ThomEye

Hey all, we’re content locked on the 41.54 update to the public IWBUMS beta – but it needs a few items of fixing and polish before it’s out of the door.
 
Eris’ awesome new foraging system (as described below) needs some work in response to internal tester feedback, there’s various 3D items bugs, unwanted visual TV interference, and a strange item-wobble when you zoom in and out. Noiseworks bug fixes, level adjusting and various other sound issues are also ongoing.
 
Seeing as we’re concentrating on getting this out there’s not a huge amount of big ‘new’ stuff to discuss this week, beyond foraging, but there’s still a few things to cover that’ll make your life easier should you want to decorate your safehouse like this.
 

The ability to place and rotate 3D items from your inventory is a really fun new extra, while the items themselves are in future going to allow us to decorate scenes for starting characters etc to bring new levels of ‘mise-en-scène’ to PZ’s sometimes rather spartan gameplay areas.
 


This new feature, meanwhile, has also brought about its own new brigand of hilarious bugs – which are, we’re afraid, some of the things RJ and Rockstar Mark are quashing right now.
 
  And, finally on this matter, clearly the introduction of 3D items brings us a new MVP…
NU-FORAGING
Regular readers will know that we recently hired PZ modder Eris to work on the team, and that for her first trick she would be improving on our current rather static and UI-based foraging system. We wanted a more active experience and wider set of loot and rewards, and what she has currently integrated into the game is looking hugely positive and just what we believe was required.
 
Foraging is now an active mode that you switch on and off, and allows you to search areas to find items wherever you are on the PZ map. Your search is impacted by your skill level, weather conditions, your location and your movement speed – and loot changes depending on time of day and season.
 
Markers appear on your map showing items of note on the ground, which you must then approach to pick up. Forest paths will conjure up wild plants and firewood, sidewalks in towns will provide litter and lost items, farms might have rogue crops still growing in the fields…
Although it might not be a part of 41.54, one issue we have found with 3D items is that (clearly) small items like nails, berries etc are now far harder to see than when the game was using big, chunky inventory icons.
 
It’s therefore our intention to experiment with this new Foraging system to also make it a ‘look for small items on the floor’ mode – meaning that placed small items within the world will also be flagged by Eris’ cool new pop-ups.
 
Alternatively these small items could be given a white outline, which would be accessed from the same Foraging keypress. We’ll see what works best in testing.
 
Here’s a quick vid showing it all in action.
 
  As we mentioned before, we’re really knuckling down on polish of existing features in 41.54 at the moment rather than discussing/showing things that’ll likely appear in 41.55 or beyond – so apologies if this week’s blog is shorter than the last one.
 
41.54 will also contain the full Noiseworks PZ soundscape revamp, and reams of new narrative content in the form of Pat_Bren and Turbo’s new CD and VHS system – so it should be one that brings a lot to the Knox Event experience. We’ll let you know how the polish process is going on it over the next week or so.
    This week’s spooky set-up from koekto1000 over on Steam. 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! Big thanks to everyone playing, streaming and generally surviving these past two weeks!

The issue currently, is that probably only 20% of the playerbase is surviving until the "late game." The other 80% are dying in the "early game" or winter at latest. It is more important to fill the early and mid game with content atm, since that is most people's experience with the game. Early game and Day 1 are also player's first impression so that is a huge priority. The devs are caught in a place where they have to make the late game more full by creating systems that carry from the early game onward, and can be expanded infinitely  with a branching progression tree. This way, they can create a lot of content for the casual majority, but also create fulfilling systems and mechanics for hardcore fans. They've laid the groundwork for a lot of these, but haven't made a lot of them as complex as they could be. This is currently the PZ meta as of current IWBUMS:
 
Day One) Trying to find weapons and food, looking for a bag. Clearing out campsites. Moving furniture. Watching lots of TV.
Early Game) Decent loadout and good gear. Semi-permanent base with relatively good security. Scouting out buildings for better base. One vehicle, probably crap. Reading Beginner Skill Books. Disassembling things. Crafting basic items. Scaving food from urban areas. Preparing for winter.
Mid Game) Most likely decked out survivor survived through the winter with relative ease. Permanent base with good defenses. One good vehicle, and a few part/fixer-upper cars. Might have a generator. Working on chosen skills. Basic farming, foraging, and fishing. Rarely needs to go on food runs. Securing huge area for future base expansion.
Late Game) Best gear in the game. High level combat/agility/fitness/strength skills. Building your own base either completely from the ground up, or walling off cleared out prefab areas. High level security and almost no chance for hordes to get you. Multiple good vehicles, generators, and lots of fuel. Maxed out in chosen skills. Self-sufficient/surplus farm with a few traps and no need to scav food. No real incentive to leave your safe haven or do anything further other than watch the days rack up.
End Game) ???
 
Imo, the game is really fun, but there is no real purpose to your playthrough other than RP. There isn't a goal other than indefinite security. The interesting thing about this game, and the pull for me, is that the actual goal is death. It's the only game in the world where you are meant to DIE. That's the only way to end the game. The fun for the player comes from trying to die in the most prolonged, epic, badass, awesome way they can. Will you die on Day 2, cowering in your shack with a spoon in your hand as one zombie takes you out? Or will you die in the mall, blasting hundreds of undead with a shotgun knowing you've done everything else you can. That's the appeal to most of us, I think. This doesn't, however, exclude the game from having an end-game. We just need to get creative. The end-game of Project Zomboid should be to essentially confirm the extinction of humanity. To ensure that, no matter what you do in this game, everyone and everything will die. The goal of the game should be to fight against death for just long enough to strengthen the last bastion of humanity, and watch it get wiped out. Maybe you can survive from there, but you would be alone. The last human hoping for just a few more days or years. The current update schedule seems to aim at furthering the game in this direction. Build 42 will bring in animals. Hopefully this means companion dogs, livestock farming, hunting game, and even feral animal enemies. This update alone would add so much variety to the game that it would extend playthrough lifespans by a lot. These features will definitely fill in more of the tailoring, farming, combat, base building, and survivalist aspects too. Mostly, this will just be adding more fun content and laying the groundwork for more advanced AI, without really addressing the late game problem. B43-45 will supposedly bring NPC survivors back with quests, stories, events, groups, and factions. This is the real meat and potatos of this topic. Suddenly, you have stories and events to diversify gameplay. You have your group to help you survive and develop relationships with. You have raiders and feral animals to attack your base. They could have different strategies than zeds so you would need to prepare for all different kinds of defensive situations. Ally and enemy factions could even give you a reason to build different bases. To secure certain resources or buildings, or to have a more strategic position against an enemy or trade partner. If quests are done right, they would be the perfect middle ground between the bigbrain goals you set, and the micromanagement survival stuff you do on a regular basis. Quests could be little things like making 10 spiked bats or collecting 50 logs or finding a 6 pack of root beer for someone. Small things like this would give players a break from the day to day monotony and the intimidating lofty goals they set for each playthrough. This would essentially pose the game as so:
 
