Sentinel

It’s strange when the words and phrases used on the radios and TVs of your own fictional outbreak start to be heard on real-life broadcasts. So before we get going this week (much as it’s not exactly the role of a faceless weekly development blog to say so – sorry!) we hope that you and yours are doing okay – and will continue to do okay in this period of uncertainty.
So anyway, the next patch for the IWBUMS beta will be 41.32 and it’s pretty much content-locked with some further polish/fixes to be applied before a release early next week. Content includes:
Thumping animations synced with the thump impact on doors and windows Re-balanced and improved weapon ranges and angles The player character now looks down to let you know your next attack will be ground-based one, which will hopefully help in frenetic melee encounters. Improved (but not final) behaviour around windows and fences. Zombies don’t always lunge attack, players do not always fall to the ground but instead have a diceroll dependent on player stats to see if momentarily losing balance is a more likely outcome, and a few other tweaks and polishes. A code solution for areas that mappers (community and TIS) have not marked as foraging zones during the mapping process – significantly reducing the amount of non-forageable wilderness areas on the map.  Lots of loot tweaks: increased nutritional value of caught fish, more loot in sewing boxes, more canning supplies, more painting materials and more general junk loot added to the table. Loads of general map fixes that have been absent for too long, and fixes to shotguns, players clipping through fences and loads of other stuff besides. MP STUFF
Okay this one’s going to get a bit technical I’m afraid, as we’re heading over to Zac who is deep in MP work – and while he’s in the guts of it then there’ll be a lot that many of us (including the blog writer) don’t quite understand.
With this in mind then, let’s head over to Zac and nod solemnly at everything he says.
“Right now I am taking apart the current implementation of a character’s networking packet format (known as ‘IsoZombie’) and rebuilding it to support the demands of Build 41’s new anim state system.”
“The overall objective is to transmit and receive the Zed’s AnimState, Orientation, Velocity, and relevant Anim Variables. The IsoGameCharacter, IsoZed’s ancestor class, features a pretty spiffy and complex anim state stack.”
“To transmit the contents of the entire structure would make for some unnecessarily large packets. Instead, we hope to take advantage of the animstate logic mechanism to eliminate a large portion of the required data transmission and remove a bunch of what was previously clogging up servers.”
“The end product of this will be simply transmitting the active state and substate GUID’s, and a few associated variables. From there the anim state’s logic mechanisms will take over and extrapolate the whole animation structure. Better still, this will also allow for the character to improvise in cases where data packets are dropped or in cases of lag. The data specifies a target position, orientation, and resulting state: and is then free to figure out how to get there in a convincing way.”
“This will mean that periodic drop-outs or lag shouldn’t cause the character to suddenly freeze mid-frame. The character/zed knows their last state and their desired state, and simply continue running their animation logic in that direction until told otherwise.”
“Say, for example, a character is walking in a straight line at a certain pace. The network feed drops out for a couple seconds. The character does not freeze. They keep walking. The network feed is restored, and we never even noticed it was gone”
“If, however, the remote character changed direction during the drop-out, the character now has to make their way from their current state to the new target state. They may do a 180-turn or even employ a jog/run to get there. It’s up to the anim logic. This should make for much more believable character behavior and make for a much more seamless multiplayer experience.”
“As for the savings this work would have, it’s all dependent on how complex the character’s state is from frame to frame, but we are likely to see anything from a 2x going up to 10x reduction in the required packet size – which alongside the synced MP clock that Mark has been working on and other work elsewhere should make for a far better experience for all PZ MP players once the work is complete.”
OTHER STUFF
As well as his current work renewing his previous stuff with in-game devices, Turbo has been doing some investigation work into ways we can optimize how we save and load – specifically in terms of inventory items – and cutting down the bytesizes of files. This will again have a positive impact on the amount of information shared in MP packets when the time comes. Right now he’s polishing what he’s done, while also working out a way to ensure this doesn’t completely cabbage many of your favourite mods. Yuri is working on the implementation of his new fire visuals into a revamped and recoded fire system. He’s currently making sure that fire doesn’t spread over unsuitable materials, and has also come up with a way to handle fire spreading onto unloaded chunks of the map in MP. This week’s bandana shotgunning from Matthew. 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!

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Have fun!

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

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

 

Hello all! Super quick Thursdoid this week as we’re on day 1 after the IWBUMs of build 41 yesterday. Just didn’t want to break the unbroken chain of Thursdoids/Mondoids we’ve had over the years!
Feedback so far has been better than we could have hoped for. After a year of serious full-team development, it became hard to see the forest for the trees and judge how it would go down. We’re extremely happy to see people respond so positively. The main criticism/concern we see repeatedly brought up is related to the extra weight to movement and turning.
We are looking to tighten this up a little more in future patches, but also after seeing our internal tester’s experience in adjusting to the weightier movement, we want to give people time to adjust so we don’t overfix something that just needs a bit of acclimatisation after years of playing without it, as the weight does add a lot to the game and visuals and we don’t want to tighten it too much as to jeopardise that.
Regarding difficulty, which has also met with a few concerns amongst the appreciation, we’re steadfast on our commitment to keeping Survivor ridiculously hard, though we’ll try and tighten stuff up further and work to avoid cheap or unfair deaths that come from that difficulty. We will also expand and balance the Brawler and Builder modes, as well as potentially add additional ways to provide different play-styles and difficulty preferences to make sure everyone has a way to play the way they want to.
We’ve also just pushed a little patch that should resolve some of the issues people have reported. We’ve not licked all of them yet, but have sorted out a good few of the day 1 problems and have some ‘possible fixes’ we won’t know until its out there. Changelist as follows:
– Rebuilt jassimp64.dll with statically-linked c++ library (removes dependency on msvcp140.dll).
– Fixed exception in MouseState with 2-button mouse.
– Fixed lua error with climb-through-window context-menu command.
– Fixed solidtrans objects next to windowframes-without-windows being solid.
– Removed 3D-models and 3D-corpses options to fix invisible zombie bodies.
– Removed AutoZombieManager.java which adjusted the number of 3D models
based on performance.
– Fixed exception with “New Roof-Hiding” = No option that causes black screen outside.
– Fixed “welcome to build 41” being off-center.
– Possibly fixed rainbow-colored bodies on Mac OS.
– Possibly fixed failure to load bob/bob_idle animation on Windows using the Turkish (and potentially other) locales.
That’s all! 
This week’s image from MrSopal 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!

