombies, only to to go back to the same spot to have them all spawn back. The idea that they take 3 days to respawn is absolute nonsense because of the aforementioned fact, and I have even found them to spawn inside enclosed locations. After weeks of endless killing and having over 8000 kills almost entirely in Maldraugh, I've had enough. I finally go back after a house alarm goes off and there is an impossibly large horde of zombies that have spawned in from nowhere, because I've literally been spending weeks clearing the surrounding area, and no matter how many house alarms go off or how many times I draw them in with the car horn and spend days killing the horde, it makes no difference. It made me finally realise that the one aspect of the game that I was focusing on, fighting zombies, is also pointless. No matter how many you kill, they will spawn back almost instantly. There is no point in building up your character, getting loot and hording ammunition, because the act of killing zombies is meaningless. I was imagining epic battles where I go into Louisville with a levelled up character and tons of weapons, but seeing as it's impossible to clear even the mid-sized towns, there is no point, I can simply summon an infinite number of zombies wherever I want. 
 
And no, simply going into sandbox mode and changing spawn settings is not the solution. I play on the default settings and that should be already optimised for the best experience. I am not going to spend another 70 hours to grind a character with the mods and settings to actually make the game playable. The fact that this game has been in development for 10 years and devs can't even fix simple issues that can be fixed by editing a text file already informs me that they are incompetent, I could list dozens of issues with the game that could be fixed with zero effort - food, zombie and gun spawn rates, useless skills that give little or no benefit for levelling up, imbalanced attributes and attributes that don't work, tooltips that are wrong, wacky and unintuitive ways of levelling up skills like aiming and maintenance, fire that spreads on concrete and is extremely deadly and cheesable, etc. 
 
Basically, I've already discovered how to "win" this game: sit in your walled off base and survive off infinite potatoes, cabbages and rain water. No, you don't need to worry about winter or anything because you will still easily have enough food. This game is only fun until you figure out how bad it is. 

I think if you reframe this for yourself from an action game (get in, get close and smash) to a survival game (get out, do not engage and smash only when necessary) the mechanics as-is check out. It lines up better with the threat level shown in early zombie movies and games, before the entire genre was overwhelmed with power trips. The power trip-breaking moments of pz are why I'm here!
 
Ps but yeah the loot distribution (especially guns, kitchen utensils, jars and rope) could be reworked for improved realism.

Unsatisfying and/or cheap feeling deaths were relatively rare prior to recent releases, but they've been steadily becoming more common. Awhile back deaths felt mostly deserved. You messed up and now you're dead. Now, there is more of a tendency for death to feel random and less a result of you making a stupid mistake or a poor decision. Either some mechanic that makes your character feel inept and weak, or some weirdness with hits not landing when they look like they should. Until recently I nearly always felt like the changes were moving the game in the right direction, but lately I've been getting more and more concerned.
 
Sometimes I wonder if the lack of engaging late game play in Project Zomboid is making the devs try to make the earlier game more difficult so it takes longer for people to reach that point, if at all. *IF* that is true, or ever becomes true, I would find it concerning because it would be a cover up for a bigger problem. And I've seen quite a few games take this route because it's so much easier than fixing the problem. I hope I'm wrong, and either way there is still time for things to change.
 
I guess if I had to sum it up I would say the game feels like it's going more game-y and less simulation.
 
 
 
 
A lot of old school NES games are hard, many because of gameplay and technology limitations and bad controls. That don't mean it's good difficulty.
 
Playing shooters with the AI unleashed to it's full aimbot potential on you is hard, but I doubt most would consider that to be fun.
 
There was a raid boss in World of Warcraft long ago that the devs wanted to be very hard, but they made it so much so that it seemed impossible even for the top guilds worldwide. That was hard, but it wasn't good way to do difficulty.
 
Being a "hardcore" game doesn't excuse all issues, concerns, or opinions automatically. It's just not that simple. Sometimes things are overtuned, insufficiently tested, or just outright have problems that need to be addressed. Being an incomplete game, that is reasonably the default stance for people reporting their experiences. That is half the point of an early access game after all. If everyone took all issues and concerns like a single minded drone or a yes man, the feedback would be useless.