Day One) Trying to find weapons and food, looking for a bag. Clearing out campsites. Moving furniture. Watching lots of TV. Maybe finding an animal or human friend if they're around.
Early Game) Decent loadout and good gear. Semi-permanent base with relatively good security. Scouting out buildings for other survivors. Building up a small, tight-knit group. A decent mount or one crap vehicle. Scaving food from urban areas or hunting and foraging from rural areas. Maybe working on some skills and crafting. Preparing for winter.
Mid Game) Good survivor loadout and gear, decent group loadout and gear. Difficulty finding enough for for everyone through winter. Permanent base with good defenses. One good vehicle and/or mount. Maybe a few part/fixer-upper cars or some pack animals. Might have a generator. Reading beginner books, disassembling things, and basic crafting. Basic farming, foraging, and fishing. Regular food and supply runs to keep up with higher demand from bigger group. Securing huge area for future base expansion. Might have a specialist in group. Defending from zombies and raiders as more people means more noise.
Late Game) Decked out PC. Probably a few decked out NPCs and some lame redshirts too. Several specialists in group (doctor, mechanic, soldier). High level combat/agility/fitness/strength skills. Building your own base either completely from the ground up, or walling off cleared out prefab areas. High level security and almost no chance for hordes to get you. However, strong raiders and enemy factions provide a way larger threat. Multiple good vehicles, generators, and lots of fuel. Multiple good mounts and pack animals. Working on chosen skills. Good food industry from farming/fishing/trapping/hunting, but still need occasional supply runs. NPCs automate a lot of monotonous work. PCs can focus on bigger picture goals and special ops. Bitten NPCs can turn and kill everyone in group if not careful, so no one is ever safe.
End Game) PC has best items in game. Lots of high level, decked out NPCs in group. Network of outposts and bases all under one faction. Multiple vehicles, mounts, and pack animals all supporting trade and travel between settlements. Massive walls and traps and defenses protecting humans from zombies and animals. Opposing factions diminished in strength as to no longer pose a threat. Maxed out in all chosen skills. Massive network of industry and agriculture completely handsoff for players. Self-sufficient society means no need for scavenging. Only threat is a group member getting infected and spreading the disease, but this will not be a restart if there are multiple base locations. No real point to continue on other than to push civilization to its absolute limits.
 
At this point, we have extended and expanded the game a lot. Although, we still have the issue of no real conclusion point. No moment you can say, "I WON!" My dream "win condition" that fits the lore and themes of Zomboid is this: The Megahorde. The Megahorde will be the ace up the sleeve of the Sadistic AI Director. If you managed to survive all the hordes, surprise bathroom zombies, feral animals, raiders, faction wars, internal infections, the winter, and all the other survival threats; you would be granted one final challenge. This event could not occur until some threshold like population, faction dominance, time limit, or some combination of the 3. Essentially, once you hit that point it would just be up to RNGesus. It might be the next day, it might be a whole year, but it will come. The Megahorde would be a wave spawning horde of zombies that would keep coming until you were dead. Think Last Stand Mode built into Survival. You could probably get yourself to total safety with some cheeky ingenuity, but there's just no way to save everyone. You would have to watch as everything you've built and everyone you know would be destroyed. No point in adding special infected when you can literally have zombies decked out in the awesome gear you gave them. At this point, you would essentially have a New Game+ where veteran players would see how long they can survive in the Megahorde. It might even develop a cool meta of building up your settlements strategically so you can survive longer after the Megahorde. Eventually, the waves will become super intense meaning there would be a hard cap on how long you could push it. This would essentially be the Ender Dragon of Project Zomboid. The place everyone wants to get to, and then start a new game after.

Hey all, a quick round the houses of things in the works at PZ HQ. This Monday we released IWBUMS beta version 41.30, while yesterday we hotfixed it with version 41.31 that fixed up the more egregious of its bugs.
There is still an issue (rooted, we think, at Steam’s end rather than our own) in which a minority of those running the beta with mods can’t launch the game. If this is you then a workaround can be found in this thread, while we will endeavour to have it patched in 41.32 ASAP.
We already have an internal test build for 41.32 up and running – and at the moment this also includes ropes that can be used as sheet ropes, caught fish of increased nutritional value, cutaway improvements and a variety of other improvements from the lovable bunch we know as Team Tanglewood. There’s also a load of fixes to the main map that have been added in after we received a quick kick up the bum on this subject from the chaps and ladies of the PZ reddit.
Given as we need to patch out the above Steam/mod issue this will released as soon as we can safely do so, and after another internal update of our build-making machine.
Some good progress on MP this week, with Mark’s network sync clock done and awaiting integration. This is one individual part in a wider process, but also a vital one. Longstanding doid-readers might recall our former MP experiments with Yuri establishing an overall MP loot syncing system, which we ultimately put on the shelf due to requirements elsewhere. So thankfully Mark has been able to bring this back and build on it within the codebase – saving some time in the progress.
This also gives Mark a point to inject stress test code (fake missed data, out of order data etc) for stress testing fake clients – so we can troubleshoot on non-populated servers. This will be one of Mark’s next tasks, and he told the blogger this week that “if you want a cool word to use then say that next we will be building the tools to ‘netstorm’ the server and clients so we can debug against real world worst case scenarios”. So there you go: we will be doing a ‘netstorm’.
What else then?
41.31 came with some changes to how zombies act around fences – either breaking them down in crowds, or knocking over players lying in wait. RJ is currently and improving the latter – most likely mixing in player stats/moodles/situation to determine whether or not you’ll fall, making it less automatic, potentially mixing in some more general crawler behaviour and also adding in some sandbox options. It’s not perfect currently, we know, but we’re confident we can improve it. The merge with the Zoom branch has brought us crisper character models, which also means that we can now experiment with more character customisation options – such as tattoos. Here’s a test texture that we came up with this morning both in-game and in the character creation window. (The numbers are us fiddling around with resolution and such.) Yuri is moving onto the next stage of his fire development work – which is essentially tying fire effects into the game-proper. He is currently making sure fire does not spread over unsuitable materials, and addressing current issues with the fire system like tiles not being destroyed, uncharred tiles being left behind and fires getting out of hand on the map. Turbo meanwhile, while he waits for feedback on the implementation of the current temperature system (could people please see what it’s like surviving through winter and feed back to us?), is reviving his slightly dormant work on in-game devices. The basis of this the kind of extendable IO systems you might get in something like modded minecraft, but on a more basic level you’ll finally be able to watch DVDs after broadcast transmissions have dried up. This week’s sneaking past Dr Cortman from Max0Rda. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Hi everyone, Thursday again. It’s been a busy week both out there in the wilds of the Knox Event and deep in the code-mines that have created it.
We were expecting player numbers to drop off a bit now we’re a full month after the initial 41 IWBUMS beta release but, somehow someway, they haven’t.
It makes us wonder just how many people will be booting PZ back up once we turn the MP back on – though please be aware that right now it’s still a way’s off.
In any case, on Monday we released Version 41.19 which reintroduced sprinters amidst a bunch of other cool stuff.
This left the following on our ‘big ticket item’ list that we want to have nailed before a full 41 release: MP, MP networking improvements, the improved visual fidelity via our ‘zoom’ work, optimization of zombie crowds, new fire visuals, fixed tutorial, new zed decay skins, a system for clothing repair, Turbo’s work on player body heat and finalising the ‘challenge’ of the two new Challenges.
Right now in internal testing we have a Version 41.20. We hope to release this next week, and it will contain:
NEW ZED AND PLAYER MODELS
Mash has created a better rang eof zombies, alongside various states of decay for them to show the longer you survive. These will look at their best once Zac has finished his work on the hi-res zoom branch, but already look pretty cool.
On the far left is the current base zombie level, then one to the right is the ‘new’ base level zombie appearance. The two more decomposed guys to the right are what happens when he stands in a hot room for a bit too long… 
And here’s a quick pic from the Zoom branch where, annoyingly, all the zeds are looking away from the camera…
THERMAL WORK
Turbo’s work with player character temperature, clothing insulation and a code-side thermoregulator that evaluates warmth of different bodyparts and overall impact on the player. As in real life your character should still quite easily maintain a core temperature of 37 degrees when the external temperature is in the 20 – 30 degrees Celsius zone and wearing light to moderate clothes.
When conditions cause overall heat gain or loss, however, your body will try to adjust to the conditions. Your alcohol intake, hunger, fatigue, aerobic activity, water intake and more will all have a part to play.
CLOTHING REPAIR
When it’s released into the beta there will still be some UI work required, but those wanting to pick up needle and thread will have the ability to patch ripped clothes – and maybe sew on some extra defence too.
The quality of repairs and defence will be governed by a new Tailoring skill. It will be possible to cut cotton, leather and denim into strips – and then patch up your damaged clothing.
GENERAL IMPROVEMENTS
Betterment of firearm hit rates and the way aiming abilities scale as you level up. Improvements to sprinters – giving them sprint abilities only if they have a target, a chance to trip and a wider turning circle. Many and varied fixes for reported issues. IN OTHER NEWS
We would like to formally introduce Sam, Casey and Fox to the PZ codebase – who will be working as Junior Programmers and focusing on bugs and QoL issues.
Sam and Casey are both students, while Fox is a recent graduate. They are all a part of Tanglewood Games’ new Revolting Creations team (who regular readers will know as ChrisW) and we’re very excited to provide them with one of their first steps into the wider gaming industry.
Chris is looking for programmers of all levels, including students with no industry experience, so if you think you fit that brief then here’s the deets.
IN AMAZING NEWS
Our heartfelt congratulations to Ocean and Valkoinen: a couple who first met while playing Project Zomboid, and who got married at the end of October! Spiffo (our Spiffo) sends all his love, and best wishes for the future!
This week’s image from Ashsjester who lives over on Reddit. 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!