Hey everyone! It’s been a busy week!
Build 41 IWBUMs
In the past week we’ve put a few builds out of our animation build beta, and response so far has been great! We’ve been responding to people’s feedback on character movement by tightening it up wherever possible. There may still be improvements to be made, but on the whole feedback has been very positive after various changes to locomotion and we feel we’re getting close.
We still have issues with character and car saving being unreliable, which we continue to look into, and performance is an ongoing concern we will work on throughout the entire IWBUMs. There are still zombie spawning bugs that we’re still investigating. Most of the crashes have been solved, but a minority of players are still having issues that we are continuing to work on. There are numerous other issues, but we feel we’re starting to iron out the most serious and will be able to start cleaning up the less serious once we get to them.
A lot of people have been enquiring about when multiplayer may drop into the build, and it’s not going to be imminent. The reason we released IWBUMs without MP was specifically because we anticipate the multiplayer work that is required to take at least a month, possibly more. Not least because the devs that need to take care of the multiplayer also have a pile of issues with the build that still need resolving to make sure the game plays well on single player. We know this is not ideal for those eager to get into multiplayer, however we hope you appreciate that we got you the single player game ASAP instead of holding it all back until it was done, and our plans are for build 41’s multiplayer to be significantly improved in stability and reduced lag and rubber-banding post IWBUMs, so should be worth the wait.
The next animation system related feature we expect to drop in is the new zoom system, which as stated in previous Thursdoids will both eliminate a large amount of GPU memory being currently squandered on super-sampling a much huger game-screen than the resolution the game is running at (which may help some of those on weaker GPUs), reduce the general rendering overhead of zooming out, but also will provide much more detailed game characters on-screen since their rendering will no longer be bound to the resolution of the super sampled FBO. There are still issues to solve with this, so no timescale on it, but we consider it priority outside serious bug fixes so that we can get onto multiplayer support fully.
Insulation
Why is insulation not implemented yet? I hear you ask.
As usual, the level of simulation planned for insulation is typical Zomboid levels of ridiculous depth. Turbo has been working on this for a while now, and while it’s proving tricky to balance the values to be stable, and has required a few iterations to get right, it’ll be worth the wait as it’s planned to provide an extremely realistic and detailed system for how your body reacts to temperatures and dampness, how heat escapes from your body, even down to how your blood vessels contract and dilate in various body parts. 
Clothing you are wearing will affect you in numerous realistic ways, depending on whether it is wet or dry, its insulation properties, where they are placed, and other factors to make clothing even more important in future.
Note not all this information may be presented to the player, and we’ll likely have more moodles to cover some of the details as ‘feelings’, as a character would likely not know accurately as to the amount of contraction of particular blood vessels.
Hotbar
This is a project RJ’s been working on for a while whenever he has a quiet moment and no super pressing issues to fix, based on the model attachment system EP added, which we hope will dramatically improve player’s weapon and inventory management – as well as make their character’s look even cooler to boot.
A special hotbar system will be making it to build 41, where some clothing will provide hotbar slots at the bottom of the screen that items can be placed in for quick access. Find a holster, and you’ll have a slot to place a pistol that correlates to a number key on your keyboard. The pistol will be visible in holster on the model and will be equippable at a faster speed via that hotkey. Weapons can be carried on the player’s back, or in their belt, and thus clothing that adds these slots will have a weight reduction bonus just like bags and other containers.
This system should give survivors an extra way to prepare themselves and quickly equip weapons when they need them. We will likely expand this system in future, perhaps providing additional bonuses to equip speed and such dependant on the clothing providing the slot.
Here’s a video. Please note however that only ‘equipping weapon from back’ has an animation currently, the others simply snap into hand, but this will be addressed before release.
 
 
This week’s image from Airpex. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

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!

Hi all, here’s some details on our next patch for the current Build 41 IWBUMS beta – and some updates on what will follow.
41.19 Patch
We’ve currently got the next patch in internal testing, and making sure there aren’t any last minute gremlins. Over the course of the 41 IWBUMS beta process we still need to reintroduce and improve networking in MP, improve visual fidelity via our ‘zoom’ work, optimize zombie crowds, mix in our new fire visuals, fix up the tutorial, add in new zed decay skins, create a system for clothing repair and reintroduce optional sandbox sprinters.
And, as of 41.19, the first of these big ticket items will be back in-game. Get ready to run!
[If you want to! As before: runners are an optional sandbox thing!]
Other fixes and balance that will be in this patch include:
 
New SFX for lower impact car collisions Hotbar improvements Through-open-door zed visibility fix Increased gun and ammo spawns Loot balance and game mode loot balance Controller fixes that will hopefully aid players who use gamepads A fix to those weird moments your car duplicates Smoothened fence vaulting Fixed eating and drinking animations Certain headwear now has a chance to fall when hit/attacked. Hats now rendered as 3D models in the world.  
 
Barring gremlins appearing, which they often do, this patch is almost ready to go – but be warned that we rarely release on Fridays for fear of breakage. It shouldn’t be far off though.
Beyond
The next big ticket 41 items that’s likely to drop in an upcoming patch are the zoom and visual fidelity improvements that Zac’s currently on. It’s currently looking like this.
As a part of this work Zac has been doing some simultaneous performance optimization. This week has seen the renderer undergo some scrutiny. The rendering pipeline has been carefully dissected, and various instrumentation nodes have been added at various stages.
We can now toggle individual portions of the render on/off, and measure individual parts in isolation. Another aspect is GPU fill rate. We noticed that some graphics cards suffered more than others when certain shaders were enabled.
So a custom shader was added that shows the invisible pixels that are stealing our performance. The terrain renderer is also getting some attention to try to reduce the amount of transparent pixels emitted by the floor tiles, by cutting their mesh more aggressively to their individual shapes. This is cutting the fill-rate cost by about 40-50%, which is seeing a nice FPS boost, particularly on older GPU’s
Elsewhere Yuri is finishing up crash chasing and save system prodding, so he’ll be getting to work with the new fire visuals over the coming week  – while Turbo’s reintroduction of heat insulation and clothing systems will likely drop into the build over the next patch or two.
Finally: Connall would like community reports on how different community translations are being received in non-English languages. If you have any feedback on them, or have noticed any parts of the game that remain untranslated, please get in touch with him via the translations channel in the Discord – or on the TIS forums.
Thanks all! We’re all glad that Build 41 is still getting some positive buzz.
This week’s image from VunderFiz, who just noticed we’d used his image on Discord and seems genuinely delighted. 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!

