Zebulon

Howdy survivors! Another crazy week for us, we’re still in a bit of a daze!
 
Just a few more days until the entire team are back together after the various international holiday periods have all come to an end, and we’re looking exceedingly forward to fixing up a few of the big issues that have come out in the wash since the MP launch. You can read more about them in last week’s blog here.
 
So the big question, now 41 is out there, and after the remaining MP issues have been fixed up, is what comes next?
 
 
Two Team Release Schedule
Going forward, now the behemoth that is Build 41 is increasingly looking to be in our rear-view mirror, we are going to structure the internal game’s development into two distinct teams (With General Arcade continuing in the meantime on improving MP, optimizing the server, increasing the player count and other MP related tech)
 
First, a little bit of a teaser!
 
 
(This is a fairly old internal video, created as a working proof-of-concept of various aspects of our NPC tech. It’s also not necessarily canonically accurate anymore. It was built to echo our earliest tech demo, but this might not be the start point we take with narrative in future, even if the characters would still be familiar.)
 
It’ll have been no surprise to anyone who read the interview in which Lemmy dropped some major Thursdoid spoilers that one of those teams is going to be focusing exclusively on NPC development from this point on. We’ll also be able to talk about it (not necessarily every Thursdoid, but certainly no longer in a vacuum), rather than work away in secret due to our ‘only discuss what’s coming next’ rule we instigated after a few instances of talking far too early about stuff.
 
Long ago we stated (informally on a forum post) our planned features for future builds, starting with hunting for build 42, and then numerous NPC builds for build 43 and onward.
 
However, many changed circumstances and much ponderings later, we’ve decided that this is not the best approach to take. First of all, its very clear that human NPCs have long been the most requested feature that is still outstanding, and the source of most of the frustration and bad feeling from those who consider the game to still be incomplete.
 
Not only this, but in slightly more selfish reasons, a big reason for not being comfortable with hunting and pets being first, is they are still NPCs and would necessarily leverage all the technology we’ve being working on for years at this point.
 
We have such amazing and peskily talented modders out there, we know fine well that as soon as we released this tech within their grasps, we would end up seeing extremely powerful NPC mods appearing, using our NPC tech heavily, before we had the pleasure of seeing this hard work paid off with our own NPCs.
 
It may be the initial build still contains hunting and wild animals, they ARE NPCs after all. It may be they drop into a subsequent build or later on in the unstable beta cycle, its not clear yet for reasons we’ll discuss in a bit. But the next BIG thing will be NPCs and we’ll have a dedicated team working toward this goal going forward.
 
However, NPCs will still, technically, be build 43. This is because we’ll be running a second dev team exclusively on a quicker, less risky yet still super cool content patch before the NPC work is complete, and then ongoing alternately between the other NPC patches to keep the content train going.
 
Behold this fancy graphic we cooked up! Now that we’ve blown up a bit we need some fancy graphical charts in our Thursdoids!
 
Hopefully the chart shows that, in very real terms, NPCs will be coming out as quickly as they can, uninterrupted, and the other builds are there to help bridge the gap. No build will ever take as long as Build 41 did, it was a practical rewrite of large portions of the game, but nontheless NPCs will take time to emerge, and we don’t want to leave the community without new content in those waits.
 
 
Build 42
There is still a lot of polish and fix work to do on 41, primarily for the MP team but also with a side-salad of bug-fixing issues in both online and solo.
 
Beyond this, however, is a much ‘smaller’ but still extremely cool update that’ll drop before NPCs, that will release during the push toward an NPC release.
 
I say ‘smaller’ only because no major functionality or new fundamental systems, and it will be more a balancing and content patch while NPC team’s work is underway. However it will still be pretty beefy in terms of what it brings to the game.
 
It will serve several important purposes:
 
1) To balance a lot of the existing mechanics, particularly in relation to traits, professions, skills and other areas of the game that have been neglected or suffered some degradation during the years of development since they were introduced. Balancing traits and professions, medical system, and other stuff where it comes down to essentially tweaking numbers to make more builds viable or close up ‘free points’ exploits in character creation. Loot balancing and anything else that’s an easy balance but will help improve the game also fits in here.
 
2) To begin the expansion of the ‘tech tree’ of the game significantly to provide a more rich end-game experience. While until NPCs exist, some of this may be slightly less impactful on single player (though we’re sure will still add a lot of potential), it will significantly improve the MP experience by servers being less pressured to wipe or have loot respawning, providing players and communities ability to create more items that at present can only be obtained through looting.
 
While we may not hit this spot in our first build, our ultimate goal is to provide significantly extra crafting potential to allow players to effectively create a post-apocalypse nu medieval community, to provide plausable alternatives to any of the lootable items in the game that would logically be plausable with the correct skills and resources so players don’t feel pressured to restart the early game repeatedly to get long term fun out of the game. Want to be the person who makes clothes and sells them to a neighbouring settlement? Build brick walls and create something that resembles an actual house? Maybe even build a windmill? Who knows.
 
These are all examples of things we could do here, and may not all appear in Build 42, but hopefully our intended direction is clear. Ultimately to build up to the point that Alexandria / Hilltop / Kingdom style communities can form years after the apocalypse, giving more incentive to keep playing and building on existing worlds instead of intentionally replaying the early game because there is no real late game.
All this would be a time sink and require a group effort and wouldn’t be compulsory for those who prefer to just die repeatedly in the early apocalypse days, but the hope is to allow for a much greater level of community building, and facilitate trade and potentially years of stories and rich history from within a single world, be it NPC populated or an MP server, spanning numerous player lives (so it can still be the story of how you died).
 
These professions and expanded tech trees would be heavily gated and require specialization, often in case of the more complex crafting paths requiring pre-apocalypse skills that while it’s possible, are extremely difficult to attain to high levels after the apocalypse without a character specced toward them. We long ago ‘nerfed’ a metalworking system that was added to the game due to the implausibility of some random survivor crafting spoons and katanas in the apocalypse, however we’ll be expanding this again to include better items available through sufficient mastery and enough plausibility with the character build.
 
We’ll increase the amount of recipes that’ll be unlockable within the world through books, magazines or VHSs, and try and accurately model more advanced and multi-tier crafting professions to allow survivor communities to thrive and provide much more diverse activities for players who like to stay in the safehouses.
 
Finally, and vitally, we’ll be introducing the concept of ‘crafting surfaces’ to further restrict where some crafting recipes can be used. Some more complex recipes will require specific tables or equipment, some will just require a table or surface of any kind, while others can be carried out in your hands with no surface at all.
 
This will add an extra level to the crafting, as making a place suitable for crafting the more complex multi-stage recipes, and potentially upgrading your crafting station and equipment, would become a more fulfilling experience than standing in the field and being able to make a stir fry.
 
We have many and varied other things we want to inject into the game also – we’re currently working on seated / reclining characters for example, and also want to expand on in-game events and tie them to the map. We also need to do some work to improve guns, and PvP, at some point. It’s not clear when smaller features will start appearing, however, so will report on them in blogs as the year progresses.
 
 
Build 43
Worked on concurrently to the balancing and crafting update, as well as discussed and shown within our blogs going forward, will be the first version of NPCs. We’re still deciding what should, could and would be present in the first NPC build. It could include autonomous NPCs that the player can group with, it could primarily include the reintroduction of the story mode, it could have NPC animals, or that could come later.
We really need to look at what we have, and what’s feasible to deliver in a reasonable amount of time, as well as what we could release as a first build and not have people who’ve waited years for them to appear be disappointed. There’s a lot of plates to spin, decisions to make that require more brain power than we’ve had to spare during B41’s development, so we’re going to take some more time to discuss what would make the most satisfying and manageable first build, and take a stock check of what we have.
 
We’ve got a LOT of NPC code, lots of cool systems, from Rimworld style priority and jobs system, personality systems, procedural story event systems, combat systems, autonomous survival behaviours, advanced group behaviour systems, vehicle driving systems, and a whole bunch more. While nothing could be described as 100% complete, the vast majority of the hard work has been done, is functional and is extremely cool.
 
But B41 has taken a huge amount of our time and resources, and also taken some elements of the PZ workings in a different direction to things our NPCs were using, and so they need some time to be reintroduced to the most current build and made MP compatible. And when we do that, we’ll be moving stuff over in stages to release, rather than try and get everything functional and release ready at once.
A good analogy is we’ve got two rooms, one full to the ceiling of extremely cool and complex circuit boards and wires that we’ve spent years making, one room is empty.
 
Trying to tidy and assemble everything in the first room will be a nightmare. So we’ll start moving bits into a new room, setting them up, plugging them in together, and making something cool out of them to release. After release we’ll continue bringing in more pieces and attaching them, and so on for perhaps 2 or 3 builds until the first room is empty and our vision of NPCs is complete. It doesn’t mean that’s all we have, far from it, just sorting that entire packed room out would take too long and we want to finally start pushing NPC content out as soon as possible.
 
We also have some big plans for a gun mechanics rework at some point, to provide a more solid gunplay experience that will make guns not only more interesting to use, require more a player skill element, but also make PVP encounters a lot more interesting for those who enjoy that kind of thing, as our PVP component is still one of the more lacking elements of our multiplayer experience. But for now we are not committing to where this will thread into the release schedule.
 
The process of moving stuff over will take some time, and so we may be quiet for a couple of Thursdoids until we start getting stuff moving in the current build. As soon as we are though, we’ll be talking about the ongoing NPC development, alongside the concurrent crafting and balance patch, until they drop. Exciting times!
 
It shouldn’t go unsaid, however, that if a big new feature is not ready then it’s not in our DNA to push it out of the door uncooked. We’re confident that this will be a great year for PZ, and feel we can keep the content pipe flowing, but also won’t be abandoning our accustomed position as the tortoise in the ‘tortoise vs. hare’ race which appears to now be paying dividends for both game and community.
 
 
Much love,
 
TIS x

A short Thursdoid this week, and we’ll return to our normal larger update blogs from next week in our first 2022 blog! Where we’ll discuss where we’re going after build 41 has been finished off!
 
First of all, wow.
 
We’ve put a huge amount of work and time into this game, and while we always considered ourselves lucky to be able to sell more copies than a lot of indies who struggle to get their game noticed in the extremely competitive indie game dev scene, we never quite imagined we’d manage to break out in the way we have this past month.
 
It’s thanks to the tireless devs in our team who have worked on this game for years and made the game what it is through passion and blood and sweat, the support team who’ve had to try and get all our new players into the game when they have issues–despite this massive surge happening throughout the holidays, the community that have supported us the whole time through this journey and understood what we were trying to do, the incredible modding community who have expanded the game in so many ways and made diving into Zomboid many orders of magnitude more interesting, and it’s thanks to the content creators that have grown up alongside us, who’ve dedicated hundreds of hours of their content to Zomboid to introduce and entertain new players looking to dive in, and we’re overjoyed to see them get extra exposure as the game’s been thrust into many people’s line of sight.
 
There are so many links in the chain that led us to where we are, and we wish you all a happy new year and thank everyone for coming on this ride with us!
 
 
Build 41.66 plans
 
A few updates on our plans for the next patch for Build 41, which will be appearing in the new year!
 
VOIP has experienced numerous issues which we are keen to solve in our next patch, firstly the voip is adding a significant amount of additional traffic to servers which decrease performance not insignificantly, especially when larger groups are together. In addition, we’re experiencing some rather annoying peaking and clipping when some users start talking which is rather annoying to listen to. We hope to have a solution to this in the next build. We’ve implemented a queuing system to the server joining process. This accomplishes several things: Allows more than 32 players to queue to join a server, and will maintain a queue number that will decrease until they load into the game. This will allow those looking for entry into popular servers a way to start the joining process and allow them to browse the net, watch the Youtubes or play other games while they wait for connection. Forces players to load in one at a time, so as not to cause the server severe lag from numerous players joining at once and requesting large clumps of map chunks to be sent their way. Allows for whitelisted players to be flagged as priority irrespective of their admin status, which will let them jump the queue to get in if they have say VIP status for helping fund a server, or are content creators on their own community servers. Other big issues we’re seeing reported are item duplication bugs, something we’ll be looking to resolve before release. Also we’re keen to look into ways to make dealing with updating workshop mods a lot easier, both in terms of mods updating and causing connection issues for clients as the server hasn’t updated yet (which admittedly is a very very difficult issue to see how we can improve), improving the system for detecting changes and getting rid of any lingering ‘workshop mismatch’ errors that are not related to a server not being updated. Also, an incident recently involving a mod update breaking saves makes us realise we may need to do more to safeguard saves from mods removing item definitions.  
There are likely countless other fixes that we have in the pipe, so if you don’t see your own particular issue listed here, it doesn’t mean we’re not aware of it or have a priority to fix it, more that this blog writer forgot about them! We’ll discuss more in the new year in the run up to the patch, which will likely be put into a public unstable branch first to ensure there are no issues that could cause problems for servers who do not wish to test the fixes.
 