A different problem that's not for everyone, but is certainly for me, is that I have an older PC and b41 tries to peg my system even when turning all the rendering to potato mode.  I'm hoping there are plans for reimplementing a b40-style option to only fully render the nearest so many character/npc models while offering a less-specific render for the remainder so we can keep some of our low-end FPS going stronger for longer.
 
Since I'm griping, I'll share one I know is an easy fix everyone will enjoy - can we make the inventory expand/contract arrows on the left edge of the line items ... wider?  Like, a lot wider?  Please?

Wow, sounds great already.  Maybe a bit much white(brown?) noise, but it's not bad at all, I was really pulled in.  With tweaks it's going to be amazing.  
 
I agree about cutting back on the sound level change on zoom, but maybe as an option?  That volume drop is kind of nice even if it's not tactically advantageous.  It really sells the "bird's eye view".

oh man them curves are so sexy.  also VOIP walkie talkies? HELL YES!

OK, problem solved. It was the update to Raven Creek that had caused my old saves to not work properly. The mod's author has since released the old files for us to download and once installed, everything went back to normal again. Thanks for your attention and sorry for any inconveniences caused.

THE BAD NEWS This week we have been playing the MP build extensively, to try and get a clearer and more solid idea how much work would be required to get it into a state we’d be comfortable releasing, and have increasingly become aware that it’s not good enough. We have been too optimistic, and for that we are extremely sorry.
 
Advances have been made, and the quality of where it is going is clear from our many tester testimonials and gameplay sessions, but since the (vital) transitions to zombies on the client it is not even close to the quality that the game or our players deserve, even for a beta. Furthermore, the deeper we’ve looked into it, the more systemic issues deep down have reared their heads.
It needs more time in the oven. We simply cannot release it half-baked. You don’t have to look far in gaming to see what can happen when you do.
 
We recognise that (especially in the past two weeks) we have been making cautiously optimistic noises – but put simply the more we played, the more we became aware of deep-rooted issues that it would be near-impossible to fix in a ‘live service’ situation. 
 
Project Zomboid has every chance of being extremely popular when we release MP – it’s something that we’ve read from people everywhere, and increasingly something we’ve quietly believed ourselves. As we’ve said multiple times in the past, the multiplayer release of 41 is by far the most important build in Zomboid’s history, and if we don’t stick that landing it would be bad.
 
As it stands the MP build we’re playing internally isn’t robust enough to cope with potentially huge floodgates being opened upon it. Support requests, tech queries and bug reports would simply drown us – and the player and community experience would be poor in the absolute extreme. 
 
We had a big meeting with General Arcade, and went through everything that could (and should) still be done to make PZ a MP game that could both stand the test of time, and a huge launch day. Something that would keep multiplayer servers populated and not result in disappointment for our community that have been so patient for so long.
 
This will likely be a much longer wait than we’ve been hoping, and particularly in light of the last two weeks of misguided hopefulness over improvements that while exciting, in the cold hard light of day still are far short of what we would dare release. 
 
We have long shied away from giving any form of ETA, but in the interest of ensuring we are not stringing anyone along with vague notions of a timescale Thursdoid after Thursdoid, we have agreed with our MP team that anything up to six months should be the ballpark we’re now aiming for when it comes to getting a Build 41 MP release into player hands to a level of quality we’ll be confident it won’t blow up in everyone’s faces. 
 
We know this will be of disappointment for many — and we’ll likely receive some flak for this decision — which is understandable, especially given the noises we’ve been making in the Thursdoids recently. 
 
But we ask those that are upset by this news please to bear in mind other recent releases that people were begging for, and getting increasingly hyper-frustrated at the frequent delays — only to finally have it in their hands, as they facepalmed and asked themselves why the hell this wasn’t held back further??
 
That’s what we’re doing — because we’re lucky enough to be in a position we’re able to do that, both financially, as well as without marketing spends or boardroom pressure forcing our hand, and we are committed to the fact that while we feel the pressure from the community’s frustrations at the wait as well as our own desire for it to be ‘done’, we will not allow that to blind us to putting something out that will end badly for both us and our community that want to see the game grow. We may get a bloody nose for delaying it further and for this long, but we’ll take that gladly to ensure that doesn’t instead happen on release–as that’s a bloody nose we might not recover from.
 
This has been an immensely difficult week for us — people sometimes forget that we want this build out there too. It’s not just a game to us but our daily lives, and the march toward a multiplayer release — the moment we’ve desired to see for so long vanishing away months into the distance, and the prospect of continuing that climb for another six months is heartbreaking to us. 
 