NEW

Re-added sprinter zombies to sandbox.
Certain headwear now have a chance to fall when attacking (on zombies and players). Hats now rendered as 3D models in the world.
Slot labels now displayed above the hotbar when the mouse hovers that slot.  This was to fix labels that are longer than the slot. When no item is in a slot, the faded icon of the item that provides the slot (such as a belt) is displayed instead.
New SFX for lower impact car collisions
Added  new sandbox presets to the sandbox options screen. Updated all the sandbox preset files so they include values for all options.
Added star quality to show durability of items in hotbar.
Left belt is now first, then right slot, this'll work only if you unequip/reequip the belt.
Updated community translations
Added ProjectZomboidOpenGLDebug64.bat which uses lwjgl-debug.jar instead of lwjgl.jar to enable extended error checking. Among other things, this calls glGetError() after every OpenGL call.
Sneaking now drains more endurance when walking/jogging than normal walking/jogging.
Equipped item/clothing now at the end of the inventory and not at the top.
Added some debug info about quit and around saving the game on quit
Pressing R can now do multiple thing:
- If mag is in equipped gun, unequip it, check for a new mag to insert.
- If no other mag found, check if we can load bullets in one mag, when done auto reload/rack.
 
BALANCE
 
Changed all open doors to be see-through to help with combat when zombies are on the other side of an open door.
If a vehicle is inside a garage, the area of the vehicle now decreases slightly - to help with parking.
Balanced firearm stats.
Increased chance of finding magazine in guns.
Improved M16 and Automatic fire weapons. 
Adjusted some loot spawns
Add carpentry exp when making spears.
Zombies have now defense according to clothing
Eating frozen food now gives unhappiness/boredom malus.
Re-added guns to spawn
Lowered gigamart spawn rate.
Increased safehouse loot.
Changed Builder's food rarity settings from "extremely rare" to "rare"
Disabled automatically vaulting over fences when there's no floor on the other side.
Added a grace period during which a 'Surprise Bathroom zombie' attack does no damage to avoid unfair instadeath. 

ANIMS/MODELS
 
-tweaks to Hunting vest x files and masks so they work better together
-adjusted wedding jacket to work a bit better with jumpers.
-adjusted Huntingvest masks so that it works better with clothing
 
FIXES
 
- Fixed the player walking in the wrong direction while aiming with a controller.
- Fixed hotbar position in splitscreen and after resizing the game window.
- Fixed missing window icons.
- Fixed tired moodle not in calcul hit chance for firearm.
- Fixed exhausted moodle not being in calcul for stomping.
- Fixed zombies pushing around zombies sat against a wall.
- Fixed hand axe being on wrong rotation when attached in belt right.
- Fixed various body location (gask mask could be wear with glasses, some full helmet etc..)
- Fixed clothing protection could display over 100%.
- Fixed wrong color scheme for bite/scratch defense color.
- Fixed not regen endurance if heavy load was > 0.
- Fixed heavy load moodle level 4 not doing anything to endurance regen.
- Fixed fitness level 10 make you run faster (now only affect endurance).
- Fixed missing rip clothing SFX.
- Fixed stone not being lost when creating a spear from it.
- Fixed double create spear with screwdriver.
- Fixed missing adding kitchen knife to spear recipe.
- Fixed occasional duplicated cars.
- Fixed zombies teleporting through walls when choosing a place to sit after loading part of the map.
- Fixed zombies never sitting against south or east walls.  IsoGridSquare.getWallType() looked for WallS and WallE properties
 which don't exist.
- Fixed lua error looting hotbar items from corpses.
- Fixed dissassembling not forcing you to stand.
- Fixed removing a magazine from a firearm also removing 1 bullet from the clip.
- Fixed some lua errors being printed to console without displaying the red error box.
- Fixed car battery charger not rendering sometimes.
- Fixed some blending during vault over.
- Fixed sudden pause at the end of vaultOverRun
- Fixed vault over sprint making a snap.
- Fixed eating and drinking animations stopping in the middle of the action
- Fixed some zombies walking being really fast or way too slow
- Fixed Builder preset being initially selected in the sandbox "Saved Presets" combobox when the actual settings were for Survivor.lua aka Apocalypse.
- Fixed the player's view cone changing direction more quickly than the model is turning.
- Fixed character-info avatar not updating after washing off blood.
- Fixed zombies sometimes standing idle when they should be chasing the player.
- Fixed iso cursor being rendered at twice the size when Double-sized Textures = No.
- Fixed players not always facing the direction they should when performing actions.
- Fixed player walking when turning off an alarm that is in their inventory.
- Fixed house alarms not working.