A reminder to those operating public servers, that we cannot guarantee you won’t be hit by very destructive hackers or griefers, and its vitally important that if you’re willing to take the risk with public servers, then you practice frequent server back ups. In fact we’d recommend even white listed or private servers to consider server backups with some regularity, as its always possible a mod update or a game update could cause you problems.
 
As always, we suggest and recommend only whitelisted servers and running a public server is done at your own risk. If you want to be secure from hackers, it’s also not currently a good idea to display your server IP publicly or advertise its presence on the server list.
 
While we’ll constantly look to increase the security of the multiplayer, it was not the primary priority compared to providing a solid co-op experience during the long development, we’ll try and shore up any vulnerabilities in the packet security in the next build, but It will take some considerable time before we can implement solid anti-cheat measures given the open nature of our game’s architecture.
 
Sorry if this blog is a little short and perhaps we’ve forgotten some huge thing we were going to mention. Forgive us if our patch has to wait until the new year, and we’re a little more absent than we should be due to the holidays. The international team will be back up to full speed next week, with the Russian devs who’ve been hard at work over Xmas fixing up and adding stuff, who will be taking their holidays in early January.
 
Thanks for everything!
 
TIS

That's fine, 30K others do, and give more valuable criticisms while they're at it.

It felt like the day would never come, but we’re really happy and proud to announce that Build 41 has been released to stable!
 
If you’ve been out of the loop on the beta, a good place to start would be our new trailer to celebrate the release and show those new to Zomboid what’s in store for them:
 
 
This build marks a huge step for us, the graphics, gameplay, audio and netcode being significantly remastered and radically improved, Build 41 feels more a sequel than a patch update. As well as a huge map update, new mechanics and systems, its by far our biggest update yet.
 
Under normal circumstances, we may have done a little more polish and fixing before releasing to stable, but the truth is next to no one are playing Build 40 now, apart from those that didn’t know of the beta branch. It’s presence if anything has been damaging to Project Zomboid’s first impressions and we were only waiting for multiplayer to drop in a somewhat stable fashion to allow us to move on, as we feel strongly that Build 41 even with the remaining bugs and issues that need weeding out, casts a far superior first impression for new players.
 
Build 40 will forever live on in a branch, access the beta branch “legacy40 – Classic Zomboid” at any point to continue playing, or if your specs aren’t capable of running build 41 comfortably.
 
So what’s new in this build?
 
Massive animation and character overhaul, more immersive animations and smoother gameplay and combat, highly customizable character that shows clothing and equipment in the world. Visibly ripped and damaged clothing. Visible Backpacks and Bags. In-game map system to allow the player to chart their exploration and find their way around the huge map. New animations and new movement systems. Sneaking, sprinting, jogging, racking, reloading, climbing, fence-jumping, collapsing and much much more. New multiplayer built from the ground up for smooth, immersive and low latency player and zombie movement. New combat, new weapons, new difficulty balance. New tutorial teaching you the very basics of the new movement and combat. New character creation – many, many different new clothing options both on spawn and discoverable in the world as loot or on zombies. New city to explore, the gargantuan Louisville, as well as many improvements across the entire map, including new buildings, decoration, and curved roads for easier driving. New zombie behaviour: feasting on recent corpses, lolling against walls, falling over fences etc. Blood and dirt 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 target outline while aiming, increased gun loot spawn. Randomized environmental storytelling elements. Death Scenes, zombies discovered in the situations in which people died. Prayer meetings, sports-viewing parties, survivor zeds wearing backpacks etc, vehicle crashes and blockades. 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. New Sims-style cutaway vision system. Vehicle handling improvements, resizing and appearance tweaks. Updated, remastered and expanded Kentucky-themed soundtrack. Complete soundscape overhaul – All new sounds, building a more immersive and compelling sonic landscape. Items now have placeable 3D models in the world, for all your decorative needs. New Gameplay Styles
Apocalypse: Stealth focus. Short lifespan. Combat best avoided and picked selectively.
Survivor: Powerful combat. Longer Lifespan. A challenging playstyle based on PZ’s previous Survival mode of Build 40.
Builder: Construction, Exploration, and Farming focus. A more relaxed experience. New Challenges
Kingsmouth – A separate challenge map, Kingsmouth puts you on a paradise island vacation resort.
Studio – Try to survive as the Knox Infection hits the dream factory. Some of these zombies are not like the others. Entirely new foraging system. New inventory slots – belts and holsters now give quick equip slots. Weapons can be attached to the character’s back. New thermal / body temperature system. New Tailoring system for clothing repairs. New Fitness / Exercise system. New emote system – Hold Q to bring up the Radial Menu for Emotes. New water visuals – including visible flow direction. New puddle system during heavy rain. New fog visuals. New levelling system. New VHS, and CDs system. Broken glass and related injuries. 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 radial menu for reloading firearms. New game cursor 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. Isometric aiming cursor that shows where you’re aiming in iso space to aid in combat. A gigantic list of fixes and QoL improvements.  
 
Thank you
A huge thanks everyone for the wonderful experience we’ve had since releasing multiplayer, seeing such a wave of positivity has been wild and made this long journey for this build more than worth it! Seeing the player numbers dwarf our previous record has been crazy:
 

 
We’re over the moon over the success the multiplayer has seen and we vow to continue and expand on that.
 
We’re so proud of everyone on our team, we know we wouldn’t be here today if we didn’t have such dedicated devs working on all these features, often under intense external pressure, and the support team for helping us keep the sometimes chaotic wheels spinning. Every one of them is wonderful and deserving of all our thanks.
 
Finally, a huge specific thank you to General Arcade, in particular Yuri and Andrei who have put such amazing work into bringing a quality to Zomboid’s multiplayer we simply would never have (and indeed, hadn’t) achieved without them. They’ve put huge amounts of work into this, and we’re thankful to them for helping Zomboid multiplayer come to the vision we had for it.
 
That’s all for this update. See you all after the new year where we’ll talk about what comes next!

4 updates fixing stuff like mods not updating, an exploit allowing players to teleport around the map, allowing 32 players etc. That we haven't fixed a loot problem with one set of containers on one part of the map, do you think there's like 500 of us or something? This is the first I'm even hearing of it please give us a chance. We only have a finite amount of people and time. 

With the release of 41.61 we've increased server player limit to 32.
WARNING: THIS IS FOR TEST PURPOSES.
We can't guarantee a smooth experience but would like to hear people's feedback on server performance.
VOIP is still recommended to be disabled for now.
 
To be safe, it is recommended to back up your server saves. 
We will always try to retain save compatibility, but in these early stages we cannot rule out possible save breakage.

41.60 will be available on the "legacy41_60" branch for those who need it
 
41.61
MP
 
Increased server player limit to 32. WARNING: THIS IS FOR TEST PURPOSES. We can't guarantee a smooth experience but would like to hear people's feedback on server performance. Optimized server packet handling. Should have significant impact on player, zombie and vehicle syncing, removing potentially 100ms of latency on top of player ping. Fixed looping VehicleHotwireStart. Call stopOrTriggerSound() so the StopSound packet is sent to stop the sound on other clients. Fixed clients sending cooking sounds to other clients. Fixed server sometimes setting ownership for a zombie that was far away from the player Add packet type parameter to server receive methods Resend PlayerUpdateReliable packet to all clients Added missing lwjgl-natives-windows-x86.jar to Build.bat for the 32-bit Windows server. Added chopper command start/stop optional arguments Fixed debug logging remaining enabled by default Fixed clients seeing UI_ServerStatus_Initialising. UI_ServerStatus_xxx messages were sent before the server loaded translation files. These are now sent untranslated from the coop server so they can be translated on the client. Added "PlayerBumpPlayer" server option. Default set to false. When set to true, players will be and bump other players when running into them. Fixed MP debug stats showing in SP. Set HitReactionNetwork sync angle for zombie in MP Debug only option for zombie quick spawn Fixed Linux start-server.sh. Fixed the Linux 64-bit server using G1GC instead of ZGC garbage collector. Use the ZGC garbage collector when starting 64-bit coop servers, otherwise use G1GC. Also pass -Djava.awt.headless=true and -XX:-OmitStackTraceInFastThrow. Parse the client's JVM arguments to see if -XX:+UseG1GC or -XX:+UseZGC is used, and pass that to the coop server. This is to handle older 64-bit Windows not supporting ZGC. Fixed vehicle stories not spawning in multiplayer. Clarified the "map_t.bin does not exist, cannot determine the server's WorldVersion." console message as being ok the first time a server is started, when map_t.bin hasn't been created yet. Fixed radio broadcasts being reset on the server each restart.  
 
FORAGING / SEARCH SYSTEM
 
Added Foraging info panel. Added checking obsolete status when importing and removed some obsolete items Fixed spot item method - now only triggers once per spot event Exit search mode after a few moments of running/sprinting Exit search mode under basic combat conditions (3 or more zombies visible + chasing) Fixed single context menu compatibility and added multi pickup option for player inventory Discard action is now instant and doesn't require player to walk over to item Added IsoMarker rendering for forage icons Changed bonus abundance settings to percentages and tweaked loot abundance Added two step icon loading for performance Added a haloNote + xp reward for spotting forage icons Added moving of icons close to the player if they've been searching the area too long without finding anything Fixed mod data being initialised too early Added re-init missing forageData + debug message for missing data Restore updating of perkLevel for overlay radius in SearchManager Increased delay for re-positioning items and ensure it does not reposition previously noticed items Adjusted rare item and junk spawn rates Adjusted delay for repositioning items for high level characters Added slight eye flash when moving an icon close Translated SearchMode debug menu Moved forageSystem events to LuaEventManager Added sprite affinities for forage icons (more likely to find sticks on sticks, etc.) Improved ISSearchManager:checkIcons() handling of icon activation/deactivation Increased deferred update and world scanner rates in ISSearchManager Removed noise from SearchMode shader Fixed some typos and tidied up forage definitions Added some randomness to the force-a-find system Added resetting of force find if the player begins to spot something Added disabling Search Mode when time is fast forwarded Added an Accessibility menu option to change the Search Mode overlay effect Removed some unused properties in forageSystem Added itemSizeModifier - adds bonus/malus weight for vision radius checks Added bonus vision radius for berry bushes, fruit trees, plants  

IN-GAME MAP
 
Added "All Known On Start" sandbox option for the in-game map. When enabled, the entire world is marked "known" but "unvisited".  

FIXES
 
Fixed car crashes causing multiple hits in quick succession. Fixed in-game map rendering bug at vertical resolution 1155 or higher. Fixed wrong zombies outfit spawning. Fixed the "Move To" inventory context-menu options always being disabled when using a controller. Fixed equipped keyrings not being displayed as options in the "Move To" menu when using a controller. Rebuilt Linux PZBullet libraries on Docker to use an older glibc. Renamed CannedPineapplesOpen to CannedPineappleOpen to fix missing recipe result. Fixed an error starting a server when attempting to host a game on MacOS. Fixed JaysChickenHat not rendering properly Fixed skin poking through Trousers_LeatherBlack Fixed Trousers_Shellsuit_White not been tinted Fixed Trousers_Police mask Fixed Hockey Mask not rendering properly Fixed Shellsuit Jackets not rendering properly with undergarments Fixed Leather Jackets not rendering properly with undergarments Fixed grapefruit being too heavy  
 
 
____________________________________________
41.60
 
MP
 
Multiplayer Released. Capped to 16 player servers. Local chat supports icons and colours. See here for more info: https://projectzomboid.com/chat_colours.txt  

NEW
 
Added various new items, clothes, and recipes. Add a progress bar to "Wash Vehicle" action. Added displaying the item context menu when right-clicking on container buttons in the inventory window. Added 2 missing zombie-crawler animations. Equipped items are now unequipped or removed from the hotbar before dropping them. Items in the player's hands are dropped without unequipping them first. Added a progress bar to "Wash Vehicle" action. Improved Item Categories. Added back option for clock display size  Added Item.getEatType() method. Implemented rotation of vehicle passengers. This is for mods where passengers aren't hidden, allowing passengers to face different directions.  Allow character to take 1 item of the pile when selecting option "Place item" directly from container. Updated Distributions Tweaked water shader to get rid of some artifacts, water has a slightly more green tint, increased ripple effect, added extra iteration to medium to get rid of obvious tiling. Added sandbox options to unlock all clothing slots and items in the character creation screen.  
 