Nonetheless, it’s 100% the right call — we will not waver, and when all is said and done and multiplayer has been out for months and everyone is playing it, we promise everyone — ourselves and our community — will be glad we made this call, instead of releasing in a soon forgotten whimper. 
 
We may take our time, but we get the job done in the end. Hopefully the almost unanimously positive reception to the long awaited animation update proved that to be the case. I honestly believe we wouldn’t be where we are today if we weren’t just as strict back then on what we put out, when everyone was chomping at the bit to play it, bugs and all, and couldn’t fathom why we were being so careful and protective for such a long time. Now people have had it for a long while, no one would want to go back in time and have us retroactively release the anim build 6 months earlier than we felt comfortable doing so, and risk it crashing like a lead balloon and damaging the game’s reputation and future. Our caution led to the most success Zomboid has ever enjoyed. We know the same will be true about multiplayer when people are finally playing it.
 
We’ve discussed with GA about getting two more internal QA engineers the MP team will have direct access to day to day while working, to allow them to more quickly diagnose and test stuff with more players outside our TIS internal tests. 
 
They are also on the lookout for additional resources for the coding team to speed things up. Though it’s worth pointing out that this will require some significant time to learn the codebase and get up to speed for any new developer, which is why it was never a practical solution before our decision to commit to this longer delay with which to capitalize on another coder. 
 
We hope with the changes we make, along with many organizational changes to improve our internal workflow with GA, we can deliver something sooner, and will of course continue looking for new avenues to speed things up — but for all intents and purposes we’re committing to this period of delay to make sure it is definitely achievable and no one should be under any illusions of expecting it sooner. 
 
 
THE GOOD NEWS
It’s not all bad news however. This longer and more defined schedule of getting MP up to scratch makes it clear that we can’t just continue this release drought in the meantime. 
 
Therefore we are going to start releasing IWBUMs builds with new content in the interim, rather than holding back until the MP build is complete as was our original plan.  
 
We will be removing MP elements from the current trunk code that would interfere with the single player game, and releasing a six month backlog of changes, fixes, optimization and upgrades waiting to go into the game. LWJGL 3 and java 15 upgrades in particular that will improve performance and compatibility, not least a new fancy garbage collector we’ve never had the opportunity to use before that should all but eliminate any periodic pauses that have plagued our game in the past.
 
After this, we will be starting to release additional content builds to tide the community over in the wait. We have to be somewhat careful on the style of content we add, so as to not make the MP work more complicated and hold it back further, but stuff you should be able to look forward to in the coming months include:
 
Noiseworks sound overhaul. Noiseworks are due to provide the first complete version of their ‘round 1’ additions to the game, replacing all sounds in the game, for testing and feedback from TIS. Those keeping up with the Thursdoids will have a good idea of what this will bring. After some testing, and adjusting sounds to tester and community feedback, we’ll be getting this out to you as soon as we can. Noiseworks will then be continuing with adding additional sounds, and a procedural music system, which will bring even more atmosphere to the game.
  Map updates. We’re pushing toward a release of Louisville, which nears completion outside some zoning work and bug-fixing. It’s unclear how much time remains to polish this up to releasable standard, but it seems very likely it will drop before multiplayer. Non-90 degree roads with curves, improvements to the existing map, and even perhaps beyond our original scope of the map now our mapping team has grown.
  Several other really cool gameplay features. We’ll talk about them in the coming Thursdoids when we can feel confident they will drop in the interim period.

  THURSDOIDS
Speaking of Thursdoids, a primary piece of feedback we’ve had from the MP team has been the detrimental effect that the weekly cycle of blog updates on MP progress has had on the development process. 
 
A weekly development sprint, where results are desired to show off or talk about makes it much harder to work on longer term improvements. To be honest this is not the first time this has been brought up or felt by the TIS team, the weekly blogs have always stacked a lot of pressure on our shoulders, only ever being 7 days away. But we are both immensely proud of our weekly blogs, and have found them to be a huge part of keeping our community content and informed. Truth be told, we have also been somewhat nervous that reducing their frequency suddenly may be perceived by our community as some kind of winding down, rather than something that would improve development in any way, and so have long been resistant to change.
 