This week’s Thursdoid is a quick walk-through of where we’re at we’re afraid – nothing super-sexy, but hopefully a few items of interest.
NEXT PATCH
The next patch, 41.21, is now in internal testing and feature-locked aside from any new fixes or balance. We’re trying to schedule these releases for the start of each new working week, so fingers crossed this coming Monday we will be seeing the following in the public IWBUMS beta:
The new (expansive) tailoring submenus replaced with a new clothing UI for each individual garment – where blood/rips can be seen clearly, and cleaning and repairs can be performed. WIP version below. General balance for the new insulation/thermos system. Includes: slowed body heat gain/loss rates, slightly easier to regain the feeling of warmth, less general sweat in colder temperatures, water resistance added to relevant garments and increased energy/fluid consumption in extreme conditions. We’ve also begun separating out the more technical aspects out of the current ‘debug’ style UI. Visible bandages on the player Fixes for: walking-in-place zeds (hopefully), sheet rope blockages, disappearing/reappearing vehicles and many/varied other issues BEYOND
Next of our required big ticket items will likely be Yuri’s new fire visuals, and also some specific ‘challenges’ for the Kingsmouth paradise island and film set maps.
In terms of other stuff required for the big relaunch and 41 release, meanwhile are the travails of Zac: poor old lovely Zac, still waist-deep in our zoom/hi-res branch.
Formerly we had this working well in testing, as both an optimization and  visual improvement, aside from occasional issues – but the fixes for those occasional issues have run ever more deep into the codebase.
We’re increasingly aware however that this has now begun to steal manpower away from MP, which isn’t really fair on those waiting for it, so might have to reassess the situation next week once it’s clearer how much longer Zac’s toil could be.
Finally, seeing as it’s been a dry-doid overall, here’s something else RJ’s been cooking up that will likely appear in a patch or two’s time:

This week’s image from Swordfish II 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!

Hey everyone, here’s a quick update on where we are with the current IWBUMS beta process. We do hope you’re well, and wish all Americans a happy Thanksgiving today – even if many of the PZ team only really know of it via films and soft focus television comedies from the 1990s.
41.21 PATCH
We patched the current IWBUMS beta on Tuesday, which was a version that contained:
Visible bandages A new ‘inspect clothing’ UI and improved tailoring Randomized vehicle events to come across on the highways of the Knox Event Improved Studio and Kingsmouth challenges Insulation/temperature system changes Loads of balance and bug squashes Annoyingly this patch also came with its own measure of bugs, and we had to spend a day hotfixing players who couldn’t survive through winter due to INTENSE SUFFERING and also a savegame issue.
These issues should now be fixed, so if you’re still having problems with them then please double-check your system has the very latest version of the IWBUMS beta by verifying files or reinstalling. If problems remain then please let us know on the forums.
UP NEXT
We’re slightly behind schedule in our new weekly patch release schedule, what with the above issues, so the next patch probably won’t be quite as bumper as recent ones have been.
However it should contain the return of rusty cars, more and improved vehicle events on the roads and a QOL looting improvement that displays all containers in a 3×3 area around the player – which should also make corpse looting a lot less fiddly.
EP has also, meanwhile, been experimenting with a function that provides  a radial menu for hot bar slots – that then lets you choose an item to equip in that slot.
UP SOON
Regular readers will recall that last week we were debating whether to put Zac’s work on the improved character fidelity and optimization into cold storage – which would then allow us to throw him into the mix on work on the much-awaited (but still not at all imminent, we’re afraid) Build 41 MP.
However, in the past week he’s slayed a whole bunch of rendering demons and the whole thing is looking a lot more positive. Here’s a video from his branch showing where he’s at right now. He’s really made some headway in the past week, and the seams and fuzz that were cropping up are increasingly in check.
Another big ticket item that’s on our list for the full version 41 release, meanwhile, are Yuri’s improved fire visuals. Working with assets made for us by a lovely effects specialist called Dan, this is the current look we have for in-game fire.
PLEASE remember this is still work in progress – and currently not tied to the actual PZ fire and firespread system.
Yuri is currently optimizing the fire for low-end systems, and is also implementing his fire effects in script, which will allow the community to easily upgrade and create their own visual effects.
That’s about it for now, but many thanks for all the enthusiasm we’re still (still!) seeing for Build 41. The last month has seen the highest average player count we’ve ever had for PZ – beating the full vehicles release by quite some way, and the animations build isn’t even fully released yet!
It’s great to see that people are digging it, and exciting to think what the MP scene and modding potential will be once it’s fully out in the open.
This week’s image from MrSopal 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!

It’s a slightly strange time currently. We’re updating/polishing the 41 IWBUMS beta, but waiting for work to be completed on big ticket ‘need’ items like the close fire and hi-res updates, and the more distant reintegration of Multiplayer. Things are ticking over well, but this Thursday blog won’t be a blockbuster we’re afraid.
41 IWBUMS PATCHING
The weekly patch cycle still seems to be working out okay. Yesterday’s 41.22 contained stuff like:
More and improved vehicle zed events to come across as you explore – roadblocks, crashed ambulances and such Moodles now shake and shimmer to signal combat being impaired by panic, injury and the like. Pressing one of the hotbar keys for half a second now displays a radial menu for choosing an item to equip in that slot. Healing items can be dragged onto the Health panel to treat injuries. All containers in the loot window now displayed in the 3×3 area around the player – which among other things makes corpse looting a bunch easier. Fixed: missing rust on cars, hotbar weapon-switch anims, ultra-fragile headlights, resetting sandbox loot options (yay!), car duplication (again!) and much else besides. The next patch will contain Turbo’s latest improvements/pondering on the temperature system, and hopefully some renewed fix/polish for the Sims-style cutaway system.
Already in the internal test build, meanwhile, is some balance for clothing weight, trait balance and fixes to weapon-jamming – as well as a some work on zed footsteps and the new challenges. We anticipate that this, and more besides will be released in the first half of next week.
UP NEXT
Apologies for repeating ourselves, but so everyone knows – work is ongoing on the following for the more imminent of our upcoming patches.
Zac is continuing his push on the zoom / hi-res model branch, and when work on this is stable will be moving over onto MP. The lighting algorithm has been rewritten, condensing the old twin-step color+lighting stages into a single pass. This fixes a myriad of flickering ‘light-leakage’ artefacts, as well as halves the fill-rate costs for buildings, floors, and terrain. This should also provide a performance boost, particularly on older GPUs where fill rate is a premium – though it’s not clear just yet how much of one. Yuri is optimizing his fire system, seen last week, and also making it possible for the PZ modding community to create their own effects. Modders will be able to set textures, shaders, particle numbers and parameters for how it all moves – meaning that ultimately people will be able to implement different fires, smoke, vapours, swarms, magic, geysers, blood eruptions and whatever else floats your boat. In more boring non-game affairs, meanwhile, that you may well still be interested in – we will also be using the full launch of 41 to coincide with a bunch of other ‘new’ stuff. New trailer, new website, new all-kinds-of-stuff – so there’s also a lot of activity in non-game areas of Zomboid too. More of which we will hopefully see emerge in the weeks ahead.
Thanks all, hopefully a kickass Thursdoid next week when the stuff mentioned above starts to come online.
Many thanks for all the bug-hunting and feedback the community has been doing for us too, by the way. There have been some really nasty gremlins eradicated that could only be exposed by the forensic reporting of our IWBUMS beta testers, and all your efforts have been very much appreciated. 
This week’s image from Penelope Graves. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Hello all! Small Thursdoid this week with just a little progress update, everyone’s very tied up today with various things both Zomboid and non-Zomboid, so we’ll just cover a few points.
NEXT BUILD
We’re currently hard at work on the next IWBUMS build, 41.24. Fixes and additions in the build include: combat changes to stop zombies standing up if the player is standing on them as well as general fixes to swinging distances for weapons, stopping players climbing through windows with a zombie on the other side (instead the player falling back into the room), shooting at windows, quality of life additions or pouring dirt/gravel/sand, balance changes for falling out of upstairs windows, changes to the weight system, and various zombie AI fixes when dealing with fences and windows.
Another thing that’s been added in finally is the zombie alert animation which we demoed a long while back but was faulty, now issues with it have been resolved. This should make zombies reaction times a little more realistic, as well as provide a bit more of a spooky atmosphere when a zombie notices you. A little sneak peek at it follows:
BEYOND