LOUISVILLE AND OVERALL GAMEWORLD
 
- Louisville added
    - Venture into the massive city by following the highway up north from West Point and through Valley Station (North East of the map).
    - Added Radio obfuscation inside of the Louisville zone for the following vanilla frequencies:
        LBMW - 93.2, NNR - 98.0, KnoxTalk - 101.2, Triple N - cable 200, WBLN - cable 201, Turbo - cable 204
        - Applies a 85% scramble on transmitted lines once player enters or starts in the zone, scrambling persists afterwards when leaving zone.
        - Scramble line greyed out color has slight red tint to distinguish from storm interference.
        - When a line gets scrambled radio codes (for skill gain etc) are removed.
        - Added the above to regular weather interference as well.
- Curved Roads placed on many crucial corners in the road network, for safer driving.
- Plenty of minor map additions, landscaping, and polish added to all towns and outskirts.
 
 
FORAGING / SEARCH SYSTEM
 
- New Foraging / Search System
    - Click the magnifying glass icon on the left side of the UI.
        - The "Investigate Area" window will show you the type of zone you are in, which affects the loot you can find.
        - If it has "?????" showing, there is nothing around to find. This is temporary until more foraging/search zones are added to the map.
    - To start searching, click the "Enable Search Mode" Button in the "Investigate Area" window. The character will start looking for items while you walk around.
    - An eye icon will appear overhead when your character spots something. Double click the item icon to pick it up.
        Keep looking around until the eye is completely visible and the icon for the item will appear.
    - Running will make it harder to find items
    - Looking around (by aiming) will increase the vision radius to help spot hard to locate items.
    - Darkness, weather, and negative character moodles (stress, injuries, etc) will affect the chance to find something
    
 
IN-GAME MAP
 
- New In-game Map System
      - Click the Map icon on the left side of the UI.
            - The map will be filled out around your character as you explore the world.
              - Writing utensils will let you make notes and draw on the map. 
              - The Grid Icon in the bottom right switches between isometric and top-down view.
               - The C Button centers the view back on your current location.
               - The S Button toggles the Map Symbols UI element.
               - The X Button closes the map.
               - Added an option to the in-game map radial menu that sets the controller focus to the minimap to allow zooming in/out etc.
               - On Controllers, pressing the Y button (xbox) accesses the four buttons on the bottom-right of the world map.
    - There are Sandbox Option for solo players and server admins to toggle the World Map system, as well as a Mini-Map system.
    - When enabled, the Mini-Map system will be shown in the bottom right. 
        - With the mouse over the minimap, scrolling with the mousewheel will zoom in and out (Plus and Minus buttons below the map will also do this).
        -Left Clicking on the Mini-Map or the "M" Button below the Mini-Map will open up the world map.
        - When the Mini-Map was closed via the "X" Button below the map, it can be re-opened by hovering over the Map Icon on the left side of the UI and clicking the second Map icon that appears on mouseover.
    - Finding Maps for towns as well as annotated maps will add the relevant area to your World Map, along with annotations.
 

BALANCE
 
Increased Log fuel time to six hours. Allow curtains to be added to window frames without windows. Allow two curtains to be added on different edges of the same square. When trying to add an item that needs to be cooked in an evolved recipe, it'll now display "need to be cooked" instead of purely removing the item from possible items in the recipe. Allow zombies to thump certain objects that have been moved by the player. This includes Barbecue, Clothing Dryer, Clothing Washer, Radio, Television, Jukebox, Microwave and Stove. Reduced SoundRadius for firearms. This was in part for MP testing optimisation and is subject to change.  

NOISEWORKS AND SOUNDS
 
Updated sounds for lots of melee weapons, like Guitars, Drumsticks, small stab weapons, hammers,  and more. New spear sounds, although we need a way to differentiate between slashing/stabbing. So far only the slashing sounds play for both anims.  Added additional rain layers for vehicles and trees. If a player is next to them, rain hitting vehicles and/or trees will be audible. Added farming-related sounds for plowing, seeding, watering, and harvesting. Added evolvedrecipe.AddIngredientSound script property so "Prepare Beverage" can play a different sound than the default chopping one. Currently it plays AddItemInBeverage, which is the same as the default chopping one. Play ZombieThumpMetal for zombies thumping metal doors, instead of ZombieThumpGeneric. This includes single-tile metal doors, as well as garage doors and metal gates. Occlusion/Volume fix for generators. Reduced occurrences of big mammal sounds. Tweaked the bird scatter sound after firing a weapon to occur less often.  

FIXES
 
Fixed the player's movement keys sometimes being ignored after getting bumped by a zombie. Fixed holding down the Shift key while standing still resulting in the player getting knocked forward by a zombie. Fixed issues with hitting crawling zombies while they are still on their back, or in the first half of their flip-onto-front animation. Fixed a magazine not being removed from the player's hands after it is loaded into a firearm. Fixed a Lua error in ISFertilizeAction:perform() after a previous action used all of a fertilizer bag. Fixed missing braces in RecipeManager affecting recipes with AllowDestroyedItem=true. Fixed warning about undefined OnWorldSound Lua event. Fixed ISPlace3DItemCursor error on the server caused by accessing TextManager fonts. The whole lua/server/BuildingObjects directory belongs on the client. Fixed the player passing through walls when climbing over a wall during fast-forward. Fixed Lua error in ISVehicleMechanics when a part has no install.items or uninstall.items. Fixed Lua error after left-clicking on the Device Properties media icon, or after dropping an invalid item onto it. Fixed media items not being removed from the player's hand after inserting an item into a CD player or TV. Fixed the Device Properties "Play" button being enabled when there is no media inserted. Fixed a Lua error when removing grass from a square with a fire on it. Fixed double doors losing their assigned key ID when opened.  I'm not sure if these can be locked. Fixed locked carpentry doors being opened by zombies with the Cognition sandbox option. Fixed locked carpentry doors not shaking when attempting to open them. Fixed being unable to open locked carpentry doors from inside a player-made room (without a key). Fixed missing context-menu options to the "[Debug] Object" submenu to lock/unlock carpentry doors, and set the key ID of any door. Fixed another crawler-flipping-on-front animation instance. Fixed zombie voices often playing the sound for the opposite sex. Fixed possible crash with mods in RVSChangingTire. Fixed spiked / pick axe handle not being equippable as 2-handed weapon. Fixed "build floor" anim playing when player builds shelves. Fixed disassembling/Building furniture being possible while character is in another room/floor. Fixed Sack icon disappearing from inventory's equipped containers bar after it is filled and clicked on. Fixed being unable to drop equipped items via the context menu. (This was already possible by clicking the small "Drop" button in the inventory window, but only "Unequip" was displayed in the menu.) Fixed Spiked / Pick axe handle not being equippable as 2-handed weapon. Fixed playing wrong animation when building shelves. Fixed disassembling/building furniture often being possible while character is in another room/floor. Fixed Sack icon disappearing from inventory's equipped containers bar after it is filled and clicked on. Fixed the Overweight trait not having a Fitness -1 penalty. Fixed the read-a-book action cancelling any subsequent actions that are queued. Fixed hotbar-related animations finishing before the timed actions, when the player has high unhappiness. Fixed a Lua error when disassembling stairs. Fixed being unable to climb up and over a fence at the top of a sheet rope. Fixed electronic scrap not being consumed from backpacks (fixing generators) Fixed vehicle parts being damaged even though the mechanical skill requirement is met. Fixed Pipe Wrench not being usable for plumbing. Fixed water dispenser providing an infinite amount of water when placed over a river/lake. Fixed lit candle not being extinguished after it was unequipped. Fixed “Take fuel” option becoming available everywhere in context menu after connecting a generator to a gas station. Fixed a memory leak with font Texture objects. Fixed a memory leak with ScriptModule objects after reloading Lua/etc. Fixed garbage creation in IsoPuddlesCompute (38 Vector3f and 1 Vector2f per call). Exit IsoPuddlesCompute.computePuddle() early when there are no puddles on the ground (IsoPuddles.getPuddlesSize() == 0). Fixed a multithreading bug in IsoPuddlesCompute.computePuddle() accessing IsoPuddles.getShaderOffset(). Fixed old entries in zombieszonedefinition (fix for zombies spawning with random outfits sometimes). Fixed zombies trying to walk through fences with sandbags placed in front of them. Made the military sandbag blocks solid. Fixed using wrong container icon for Military Crate. Fixed not being able to open and close curtains on military tents. Turned sync-tracking off for the shove and stomp animations. This should fix the animations not starting from the beginning sometimes. Fixed incorrect "require" statements in Foraging Lua files. Fixed unused Object/WoodGate/Break FMOD event. Fixed duplicate CDplayer in models_items.txt. Fixed the propane bbq turning into a microwave when rotated. Fixed Bait disappearing from inventory when removing bait from trap. Fixed: When creating another character in the same world after the first one died, renaming the character does not work. The character will carry the randomly generated name for the character instead. Fixed Sack icon disappearing - Adds tooltips for "Can be used as a container if empty." to filled sandbag type items Only show the Place Item submenu for items outside the player main inventory Fixed not being able to translate coughs and sneezing. Fixed Disassembling/Building furniture often being possible while character was in another room/floor Fixed lights from fires sometimes remaining after a fire is removed. Removed IsoFireManager.NumActiveFires, since it should always equal IsoFireManager.FireStack.size(). Fixed IsoFireManager.RemoveAllOn() decrementing IsoFireManager.NumActiveFires twice. This is called when the player extinguishes a fire. Made recipe.AllowDestroyedItem and recipe.NoBrokenItems script properties both set the same Recipe member variable. Moved some ingredient-valid checks from RecipeManager.HasAllRequiredItems() into RMRecipeItemList.getItemsFrom(). Fixed a bug with clothing where zombies could rip your clothes in one attack. Fixed duplicating world item by grabbing it after another player picks it up Fixed weapons floating after being dropped when the player dies. Fixed clothes lines blocking movement. Fixed not being able to click on the debug-options button in the world map. Fixed auto-zoom staying zoomed in when sprinting (but not when running). Fixed dragged inventory items sometimes not being rendered until the mouse re-enters the inventory or loot window the items were dragged from. Fixed: Dragging square around inventory items shouldn't fail if mouse goes outside window before mouse up Fixed: Clear dragging marquis state if mouse was released over an element which consumes the event (e.g. the moveables panel) Stop rendering marquis immediately on clearing marquis state Fixed other clients hearing VehicleHotwireStart sound looping for other players. Fixed clients sending cooking sounds to other clients. Fixed "Open Sack of Tomatoes" recipe using an undefined Lua function.

Straight in with the MP update this week.
 
As stated in the last Thursdoid, we feel we’re on the home stretch now and are still confident in our December (or at worst January, after Russian New Year and Christmas, if we get uncomfortably close to the holidays) estimate.
 
Though truth be told, the day we were pushing to have a release candidate ready for was Dec 1st – and clearly that didn’t happen. The additional issue with black boxing (which wasn’t discovered and within the schedule to a Dec 1st release) took up a good chunk of the MP team’s time to diagnose and repair, so the presence of looming holidays marching toward us is ever-present.
 
It’ll basically come down to how quickly the last serious issues get squashed as to whether we’ll make it before Xmas. We still very much want it, and will tirelessly push toward getting it out during early December, until the proximity to the holidays no longer feels safe to release in terms of pumping out the required hot-fixes while team members are away.
 
Many of you have probably seen that we gave MrAtomicDuck permission to make a video based on his experiences in our latest MP test session, we said that we wanted to hear his honest opinions and were extremely happy to see what a positive experience he had.
 
 
As highlighted in his video, and in our previous Thursdoid, the main release-blocker at this point is vehicles, whose rubber-banding and physics bugs are severe enough that we’d not be comfortable releasing until they are fixed. Put simply: they are frequently an instant death trap and this clearly isn’t something that could be present in a release candidate build. As such, the MP team are hard at work improving these as we speak.
 
Several other issues discussed last week are fixed, VOIP is now crystal clear (however we’re still investigating to make sure VOIP doesn’t have any adverse effect on network performance), black boxing and excessive rubberbanding and lag experienced by a select few of our testers seems to have similarly been dealt with.
 
So outside the vehicle issues described, our next priority pre-release is dealing with issues with zombies not responding to guns, helicopters, alarms etc.
 
Eagle eyed viewers of Duck’s video may have noticed that the gunfire wasn’t attracting the hordes one would expect. At some point in the restructuring how zombies work to eliminate lag bites etc and provide smooth movement to clients, their ability to reliably hear all sounds in the world has been broken.
 
This will be a top priority along with vehicle fixes, and the doctor zombie convention that seemed to have been taking place at the hospital.
 
ZOMBIE SYNC
We thought we’d respond to the main reoccurring piece of negative feedback we read after Duck’s video, which was otherwise overwhelmingly positive.
 
The main piece of negative feedback we read, that cropped up several times, related to instances where a certain broom-wielding maniac was fighting zombies and visually it looked a bit odd. The choice of using a one-handed broom while simultaneously wielding amped-up admin powers, and maybe a slightly higher ping, probably exacerbated this!
 