However, in the interest of aiding the MP team in having the time to do longer and less interrupted work on features without the pressure to provide small incremental improvements that clearly haven’t been enough to make the leaps to release that are needed–we are going to make the following changes to how we release Thursdoids over the coming six month period.
 
We will be doing bi-weekly Thursdoids (that’s every two weeks). These will likely be more content-packed, and have more time spent writing them. They will hopefully provide much more bang for your buck and less likely to have us repeating ourselves.
  We’re only going to focus on multiplayer development every other Thursdoid, allowing the team to have a solid month to make longer term, deeper and more substantial improvements without worrying about us coming knocking for stuff to show or test. The alternate Thursdoid will focus on the single-player interim updates, features and fixes coming in the shorter term. That all said if we do have cool MP stuff to talk about, we’ll be sure to let you know regardless of what week it falls on.
  We’ll see how these Thursdoids go down over the coming months, and will decide based on that what to do once multiplayer releases whether to go back to weekly Thursdoids or to carry on with bi-weekly.
 
Thanks for reading, and apologies again for the major misstep in our recent enthusiasm. While we did state it was ‘cautious optimism’, we regret letting short term improvements and perhaps a bit of wishful thinking colour our blog updates. Sometimes you just get lost in the weeds and an uptick one week is deceptive to how much work really remains. We hope the firmer date will give solace to those who check week after week to frustration, who are largely only interested in multiplayer, that they can safely put our game aside for a while, and when to start looking again. And to everyone else, we hope getting fresh content again will help the time pass that little bit quicker.

 
Much love
 
The Indie Stone

oh man them curves are so sexy.  also VOIP walkie talkies? HELL YES!

A significantly smoother Wednesday Night Test internal session last night on the 41 MP build: still with its issues and bugs to improve/fix but a clear sign that concentrating on server stability for the past week or so was the right thing for us to be doing.
 
We had a good session with 20-ish players: vastly diminished map load cones, zero black boxing and an overall much smoother experience.
Next plans are to keep server testing with more and more fake clients rather than real ones (32 next, 64 later) in various normal gameplay and edge case scenarios like spawned hordes or multiple admin teleports.
 
Once things start appearing watertight from simulations, and are proven watertight in wider testing, it will be safer ground to back-fill teleportation bugs and weirdnesses. (Though that’s not to say that we will have improved some of these in the meantime too.)
 
Here’s the changelist of what was being tested last night.
 
Highlights vid – with players testing around mega hordes. (We still clearly need to do some performance work here, but it’s still good the server could handle this.)

Car crash testing vid.
—————
Tester testimonials:
“No cones today nor black boxes. We caught two freezes while driving for a sec, but that was about it. Smoothest session ever! When WP was over populated ( we managed to collect big horde) the FPS dropped majorly for everyone though. Less teleportation zeds, but they are still around. We did have some slight dsync problems and players teleporting though. Overall the session was awesome!“
 
—————
“It did feel better: we drove quite a distance with zero cones, but still had one or two hiccups of the car randomly stopping after driving over half the map. In terms of general gameplay it felt like a regular multiplayer game, running and driving around without any problem, fighting with others feels great and I didn’t see see any players become suddenly invisible or any weird character behaviour. There are still problems with some animations not showing up, weapon models not showing and the “pushing away a zombie” animations sometimes happening when a player tries to sprint after fighting zombies. As for zombie fights there were still teleports or and zombie teleports that still need to be cleared up. There was also a bug with player skills being reset that will need to be looked into as several players reported that happening.“
 
—————
“The game ran very smoothly. There were no black squares and cones. It was fun to shoot crowds of zombies with the gang. But it was not without problems – there were errors from burned-out cars, small lags with a very large number of zombies and problems with showing some guns.“
 
—————
“Overall was the most stable and fun version I have tested. No black boxing and cones at all. A few odd stutter stepping (like rubber-banding on foot almost) that got me killed twice but I’m guessing that might be to do with my control pad inputs. Was cool to hang out at the Rusty Rifle with the guys but the chaos is too much for my OCD brain lol. Big improvement from my first few experiences.“
 
—————
“My experience on the server today, logging into the server in France from Louisiana, was about 50/50 gameplay-wise but I still had a ton of fun. It seemed to run really well at times but also had a few issues with teleporting zombies and cars stuttering doing the start/ stop thing, also ran into a few instances of players teleporting around while fighting zeds. I got into a little PvP by the Rusty Rifle which seemed to work well though: the other player fell when shot and everything seemed synced as far as I could tell, even got shot in the hand. All in all though had a great time playing PZ with others and looking forward to the next test.“
—————
 
NOISEWORKS
First off a quick clarification. One of the reasons we have Noiseworks redoing our entire soundscape is that it means that we can have a team of four people (eight people over the course of the whole project) working on PZ with very little intervention from us apart from when we give feedback, provide occasional directions or tell them that they are awesome.
 