Could we please get a buff for the farmer profession? Farming is honestly one of the easiest skills to upgrade, plus honestly it doesn't really make much sense to them only to have skills in *just* farming. You could give them a +1 to maintenance, since maintainin' and repairing farm equipment, be it a tractor, your power tools or simpler tools is something most rural American farmers do. My godfather's dad who lived on a farm all his life maintained most of his tools instead of buying new ones which is why he's had them for some twenty odd years. Even the chef profession gets maintenance skill but the farmer doesn't??? The most maintenance chef's typically do is sharpening knives! You could even give them a +1 to long blunt skill, since they're used to using shovels, rakes, pickaxes, etc. Which does require some time to aim right since you always wanna hit the dirt at its weakest point and it requires some know how to effectively use those tools. Hell you could give 'em +1 shootin'! I've never known a farmer who didn't own a shotgun down here in rural southern America. Farmers are used to needing one to scare away hogs, deer and on occasion birds who try to eat the crops! As it stands the farming profession is highkey one of the more useless ones which is sad and farmer's know how extends out farther than just knowing about crops, they also have a basic knowledge of the land as well as survival. This is just my two cents and I'd like to see if anyone here agrees with me here. Cause as it stands professions like Carpenter, Engineer, Veteran or even Electrician are objectively better professions to take. 

Hello everyone! Lazy Thursdoid this week while we can get away with it, IWBUMs are out and for the most part everyone seems to be really happy with how its going. A few much more isolated issues to resolve on low end PCs and Mac, Linux builds. It sucks and we promise we’re working on them, if there’s anyone out there who feels they haven’t been responded to about their issue, chances are we’re already aware and are working on solving it or getting hold of a similar spec ourselves to debug on. Otherwise, people seem to be responding very positively, and player counts, reviews and everything seem to be very active. Exciting times!
We released 5th patch to IWBUMs yesterday, and boy was everyone really happy to see the increased soap spawns! We seem to have licked all the specific performance related issues, and now only need to improve general performance with skeleton sharing between zombies in hordes. This will happen during IWBUMs at some stage, but is a bigger task than some others so we’ll see at what point it does drop in.
We feel our naming scheme for the playstyles has been a lot more successful than previous attempts, the hotbar system has been going down a storm. We’ll carry on polishing, balancing and fixing until we’re finally ready to start testing the multiplayer code (no timescale on this, it really does depend on a lot of factors) and until then… enjoy!
This week’s image from Vic on Steam. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

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

Hear the 'difference':
 
 
The zombie sounds we've added are surprisingly similar (though we didn't consciously imitate) to a show that probably represents the most culturally relevant modern depiction of the zombie in popular culture, so to those saying 'too animalistic' or 'over the top' I respectfully disagree. The vast majority of feedback we've received has been overwhelmingly positive, we're extremely happy with the results, we may tweak volumes and hearing distances before release, or add more variation and degrees between different zombies, but this is how the zombies are now and there's nothing wrong with them. If they are 'too scary' then they are doing their job well, and someone of a nervous disposition or young age should not probably be playing if they are too scary. Zomboid has never been intended for the faint of heart and always blatantly and clearly intended and advertised to be a dark, bleak, nerve-wracking survival horror experience, and if it wasn't before these zombies, then it was a failing we've managed to overcome. This ain't Minecraft, it's Project Zomboid.

Happy Thursday all. First things first:
PROJECT ZOMBOID 40% OFF, NOW AND ALL WEEKEND. TELL YOUR FRIENDS. ALL YOUR FRIENDS. Etc. Etc.
(Sorry about all this.) 
So anyway, it’s been a week of fixing stuff on the animations build generally this week – and usually we’d be doing a ‘sorry, dull blog today’ blog.
HOWEVER some of you might find the deeper elements of the animations system interesting, and we’re also secretly hoping that a fair few of you will be interested in digging into the dev/modding tool yourselves once AnimZed is released alongside Build 41.
Sooooo… Zac has kindly written something up for us that’s a bit more technical than we usually talk about – but thankfully RJ has also provided a quick vid of something fun he’s implementing before we get into the nitty-gritty.
 
LIMPIN’
What you can see in the vid below is our first pass on the various animations that can impact on your walking and running – all of which will get some balance love before any test release.
First off the video you see a scratch cause a light limp – and a limping run. Burns will also have the same impact, alongside cuts – a new injury type that’s somewhere between our existing scratch and deep wound.
After this: a deep wound that triggers heavy walk limps. You can still try to run, but it’ll be slow – on a par with the walk speed with a light limp. Finally in the vid: a fracture. This is currently a heavy limp, but it will forbid a run. This will also be the case if you have glass shards, bad burns or a leg bite.
Okay, with that all explained: here comes the science.
Over to you Zac.
THE ANIM PROBLEM
The Animation system needed a big quality pass. Plagued by dozens of tiny issues with snaps and odd transitions, the system was functional – but a rough diamond in need of refinement.
 