However, it highlighted that the combat between other remote players and zombies can sometimes have sync issues. In crowded scenes like these, especially, characters seem too far from zombies when they kill them, and zombies sometimes fall in the wrong direction.
We certainly intend to improve this going forward – possibly prior to release, but much more likely afterward. However, there is only so far we will be able to push it.
 
Our biggest priority with making solid multiplayer was to prioritize interactions between the local player and zombies that are targeting them, so that lagging zombies leading to an unfair bite are an impossibility.
 
This to our mind, in a game where a single zombie bite can end a character you’ve pumped many hours into in an instant, was our biggest priority at the expense of all else.
 
As such, the way zombie positions are calculated (which will always differ between clients due to unavoidable latency of different geographic locations) is handled in a way to ensure that when a zombie is chasing the local player, then that local player will treat the zombie as if it were a single player zombie. This, then, has the side effect of essentially doubling the latency and delay on syncing that zombie’s position with the other players who are NOT being chased by that zombie.
 
As such, zombies chasing someone else will always be a little bit out. We have a lot of code in to predict zed movement, and we do mask this inconsistency as much as possible, but it will always be a present issue.
 
There are, however, various other ways we can look into improving these visuals in future: finding ways to speed up message transmission and server tick rate to help sync them further, and better predicting their movements between clients.
 
However, it’s unlikely this will ever be perfect when dealing with potentially hundreds of zombies being witnessed by numerous clients at the same time. In other games with high enemy counts, it’s rare that a single enemy can instantly kill you, so other games generally have more leeway available to them than we do.
 
On the up side, as it stands, combat with zombies by the player themselves will suffer zero latency, and will be completely indistinguishable from single player combat.
 
The price paid for that is sometimes companions you can see fighting other zombies (especially those who have larger pings) may not appear to connect fully with zombies they are fighting or the zombie they hit may slide a bit as they die or change target.
 
We think that’s a good price to pay for what it brings to the individual player’s combat, and further when you’re more likely playing on a more local server (unlike our testers connecting from all around the world onto a server based out of Paris) we don’t think these issues will get in the way too often for the majority of players.
 
As ever, also, it’s an evolving process that we will continue to work on both in the run-up to release – and as each new patch and build is released beyond it.
 
To end with, a few more vids taken by the internal test team – one of which very much underlines why we need to get the vehicles physics fixed up.
 

 



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

Skill issue

Added Noiseworks Sound Revamp - Stage #1
Stage #2 is going to introduce a wider range for zombie voice sets as well as further improvements to the music and ambiance systems. Melee weapon SFX - currently mostly based on material rather than the weapon in question - will also get more specific to the weapons themselves; same goes for firearms. 
 
Added VHS, CDs etc.
- Added functionality and data for for Disks and Tapes. Data is stored in 'recorded_media.lua'.
- Media line effects will apply only once per player upon first time listening.
- Home VHS's spawn uniquely.
- Retail CD and VHS can have 'common', 'rare', 'very rare' spawn chance.
- Added learnRecipe method to gamecharacter. Adds the ability to learn recipes via the radio line codes.
- Added new translation file 'recorded_media_EN.txt'
    - This translation set keeps a translation of the english versions which can be retrieved seperatly.
    (needed for LCD which only supports basic ASCII chars)
- Added event 'OnInitRecordedMedia' to setup any recorded media data, see ISRecordedMedia.lua for modding.
- Added new Media UI section to device control panel.
- Added UI popup for disc's and tapes, some of them can show backcase info via the rightclick context menu.
- Removed item 'CDplayer' and added 'Radio.CDplayer' a portable device able to play CD's.
- Added ability to play media, RadioRed = CD, Black/Wide television = Tapes
- Changed display of overhead notifications for skills etc
    - Softer pastel colors and outlining, red for negative green for positive effect
    - Replaced skill/stat effect numbers by arrow up or down
- Small overhead text for skills and stats are no longer being displayed if there is no effect on their value.
- Removed overhead text code from ISRadioInteractions
- Added static class HaloTextHelper.java for more universal use of the overhead text.
- Added a few functions to add text, options for color and usage of the indicator arrows.
- If a text is already being displayed the next text is briefly queued.
- If multiple text are being added on same tick or while queueing they are combined and seperated with a grey ','.
- If a text is added which is already being displayed, it's discarded.
 
- Added world lights for flashing vehicle lights.
- Added animated flies texture displayed where corpse-flies are buzzing.
- Added new mugs
- Display read books in the character info panel ("Training Material"). This might move to the Crafting UI later on.
- Added highlighting to dragged items that can't be moved to the destination container.
- Added a loot-window container icon for mannequins as well as the container title "Mannequin".
- Added a context-menu command to empty a rain collector barrel onto the ground so it can be moved.
- Added a history of the last three catches to the Fishing menu. They will not fade out anymore. 
- Added the option to select a dedicated container for catches in the Fishing Menu. All catches will go to this container until full.
- Heart UI icon will shake when player character takes damage. It will stop shaking once the player is no longer losing health. 
- Draw a faint border around the player's health bar so the amount of lost health is easier to see.
- When crafting, items will be put back in their original container/bag. E.g. when adding Salt to a Salad, the salt will be grabbed from a counter, used, and put back.
  
- Upgrading walls (multi-stage building) takes items from the ground similar to carpentry.
    This includes opening boxes of nails automatically.
    For metal walls, propane will be used from multiple propane torches as needed. Only one propane torch needs to be in inventory, and it may be empty, as others will be used from the ground.
  
- Removed StopCar and HitByCar properties from one of the walls_exterior_house_01 south-east wall pillars.
    The properties were only on one of the several south-east wall pillars.
    This put "tree" physics on the center of the square.
    These pillars should be removed when one of the two adjacent walls is removed.
 
  
- Added 3D models for items placed in the world. 
    Right Clicking an item will show the "Place Item" option. This will display a rendered model of this item and highlight the square to know where it is being placed. On controllers, the item is currently always placed at the center of a square.
- Items automatically go on a table/counter if the mouse is over one of them.
- Press R to rotate clockwise, shift+R to rotate anti-clockwise.
- If you select multiple items and one does not have a 3D model yet, you'll simply drop it at your feet.
- Fixed rotation speed at different framerates.
- Added snapping to the nearest 5 degrees.
- Place items one at a time at the current rotation. 
- Shift-click to place all items. With a controller, the X button toggles between placing one or placing all.
- Improved lighting of 3d items in-world, to closer match the tiles lighting.
- Added rotation to the lighting in 3d items in world, before their lighting would rotate along with the item when rotated.
- Improved lighting on all 3d objects, characters, vehicles, items etc.
- Added "itemHeight" so players can place things on a microwave that is on a table for example.
- If you have a counter with a shelve on top of it, you can press tab to change the height of the item.
- Default "Iso Cursor Visibility" changed to 50% due to the regular cursor being hidden by default.
- 3D items can be disabled in the options.
 
- Table stories. Random chance to have some stuff on a basic home's table to tell a story.
- Multi-stage building QoL: Now if you upgrade a wall frame, wall, etc, you'll have the item displayed until you press ESC (like normal building), allowing to build multiples without having to use the right click context menu every time.
- Added a "Can't Sprint"-moodle which will appear when the character is unable to sprint. The moodle will shake for a bit when you can't sprint but try to.
 
Last Stand Compatibility changes:
- Player files are saved in Zomboid\Lua\LastStand instead of Zomboid\Lua\Players to avoid conflicts with Build 40.
- Player files have VERSION=1 at the top for compatibility with future versions of the game.
- Existing Build 41 player files will need to be moved into Zomboid\Lua\LastStand and add VERSION=1 at the top to work.
 
- The character-creation "Save" button dialog now fills in the name of the preset selected in the combobox, if one is selected.
- Require the player to be near a vehicle before the context menu displays refueling options to fix gas E.S.P.
- Changed the vehicle radial-menu icons for adding and removing gas (they were the same before).
- Added BaseTimedAction:setCurrentTime(). This is used by ISReadABook to set the start time based on the number of pages already read.
- Added blood and dirt stats to the Wash context-menu item tooltips.
- Added "Stack Weight" to inventory-item tooltips to show the total weight of a stack.
- Added a "Training Materials" button to the character Info panel. This displays a window with two tabs, one for skill books and another for magazines that teach recipes.
    For skill books, the item name is displayed in white once the player has read the book completely, or has gained the skill levels through other means.
    For magazines, the item name is displayed in white once the player knows all the recipes taught by the magazine.
- Updated/added Radio translations for Japanese, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese
 
 
BALANCE
 
- Allow plumbing a non-moved sink before the water shuts off if there is a rain barrel above. The water is still infinite for plumbed sinks before the water shuts off.
- Allow plumbing a sink to an empty rain barrel.
- Allow metal drums to be picked up with the furniture-moving tool.
- Allow pouring water into metal drums.
- Boosted loot spawns in stash.
- Display what perk just levelup up on top of the char (like exp gain from TV).
- Sheet ropes can now be attached to metal railings on balconies. (Currently doesn't work for fences on the south or east of a floor)
- Car wrecks appear less often, but can now be dismantled.
- Increased odds of curtains being already closed in houses.
- Holes will be added to clothing after the check for protection, meaning 100% protection will always defend you from a bite and lowered protection from a hole will only affect future attacks. Thanks to PseudonymousEd for pointing this out. 
- Shooting out of cars now has a more limited angle than the former 360°.
- Player will now be unable to control the car while reloading. 
- Reload time increased while driving.
- Control of the car is also lost when shooting rifles, but not with pistols.
 
Distribution changes:
- Updated distributions.
- Added a weightChance property, so you can try to make X spawn more than Y. Defines all the weight chance in said list (total can be over or under 100, doesn't matter).
- Added a forceForTiles property, this'll check that a specific tile exist on this container's square to spawn items from this distribution list (ex: force something in counter under a sink).
- Added a forceForRooms property, we'll check that a room specified in this list exists in the building of the container.
    Example: Police station has an "office" room with a desk, but we don't have ways to spawn more police themed items in their desk. 
    Simply define a new distrib PoliceOfficeDesk, and add a forceForRooms="policestorage" so if we detect a policestorage room in this building, we'll use PoliceOfficeDesk instead of a regular desk)
 
Changes to knives:
- If you're too close to a zombie but there's another zombie chasing you (thus not be able to do a jawstab) the character will shove instead of stabbing normally.
- Slightly reduced movement speed while attacking with knives, similar to other weapons.
- Reduced Hunting knife damage a tad.
 
- Balanced some clothings Speed Reduction and Protection to be more consistent.
- Small chance of having some house windows being left open.
- Curtains can now spawn closed.
 
 
MOD SUPPORT
 
- Added outfit zombie distribution (see example in Distributions.lua). Allows modders to add items to specific zombie outfits (e.g. bigger chance of finding ammo on police zombies, etc)
    Quick example, add Outfit_ in front of the outfit name, like Outfit_Generic01 and define your loot table.
- Added getters and setters to Recipe, Recipe.Result and Recipe.Source for mods.
- Added a system for respawning zombies on island maps (e.g., Kingsmouth).
    Normally when respawning zombies, a random location on the edge of the map is chosen as a start location.
    The game then attempts to find a path from that start location to the chunk that zombies are respawning in.
    This doesn't work for maps that have water on all edges, since paths cannot be found through water.
    Map creators may now specify valid start locations by adding objects to the map's objects.lua file.
    The objects.lua file is normally created by WorldEd.
    These objects are rectangular areas along edges of the island indicating respawn start locations.
    These objects should be right on the edge of the land next to the water (but not in the water).
    Alternatively, these objects may be put into a file called spawnOrigins.lua in the map's directory.
    This file has the same format as objects.lua. See Kingsmouth/spawnOrigins.lua for an example.
- Added ISLiteratureUI.SetItemHidden(fullType, hidden) function so mods can prevent items being displayed in the Training Materials ui.
 