The way the FMOD project works is that PZ already has pre-existing hooks to put new sounds onto, so there’s actually very little attention to this required from the core PZ team.
 
(With this said, occasionally new or more refined hooks are requested – so there’s probably an hour or two spent every week on this at a very rough estimate)
 
So this is just to say that, although we are quite giddy and excited about our friend from Alien Isolation doing PZ sounds, we don’t feel that it is standing in the way of the current core mission of getting MP out of the door and into your hands.
 
We know we said we’d wait before showing you stuff from this, but it’s coming through so thick and fast currently that it would seem churlish not to when everything is very MP focussed in the blogs and there’s not much for those who aren’t MP players to check out.
 
Which is all quite a lengthy preamble to us saying: “would you just take a quick listen to our new tumble dryer?!”

WELCOME AYRTON
To many in the community Ayrton Orio (aka Kukrapok) will need no introduction: he’s the guy behind the Cherbourg map, a collaborator in the recent excellent boat mod (which we will be doing a mod interview blog about in coming weeks) and an stalwart foundation of the PZ scene.

While he fully intends to continue supporting Cherbourg (which we will, in turn, support him in) Ayrton is now also an official PZ mapper. He will be working alongside Mash, Binky, Xeonyx and RingoD on the main map – with his initial focus being on improving visual variety on the current map, making bends in roads less like right angles where at all possible, adding more fences / barriers to complement our future planned stealth improvements and a few secret missions besides.
 
To celebrate, the blog writer has been allowed to show off another aspect of our vast Louisville map expansion – which, while being increasingly filled out these days, is still in the relative mid/long term future in terms of testing/release.
 
With that in mind, then, here’s one of the rare occasions we let a snapshot of it out into the wild: the Grand Ohio Mall, built by Xeonyx who himself was a former PZ community mapper. This will be found to the east of our version of Louisville.
 
(Please check out the little train ride that Jamie has put in the main atrium! Also clearly it will have a car park upon release!)
 
OTHER STUFF
While testing zed teleports and zed appearances in MP, longstanding issues with the speed that zombies can appear within your field of vision became ever more apparent. With this in mind then Zac has been burrowing into the code to make it all much snappier, especially when your framerate is dipping.
  Something else that ongoing MP work has revealed are potential conflicts with Turbo’s isoregions work – which is the code that can tell when a building or player construction is an enclosed space and as such doesn’t let fog or the rain in. To this end Turbo is giving it a lick of paint, which will also fix some longstanding irregularities with the system – and also build in some extra info that will help Fox to bring the current cutaway system into player-built structures at a later date.
  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!

Freaking awesome. This game is/will be sososo unique on full launch.
 
Thought about the rain though: if the height of the storm is to be as intense as the sound suggests, I (or anyone familiar with continental summer storms) would recommend significantly further increasing visibility obstruction at those times. Rain that sounds that loud in an outdoor, natural environment (as opposed to hammering on resonant rooftops) can obscure your vision of what's across the street from you, coming down in literal curtains of water. What we're seeing now reminds me of the light coastal showers we get on the west coast in Canada, whose aural "signature" never reach the heights heard in that audio.
 
Still freaking amazing as-is of course.

I agree some combination of numbers 2 and 4 would fit PZ the best. Lots of Number 2ish things are already announced. Animals, NPCs, and Louisville should all fit this category. Currently, you can play as a hardcore combat survivor in a small town, or a farmer in the woods. There is plenty in between, but this is a fairly narrow spectrum.
 