THE ANIM OVERVIEW
So, basically, the Animation system is divided into three layers: the AnimState, AnimNode and AnimTracks.
The AnimState handles the big picture: what the character is currently doing. For example, the character is standing idle, walking, sneaking, and so on. The character can only ever be in any one state at a time.
Next layer down is the AnimNode. These handle the middle-detail of what the character is up to, like walking while holding a crowbar, sneaking while walking sideways, etc. The state determines what nodes should be active, and assigns a weight to each. As nodes come and go, their weights are faded in and out.
Finally, the bottom-most layer is the AnimTracks. These are the fine-grained animations that get mixed and applied to the character’s bones. Tracks are also weighted and transitioned, similar to nodes.
One of the common issues we had was visible snapping between nodes. For example, when a character goes from strafing to sprinting, while holding a 2-handed weapon, the weapon would go from being nearly vertical to suddenly snapping to being horizontal, in under 3 frames.
THE FIX
The first step was to refactor the code itself. From the ground up, the code was tidied and tightened up to be cleaner and more efficient.
Next, it was a matter of finding out exactly what the weightings were at the time the issues were occurring.
There was no easy way to make the game stop and show us the data. There was no crash, no exception, no stackdump.
So, a recorder was written up to take the values of weights and times, and dump them out to the console in a comma-separated format. Next, it was a simple matter of putting it into a spreadsheet, and having a close look at the various curves.
It was immediately apparent that the curves were not smooth. The blending algorithm needed some work.
So, we needed to use math(s).
THE MATH(S)
A set of quadratic tweening functions were written up, called EaseOut, EaseIn, and EaseOutIn. A square-root function was also written, but turned out to be too CPU-intensive for what it was intended.
The AnimNode weight transitions were upgraded with these easing functions, and pretty soon we had some nice and smooth transitions between nodes.
The AnimTracks got the same treatment, and transitions between tracks became much smoother as well. The number of snapping issues greatly decreased, and much joy was had. However, a few issues continued to stubbornly evade us.
Deciding to focus on one issue at a time, we chose the crowbar strafe->run transition. A video was taken, alongside the recorded weight data for states, nodes, and tracks. The individual frames were then painstakingly arranged alongside the generated curves, and then closely examined.
Once the track weight curves were stacked and normalized, a problem became visible. There was a rogue Idle animation sneaking into the mix. Its weight would reach barely 40% before it disappeared, over a period of just 10 frames. This made us intrigued, but also sad and weary.
THE SOLUTION
With this clue, the field of possibilities was greatly narrowed. The cause was soon found. As the strafe node was transitioning out, it was still processing its blend-field. Even though the character was now in the sprint state, its strafe state was still active, and it thought that the character was standing still.
So, in its few last dying frames, the strafe state would blend in the Idle animation, just before snapping it off again.
With the root cause discovered, the solution was simple. Stop any transitioning-out nodes from applying their blend-field. The fix was made, and the last remaining snapping issues were conquered. HOORAY!

  LESSON LEARNED
There were a few lessons learned. Firstly, Math(s) is great – even when we got down to brass tacks and went old school on this issue.
The second was how helpful it was to observe, reproduce, and document every known issue in a visible list. Then performing a ground-up service and tune-up, systematically fixing each issue one at a time.
Finally, that it is important to have visibility on the internal workings of the system. Instead of relying on stop-start debugging, we need a mechanism for recording all state data as it changes over time, and present it in a human-readable format.
Thing was, the spreadsheet and curves were incredibly useful, but were slow and cumbersome to use.
So! We are now building a fully-fledged recording viewer as a part and parcel of the AnimZed dev and modding tool. Huzzah!
We’re sorry this has been such a technical Thursdoid, easily the most involved one we’ve ever done, but in amongst all the cool vids we’ve been showing in past weeks we wanted to spotlight some of the work that’s been happening that’s not quite as sexy. (Well, not mainstream sexy anyway.)
We also know that there are some among you who really dig this sort of thing – but apologise whole-heartedly if you’re not. We’ll be a lot less clever-clever next week, and that’s a promise/inevitability. 
This week’s winter that’s coming from eHxAtoMiic. 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!

Given as we’re starting from a slightly blanker slate with Build 41 than we usually do, and combat by necessity is changing to match the improved visuals, this week we’ve been making some experimental balance changes to the game.
The primary goal of this is to bring Zomboid further into line with the fantasy of living in a zombie apocalypse – and making the zed threat as real and as valid as those you’d see in a Romero movie or The Walking Dead.
So, for example, one of our intentions has been to make sure that combat adheres to the more classic zombie philosophy of threats coming not from the front, but from behind – with zeds more likely to take a nice chunk out of your neck or shoulder.
Here’s a quick video with explanatory subtitles, but once you’ve viewed it please check out the extra-explanatory text below too.
(We think you’ll also agree with us that Mister Beever has excelled himself with the new music here too).
Soo… here comes our current thinking on this.
Although PLEASE NOTE this is very much our current thinking and NOT the final product. Some content will settle during transit. Player feedback, both within and without, will be sought when the time is right.
We’ve currently got it so one-on-one combat (from the front) feels much easier. One single, solo zombie will be unlikely to cause you too much of an issue if you’re armed with an effective weapon – and even without you should be able to deal with the situation. We’re not going to be that kind to you though. In the new build difficulty will come from two sources: unseen zombies which get close to you, and groups of zombies. Zombies to the side, and even moreso behind, will have a much greater chance of getting hold of you –  and from that a much increased chance of landing a bite. From the front you’ll always have options to knock zombies back, push them and generally defend yourself with your arms. From the back, however, you’re much more likely to ‘get got’. Zombies currently go for the neck a lot more, as from the back it’s a much easier target for them. Neck bites have been much increased in severity of blood loss, and someone with a big chunk torn out of their neck is unlikely to survive longer than 10-20 seconds at most, perhaps even less. (We plan on some clothing to mitigate this risk once protective stats on clothing are working.) In real life (kinda) a group of zombies all attacking at the same time will divert your attention in many different ways – and compromise your ability to avoid them or push them away. To simulate this, each zombie attacking you now gets a boosted chance of laying a scratch or bite on you if there are a bunch of them attacking, and this boost goes up per zombie. So if you’re surrounded, don’t expect to be stood there 15 seconds, get lucky and run away with just a scratch. It’s not implemented yet, nor has Martin made us the anims for it yet, but it’s worth saying that we plan on having an ‘upper limit’ of zombies surrounding and attacking you that will trigger them to pull you to the ground and start to feast on you. There comes a point at which you’re simply overrun and overpowered, and the game currently does not allow for this. We may include multiplayer ways for a player to be saved from this fate before the bites start coming, and sandbox options, but for all intents and purposes we don’t think we can be considered a valid zombie survival simulator if there are 8 zombies pulling at you from every direction and you’re walking out of there alive. It’s not perfect yet in the build, and should be considered as ultra-experimental, but we’ve now got it so that swings at zombies on the floor do a hit test between the end of your weapon and the zed’s head. This means that you can no longer stomp or swing at a zombie’s pinky toe and the game will understand it as smashing its brains in. This has long been an irritation in a game where aiming for the head should be of paramount importance. As such, the player will need to position themselves so their bat will (approximately) aim at the zed head – with a hitbox that’s hopefully generous enough to compensate for inaccuracy of the viewpoint and controls. Due to feedback from the community on anims vids, and our own internal testing, we’ve also upped movement and combat speeds a tad to try make things a little less sluggish. This may get toned down depending on how it affects long term difficulty – and also overloaded, unfit and tired characters will clearly move more slowly OTHER STUFF DONE THIS WEEK
Polish for zeds eating, them noticing and rising to attack you – and the ability to attack them properly while they feed. As part of the gameplay balance mission we’ve been messing around with stomp damage, (barefoot vs. shoe-wearing etc) and fixed zeds staggering back and sliding after attacks too. We’ve also done stuff like increase knockdowns chance when pushing a zombie – which is a lot more dependent on character strength now. Martin has added animation so zeds can bite seated player characters, and better bite reactions from the bitten. Likewise he’s made zombie head hit reactions whilst they lie on the floor, whether on their front or on their back. Tim has fixed a prevalent issue with footsteps – in that they weren’t playing and needed tying to the new animation system whether you’re sneaking, walking or running. He’s also fixed loads of issues around melee attacks in vehicles, reloading and flipping corpses. Zac has been working on fixing blending issues, and done super-well with it to the extent that the first video above runs without a single one – bar a minor one that’s rooted in data rather than the anim system itself. (Boring to read, but a big ‘yay’ for us.) ChrisW has committed a bunch of improvements to the new cutaway system – which is working well, but needs a fair amount of polish work and gremlin chasing. It’s already working really well in-game though, and complements the new animations nicely. Thanks all! Cheers for coming to our little Thursdoid info-nugget.
This week’s misty moment from Computerheadguy. 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! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

I just want to say that when I heard talk a year or so about an anims release, I was excited that we would get to see our characters wearing a backpack and maybe look a little more like we have them outfitted.
 