 
FIXES
 
- Fixed being able to fish from swimming pools.
- Fixed the "randomAngle" field of a VehicleZoneDistribution always being false.
- Fixed triggering OnObjectLeftMouseButtonDown and similar events on objects that have been removed from the world.
- Fixed long braided hairstyles not pointing to correct hairstyle.
- Fixed belt not working as 3D item.
- Fixed buildings having more than one table story.
- Fixed issues adding water to and taking water from rain-collecting items on the ground.
- Fixed aiming cursor being less visible on light backgrounds.
- Fixed changed shader files not automatically being reloaded.
- Fixed an infinite loop occurring when require()'ing a Lua file recursively.
- Fixed "invalid direction" exception when a fence is broken by zombies.
- Fixed "VanAmbulance" instead of "Base.VanAmbulance" in RVSCarCrash.
- Tutorial: Fixed the dad zombie's eating sound not stopping after he stands up.
- Tutorial: Fixed the player getting stuck using the Open Curtain context menu option.
- Fixed RVSCarCrash.
- Fixed some container types.
- Fixed issues with automatically opening boxes of nails when doing carpentry.
- Fixed tainted-water status of metal drums with water in them.
- Fixed some vehicles not playing Lock/Unlock/IsLocked sounds for trunks.
- Fixed the game hitching every second while in a vehicle until zombies are near again.
- Fixed no sound playing when hitting objects with bare hands.
- Fixed a multithreading issue with keyboard input. This only affected entering text, not keyboard controls while playing.
- Fixed vehicle radio text staying onscreen after turning off the radio when not in the driver's seat.
- Fixed the player's animation locking up when charging with a spear after a zombie is hit.
    This happened when the "Manual Floor Attack" key was the same as the "Sprint" key.
- Fixed impact and death sound not playing when spear-charging a zombie.
- Fixed "Place Car Battery Charger" displaying for every item clicked on
- Fixed the "Plant Information" window not handling different font sizes.
- Fixed bomb explosion sounds not playing.
- Fixed the weapon swing sound not playing when using the "Smash Window" context-menu option.
- Fixed class-cast exception in Moodle caused by HumanCorpse updating Moodles.
- Fixed HumanCorpse update() getting called when zombie spawning is disabled, which caused a NullPointerException with Moodles.
- Fixed overlapping disease text in the Plant Information window.
- Fixed farming with a controller.
- Fixed some of the excessive head movement when swinging a spear.
- Fixed Lamp On Pillar losing it's battery and on/off state upon reloading. This raises the WorldVersion to 183.
- Fixed rendering the isocursor and aim-outline in splitscreen.
- Fixed the position of the vehicle dashboard in splitscreen with more than two players.
- Fixed conditions of cooking vessels resetting the condition when adding water and rice or pasta. 
- Fixed Welding Masks getting soaked in the rain.
- Fixed Thick Skinned and Thin Skinned incorrectly calculating the chance to do damage from zombies.
- Fixed being unable to remove Thin Skinned using the Player Stats debug ui.
- Fixed Lua error after removing a trait in the Player Stats debug ui.
- Fixed showing zero-cost traits such as Axeman as "bad" when adding traits in the Player Stats debug ui.
- Fixed setting the Occlusion FMOD parameter to simulate the Hard Of Hearing trait, since it is now done in FMOD Studio.
- Fixed infinite carry capacity after making rotten-strawberry salad.
- Fixed the layout of the microwave and oven UIs with different-sized fonts.
- Fixed Lua error wobbling the non-existent heart icon of splitscreen players.
- Fixed endurance being reduced while holding down the Run key when not moving.
- Fixed misplaced halves of Large Modern Oven in one orientation.
- Fixed not being able to barricade carpentry Wooden Door.
- Fixed the layout of ISAlarmClockDialog with larger fonts.
- Fixed ISTabPanel:getWidthOfAllTabs() when equal tabs widths are used.
- Fixed native-code exception when opening the Option screen. This was a bug in GLFW.glfwGetKeyName().
- Fixed animation and sound issues when attacking zombies that are eating corpses
- Fixed VehicleAmbiance using the wrong event name.
- Fixed the vehicle horn continuing to play after the switch-seat ui is displayed while honking.
- Fixed Radio items without a WorldSprite being assigned an invalid module.type.
- Fixed duplication bug when crafting from containers.
- Fixed not being able to make coffee and tea with the Spiffo mug.
- Fixed hot beverage not being hot right after it is crafted.
- Fixed hot and cold drinks not giving a happiness bonus.
- Fixed not being able to tie a rope to player-made windows (gracias dito!)
- Fixed ranger car siren light colour.
- Fixed annotated map loot not always spawning when it should.
- Fixed crash when trying to go forwards & backwards at the same time in a car.
- Fixed Firearm Radial Menu coming up when any ISBuildingObject cursor is already displayed.
- Fixed trying to play multiple instances of WorldAmbiance since only one is allowed.

 
TECHNICAL
 
- Added a bunch of performance probes to IsoCell.renderTiles to help track down the inner-most causes of the performance lagging issue.
- New class: PerformanceProfileProbeList
    Allows us to have arrays of performance probes, suitable for profiling arrays of code blocks, like with IsoCell.renderTile layers.
- Added a few WorldDictionary.DebugPrintItem calls to some functions to help find some mod problems
- Moved updating some global FMOD parameters out of IsoPlayer into AmbientStreamManager.


________________________________________


Additional Hotfix:

- Fixed small clock
- Fixed DrinkingFromBottle sound continuing forever after the action completes.
- Fixed the Training Materials button overlapping other text with 3x font size and many traits.

Hey all, it’s an MP Strike Force update blog this week – so here’s the latest from the test server.
 
We now have three coders from General Arcade working on Build 41’s multiplayer – alongside two dedicated QA operatives. Work primarily takes place in GA territory with regular code top-ups from the in-dev 41 codebase, though there’s clearly a lot of communication between our relevant QA and organisational peeps.
 
First off then, here’s a quick update from someone who has been playing it more than most – multiplayer QA chap Oleg. Welcome to the blog, Oleg!
 
“Multiplayer is quite solid at the moment. There are no critical errors that would lead to a crash, data loss or anything like that. I’ll be honest, right now it’s far more interesting for me to play in MP than on my own!”
 
“At this exact moment we’ve got some smaller problems with zombie corpses, synchronization of various animations and many and varied other issues popping up from areas throughout the MP game – so there is certainly still something to work on.”
 
“The difference between the game that myself and Mikhail started playing two months ago when we started QA and now is pretty big. In terms of the smoothness and synchronization of the movement of the characters, most of the animations, how pvp feels – all this stuff has changed for the better.”

“Big thanks to Yuri, Andrei and Aleksandr – and of course to TIS’s Sasha who has been a great go-between answering questions and raising issues between the teams!”
 
So that’s the baseline stuff but, as Jennifer Aniston once said in a commercial that half of the people reading this blog are too young to remember, “here comes the science”. Over to Yuri.
 
“Our focus this month has been in improving the synchronization of zombies between different players, and also in PvP.”
“Our QA team has been spotlighting bugs, and right now the majority of them aren’t zombie or player character related – but are in other areas of the game that need polish like throwable weapons/items, vehicles etc.”

“As such the focus of our next month of work will likely be in turning to these issues and fixing them up to raise the overall playability.”
 
So, right now, everything seems to be ticking over and on-track. We should have a clearer overall picture when we put out the next MP blog.
Some of the individual items fixed recently:
 
Zombies didn’t have the ‘alerted’ animation in MP when they heard a sound, leading to various issues and it not looking as good. Character sync accuracy was increased. The remote character makes less extra movements when turn around. Standing characters are now on the same square on all clients due to setJustMoved and isJustMoved functions being added. Further improvements to positioning through prediction points when players turn around, a new PZMath.roundFromEdges function and the threshold for starting and ending remote character movement being reduced. The algorithm for calculating the forecast of the player’s position has also been changed. Many and varied new debug tools Fixed gunshots happening twice at the end of zed bites.
    Many PvP upgrades and improvements starting with the calculation of damage in PVP – meaning that the game uses BodyDamage instead of Health for player hits now. Addition of sync for falling players in PVP. Fixed clothing on zombies sometimes disappearing after being killed. Fixed issues with bomb devices not causing damage to zombies. Calculation of damage from bombs had to be moved from server to client. Fixed an issue in which some zombies were not visible to the other player. Refactored a loooot of complicated things that the blog writer could not hope to understand.
    Zombies could get up if the remote player hit  the zombie first. Remote clients would see the zombie on the ground in different poses after each hit. Desynchronization when one player enters the an area where certain events caused by another player had already happened – for example if a zombie was on the ground, and a new player appeared the zed wouldn’t be lying down.
   
41.54


We are currently finalising 41.54 for a release to the IWBUMS public beta. The biggest items of note in this are the full Noiseworks sound revamp, the new VHS system and the placeable 3D models. You can read the full current changelist here.
 
Foraging needs some more time in the oven at the moment so that is being put back to a later build we’re afraid, while we are currently at 90% of our available 3D items sized, imported, tested and signed off – with the full range of food items most recently mixed in.
We’d like the full list of these in-game, and some important bug fixes, to go in before we release. So we’ll see where we have gotten to next week. Fingers crossed it’ll be good to go.
 
In the meantime here’s a quick vid of a wintry scene to whet your whistle.
 

Likewise we gave a key to the Noiseworks build to our good friend (and total PZ noob) Dean Cutty in the run up to 41.54’s release, and this is what emerged.
 

RJ would also like it mentioned that this week he’s also put in a nerf to the current 360 degree shooting from cars, will only allow shooting with one-handed guns when the car is in motion and other such weapons/driving polish.
 
NEXT BUILD
Also underway currently is the second phase of our work alongside Noiseworks, the amazing sound team redesigning our soundscape. This work will effectively straddle 41.54, which contains many of the new sounds mentioned below, and 41.55. Over to NW’s Michael Klier for some details on this.
 
“The next phase of the Zomboid sound overhaul will add new content to many other areas of the game – with our emphasis on the stuff heard most often by players while they play. There’s additional foley for player actions like climbing fences, tripping over obstacles, carrying heavy bags, cooking, smoking, UI sounds for map interactions… the list goes on.”
 

“We will also be adding new zombie voice sets, and the zombie voices in the context of hordes will be improved upon.”
 
“On top of this we will be adding even more content for melee weapons when it comes to weapon-specific hits/impacts to further build upon the general/generic melee set that was covered in the phase 1. The same will go for the firearms, which will have more specific weapon sounds for each available firearm as well as additional foley for things like shell drops. We are also currently redesigning some of the current firearms, like the shotgun, from internal tester feedback.”
 
“Something we want to include and redesign, but which will involve a fair degree more work with the TIS coders, is how sounds are affected by obstacles in the world. We want this to have more realistic behaviour, so sounds get occluded more or less based on the properties of the occluding obstacles.”
 
“Inside buildings for example, sounds should be occluded differently depending on there is a concrete wall between a zombie or the player or if there’s a wooden wall. In 41.54 the occlusion is a catch-all – if there’s something in between the player the sound is occluded.”
 
“And last not least the ambiance and music systems will further be improved upon.”
 
TILL NEXT TIME
Pat_Bren’s mod blog will return next week spotlighting on the remarkable Daegu map and our amazing Korean community, while in two weeks’ time the dev blog should be covering some of the 41.55 content we’re currently working on including a pretty cool cartographic feature. Till then!

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

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

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


This new feature, meanwhile, has also brought about its own new brigand of hilarious bugs – which are, we’re afraid, some of the things RJ and Rockstar Mark are quashing right now.
 
  And, finally on this matter, clearly the introduction of 3D items brings us a new MVP…
NU-FORAGING
Regular readers will know that we recently hired PZ modder Eris to work on the team, and that for her first trick she would be improving on our current rather static and UI-based foraging system. We wanted a more active experience and wider set of loot and rewards, and what she has currently integrated into the game is looking hugely positive and just what we believe was required.
 
Foraging is now an active mode that you switch on and off, and allows you to search areas to find items wherever you are on the PZ map. Your search is impacted by your skill level, weather conditions, your location and your movement speed – and loot changes depending on time of day and season.
 
Markers appear on your map showing items of note on the ground, which you must then approach to pick up. Forest paths will conjure up wild plants and firewood, sidewalks in towns will provide litter and lost items, farms might have rogue crops still growing in the fields…
Although it might not be a part of 41.54, one issue we have found with 3D items is that (clearly) small items like nails, berries etc are now far harder to see than when the game was using big, chunky inventory icons.
 
It’s therefore our intention to experiment with this new Foraging system to also make it a ‘look for small items on the floor’ mode – meaning that placed small items within the world will also be flagged by Eris’ cool new pop-ups.
 
Alternatively these small items could be given a white outline, which would be accessed from the same Foraging keypress. We’ll see what works best in testing.
 
Here’s a quick vid showing it all in action.
 
  As we mentioned before, we’re really knuckling down on polish of existing features in 41.54 at the moment rather than discussing/showing things that’ll likely appear in 41.55 or beyond – so apologies if this week’s blog is shorter than the last one.
 
41.54 will also contain the full Noiseworks PZ soundscape revamp, and reams of new narrative content in the form of Pat_Bren and Turbo’s new CD and VHS system – so it should be one that brings a lot to the Knox Event experience. We’ll let you know how the polish process is going on it over the next week or so.
    This week’s spooky set-up from koekto1000 over on Steam. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too! Big thanks to everyone playing, streaming and generally surviving these past two weeks!