Adding Louisville alone should allow for a new range of playstyle from urban to suburban to rural. It has been mentioned zombie spawns will be fixed when map is completed so that you don't have hordes unrealistically spawning at the Pony Roam-O anymore. This will allow for the range of low loot, low zed areas and high loot, high zed areas to be more extreme. NPCs will definitely create a meta of lone wolf vs trained combat team vs big society, which will all have pros and cons. We don't know how far they will go with animals, but we do know some things are confirmed. Companion animals, hunting, and feral predators. If you remember your first time playing Fallout 3, you know how much value a pet dog can add to a playthrough. Hunting should make it more viable to live a wilderness lifestyle. Wolves and bears would definitely add to the overall threat, but also potentially be a great source of food or protection. Hopefully, we will also see animal husbandry, mounts, and pack animals. These could totally change how players travel and farm, and could open up the world of advanced trading and moving.
 
These announced features alone would push the creativity and replayability to new levels. There's even a cheeky enemy progression mixed in there too. Zombies < Animals < Raiders < Enemy Factions < US Army. I imagine with these systems in place, players would be free to loosely plan out a playthrough beforehand. You could choose to start a game and be a lone Farmer growing potatos and getting milk and beef from cows, hoping to gain supplies by trading with friendly groups. You could be a member of a group of Veterans that want to train and raid gun stores while building up enough firepower to take on the Army and get their elite weapons. You could be a crazy homeless guy with a pack of stray dogs that protect you while you trap pigeons on the roof of a skyscraper for food. Maybe you could just be a mechanic in a small settlement.
 
Number 4 stuff would just be the icing on top in this situation. The Mod, Spiffomon, does a good job of fulfilling this need with fun Spiffo plushies to collect. I've seen others suggest that each town should have a unique item as well. I would suggest maybe a unique machine in each major township. For example, a Sewing Machine in Riverside for making homemade clothes, a Metal Press in West Point to make armored doors and windows, or a Coal Generator in Muldraugh for making electricity. These would not only fulfill more of those Number 2 needs for more gameplay systems to solve problems, but also create a need to plan an op to each urban center so you can collect all these great devices. Since these are the greatest areas of danger, it's fun to kinda force players back into the heat even if they choose rural areas to base up. This could also provide a fun resource for factions to battle and trade over since there would only be one of each on the map. Maybe they could even be randomly generated in different towns so each playthrough is different. I also think adding a collectible cosmetic for each major POI would be nice too. Like a Top Hat and Monocle at the Country Club, Cowboy Boots from the Pony Roam-O, or a Pirate Costume at the Docks. There's a lot they could do here, but it would be fun to have to find the clothes you want to wear. As an alternative, since clothes are kinda important to survival, devs could always add Backpatches, Decals, Posters, and Sculptures to serve as collectibles too.

I think two things could help.
 
First, and this is the big one: NPC's.  Having to manage a group and keep it together and keep everyone alive, dealing with people dying in their sleep and turning, trying to go from a scrappy group of survivors trying to scavenge to a town (instead of just building a base for yourself and calling it a day).  Especially if there are things like wildlife (hunting and hostile wildlife like packs of wolves) and raiders.
 
Second, more infrastructure-style buildings.  The power and water failure should be more than just an on/off switch for the whole world.  There should be power plants and distribution stations near the towns, water pumping and purifying centers, etc.  Stuff that would be too much for a single person to fix up by themselves, but for a big group of survivors (player + NPC's or MP groups) with fully leveled skills could be good endgame goals: fixing up, maintaining, and controlling things like power, water, rail systems, etc.
 
If they go that route, they can also expand out the construction / metalworking skill with foundries and machine shops / fabrication shops that you can clear out and control (to make stuff like replacement parts when stuff breaks - either to use themselves or sell to groups that control the infrastructure).

None of those things are things that an animator does.
This was merely fixing an animation that looked bug ever since 41 launched. Nothing more.
 
 

Late game wise I guess I'm hoping NPCs,   and keeping idiots alive,   will create some of that late game content.        Though some optional zombie twist would be welcome.   Either mutating or turning buildings into "nests" over time which would make areas more dangerous in some way.  (SOD).        Anything that adds to the danger over time would be welcome.

Lol, dumbb statment is dumbb. Pipe Bomb obvzly best wepon in gaem!
 