Meanwhile we still are trying to get the last few bothersome issues with the zoom build sorted, we apologize its taking so long but it is quite a significant change to how the entire game world is rendered and whenever we think we’re ready to go, lingering issues keep cropping up. When this is sorted, we hope it will go some way to ease the out of memory crashes some low end GPUs are seeing. To those who can’t run the IWBUMS properly, you’re not forgotten and we’re working on it.

Multiplayer is still some way off with the devs able to work on the revamp preoccupied with more immediate compatibility concerns with people not being able to run the game, the zoom build needs to be polished off before we can dedicate the resources to the multiplayer systems. It’s coming though! And we will get the first MP tests in the new year.

Looking further ahead, Lemmy meanwhile has been continuing his eternal work on REDACTED (you know what) and has been sharing some really cool progress videos within the team that, due to us learning our lessons from the past of showing progress prematurely in that department, we’re forbidding ourselves sharing at this point until they are more imminent (despite us really wanting to!)
However with the new animation system in-place, progress has been great and sexy looking, and things are looking really exciting and progress has been very swift due to leveraging the animation overhaul’s data driven systems. We can’t wait to share once build 41 hits stable!
This week’s image by Tiarv. 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!

Hokay, so holiday season is fast approaching so the IWBUMS beta patch we put out today is going to be the last of 2019 – barring the unexpected or the hotfix in nature.
The details of 41.24 can be found here, and amongst other things it contains two combat changes/improvements that we’d like some feedback on.
The first is that we’ve addressed those moments when you swing and a melee weapon passes through a zombie’s head, when it looks like it clearly should have connected. Previously when a zombie was coming at you, but was out of range, you’d play the “miss” anim: a long anim with a big swing and it would feel like you were missing. Now, if a lunging zed is out of range then the hit will more clearly connect. This will hopefully make the combat feel a little more punchy and connective. The second is that we’ve tried to make zombie whack-a-mole a little fairer by forbidding any zeds you’re standing on (standing on quite precisely) to get back up to take a bite while you’re attacking their friends. This isn’t quite as all-powerful a change as it initially sounds (we think) but we could still do with some feedback on how it changes combat and whether we ought to nerf it a little. Also in 41.24: zombie alert turn animations, the ability to shoot out window panes, better zeds vs. vehicles pathfinding, QOL improvements for taking dirt/gravel/sand, some trait changes and fixes to issues that were preventing ‘feeding zed’ scenes spawning in various locations.
NEXT PATCH
We’ll be powering down for Christmas tomorrow, though generally our more fervent coders tend to carry on checking stuff in whenever they feel the need to avoid festive cheer. As such, we’ll likely have the next IWBUMS patch going out to you early in the first working week of Jan – which starts on Jan 6th.
Already in the pot for this are improvements to the cutaway system from new ChrisW acolyte coder Fox, new clutter sprites to bring life to interiors, and some improvements to the thermo system that we wanted to test thoroughly backstage rather than plop them into a live test public test build before running away draped in tinsel.
The new improved character resolutions provided by our zoom improvements (also an optimization that we hope will get remaining potato PCs aboard the anims train) should also be cooked around this point, after which will come MP and MP testing – although still no firm dates on this we’re afraid.
We’re also at the point at which some of our workers are on foundation work for Build 42 both in terms of features and cool (non-Louisville) map content. It’s all looking hugely promising – and will hopefully make 2020 a year to remember for all Knox Event survivors past and present. 
We’ll be back with our traditional Snowman Spiffo image and a few dev-nuggets next Thursday, as we long ago sold our soul to the devil at some point in terms of doing these blogs week-in week-out. Until then though, have a great Christmas if you’re celebrating – and a nice time doing whatever else you’re doing if you’re not.
This week’s image by Anikin. 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, long ago a bargain was made with a mischievous Christmas spirit that we’d blog every week come rain, sleet or snow – so here’s your Yuletide Thursdoid. Complete, now, with IWBUMS beta Santa Hats!
Clearly, not a lot to shout about this week due to the festivities BUT a few interesting nuggets have been submitted to the internal tester build for inclusion in the patch when we all get back into the swing of things back in 2020:
A fix for blob corpses in areas like McCoys logging and the Prison A fix for vehicles being launched into the air by corpse piles Addition of a sewing kit to the loot table, and the glorious return of Mouse Traps. Improvements to where/how loot is dropped – including an option to allow you to always drop at the centre of the tile you’re stood on if you’re a neat freak. A fix of a pretty major ‘zombie attention’ bug that had negative impact on zeds spotting you from more than 10 tiles away – and has been prevalent in all public test builds. We’ll need some feedback on how much trickier this makes survival come patch release. A revamp/overhaul of our mod system – details on which we’ll provide next week.  Traditionally too, holiday time off has always been one something that’s allowed for experimentation – stuff for the builds beyond the current one in development.
And so, amongst other exciting things, we’ve been seeing where the capabilities of the animation build can take us with the people who started it all. There’s a ton of work still to go with them, they’re not on the confirmed list for 42, but…
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?
 
Thanks all, here’s to a 2020 that’s been as exciting as 2019 has been for Project Zomboid. See you next week!
Many thanks to WolframGama on Reddit for the awesome screenshot we used as the Featured Image in this blog.