Howdy, pardnerz! This time, we’re taking a look at one of the most subscribed Project Zomboid mods of all time: Filibuster Rhymes’ Used Cars (a version of the mod for Build 40 can be found here.) The mod’s description promises a “handful” of new vehicles, but you’d have to have pretty big hands to fit all 90+ new vehicles! 
 

 
The vehicles all spawn naturally within the base game’s “traffic” and replicate the simple but beautiful graphical style of our existing cars.
Along with a variety of new sedans, compacts, SUVs, police cars, and pick-up trucks similar to the vehicles we’re used to, the mod adds heavy box trucks and flatbeds, fuel trucks, big yellow school buses, military Humvees, and some more retro cars like rusted pick-ups and a certain famous rear-engined German car from the 1960s. Filibuster even went to the bother of creating fictional lore-friendly names for his vehicles, so they fit even more snugly into our game. 
 

 
Each of the vehicles have unique handling characteristics and add more options for vehicle strategies. Should you pick the reliable old compact, the speedy sports car, or the huge and roomy but tediously slow truck? (You should choose the nippy Pazuzu truck, objectively the best vehicle in the mod).
 

 

 
We headed on down to Filibuster’s lot and, after agreeing to a sweet deal on a 3-wheeled Chevalier Dart, got him to answer a few questions for us about himself and his mod.
 
Filibuster

 
Hello Filibuster! Who are you in real life?
 
I’m pretty much just a slacker with a fat diabetic cat. Nothing too exciting, honestly.
 
How did you first discover PZ? Why do you like it?
 
I got it way back on Desura. I really like more slow-paced hardcore survival games, stuff where you’ve gotta plan a little bit instead of just going buck wild. I rarely stick with a game for more than a few weeks, but me and my friends played Build 40 multiplayer for like three months straight!
 
How did you get into PZ modding? Did you have experience making or modding other games previously?
 
The most experience I had with Blender was smashing together two models like a caveman beating on rocks to add some arms to the gun models in System Shock 2. Most of my modding in other games has been simple stuff like changing weapon damage in config files.
 
When did you start developing your used car mod? How long have you spent making it? How has it changed and developed over time?
 
I sometimes get into creative phases that last a while. I used to just waste time in games like Space Engineers or Interstellar Rift, then get disgusted with myself for wasting so much time. When I started modelling a few cars sometime in 2018, I just kinda went wild, ignored my girlfriend for like two months and threw a buncha models together into a pack. I can’t really tell ya how much time’s gone into it all together, but it was definitely a lotta fun.
 
It all started with a boxy, torn looking model that didn’t even light up and snowballed into 70 or 90 something vehicles and trailers. I’ve lost count! Most other stuff has just been keeping up with the game’s new features. I’m really not looking forward to vehicle interiors and animated doors and stuff, oh man…
 
Your car mod is one of the most popular PZ mods of all time. Do you have an interest in cars in real life? If so, what’s your dream car?
 
Man, I never expected the mod to blow up like it did! It’s crazy to think that something like 90k people are using it. 
 
I used to be super into older muscle cars. I had a 1971 Impala for a good few years. It was beat to shit, had a rusted-through leaky vinyl roof filled with Great Stuff™ foam, no working AC, but I loved it (still do) and wanted to add it to the game. I also had an ‘83 El Camino and a ‘68 Bonneville, but I think I’ve gotten to the point where I prefer the ease and comfort of modern stuff. Old stuff is so much easier to work on, though. (Like, the engine compartment of my Impala was an empty aircraft hangar compared to my Corolla!) 
 
As for my dream car? I used to really want a 1968 Buick Wildcat or LeSabre convertible. Now I’m thinkin’ I’d like another El Camino.
 
Do you have a favourite from your own vehicles in the mod? Have players given feedback on their favourites? Or least favourite?
 
Shoot, that’s kinda a hard choice. I guess I’m more drawn to the Suburban and the Blazer when I’m playing. I’m pretty happy about some of the references I’ve put on stuff, like the moving truck or Pazuzu box trucks. A lot of people seem really thrilled over the military stuff and easter egg vehicles I’ve thrown in there.
 
How difficult is it for you to model new cars, and keep them consistent with the style of the base game’s graphics? How long does it take you to debug them?
 
Making new cars has gotten a LOT easier since I first started. I still have to Google half the stuff I’m trying to do on Blender. I’ve never been super artistic, so the texturing was more of a science than an art to me. I tried to copy the vanilla style as much as possible and it worked out somehow. If the game didn’t go for the low poly style, there’s definitely no way I could match it.
 
Scripting and debugging the vehicles was actually more difficult than modelling them when I first started. You’d have to change a few settings for, like, tire locations, start the game, test, close it, change, start, test, repeat. Thankfully, TIS added some tools to debug mode that make it super simple now!
 
How have you found the PZ community? How helpful has their feedback been? Is there anyone in the PZ community you would like to give a shout-out/thanks to?
 
I’m not really the most social dude, but I’ve had lots of helpful bug reports. Sometimes when I add in a buncha stuff, I miss some really small, stupid little thing that screws something big up. It’s definitely nice when someone catches that.
 
And heck yeah, I’ve got some people to thank! Super early on, Soul Filcher helped me out with getting the models to load. Then Fenris Wolf wrote pretty much ALL the code for the old model loading system and made it super-efficient and simple for even someone like me to understand!
 
My buddy Blair (Planet Algol) has been helping me with fuel trailers recently. And by helping me out, I mean he literally wrote all the code for it!
 
Shout-out too to Hurley who helped test the last version, and MrDanny who’s been really nice and helpful to people in my Discord who are learning to mod.
 
And Charger? You get a shout out just for being Charger.
 
Finally, an obvious one, but I’d like to thank the devs for everything, ESPECIALLY the debug tools!
 
What vehicles or vehicle features would you most like to see added to the base game?
 
Repainting vehicles and customising parts would be great. Like, some having carburettors and others having fuel injection, some having a manual and others having automatic transmission. I think it’s probably already in the works, but being able to add like a luggage rack or big f-off bumper would be awesome too
 
Other than your own, which mods/maps do you enjoy or find interesting?
 
Besides testing, I haven’t actually played much in the last few years! Back in Build 40, ORGM was/is a must. Clearing out Fort Redstone was super memorable, too. The hospital there was packed to the brim with zombarinos. We had to go outside because we kept getting sick from all the bodies! Wild times, man.
 
What’s next in your modding plans? What’s the dream?
 
Blair and I have a gun mod in the works. It’s mostly modelled and planned out, we’re just waiting for changes to the vanilla game to get a little more stable so he doesn’t have to redo a bunch of code. We’ve had another idea floating around for a long while too, but we’re gonna keep that under wraps for now. It’s not gonna be a roadside picnic, so it might not even pan out. But I gotta admit, my ultimate creative dream is to make my own game!
 
Thanks to Filibuster for taking time to answer our questions! You can find his car mod here.

Good job noisework, that eerie night ambient + crickets combined with a random corpse next to a police vehicle with upgraded emergency lights made the atmosphere so creepy, I'm really excited to experience this during the actual gameplay!!!

Im excited to get the sound update, any word on reverb for gunshots indoors? 

How do all, let’s get on into it.
MP WORK
This week we were excited to welcome a new MP Strike Force team member into the ranks from General Arcade. Aleksandr comes to us with a lot of experience in Java projects, and will be working alongside Yuri and Andrei for the foreseeable future.
 
Whereas before our own team of testers and volunteers were putting the MP build through its paces, now the TIS team are working on mainline SP releases we have also separated testing duties – and GA have their own branch and testing channel populated by two other bright, shiny new faces – Oleg and Mikhail.
 
This allows us to concentrate on the more imminent 41 releases (Noiseworks, 3D items etc) while allowing General Arcade to come to us with cleaner builds for wider internal testing when the time is right – as opposed to our previous weekly TIS-side sessions.
 
Recent work has concentrated on combat between zombies and groups of players, though the guys have also hooked up a few things like thrown objects etc that had been left untouched thus far. As in the current build the latter still looks like the jankest thing in the game currently, but will do for now until we have time to input throwables that at least look like they obey the laws of physics.
 
“Last month we implemented a system in which zombies would visibly react to hits from their target player, but attacks from other players present would only create splashes of blood and drops in health” explains Yuri. “Unfortunately, this didn’t look good at all. You never felt that you’d hit the zombie if you weren’t its target, as it wouldn’t play a reaction animation.”
 
“As such, we allowed the zombie animated reactions to all players – but made it so that the super-close zombies within 5 in-game metres of their target would be far less likely to be distracted by other players. To add some texture to this, however, zombies also now have an aggro level – meaning that if attacked sufficiently within a short time interval a zed closing in on its target will change its target. The server now calculates aggro level for each zombie and sends a ZombieControl packet to change the owner.”
 
“We also put a lot of work into our syncing of zombies falling to the ground – which when allowed to happen out of time can lead to increased desync. Our first implementation was working fine for solo players, but when multiple players were attacking zeds the fall position was being rewritten and there was confusion between all the different clients. We believe we now have a solution for this by concentrating on the attacks of the target player, which the team are now testing.”
 
“We have also been fixing bugs discovered by our QA team, like players not being able to kill each other, debugged issues of corpse teleport, worked on various aspects of throwables that were not already implemented and many other issues.”
 
  NEXT 41
We don’t want to mix in too much more to the upcoming 41.54 version of the IWBUMS public beta feature-wise, as it’s already pretty packed. Likewise we also need to make sure that everything going into the 3D items behaves visually and performance-wise, so it’s going to be at least two weeks away most likely.
 
This said we are SUPER jazzed by how the 3D items are looking in-game, and look forward to being able to provide more varied in-game starting / zed story scenes to bring more variety to the map.
 

 
Please check out the entirety of this vid showing a player-decorated safehouse, and also note that since this was taken RJ has added in first iteration of a system that allows you to drag an item from your inventory and place it more accurately on the floor, and to rotate the item using the R key.
 
WIP NOTICE: You may notice when the camera is panned the 3D objects don’t match the 2D tile positions perfectly. This has been a longstanding issue with vehicles and zombies, but has never really been this noticeable as there’s been less of it to see on-screen. We’re setting Zac and his magical maths abilities on this fix tomorrow, and will also be looking to match the lighting of the 3D objects closer match the 2D tiles before release. Despite all this, we hope you’ll agree that it looks awesome.
 
  Oh, also clearly there’s Noiseworks sounds in here now too – we’ve covered the revamped PZ soundscape enough in the past now, but everything the NW team have done up to this point is now in the internal test build.
 
Phase two of their work is starting next week, alongside fixes and required changes brought up by our internal testers and agreed by the core team. Here’s a quick ‘latest’ vid on that front. (There’s some debate internally on the shotgun ‘bang’ noise – so please treat that aspect as WIP for now.)
 
 
 
Other smaller fun/necessary stuff going into 41.54 will be:
 
A fix for those pesky framerate chugs you can get after long journeys in a vehicle (hurrah!) Visible flies over corpses (and, later, rotten food etc)  
 
Some required nerfs to knife-fighting QoL improvements to multi-stage building Better lighting effects from emergency lights, to go along with the better Noiseworks sirens. (Sirens not playing in this vid, but oh well it looks good)  
 
On top of this there’ll also be Turbo and Pat_Bren/Will’s VHS and CD entertainment system – which we’ve covered in previous blogs and is also now in testing.
 
Pat and Will (but mainly Pat, in all truth) have provided 3900 new lines for the new system, which should keep the translators busy.
 
ALL THINGS LOUISVILLE
As we’ve mentioned before, our PZ version of Louisville is now certainly on the horizon – so we thought it might be a good idea to check in with our map team to provide you with a clearer idea of what to expect when it does arrive.

Q. To what extent is Louisville based on reality?
A. Mash:
 
“Initially Binky made the general layout follow reality for the most part, but from that base I took some liberties- some larger than others. For gameplay reasons I wanted to have our (necessarily smaller scale) LV to encompass the types of neighbourhoods you might encounter in any city: the “bad neighbourhood”, the “business district”, the “rich area”.”
 
“As such, the locations of these are not at all based on the real Louisville. For one thing, the city on our map is much smaller (though still relatively huge), so we couldn’t really adhere to reality. The main goal was to make map exploration more fun and engaging, and having varied neighbourhoods that might not be totally realistic but makes organic sense within the map is part of that.”
 
“I think there won’t be much recognition of Louisville and it feeling just like the real world one when you are exploring it on the ground, but that said you will see some recognizable buildings here and there, such as City Hall.”
 
“We are also taking some inspiration from real world districts when we are designing some of our own, for example I know that Xeonyx has loosely based our version of NE Louisville (home of our new Grand Ohio Mall) on the St. Matthews district east of real world LV, and his old town district around Fossoil Field is based off the real world’s Smoketown and Phoenix Hill.”
 