This is above and beyond what I was expecting and it still is growing. I'm hoping that you folks at TIS have an expected date for the release - even if you don't want to get our hopes up too much by saying it. I'm really looking forward to these additions.  Especially the animations of our characters doing the many tasks they have to do from day to day that currently just show them staring back at us.
 
Good luck with this build. I hope it goes to IWBUMS soon.

The guy who writes the Thursday blogs is having a fun time with a screaming baby, a wife with bad toothache and another child intent on destroying things – but the good news is that there’s some cool stuff to show you today, and a sudden brief window in which to write about them. And so, onward…
There’s a lot of general smoothening of rough edges happening on the build at the moment, and to give you an idea of what sort of items these are then currently on the internal ‘Top Three Issues!’ Sasha Shit List are: jolting walking animations on initial start-up, inconsistency with the directions of melee attacks and the way that timed actions (farming, pouring, building etc) have to play out before you can defend yourself from roaming zeds.
In amongst this necessary fixes, though there’s also some fun stuff being added to the internal playable test build. Primarily discoveries that will make it a more varied and interesting experience when exploring your surroundings.
 
BODIES EVERYWHERE
In the next build we will be adapting the lore slightly (hopefully forgivably) by making it so that the zed impulse to bite someone who’s unturned isn’t entirely removed after their death. Idle zeds will be slightly attracted to human corpses, and will crouch to feed – meaning you can sneak by or attack without them noticing you as easily. This can be seen in the vid below:
Meanwhile the same event can be added to our growing roster of interesting scenes we can spawn in random houses, which can be seen in the below screenshot– which is also a good example of how neatly ChrisW’s cutaway system will be improving the game.
In the current build the discovery of survivor bodies can be quite crude, with bleach or alcohol bottles scattered around willy-nilly for example. With our new systems we can also quite easily add in bodies that tell a clearer and neater story. Even if it’s as simple, and tragic, as someone who died from self-inflicted gun wounds.
[PLEASE NOTE THIS IMAGE IS WIP, AND CLEARLY DEBUG – POSES ETC WILL BE MORE VARIED AND IMPROVED]

 
OTHER NEWLY IMPLEMENTED ANIMATIONS
Here’s a quick vid that shows off the ability to pour out liquid from a container, the ability to sit on the ground to have a rest, and an idle that shows the survivors warming themselves in front of a heat source.
Crikey, this game’s quite dark isn’t it?
  MODDING POTENTIAL
We will be releasing our new AnimZed dev tools to the community when we release this version (perhaps even when we are still in IWBUMS testing if the documentation is ready) and just wanted to touch on the sort of thing that could be done quite easily with them once they’re available.
For example, a while ago Martin made us some skeleton models. These are primarily intended for use when exposing bone under character flesh when mortal body damage occurs. Likewise, bodies that have been feasted on may have exposed limb bones where the flesh has been picked clean – and on top of that there’s always the opportunity for crawlers to be dragging skeletal bloody legs across the floor and for more damaged zeds to be appearing in Six Months Later and beyond.
All that’s still to come though, and as a quick mod experiment on his birthday (when he should have been having a day off) RJ decided to have a look what they’d look like if used in-game in their entirety.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN EXAMPLE, AND NOT A REAL GAME FEATURE
The results are a bit rough still, but we’re sure you’ll agree: Boom, there’s the beginnings of a Harryhausen or fantasy mod. Good times to come hopefully.
This week’s fast food order from Lazy Joe. 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. Also OMG have you seeeen Xonic’s Mall map? It’s super-good. Please check it out.

It’s been a week of consolidation really in terms of Build 41, so nothing really super AMAZING that folk haven’t seen before – but there’s still a few items of note that we thought you might be interested in.
SURVIVOR ZEDS
Our primary rule with Build 41 is that we’re updating animations to complement and add foundation to our existing gameplay, rather than get too excited and add in loads of new systems that could otherwise wait till a later version.
A good example of this is something that’s been in the game for a while, but have always been hidden slightly: our annotated survivor maps that show you the way to various loot stashes.
Now though, to create a bit of a breadcrumb trail for players to follow, we have introduced ‘uniformed’ survivor zeds. They are the walking corpse of a survivor like yourself, who will not only carry some handy loot, but also potentially lead you to a place of interest.
They will always be rare and spawned in a big crowd of zombies, but also appear bloodied and messed up and wear a neat backpack. One of our prototype Survivor Zeds looks a little like this:
YURI ESCAPADES
Over with General Arcade Yuri has been continuing his visual effect work – and has fine-tuned his water so that waves and ripples aren’t as small. When it was windy in-game this was fairly uncomfortable on the eyes of our internal testers, so they now look like this.
Right now Yuri is also addressing something that’s been an issue with cars since their introduction, but that we were waiting to address once the differently proportioned new character models were in-game. As such, say hello to the more sensibly-sized cars that Yuri’s currently updating the physics for:
Also, it won’t be for Build 41, but Yuri has also continued his early experimental work in terms of getting a particle system up and running to improve our fire visuals – please note however again that the results are FAR from complete, and we won’t be showing anything else of this for quite a while as Yuri will now be on Build 41 fixes, optimization and polish until release.
AND FINALLY
Oh, and just today we found a way to make PZ feel a little more American.
Thanks all, hopefully a bit of a longer/deeper blog next Thursday. Our best to all!
This week’s unstaffed bar from Ксения. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here– so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Hey all, here’s a quick round-up of all the work that’s gone into the internal dev branch of PZ this week.
First off, we’ve had some significant improvements and fixes made by Bitbaboon Mark to the core animation blending system. He’s fixing a whole bunch of issues, snaps and glitches that have been vexxing us for many, many weeks – digging deep into the code, and doing a total rewire where necessary.
In prior Thursday vids we cut around these uglinesses as much as possible, but they still reared their heads. Snaps between character animations, jarring moves when turning to certain compass directions while strafing, and various other ugly things that we just couldn’t account for were plaguing us – but have now finally been fixed, leading to a 100% smooth animation blending system.
Zac’s prepared a video demoing the new blending – although please note he’s running in debug, so this doesn’t represent gameplay. It’s only to show off the smoother animation blending.
Zac’s own work continues on the torn clothing system, allowing us much more visual indications of damage and clothing wear and tear (quite literally).
As well as putting a player’s newly scavenged/treasured Spiffo shirt at risk of damage, this will allow much more variety with zombies in particular. Romain has been adding code to implement this new system to further randomize zombie’s clothing conditions, and tie potential clothing damage into the various game systems for the player.
Here’s another Zac video demoing this new functionality, we’ll look to get a video of it in context of the game mechanics later on.
Beyond this in the world of TEA, Mark is now starting work on his much awaited rotational blending system – having secured the foundations with the work outlined above.
This will allow us features such as wheeling/turning for characters, allowing the player to turn on the spot (by stepping in a circle), or to turn realistically while walking/running just like people are used to in the big boy AAA games.
We will of course prioritize the feeling of control and immediacy that people are used to as much as possible, we don’t want the controls to feel sluggish, but we hope it will make the characters control and look much more like they are part of the world.
Speaking of, please note, that we’ve decided to put the high-res model rendering work on ice for a week or two, since there were still numerous issues with it that meant it wasn’t suitable to put into the main line – and also it kept getting further broken by the flurry of additions and changes from the team’s work described above.
We feel it would be best approached toward the end of Build 41 dev just before IWBUMS, at the point we could get extra resources on board to get it working right. As such all videos until then will use the traditional character resolution.
At the TIS end, meanwhile, other work this week includes the addition of new clothing items such as a poncho, hoodies, scarfs, aprons and swimming outfits. RJ also now has hair and beard styles being associated with zone costumes (for e.g. so you don’t tend to get military zombies or cops with hippy hairstyles and big beards).
Martin meanwhile has been busy with new anims and costumes, hawaiian shirts, several new combat animations, and has extended the logo decals to cover even more in-game stores and brands.
OTHER STUFF
Next week Xeonyx will be starting work on main map polish (signage, roads, widened garages). A big priority for us in this is to provide adequate warning to drivers that sharp turns are ahead, particularly on the highways between towns. So where possible, he’s also going to explore smoothing out the corners with diagonals if they allow it – although sadly it’s not currently possible for any roads that have curbs or markings.
We are looking to merge in Yuri’s water tech into the main line tomorrow, and will be focusing on balancing colours and other aspects of the effects as per internal team and community feedback once we hit IWBUMS.
Given the amount of moving parts in this build already, we’re considering bumping revamped fire effects to build 42 as it still has significant work left to do, and as such Yuri will then be joining in on the efforts to bring build 41 to the IWBUMS stage. His primary missions will be in reducing general car sizes and also nixing the annoying way that cars can sometimes be lost after computer system crashes.
Finally, It is very important that this reddit post gets upvoted. Please do so if you can.
This week’s motel horde from AfterLife. 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.