Hey all, first week properly back this week – so a few things to tell. The next IWBUMS beta patch should be rolling out early next week and some new details of it can be found below.
Over the 2.5ish months we’ve had the public testing the Animations beta some of our primary aims have been a) to ensure that the harder difficulty is 100% fair in terms of gameplay, and b) to try to get as many lower-spec people as we can with an uninterrupted non-crash game experience via Zac’s work on what we call the ‘zoom’ build – which in effect gives us higher res models via the removal the memory-hogging FBO.
Clearly the c) lurking nearby all this, however, is getting MP functional again. The current state of MP is that servers can be created just as before, Yuri’s new server-side save system has been implemented (though not tested with a heavy-load), Steve’s optimizations are in from our previous work on Build 40 and everything is working fine (comparatively) in local splitscreen and via Steam Remote Play. To play on a server, however, is a lonely experience – as zeds and other players haven’t been made visible. This, therefore, is the current mission.
We have a big MP meeting tomorrow morning (so will hopefully have more details next week) but in terms of item b) – Zac has just finished a large chunk of his necessary compatibility work on the zoom build (remaking aspects of our lighting so it’s not done as a separate render pass) and will be adding these optimizations into the main beta and moving onto the server stuff.
Notwithstanding a breakthrough on some tile-seam artefacts in the next day and a half (always a possibility with Zac, the dude’s a fkin legend) we’ll be leaving the higher-res models on the shelf till the end of 41 dev (or for 42) at this point.
Zac’s shift over to the server work has been timed alongside the glorious return of TEA/Bitbaboon Mark – who is free again to help us with ‘dead reckoning’. This zombie-game-sounding technology will allow us to predict character movement with the anims on clients so there’s less rubber banding and lagging of character and zombie movement.
We’re very excited to have Mark’s fingers back on the code, as it’s through his initial expertise and direction that we ended up with such a solid animation build. Hopefully he can cook up something just as special for our MP community.
But what of item a) I hear you scream? Well with next week’s release of beta patch 41.25 we’ll *hopefully* have addressed all of the primary causes of survivor teeth-gnashing – with work done on attack prediction to stop you targeting a downed zombie when a walking zed is going to walk into range, nerfs on attack-cancelling and the ability to drop items while walking. So here too we will be free-er, in this the dawn of 2020, to go all guns-blazing onto MP and get it out into testing.
Onto more general news-age. Apologies for any repeats of items from over the New Year.
41.25 PATCH
We’ll be releasing the next IWBUMS beta patch early next week. It includes:
A revamped mod system. Savegames now maintain their own list of active mods. This means installed mods will be activated or deactivated to match the mods specified in the save file, to avoid situations where activating or deactivating mods before loading a game would corrupt the save. Saved outfit load-outs at character creation Vehicle-headlight distance and intensity now based on the part condition Red box of doom now says ‘error’ on it. [BIG NEWS!] Sewing kit added into loot table Many and various cutaway systems fixes and improvements Fixes to: generator use, heavy load damage, being able to drink from washing machines, zombie clothing not getting wet in rain, rooftop grave digging, engine starts in cold weather, light switch rendering and usage and about a hundred other things. Zeds can also now come with bandages, many thanks to Captain Australia on Reddit for the idea.
OTHER STUFF
Turbo’s primary work at the moment is polishing the new body temperature system, but over Christmas if people want to work (which the maniacs often do) then bubbling side projects often come to light.
The Automated Emergency Broadcast System is an example of this – a neat little extra use for a specific military frequency on your radio set that initially will allow you to ascertain what the weather is going to be doing in the area, and potentially also news on power starting to falter and other different sorts of strange messages and activity in the area.
We don’t know quite how far we’re going to take this just yet, but we think it’ll be fun and useful.
Yuri meanwhile has been continuing his work on the new fire visuals – optimizing effect rendering, adding different fire qualities for option toggles, making particle systems for explosions and the like moddable by the community and various other stuff.
Here’s the current new fire visuals on ‘low’ quality.
And here they are on high – please note there’s way too much smoke here currently. That’ll improve.
Meanwhile, in non-game news, we should be unveiling our new website pretty soon – and exciting work on the trailer for the big Build 41 relaunch is also picking up speed.
We’re also pleased to say that Blindcoder has now updated the online PZ Map with both the Kingsmouth holiday island and Film Studio challenge maps – which were ably made for us by the amazing Xeonyx.
So check ’em out here, and also do get excited for the next map Xeonyx is cooking up for us backstage. It’s a proper doozy, and it’s awesome having Jamie on-board with us.
This week’s roof camp image by Dybala. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

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

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

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

Horde traffic optimization:
Also on the menu are clusters and islands – these are ways of reorganizing horde data to vastly minimize the amount of traffic sent to update zombie positions, hopefully with little visual or mechanical detrimental effect to the online experience.
We’ve also been discussing splitting the horde into the zombies most relevant to different players to augment how they are synchronised to each client which, along with dead reckoning should drastically reduce those famous moments when you’ve all been bitten by a laggy/invisible/distant zombie.
In short though: we’ve got big plans for all this stuff, but we want to get it right so everyone has the best experience possible AND so it’s ‘done and stable’ for the entire future of PZ.
MP functionality for the anims build won’t suddenly be back next week, but we will keep you updated in the blogs – and when it does return it will have had insight and coding from some very talented people we’ve brought in especially for it, and will have been worth the wait.
This week’s ‘oof, right in the kisser’ from Airpex. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