“As I said previously however, in terms of being close to reality it’s better to think of our version of Louisville to be closer to our more recent additions to the map, rather than having the veracity of places like Muldraugh and West Point”

 
Q. How does it differ when you’re designing a city, as compared to when you created PZ’s smaller towns?
A. Mash:
 
“The size of the city and the new map makes things exponentially more complicated, which led us to choosing to knuckle down on identifiable themed neighbourhoods which would benefit a game like PZ more clearly. From this we then had to make sure it transitioned from one area to another in a way that made some sort of sense. The smaller towns are, for the most part, fairly uniform in feel within each individual location.”

 
Q. Clearly with PZ you are limited to seven storeys and a rooftop – is it frustrating not being able to go higher?
A. Mash:
 
“I think things are pretty relative, and since buildings are only 1-3 storeys in other locations, the 7 storey buildings of our Louisville give a good sense of size and, I think, allow for pretty identical gameplay as if the game had even taller buildings.”
 
A. Xeonyx
“To me, being limited to 7 stories isn’t really a problem. It doesn’t negatively affect gameplay, and the buildings offer a nice mix of high risk/high reward while still retaining the feeling of a large city.”

 
Q. What are your favourite new buildings and locations?
A. Mash:
 
“Some of my favourite buildings I want to leave as a surprise, but one of my favourite areas is the university area.”


  A. Xeonyx
“The scale and design of Louisville offers many new playstyles and challenges to experience, but if I were to pick a favorite new location, it’d be a tie between the gritty industrial district, and the South Louisville district which was designed to be similar to the real life Auburndale district.”

NEW NOLAN MOD
Some areas that we are very aware that PZ needs some improvement in are those related to accessibility – some stuff we’re okay at, some stuff needs a lot of love.
 
For this reason we just wanted to take a second to highlight Nolan’s new mod – which will be of massive help to those who are hard of hearing.
 
Likewise it’ll probably be handy for those who like to PZ while doing another activity, watching TV or similar, where you’re not always glued to your speakers for audio cues and clues.

So, all in all, if this is something that you need improved in PZ, then for now please please check out the Sound Direction Indicator. Thanks Modding Hero Nolan!

  Thanks everyone next week we’ll have a Mod Spotlight on that beautiful creature Filibuster Rhymes, and in the dev blog following that there’ll be lots more goodies including a first full look at TIS newbie Eris’ awesome improved foraging system.
 
A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Afternoon all. Here’s where we’re at with life and love in Kentucky.
 
IWBUMS PUBLIC BETA
Last Monday we released Build 41.51 to the IWBUMS public beta, which was then followed by a 41.52 patch the following Thursday.
This update was a general mixture of changes, fixes, balance that had been building up over the six months we were working on MP before deciding it needed extra time – while also providing some important foundational updates to the underlying systems that the game runs on and some advances in optimization.
 
Given the breadth of things covered in the patch and the java/lwjgl upgrades we were expecting a few bugs, and got a few bugs, but overall things went quite smoothly – and a final patch to clear up residual issues is releasing today.
 
Many thanks also to all the modders who have worked so hard to update their wares alongside the new version – your toil is appreciated by gamers, game developers and everyone in-between.
 
41.53 contains a few things but primarily the following:
 
A fix to a longstanding bug that has always prevented us from having the mouse cursor disappear when you prepare for a melee strike – leaving only the iso-cursor is visible. We have always wanted this fixed as it will mean that new players find it easier to adjust to PZ’s combat.

If you find this fix weird/annoying then we have also added a Display option to toggle it back to how it was before: “Show Mouse Cursor While Aiming”.
  Usual curtain/sheet service is now resumed. HOWEVER we reserve the right in future to swap this over to making sheets lootable in more logical locations like on beds, or spawn more readily in bedroom wardrobes. You will now be able to turn off the alarm on your watch via the clock UI. Various items of Mod Support, including a check for a change necessitated by our MP work that should help in terms of getting mods such as SuperSurvivors working again.
  There are a few things that we need from you in terms of feedback from the 41.51 – 41.53 builds also.
 
Primarily, we would like to hear about loot balance across all the different loot scarcity settings. How have recent changes impacted on your game? Are you finding too much or too little of your required items?
 
We would also like to hear back from our Mac players – how is the game launching for you? We have improved aspects of your game display but our Mac tester pool is quite shallow so need to hear from some more voices.
 
NEXT: NOISEWORKS
Barring any further fixes to the IWBUMS Public beta our next step will be to mix some of our game features that have been kept in a holding pattern over the past few months into our internal test build.
 
First and foremost in this will be our Noiseworks sound revamp, which you have seen a bunch of over the past few months in blogs – but just in case you’re out of the loop here’s a quick thunderstorm video. (Be sure to spin on to the middle of the video for when the storm really gets going if you choose to watch.)
 

We anticipate a few weeks of testing, rebalancing and fixing alongside the Noiseworks team once their work is in the internal test build.
Beyond this we have already arranged for ‘Round two’ of their work in which the Noiseworks crew will adjust anything that needs improving from the initial integration.
 
They will also work on improving (by a lot) the systemic music integration, and some of the sounds that are still missing like fence climbing, tripping, painting, plastering, farming, improved gear shifts and more in vehicles etc. They will also record some more rabid SFX for sprinters, and many many other things all on our shared spreadsheet.
 
NEXT: VHS AND ‘WELCOME PAT’
As mentioned last time, we are expanding our ‘in-game entertainment’ options by moving a lot of our existing TV and radio content onto playable (well, legible) CDs and VHS tapes that can be looted throughout the world.
 
We hope this will end a reliance on tuning into Life & Living for established players, and also allow those starting at times later than the first week to access any broadcast-based bonuses.

No new video from Turbo this week, but this also means that we can announce the first of two ‘new people!’ announcements for this blog.
The resplendent Pat_Bren, famed throughout these lands for his mod blogs, has a writing style and sense of humour that more than matches our existing writer – and as such he has been on-hand writing a wide variety of movies, TV shows, audio books and Kentucky residents recording themselves on camcorder.
 

This is being mixed in with new content from Will, and a bunch of our existing broadcast content, and should provide some colour for your more idle moments of survival. In all there’s 31 movie VHS tapes, 8 different TV shows with five episode seasons, 22 episodes of ‘Skill TV’, 75 home-recorded VHS tapes, 26 audiobooks and 27 music CDs.
 
We hope that this will add some colour to your survival adventures, making our 90s VHS rental stores feel a bit more real, and also provide some evidence of the former lives of the zombies that you are murdering.
 
ALONGSIDE THE ABOVE
The above two features are dead certs to be mixed into the internal test build once the IWBUMS beta is fully patched up. Here’s a few other items that’ll be going in alongside ‘em.
 
Zombie Outfit loot distribution system to give modders some new opportunities, and also for us to force-spawn certain items on our costume zeds – revolver, bullets etc. definitely on a cop zed for example. Better light bar and siren functionality for police cars, ambulances etc. to go alongside the new Noiseworks SFX Improved item categorization and sorting in inventory windows Improved fishing menu and fish catch options and catch history
  ALSO INCOMING: 3D ITEMS
The 3D objects made by Rockstar Mark are currently being implemented by RJ, though there’s still a fair amount of work to go on them so they might not arrive alongside all the above.
 
Here are a few WIP screens from our existing Zed Stories to show how things will start looking in future builds.
 

WELCOME ERIS
Many players will know Eris from her fabulous mini-map mod, and we’re delighted to say that she will be joining the PZ team.
Behind the scenes we’ve been seeing her work on an excellent improvement to our existing foraging system – in which players have to actively move between foraging spots in woodland rather than click through the UI.
 
It’ll take some time to get her hooked up to the PZ mainframe and to convert the mod, but right now it looks a little like this.
 
It’s our intent that Eris will be joining RJ in future endeavours to bring this kind of interactivity to all the zomboid survival mechanics, which is a direction we’ve wanted to move toward for a long time. At the moment a lot of mechanics involve operating the right click menu and waiting a lot which (while functional) does not offer any real ‘gameplay’.
 
RJ has made some initial steps toward this with his quality of life improvements to farming, but our plan is to go further in areas like farming, fishing and construction:  mixing some basic player skill and decision making alongside, and augmented by, the character’s skills.
 
Our overall plan is to make all the individual survival systems have a lot more meat to them: make them more fun, give you more satisfaction and involvement, and make them far less laborious and menu-ey. Eris popping up with her foraging overhaul was perfectly timed and showed she would be a great addition to the team to bring this into the game.
 
That’s all for now, next week we’ll have another mod blog from the dainty fingertips of Pat_Bren. The Thursday beyond that we’ll have the latest on MP dev alongside where we’re at with all the features mentioned above and maybe a few more. Thanks all!
 
—————
 
This week’s desperate last stand from Feiticeira Supervixen. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Well, two weeks takes ages to get through right? Here we are with the first fortnightly Thursdoid which hopefully contains enough morsels to keep you satiated.
 
For details on what’s happening with MP, and why we’ve moved to blogs every two weeks for the foreseeable future, please check out our MP Status Update from last time.
IWBUMS 41.51
As we discussed last time, we have six months worth of polish, changes, additions and fixes waiting to go into the IWBUMS Build 41 Public beta that are completely unrelated to the parallel MP work.
In this past two weeks, then, we have removed/disabled its WIP multiplayer components, and are now preparing to release this as a beta update.
 
The changelist is pretty vast, and can be found here if you are interested.
 
Sometimes in the past when we have released builds with lengthy gestation times they have been buggier than we’d have otherwise liked, which is why we are putting this through a lot of testing – and are currently opening it out to an expanded pool of internal testers over the coming weekend. Please note that when we talk about holding this build back for testing, it’s not in the same league, stadium or planet as the testing for the MP overhaul, we just have to do our due diligence after all the talk of being careful about what we release not to completely break the current b41 build by hurrying to get going with the builds again.
 
This new version also includes some fairly foundational changes like updates to the Java and LWJGL we are using, that will improve a legion of compatibility issues we’ve often come up against, and many optimizations.
 
Likewise there is a big savegame file size optimization going into this version, which will mean that your current savegame will NOT be compatible. But, clearly, fret not – the current 41.50 version will remain available to you, and step-by-step savegame transfer instructions will be provided should they be required.
NOISEWORKS SOUND UPGRADE
The Noiseworks full soundscape upgrade has just gone into its first round of testing, and we’ve collated a full list of bugs and missing / wrongly wired sounds back over to them.
 
Primary issues include some rethinking of how we’re doing car noise due to some engine sound issues, lots of stuff that needs an adjustment in how its rigged, and a few sounds that don’t entirely fit the action on-screen. We’re making good headway with all this, but it’s probably best to expect its appearance in 41.52.
 
A video, and then a few tester quotes.
 
 
 
 
“The ambient sounds of the wildlife is amazing. I found myself a few times just listening to it all. hearing the zombies shuffle outside a building you are in can put you on edge, but you think you have time until that first bang on a door or window which will make you jump. And the rain sounds changing as it intensifies is amazing, you feel an urgency to immediately seek shelter, you know it’s about to get bad outside.”
 
“The game feels a lot more… full (?) with all the noises. I noticed it had tactical advantages too, as I heard the footsteps of a bunch of zombies around a corner before I got there. That was super cool.”
 
“WOW the UI makes sounds now??? Did not expect that it is awesome. Also the tweaks to the This is How You Died screen for loading into the world and all are incredible.”
 
“I haven’t felt suspense like that while playing for a long time, the jump-scares really get you as well. The new sounds give it a completely new, different experience imo, like just the eerie silence when you walk into a house all of a sudden, instantly makes you put your guard up and listen out.”
3D ITEMS
Also for likely inclusion in 41.52 are the 3D items that ‘Rockstar Mark’ has provided – which will mean that we no longer will have to use inventory icons for items left on the floor.
 
We still have to make sure these don’t dampen performance when used in extravagance, but they are already paying dividends in terms of the ‘zed stories’ we tell in abandoned houses – the frat boy zombies will have real-looking beer and chips on the floor now, while the ‘sex zombies’ we suggest were having rumpy pumpy will have real-looking clothes strewn on the floor around the bed.
 
This has also allowed for RJ to put in an extension of the world-building ‘Marie Celeste’ nature of various homes within the Knox Event – putting items on tables to suggest what was happening (or about to happen) in the build up to disaster striking.
Someone here, for example, was about to bake a cake.
This will be expanded on heavily in future, with our hopes that all items present on shelves will represent the actual items. This is a long term goal however.
 
In terms of gameplay the 3d items will bring, we do plan however in the more immediate future to make tables into containers, which allow items to be placed on them and be visible at a glance. This will surely be a welcome feature for those packrats looking for some extra storage space.
 