Yes still working on it!
I had a long hiatus as I could not spend so much time on it, but I'm back at it.
 
I want to publish the map around the end of next months (my father is eager to try it too, so I need to kick myself in the butt), but for that I need to make sure every road lead somewhere (and there are tons of it), and that the game is playable (ressources have to be spread throughout the map). If possible i woul like to hyave the basic layout for cities but it might be unrealistic.
 
Anyhow, TLDR: I will post it next month on the workshop so you can all tell me how broken the map is!
 

I actually prefer more skills and just like this, when you do something specific you get better at it specifically. If I swim a lot, that doesn't make me a good runner, it just improves my fitness. I find that too many modern games go with simpler is better approach because it seems intuitive, but it many times isn't better. This way increases differences in characters and therefore consequences for your actions and makes a more interesting gameplay.

And hi to all! Long time no post.

Super!

How do all, another fairly exciting week behind the scenes over here.
After the extensive amount of time TEA have had with our initial animations system – rebuilding and completing the framework (not to mention vastly improving it, making it more moddable, better optimized and with a better suite of tools to go with it) we’re locking in the gameplay that’s still absent, and polishing the look of it.
In our older anims videos what was seen had little capacity for game logic under the bonnet, and was essentially playing anims, sounds and bloodsplats at the appropriate time, without all the tie-ins to game systems that would control health, endurance, skills, stats, perks etc
As such, while TEA continue to work on rendering, optimization, animation states and general improvement and upkeep – the TIS side of things have split into the different areas of the game and are bringing everything up to scratch.
So, to start with here’s Zac spawning 550 or so zeds, and doing a walk-around to test some optimization stutter fixes, and the new dynamic state system that means they’re not all swaying alongside each other. Zeds here are passive, and won’t attack Zac until he attacks them first. Remember: We’ve not yet added costume rarity so please no more comments about the spiffo suits and jockeys! 
On the TIS side, then, EP has finished going through the entire game and creating the overall structure of states and transitions using the new TEA developed version of the animation system. He’s also cleaning house in terms of a lot of the old out-of-date sprite-based logic, and numerous other things to help pave the way for further anim integration.
Turbo and Connall have both been working through all the game’s systems, particularly those activities that have timed actions such as fishing, looting etc, to make sure they all work with the new system, and implement any new animations to use.
RJ is working with the combat system, and making sure that the combat system you’re familiar with from older videos works properly within the improved TEA animation framework.
While all this goes on Animator Martin is providing feedback, improving animations and creating new ones whenever changes, replacements or hole-fills are required – while the rest of the team provide direction and feedback too.
Hopefully we’ll be able to show more and more ‘expanded gameplay’ vids as the Thursdoids go on – but this week we don’t want to show stuff with obvious rough edges that we can polish relatively easily in the days ahead.
Elsewhere, meanwhile, Yuri and ChrisW are working on general engine improvements. So here are two examples of their work, although please remember that they are still highly WIP – and if you see any weirdness then we are aware of it. First off, here’s Yuri’s latest work on puddles that build up during rain.
And here’s another quick cheeky screen of ChrisW’s work with Sims-style cutaways, that should make interior exploration easier and clearer.
Finally General Arcade’s Stas is now reaching the ‘wash and brush up’ stage with his controller build, so if you want to jump in and give it a whirl and give us some final pointers / gameplay feedback then now is officially the best and most enjoyable time to do it. Update12 was released today, and beta joining details can be found here.
This week’s home renovation from Musaka. 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.