It’s largely been a week in which we’ve been drawing up plans for aspects of the MP work discussed last week, plus organising and putting roots down for stuff in Build 42.
Likewise, some big new optimizations and (code-level) combat reorganisation were only added to the internal 41 build yesterday – and could do with some more testing. As such IWBUMS beta patch 41.28 will be out early next week, most likely, and not this week.
If you’re desperate to try out any of the edited highlights changelist below, however, then there *is* a way – so keep on reading beyond the bullet points.
So, at the moment IWBUMS patch 41.28 will contain:
Experimental optimization. This allows zombies to be updated every X frames via a per-object gametime multiplier that depends on proximity / visibility to player. It spreads update ticks of zombies over frames, meaning higher FPS with large crowds. Options for different levels of this will also be provided. Turbo’s automated broadcast radio station – which provides weather forecasts, warnings on imminent power/water outages and other interesting things. Ability to turn off rain/precipitation when indoors, as this was making a fair few IWBUMS testers motion sick. Further improvements to the Foraging UI, and also now a new Fishing UI designed in a similar way. Code-changes to smoothen combat and remove the possibility of animation-cancelling. ZOOM BETA
On top of the usual public IWBUMS beta, we are also currently running a temporary beta for our ‘optimization for lower spec machines; and ‘higher res models’ zoom branch.
This is built on top of the current internal build (it will most likely be patch 41.29) so contains everything in the forthcoming 41.28 too. If you’re desperate for the new fishing UI then well, friend, you can try it out. 
Details on how to access the zoom beta and the password can be found HERE. Here’s a quick vid DrunkonLife took from it so you can see how it adds extra detail too.
Right now we need to know if you’re getting any stutters/judders after 5-10 minutes of play – which some people are reporting, but we may have fixed. We also have an odd issues with cutaways randomly failing to cut away, which we’ll need to address before we merge it all into trunk.
If you have feedback, please deposit it into the linked thread or onto the forum.
OTHER STUFF
Elsewhere Yuri continues work on fire, TEA/Bitbaboon Mark is coordinating MP efforts, Mash is working on new artwork for clutter and environments, Martin has provided new animations to counteract ‘window camping’ that we need to plug in, Xeonyx continues to beaver away on secret new map content, Binky and RingoD continue their assault on the Louisville suburbs, we’re sorting out a new website and trailer with different companies for the big 41 relaunch and… lots of cool stuff really. 
Finally:
TFW you go viral… but it’s a pre-anims build. And pre-cutaways. And pre-2x detail on the tiles 😢



Be happy. from /r/gaming
(Still VERY very cool though!)
This week’s sweet base, sweet hat and sweet bag from Kwintofly. 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!

Howdy all, let’s run through the latest.
We updated the public IWBUMS beta this morning, which is now running on Build 41.28. The changelist is viewable here.
Edited highlights though, run as we mentioned last week.
Experimental optimization. This allows zombies to be updated every X frames via a per-object gametime multiplier that depends on proximity / visibility to player. It spreads update ticks of zombies over frames, meaning higher FPS with large crowds. Options for different levels of this will also be provided. Turbo’s automated broadcast radio station – which provides weather forecasts, warnings on imminent power/water outages and other interesting things. Ability to turn off rain/precipitation when indoors, as this was making a fair few IWBUMS testers motion sick. Further improvements to the Foraging UI, and also now a new Fishing UI designed in a similar way. Code-changes to smoothen combat and remove the possibility of animation-cancelling. ZOOM AND JAVA STUFF
The zoom beta, meanwhile, has been fixed up – with its higher res models and its friendlier ability to run for those with lower end systems. This said we still have a ‘garbage collection’ judder/stutter monster to deal with after about 20-30 mins of play (fixed by a restart if you’re on the beta) which hopefully we’ll have licked soon – with this branch then moving into the main internal test build, and then the IWBUMS beta, in the form of patch 41.29.
While we are on this subject, in future news, as regular readers will know as we are constantly waging war against Java’s garbage collector, known for causing stutters and pauses in the game that not only take a huge amount of effort to minimize, but also are a ball and chain that heavily constrict how we code to try and appease the garbage gods.
This is the very problem we are dealing with right now on the zoom branch for some people. The good news is September 2020, Java OpenJDK 14 will be coming out out on all three platforms and comes with a shiny new garbage collector that should vastly improve its ability to deal with garbage without any pauses whatsoever.
This is huge, however it comes with one big caveat: it’ll be 64bit only. As such, we thought it a good idea to give enough forewarning that we’ll need to stop support on 32bit systems completely in/around September 2020. As always, legacy build will be provided on Steam betas so anyone left behind will have the latest possible version of PZ to play.
We’ve held off as long as possible, but the performance benefits not only to the game, but also freeing us up to create a bit more garbage to use many of the more modern coding conveniences and allowing easier to work with codebase that we’ve had to suffer over the years to try and stave off these pauses. We’ll remind you again closer to the time, but hopefully this is enough notice.
OTHER STUFF
Here’s a quick WIP video from Yuri’s work on fire – though as ever please bear in mind that everything you see here is exactly that. A work in progress.
At the moment Yuri is working on making fire look more ‘grounded’ and less floaty, while smoke also is being made a lot slower. Burning people/zeds will clearly have more specific animations too. We’re getting there overall, and flaming houses should be a treat to see – as well as pretty terrifying.
Oh actually, right now at the time of writing Yuri wants to show people his slower smoke – which looks ace. Here it is.
People probably care a lot less about this next aspect, but some may be interested given as they’ve spent so many Mondays/Thursdays spending time there (well, here I guess) over the years.
Given as the release of Build 41 will be something of a relaunch for PZ – with anims unlocking so much cool shit, and with the game looking and playing so differently – we are also treating ourselves to a new website and a new trailer.
The website will launch fairly soon, given as the one you’re currently reading is fairly rickety, and it’ll look a little bit like this!
Boring news, we know – but we like it. It’s always nice to see Afekay’s Bob image being given a new lease of life too.
Next week we’re hoping to provide an in-depth look into our MP efforts that we mentioned here, with some diagrams and such for the technically minded from TEA/Bitbaboon Mark. It’s a huge low level rewrite of the game’s multiplayer architecture, so won’t be something that pops into the IWBUMS beta without a lot of build-up in Thursdoids – but hopefully you’ll see more and more details of it appearing from hereon in. 
Today’s featured image is quite possibly one of the coolest ones we’ve seen in years – built in and around train carriages in Muldraugh, and is from WhitEҜnight . 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!