Here isa checklist:
Does it splode?: Pipebomb YES! Knife NOE! Look cool?: Pipebomb YES! Knife, well not if you use a butterknife NOE! Instant 23 pleyer kill streek?: Pipebomb YES! Knife NOE! Microwavable?: Pipebomb YES! Knife NOPE! Asparagys?: Pipebomb YES! Knife... mebeh Ez say?: Pipebomb YES! Knife... No way, silent K kills 5000 a year! Dumb list?: Pipebomb YES! Knife, what I am being threatened with to write this comment. Gud at partay? Pipebomb YES! Knife no (97% of cake death is caused by knive)!  
By this objective roster, we can now see that I'm a pathetic idiot. Also pipebombs > knife anyday!
 
 
Edit: You know that liking these comments of mine is a negative influence right?

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, zomboys and zombettes – we just released a big update to the IWBUMS public beta today.
IWBUMS BETA 41.44
The changelist for 41.44 is here.
 
The tldr for the changelist, amongst all the fixes and balance, is:
 
A new fitness system from RJ – containing burpees, sit-ups, squats and the like. Regular exercise will see boosts to your fitness stats. Some decent optimization that should make built-up areas like West Point a little more free-flowing in terms of fps. Polished movement animations, seated animations while performing timed actions, anims for equipping and unequipping items and various others. A range of combat fixes, primarily dealing with the thorny issue of the game choosing a zed that’s down on the floor or an approaching zed as your target. Polish and tidy-up for: the water and drinking system, zombie target outlines, traps, incorrect loot spawns, the cutaway system and general UI stuff. Recently grown saplings now less powerful. Ability to chug mayonnaise from the jar now mercifully included. MP STRIKE FORCE
Here’s a quick video to showcase some of Yuri and Andrei’s work since last Thursday.
Andrei has been working on the sync of climbing through windows, and is currently looking at climbing sheet-ropes / falling and other things on a more vertical axis.
 
Yuri, meanwhile, is working on combat again. He has fixed up variations on zed speed – and is now looking at general movement, some odd variations in damage that zeds give/receive, and also issues with zeds who have reanimated from player corpses.
NU-FOG
The other coder side project we thought we would bring into the beta while MP work continues, alongside fitness, are Turbo’s fog improvements.
 
They are currently looking like what you can see in the vid below. We need to optimize and be sure that they don’t have an undue toll on performance (though they should be fine) but you’ll be able to switch back to our current fog easy enough if you have a lower spec machine.

  This week’s despondent waiting area from zeepl0ck. 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!

Lots of good progress from the MP Strike Force again recently, so let’s start with them once more. Hopefully the week-by-week visual progress in this will be evident to everyone.
 
This week Yuri and Andrei have been concentrating on syncing event-based animations (so, non-combat), player death, window entries/exits, inventory issues, representing zombie collision and a general tightening and polish of the systems as a whole.
 
Here’s a vid that shows where we were last week, and where we’ve got to now. It’s super cool stuff.
NEXT IWBUMS 41 BETA PATCH
We’re currently looking at releasing version 41.44 to the IWBUMS public beta early next week – there’s a few things we need to revert, and a few things we need to balance in there before it’s punted live.
 
As mentioned in last Thursday’s blog this contains the new fitness system, some decent optimization for built up areas from EP, emotes that work while walking, a drinking systems tidy-up and some gun bug fixes.
 

 
Other stuff that’s gone in over the past week includes:
Some new hair-styles from Martin. Side-partings, centre-partings and a few more – so you can do a full 90s Backstreet Boys routine should you ever need to.  
Replacements for some missing 3D models that couldn’t be seen in the player’s hands – jars, bottles and gas cans.
 
Improved targeting outline around zombies, and the option for you to select it for when you are melee fighting as well as when you’re using guns. Some work on how your survivor chooses to target prone zeds, or those getting up. A brightening of our overly dark daytime storms. Lots of polish for 41’s cutaway system coming in from Fox. This should hopefully be a lot smoother now, and with less occasional jags.  
As we’ve mentioned before, fitness and a new fog aside, we’re not currently looking at adding anything else that’s ‘big’ to 41. Stuff has been set aside now for 42, though work does continue on it, so as not to complicate the MP work which is now at its most critical point.
We’ll be talking more about what else is coming along once MP is out and 41 is fully on its way to public release.
 
This week’s snow scene from General Shepherd. 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!

this is a bug, right? fresh ice cream should INCREASE happiness, not decrease it