This week has seen the final team members who’ll be working on version 41 moving wholesale into the new tech – so it’s a relatively brief blog as much of the week has involved introducing the new systems, tools and workflow to the wider team.
It’s an exciting time, and so far it’s gone pretty well. Backstage right now animation states are being hooked up to animations – so hopefully incoming weeks you’ll be able to see more and more gameplay in what we show, as opposed to the more testbed stuff that TEA have shown in recent times.
With that in mind, here’s a couple of vids from Zac, first off a walk through downtown West Point to test some of the latest optimization work, and the improved shaders that remove a lot of the bleached-out-ness from proceedings.
(You might be able to spot a few zeds in outfits from future map additions too, and also please forgive some of the float-y zeds – they should get fixed this week).
After that, here’s another zombie spawning vid – in this testbed instance with a zed-count upped to 510 before they start turning into impostor sprites on the periphery of your vision. (Please note that the brief pause before each spawn batch will be optimized by pre-loading the data).
Right now, Zac is looking into some further threading optimization as, bizarrely, better machines were having some stutters – the general plan being that TEA will continue to make engine, tool and optimization improvements while everything is bound together.
Some work that will remain in the non-anims realm andtransferred later on meanwhile (due to the ongoing public beta test) is Stas’s work on improved controllers. He released the latest test version today, and is now well on the way to fixing up all of the inconsistencies reported by our willing bunch of community testers. Check here if you would like to join ‘em.
Finally, last week we showed an example of the Sims-style cutaways that ChrisW is working on – but it was very WIP and we probably didn’t underline quite how much it would improve the visibility inside buildings. With that in mind, then, perhaps this image will be a little bit more explanatory.
This week’s snowmelt from colic2005. 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 MailingList that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct toy our mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

How do, all. We have a IWBUMS Build 40 beta patch ready backstage, but probably won’t be releasing today as we’re simultaneously working out the kinks in a new automated internal build process that Bitbaboon Steve has concocted for us.
This will make it far easier for us to maintain PZ and make for better internal testing and smoother releases, especially with the next major build being one that’s mixed in with the new animations code, but needs a few adjustments still so that our Linux IWBUMS testers and server operators don’t run into trouble with a release today.
We’ll hopefully release 40.26 into the beta soon though, which will then be considered a release candidate for a fairly imminent Build 40 public release – subject to a Community Megatest and nothing obviously exploding. We really need the auto-build up and running to release too, so we can get into the new dev groove with Build 40 patching. This notwithstanding – beta version 40.26 will include:
New, rare, inventory clothing types to better insulate players. Thunderclaps when players are banned on a server. (Optional) Better admin control over weather effects Fixed map bugs. Fixed missing vehicle skids sounds in MP. Fixed broken MP car locks. Fixed container bugs. Lots of other fixed bugs. More cosmetic aspects like new seasonal sound effects (crunching snow, wind noise etc) will now follow in Build 40 patches, while more functional stuff like Stas’ work with better joypad controls and set-up will be a part of Build 41. (Look! PZ played with a Playstation dualshock pad with the correct symbols. Amazing scenes).
Something else that may sneak into Build 40 patches, seeing as it will live separate from the main game, is something from a surprise new contributor – Xeonyx, the mapper who brought the community the New Denver Map.
Jamie (Xeonyx) fully intends to return to New Denver, but wanted to try out something else in the interim – and came to us with an awesome two cell map based on a Hollywood studio.
Xeonyx explains: “It takes inspiration from Paramount Pictures, and Warner Brothers Studio in its design.  It features a premier theater, high end restaurant and bar, a fitness center, and comedy club to name a few going down the luxury footpath road.”



Given as it’ll be a long wait for Mash’s rendition of Louisville and map expansions will be sparse until then, we thought it would be a great idea to package Jamie’s new map as an official Challenge map – and to make an awesome and longstanding community mapper an official contributor.
It’s not clear yet exactly how the challenge will operate, nor how we’ll make sure the map is available for MP servers as well as in-game SP, but it’s a great map and we’re quite excited about it – so thought we’d mention it while we help Jamie fix up map bugs and prep it for use in-game.
This week’s forboding mist from❤ BOT nitexx❤ . 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.

As mentioned in recent weeks, we’re now on clean-up duties before the release of Build 40 – which will then be patched with whatever’s necessary, before the animation branch being worked on by the guys over at TEA is fully merged into the main dev codebase for work on Build 41.
Last week, on IWBUMS beta 40.21, we put in the reflective windows skybox to better show season/day/night (and in prep for a future build’s reflective water), and also included Turbo’s more natural-looking snow, which can also be seen in the featured image above.
In the mean-time we’ve had several other test builds backstage, and are now putting out beta version 40.25. The full changelist can be found here, but the headlines are below.
Weather patterns are now more random, generally shorter, less intense in terms of screen darkness and have more periods of clear sky. Cloud patterns seen on the ground have been updated, and have new textures – night has been improved. Ground snow accumulation has been improved and updated, also working better when snow is turned on with admin/debug tools. Weather periods can now also be fully modded, including a designated ‘modded’ stage which can be freely modified. Insulation properties of different clothing now more clearly shown in the UI. Spawns have been added for McCoy Logging and Fossoil vehicles, which weren’t appearing – alongside improved car spawns at gas stations in general. Fixed: various chatbox and admin issues, a longstanding MP issue in which loot was respawning way too soon, the weird tile visual effect with some zombie corpses, crowds of zombies launching cars like bottle rockets (!) and players sometimes being trapped in their car (and zombies getting confused) by Yuri’s invisible anti-clip forcefield.  
Megatest
We will be holding an IWBUMS Community Megatest tonight to see how many major irritations remain, and to gather info on the login issues that hampered the last Megatest – should the same problem arise.
If you would like to join in then keep an eye on the TIS forums. Free PZ codes for participants will be available (usual conditions apply) but please note that this isn’t a stress test so the required player number on the server might be limited.
 
Anims
It’s been a busy week for TEA preparing for the code merge of the animation build into the mainline development branch as soon as build 40 goes final. They have completed the vast majority of the tasks required for the handoff, at which point they will continue to work on bits of extra technology to make the main animation build development go smoother, and end up with better results, while the rest of the team beavers away converting the main branch’s character states to use their new fancy state system.
TEA have implemented all the character control and combat features that were present in the early animation build, but with the new elegant and fast to implement data driven state logic that will act as example for the rest of the team to use as a basis, as well as being a much more robust and bug free base than what existed before, so we’re hoping that while it certainly won’t be a quick task, with the entire team pushing toward it we’re hoping progress will be swift, and we can finally start showing more exciting videos on the Thursdoids with the confidence that they are finally around the corner. Animations represent a huge amount of work as well as a linchpin for the rest of the major features to be implemented into the game. Each build after and including animations (intermediary quick builds aside) on our roadmap to 1.0 and filling in those missing features everyone has been waiting for (yes, those). It’s going to be an exciting 2019!
After the hand off, TEA will be looking at some extra tech, such as animation retargetting, which will not only mean a much easier time for modders to implement their own animations and models by allowing animations to be adapted to slightly differing skeletons, but will also save poor Martin many many hours of reexporting hundreds of animations whenever we decide to add a bone to the skeleton (looking at you, backpacks!). In addition, they are going to look into finally getting the proper rotation blending working nicely, which has been a thorn in our side since day 1, and would if nailed allow for better turning and much more immersive turning animations. Though obviously it’s key that we retain the nice responsive character movement, so we’ll need to experiment with how to allow for animated turning without the character feeling sluggish to control.
 
This week’s snow scene from Taquitosito. 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.

919.
If unpackaged food lays down on the ground for a bit, it should become dirty, give Unhappiness and have chance to poison you. Can be even worse if food have already been consumed partially.