First up, yesterday we released IWBUMS beta patch 41.29 – the changelist for which you can find here.
This means that our ‘zoom’ beta’s sharper models and improved compatibility is now part of the main test beta – alongside some helpful fixes and some improvements to car-destroying trees, shrubs and saplings.
The next step for the new zoom system is to clean up the last few remaining issues that a few of our players are reporting. Primarily, at the moment tiles look a bit blurred at close range.
In the old system once you were at closest zoom possible, it would use ‘nearest pixel’ filtering so everything would look nice and crisp. However, the way the new system works means that we really need to leverage the filtering effect to avoid jagged and warped pixels at 75% (the second zoom level out) as well as when zoomed out – to avoid absolutely ugly and awful flickering of pixels and severe warping of the pixels as the character moves about.
At the moment filtering is turned on across the board, causing the close-range blur, so we’ll be looking to experiment with switching on ‘nearest neighbour’ when you hit max zoom-in instead. This may have a slight visual pop, but should be preferable to the tiles looking blurry compared to the characters.
MP WHEN
It seems that questions about when 41 IWBUMS beta multiplayer will appear have been increasing exponentially over the past month or so, and we’ve still not been able to give an accurate estimate. (Characteristically, as some/many might say.)
We’re currently laying the foundations for getting the new multiplayer system working, but there is still a fair bit of work ahead of us. You can read the top-line here.
It’s not just a case of getting the old MP working with the new anims, but as we’ve discussed in the above link it’ll be an effort to vastly improve the multiplayer experience and server stability across the board. The way the animation system has been built allows aspects of it to be hooked up relatively smoothly to MP systems – but it also comes with many associated challenges.
More fundamentally though, but the bar we are setting for ourselves requires some rather clever specialist code that will be undertaken by Zac and Mark at TEA.
Seeing as it was a vital compatibility thing we needed done before 41’s release (to get lower-spec players a build that actually worked)  Zac has primarily been absorbed in getting the kinks worked out of the Zoom branch until recently. It hasn’t been his exclusive role, but Zoom did prove trickier than expected and for numerous reasons could never be put to one side. Meanwhile, Mark’s workload elsewhere with TEA meant that he hasn’t available to work in conjunction with us/Zac until very recently also.
Now Mark is available and Zac’s necessary Zoom work is complete, there will be an uptick in progress, which we hope to be able to discuss with you over the coming Thursdoids, before arranging server ‘mega-test’ events to load test a single server once the tech is operational.
We’re probably talking a month or two, here, or more if things don’t go smoothly. It’s not something that’s going to be magically dropped into the IWBUMS beta without a lot of shouting, build-up and hooplah.
To those eager for it to appear – unfortunately this is just the reality of the situation BUT it will lead to a much improved multiplayer experience FOREVER once we do finally nail it.
We don’t want to hack something in that results in the same flakey multiplayer we’ve had for years.
We’ve had, and have, a great MP community when it comes to Project Zomboid – but anyone that’s ever spent time on our servers are aware of our previous online shortcomings. The lag waves, the invisible zombies etc etc. It’s a job we need done properly, done well and by the best people we can find (and have found) to do it.
This is especially important because going from the overall reaction to the release of our version 41 beta, there’s a very real chance that there’ll be a big spike of interest in MP as soon as it’s unlocked in the IWBUMS beta.
If it’s an over-populated lag festival based on our previous MP architecture, that interest will be short-lived – and not much fun for either our existing players or us on the development side.
As such it’s vitally important to the game’s future, and everyone who desires a high multiplayer population in the long term, that we take our time and nail this one – even if it has been, and will continue to be, a painful wait for it to be reintroduced.
This really is the route we need to take to make sure Build 41 MP hits hard out of the gate, and is in the best possible place for you when we consider it cooked and ready for consumption.
In the meantime too, clearly, other members of the team will still be updating the IWBUMS beta with more general SP content, new animations, polish, Yuri’s fire system and much more besides.
Looking further on into builds beyond 41 we have three mappers working on two separate vast locations, one Louisville and the other not, and an artist and a coder that have gone great guns recently with SP gameplay content for Build 42 that we can’t wait to share with you once our work on Build 41 is coming to a close.
We’re quietly optimistic that it’s going to be a really good, and very busy, year. So thanks for your patience so far, and for coming along on this journey with us.
Today’s featured image from the actual real Rick Grimes . A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Hello all, here’s a quick dev round-up from TIS headquarters.
IWBUMS BETA 41.30
We’ve currently got the next patch being tested on an internal branch, and with a fair wind it should be released early next week. It contains the following.
A fix that should resolve intel GPU crashes we’ve been seeing since the zoom branch was merged into IWBUMS Zoom improvements that provide a clearer image on different levels of zoomed-in and zoomed-out, as well as various fixes to seams and lighting Spiffo’s Secret Special Sauce. Some small but extremely meaningful changes and tweaks to general gameplay that we’re keeping quiet on. Primarily due to our love for the dramatic, and an undercurrent of sadism. New and polished animations for: washing yourself, examining vehicles, adding/removing gas, installing and uninstalling parts/tires, multi-stage building and more. A cursor to help in blood clean-up duties. Cutaway improvements from Team Tanglewood, including a timer to stop cutaways and other visibility/hiding effects flickering. Fixes for Last Stand, foraging, fishing lines always breaking, vehicle headlights, stuck zombies, swimming pools with shorelines and (finally) Fox got to the bottom of our famous too-boring sandwiches. And there was much rejoicing. Also: other stuff. Improved body temperature stuff from Turbo. We also intend to get some stealth polish/balance in, but that’s dependent on making sure that Spiffo’s Special Secret Sauce has been accurately deployed.
MP
For discussion and explanation of current 41 IWBUMS beta MP work please check out last week’s blog.
As discussed though, Bitbaboon Mark is currently prepping the code for the implementation of a true synchronized clock to make all our future MP endeavours go a lot more smoothly. Zac, meanwhile, is laying down his plans for decoupling the animation deferred movement so that it can work in reverse – where movement can also translate to appropriate animations, instead of animations driving movement.
Once this is done, no matter how a character moves due to client interpolation and approximation, we’ll hopefully have appropriate animations with minimal foot sliding to account for it. These tasks will then lead to us hooking the animations in wholesale, and we’ll be rolling full speed on the track to full MP compatibility.
If you want to play Build 41 SP and want to switch between it and 40’s MP functionalities, by the way, then SeskaRotan’s guide is extremely helpful.
FIRE
Here’s the latest from the Yuri fire department – as ever with the usual WIP warnings. This shows camp fires of different sizes with different amount of fuel, an improved molotov effect and some early examples of flaming zombies.
Please note a) we know we need to improve the appearance/physics of thrown objects, b) we know more body parts of the zeds need to be on fire, c) we intend to improve the burning tiles so they have edge blending – they look very square at the moment.
GOODBYE CONNALL
In more bittersweet news one of our devs, Connall, who anyone involved in community translations will know very well, has had a too-good-to-pass-up opportunity down in that there London and will be moving on to pastures new at the end of February.
He’s not publicly said where he’s heading, but we know and it’s cool as all hell – and while we’re sad to see him go, we’re extremely proud that someone who has been an integral part of the Zomboid story, from literally being a young lad to having a manly goatee, has gone on to do such cool things. We were there for his first legal drink, and now he’s heading off to the big city to seek his fortune!
In his own words on twitter (https://twitter.com/ConnallTheCoble/status/1227604245832179712😞

“Hey, I will be leaving TIS at theend of February. I’ll still be around in the community and also in the translators section of Discord for the time being. Don’t worry, I’m leaving on great terms, It’s just I have an opportunity in London I can’t ignore.
I am immensely grateful for my time working for The Indie Stone. It’s been a blast and I owe those folks so much. I been a part of this community for just under 10 years now, I got Project Zomboid when I was 15 and I’m almost 24 now!
I have been a player, community member, wiki contributor, wiki administrator, forum moderator, administrator, website developer, tracker developer and programmer. I have met and been hosted by community members in their homes!”
Having good localization and community translations are really what keeps Zomboid a popular game the world over, it’s an often overlooked and undervalued part of game development.
We want to thank everyone in the community for their efforts, as well as of course Connall for organizing and facilitating all our translators getting all those lovely foreign words into our little game! And of course all the other ways he’s contributed over the years.
On the up side, as Connall says, he’ll still be around. No one is ever really gone (unless they get a bite, of course) and he’ll still be around to help and be a part of the community when his new life allows. We wish him all the luck down on that there London gravy train! ❤️
Today’s featured image is probably one of the best we’ve ever had. What an amazing screenshot Tughril! A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Hello all! Very brief Thursdoid today, our usual Thursdoider Will is away on a well deserved break from the 41 grindstone, and we’re all hard at work at our various things. A few brief points however:
NEXT BUILD WHEN
Lots of nice fixes are going into the next IWBUMS build of build 41. However, Steam has been playing silly buggers with our build system and some 90% of builds strangely fail to upload to the steam branches. Not only does this make it a more risky endeavour to do a build as it will mean it may not be possible to patch any problems quickly, but as we’ve had very few builds successfully go to the test group to make sure it’s behaving, the build has been tested a lot less than usual builds and so we’ve been cautious on doing the release discussed last week.
Steve is currently investigating the issue, seeing if we need to make any changes to the build system or whether we need to go knock on Valve’s door, and as soon as we feel confident in our ability to both test the build and also to administer prompt hotfixes, we’ll put the build out there!
MP PROGRESS
Now he’s cured of the zoomies, the commits channel of code going into the game has revealed a stream of ‘getting to know you’ refactors and polish from Zac on the multiplayer codebase. While there’s nothing to show at this point, its clear he’s been doing some substantial poking under the hood, doing his usual process of cleaning house, moving furniture and dusting the dustier pieces of furniture, adding fancy debug switches and functionality to make the MP work go a lot more smoothly.
Exciting stuff!
That’s it really, sorry its a really sparse Thursdoid, normal business will resume next week!
Love,
TIS
Picture courtesy of Harkwood 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!

The upcoming 41.30 IWBUMS beta patch is a bumper edition, built up over a few weeks now, and has now been locked, tested and is ready to roll. It was due for release today, but due to a dev illness it’ll either be out tomorrow or Monday.
Here’s some new 41.30 stuff that’s gone in recently:
Temperature system improvements. Room temperature now more accommodating until heating/cooling devices are introduced. Reinstated food consumption to combat cold, with reduced overall impact. Toned down other consumption of fatigue/fluids, though fluids remain a strong factor when overheating etc. Lots of other improvements/nerfs/tweaks to how the system was in the builds before the Thermoregulator system was taken back into the garage for extra work and fiddling from Turbo. Improvements to our backstage player/vehicle save database – meaning that the hitching when entering unexplored parts of the map (when new vehicles are created) should be fixed. Gun improvements – including some gun racking fixes, and also an increased ability to shoot zeds from close range. Sprinter improvements. Sprinters should be a lot more playable now, but still a crowd you don’t want to mess with. Running zombies will no longer run through the player, and their attacks will also slow you down for a more real-feeling experience. Gamepad players will now be able to sprint! Yes, through a toggling of the B button you too will be able to dash away from zeds. Your feedback on how well it works will be warmly received. A slight reduction in zed player-spotting distances, and a buff of stealth around walls and cars that weren’t giving any protection. Fixes to burnable in-car survivors, wounds that were healing too quick, corpses that were spread-eagled in too rigid a fashion, automated broadcast generating frequencies that weren’t being able to be tuned into manually and much more besides. Stuff we mentioned before, but you might not have read up on in 41.30:
A fix that should resolve intel GPU crashes we’ve been seeing since the zoom branch was merged into IWBUMS Zoom improvements that provide a clearer image on different levels of zoomed-in and zoomed-out, as well as various fixes to seams and lighting Spiffo’s Secret Special Sauce. Some small but extremely meaningful changes and tweaks to general gameplay that we’re keeping quiet on. Primarily due to our love for the dramatic, and an undercurrent of sadism. New and polished animations for: washing yourself, examining vehicles,adding/removing gas, installing and uninstalling parts/tires, multi-stage building and more. A cursor to help in blood clean-up duties. Cutaway improvements from Team Tanglewood, including a timer to stop cutaways and other visibility/hiding effects flickering. Fixes for Last Stand, foraging, fishing lines always breaking, vehicle headlights, stuck zombies, swimming pools with shorelines and our famous too-boring sandwiches. ELSEWHERE
It should be a bumper patch then, and apologies for the extra day-or-so of delay. But what else is happening in IWBUMS beta 41 dev?
Well, let’s visit MP as we know that’s the biggie. The full story on this can be found here, but the update from TEA’s MarkR follows thusly:
“I’m almost done with the new synced MP clock. This will be a big deal for PZ players, as it will give us the ability coordinate ‘characters’ on the server and on the map. It lets us say things like ‘Zombie X will be at position Y at time Z’.”
“The trick then will be that the position and rotation of Zombie X will be forced – so it’ll be ‘physically’ in-sync as well as in-sync via the maths, while the new anim system makes it look pretty and believable.”
“For things like zombies this means we can make an overall reduction of the bandwidth that goes to commands – which is essentially whenever something happens to make the zeds change their minds about the direction they’re going in. It’ll be a lot more of a matter of ‘fire and forget’ for the server, and that should reduce network traffic by an absolute boatload.”
Also this week behind the scenes we’ve been experimenting with some potential extra player character customization options that the sharper visuals granted to us by the zoom build has given us.
Meanwhile, Yuri’s work on fire continues – with any variety of effect we conjure up now playable of the animation bones of each zed/player character. So basically we can have more realistic fire-deaths. Hurrah. Video below.
#UNPAID ADVERTISEMENT
We also just wanted to flag a cool game that people might like – made by a nice man called Dan Marshall. PZ seems to attract a fair few… shall we call us gamers of a certain vintage? Wise elder statesmen (and statesladies) of the gaming community? Yeh, that’ll do it…
So, for your wise and knowing taste, allow us to suggest a look at Lair of the Clockwork God – a game full of great gags and an interesting mash-up of modern platforming and old school point-and-click. Currently riding high on some amazing steam reviews too.
Anyway, shilling over (sorry!) here’s a trailer, and bye bye till the patch release tomorrow or Monday.
This week’s island fortress from Yuri”Dr.K”. 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, 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!

When can we expect the multiplayer game to be available to everyone? I am very excited about the changes that are coming and I can not wait. 😛