Also, Mark just sent us these, which should much better allow us and those like us to simulate our bedroom floors within the game with more accuracy.
MAP WORK
As discussed last week we are bumping the urban map expansion, our PZ version of Louisville, up the running order of releases – though it’s still too far off to pin down in any particular version.
 
This week Jamie (Xeonyx) has been on ‘Operation Building Heighten’ – as we have increasingly become aware that we need to reinforce how verticality in the city’s innermost districts will be a big part of the feeling of difference between it and our existing rural areas.
 
We have an upper limit of seven storeys and a rooftop in PZ, which is an unavoidable performance constraint (and also something of a balance issue even if we one day surmounted it) but it should still feel urban, new and different to what’s currently available. Here’s some of Jamie’s building heightening in action:
Kukrapok/Ayrton meanwhile continues with his own mission to bring more realistic curved roads and road patterns to both the existing and new areas of the PZ map.
There’ll also clearly be loads of new tiles and decorations that come with the map update and, while the blog writer doesn’t find it hugely exciting, I am reliably informed that the ability to spruce up your bases with lovely new vegetation will be of encouragement to some.
NEXT TIME
As discussed in our last blog, when we return for our next dev update we will get the latest from Yuri and Andrei on MP, who have now an entire month to do deep dives into their work without us poking them with a stick every week for something to show the world – as well as all the SP latest similar to that discussed above.
 
In the interim we will also put up the next Mod Spotlight from Pat_Bren, who this month will be talking to none other than the elusive Snake. Thanks all for reading!
 
This week’s featured image from KPKPlays. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too! Our thanks to all bratty stepsisters out there for refusing to relinquish their gaming PC!

Honestly, I'm glad for you guys that you've made this decision. I'd much rather you take your time instead of crunching to please the masses. Those that would complain about a decision like this aren't in PZ for the long haul or the right reasons. You guys have never let me down so far and I trust your judgement.
 
*stands on desk*
 
"O Captain, my Captain!"
 

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

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

 
Much love
 
The Indie Stone

Without a doubt this update is none at all disappointing. With so many EA games out there that give BARELY monthly updates, you guys have been absolutely killing it. I cannot be any more excited to play the MP when its finally (sorta) shaped and shined into the gem we all want. Wasn't here in the beginning but damn ill be here for the rest of the ride picking up hitch hikers along the way. You guys rock!

Now i can't see the world like i do before play this game.
 


 
descarga (1).jfif descarga.jfif

Noticed that when reloading the game coffee beverage loses its fatigue bonus (bug?). Also, why tea reduces fatigue more than coffee?
 
Sometimes when i add +5 coffee, beverage reduces fatigue by 7, sometimes by 11 etc. Why it is fluctuating? (not affected by how much character is tired, tested)
Another example: i add coffee +5 and beverage has fatigue -11. Then i add another +5 coffee and fatigue becomes -7. Shouldnt stronger coffee reduce fatigue more?
Also, sometimes adding x2 or x3 coffee fatigue bonus doesnt change, sometimes it changes. Why? Sorry, but it doesnt make sense.
 
It would be nice if there were larger bottles to store coffee, maybe thermos, which would also keep beverage hot for long period of time.
 
 

It can certainly, but an awful lot of the fun in the game comes from the trill of getting there vs actually arriving.
 
 Some of that is ofc down to there just not being much to do once you get past the first 8 months or so. Another part is just that you’re not supposed to get there in the first place, so the game ends up being front heavy by its nature.  (If most people don’t last two weeks, then content past that point is also invisible.)
 
This won’t always be the case, hopefully, but an awful lot of suggestions are about subverting the early game to make it easier to get to the … boring part (as it is currently).
 
Cover yourself in entails (but don’t get infected, start off 360 no scoping zombies with guns with little risk or skill, be able to treat zombie infection indefinitely … that sort of thing.
 
It’s not really about the long game but being unable to get there in the first place (sometimes).

Happy Thursday all. Things are ticking on okay over here, hope things are well with you.
 
MP STRIKE FORCE
For those out of the loop, the last few weeks of dev-time on the Build 41 internal test build has been centred around moving control over nearby zed placement from the server over to the client.
 
As you’ve seen in previous dev blogs the previous system was allowing 32 players to run around and have fun smoothly, but instances of zombie teleportation were still present – along with their game-ending and game-breaking bites. As such the transplant was made, and for the past two weeks the team have been stitching the new organ in.
 
Last week’s test started out bright, but soon turned into a bit of a mess-on when players congregated in the same area. This week, after a week of pruning, a small scale Wednesday Night Test felt much better.
 
Over the last week Andrei has been fixing up some problems involving players seeing different inventories on zombies, as well as some odd naked zombie behaviour when they are being run over by cars, and some fixes to combat desyncs involving more than one player.
Yuri meanwhile has been working solely on the zombie desync issues, improving the code that teleports desynced zombies into their correct positions to try and do this when the zombie is not visible to a player.
 
Last night enough bug fog had been cleared to reveal other smaller-scale issues, but we feel like we’re steadily closing the net around them, and the testers seemed a lot more positive in the playability.
 
Early indications are that the client driven zombies have the potential to work well and the system seems to be for the most part operational, however all the situations where this can go wrong need to be isolated and fixed up before any true benefits can shine. As before, we’ll be scaling up player numbers as each thrice/twice-weekly test goes by – each time flushing more and more gremlins out of the system.
At the moment the transferal of zombies between clients when multiple players are present is sometimes rather bumpy (resulting in pathfinding complications, ‘Force Push’ zed deaths and disappear/reappearances) but its getting better as every day of work goes into the new system.

The server is now no longer taxed at all, which is hugely cool, and means that when we nail this and release 32 player servers, they should require a lot less in terms of cpu and memory to run, and our upper limit on player counts after that are undoubtedly going to benefit from it.
Here’s a quick vid of the testing from last night.

OTHER STUFF
Nothing huge of note to show you visually (or audibly) this week, everything is very ongoing, but perhaps just a quick rundown of ”who else is on what” for a few PZ workers when it comes to builds in/around the vicinity of the mptest build will be handy – so you know what else is in the works in terms of nearer-future zed survival.
 
The Noiseworks continue there complete overhaul of the PZ soundscape. Our amaze-o composer Zach Beever has supplied them with our whole soundtrack, including files for each separate instrument, and right now they are nose-deep in elegant new ways to mix it all together and match to the action. They will also be delivering the first batch of new vehicle sounds tomorrow, which we can’t wait to hear as (let’s face it) our current ones are prettty shit.
  Turbo’s chatbox improvement project continues – giving you more customisation options, improving legibility and improving (fixing) its implementation with in-game devices like radios.
  Fox and Aitor, our graduate coders, are working on better in-game item categorization and fishing QOL improvements respectively. We’re big fans of the Crashed Car Mod here at TIS towers (as indeed should you be, do check it out) and it’s made us realise that we have our burnt out wrecks on the road, and we have our low quality/dented cars, but we have nothing in-between. Having write-off car wrecks extremely common over the entire map doesn’t fit our current or planned lore, but having a few fender-benders and t-boned cars certainly will.

As such Martin is taking a break from a new range of ‘taking cover’ animations that he’s been working on for a future build, and has started doing a range of front, right side, left side and rear ‘smashed up’ variants of each PZ vehicle. These will then be later used as more atmospheric ‘vehicle stories’ in which you might come across (for example) a front-damaged sports car that’s piled into a side-damaged police car in a barricade – alongside all the relevant zombies.
 
Finally, wrap your ears around this tribute to the PZ theme from Exxhy. Amazing work mate, really cool stuff.
 


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

The Zomboid mod scene is currently in full bloom, and so is our Mod Spotlight thanks to our writer friend @Pat_Bren_Writer! This month, Patrick has chosen to take a look at the numerous and diverse mods of Planetalgol.
The Many Mods of Planetalgol
Spend any time looking in the PZ Steam workshop and you’ll almost immediately come across the work of Planetalgol, who has an incredible 119 (!) mods listed at the time of writing.
 
Activate several of his mods at random and you’ll find yourself firing your flare gun at sprinting zombies, flinging smoke grenades you have attached to your military webbing, and sheltering from toxic fog in a secret, zombie infested base.
 
But where to start? How do you prioritise with such a horde of mods bearing down on you? Thankfully, Mod Spotlight is here to help! We’ve been in touch with the author himself to highlight some of his best mods to get you settled into the strange and wonderful world that is Planetalgol.
 
Terror Zeds

  The first line of this mod’s description reads “WARNING: DO NOT USE THIS MOD!!!” which just about sums it up. If you thought PZ’s basic zombies were hard to kill, wait until you’re trying to out-sprint sprinting ones suddenly bursting from a horde of their slower brethren, being chewed on by walking skeletons, dodging fire zombies and ones whose sounds attract nearby fellow undead. DO NOT USE THIS MOD!
 
Lab Complex Alpha
Regular survivors may have noticed a strange facility at the end of a series of winding mud roads to the southwest. We’ll let you come to your own conclusions as to the purpose of this base, but Planetalgol’s mod adds an entirely new layer to the base – literally!
 
Find the elevator and you can head down to the underground level where a twisting maze of medical rooms, construction sites, and who knows what else horror awaits. A true end game challenge for PZ veterans.
 
ZREs

  A lot deeper than it first appears, ZREs adds military rations and their components to PZ. Unpack rations to find base foods to make new meals, or pack rations together into boxes for efficient storage. This is a mod for the long term survivor.
 
Advanced G.E.A.R.

  Definitely for the action-oriented survivor, this compilation mod adds a variety of new weapons to PZ, along with new clothing and gear to hold them in. A flare gun, incendiary grenades, a knuckleduster and landmines are some of the new tools you can play with. Just don’t forget to use the new gun cleaning kits before a big firefight.
 
Worse Searching, and Even Worse Looting
These two separate but related mods increase the tension of searching containers throughout the world. Worse Searching, inspired by Escape from Tarkov, hides the contents of a container until they are searched through a timed action. Even Worse Looting goes a step further by adding locked containers and their keys to the world.
 
Toxic Fog

  A you-get-what-it-says-on-the-tin mod, this makes PZ’s beautiful pure white fog turn green and deadly. Make sure you have your gas mask to hand if you venture out, and for an even greater challenge, rain can be made toxic too.
 
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After somehow surviving all of that, we headed to Planetalgol’s safehouse to ask him a few more questions about his many mods.
 


Who are you in real life?

“I’m an older punk rock/metal dude. My earliest memories are from when I lived on a First Nations reservation in the Canadian bush country where you had to get flown in and out by floatplanes. I’ve been a cook in fine dining, a construction foreman, and a bartender/bouncer at an illegal underground bar, among other things.”

 
How did you first discover PZ? Why do you like it?
“I think it was a friend of mine, a film professor and big Romero fan, who first told me about PZ, back when the zombies looked like weird green aliens. A couple of years ago I had spare time to fill, looked it up again and got hooked by multiplayer.”

“I played on Ambiguous Amphibian’s server, which has no PVP safety or player names displayed. I found the combination of trying to avoid getting killed by other players, and the trash and corpse strewn post apocalyptic environment to be magical.”

“My preference has always been for really punishing hardcore games, all the way back to Nethack through to Dark Souls, and PZ just totally slotted into that for me.”

 
You are a very prolific modder – 119 are listed on the workshop. Do you have many more in the works? Why do you think you have this rapid-fire approach?
“Currently there are actually 128 mods of mine on the workshop. However that includes a couple of private test mods, and does not count several mods I haven’t uploaded that “work” but I don’t feel are ready to upload. So the number is closer to 200 overall.”
 
“My rapid-fire approach probably has a lot to do with my pandemic lockdown situation more than anything else. As well, the majority of the mods are really simple affairs that don’t require much time or effort to wrap up.”


What do you consider your best mods? Are they also your most popular ones?
“Best is hard to pin down. Best for increasing the base game difficulty without radically changing the gameplay would be Worse Searching and Even Worse looting. Best for being weird, wild and hardcore ruthless would be Terror Zeds. Best for providing hardcore, endgame level challenge content would be Lab Complex Alpha.”

“Worse Searching and Even Worse Looting are surprisingly popular, but my most popular mods tend to be my most shallow ones that just add new tactical toys to play with!”


How did you get into PZ modding? Did you have experience modding other games previously?
“Initially I got into modding to make custom content for my MP server and just kept on going. The majority of my stuff is designed with using it on my, super ruthlessly ridiculously player-adversarial hardcore hellhole server in mind.”

“Previously I extensively DMed weirdo oldschool Dungeons & Dragons, and dabbled in some writing for it and some other indie RPG stuff, and that has a big influence on my approach.”


What are your general principles for PZ mods? Do you think things should be made harder, easier, more realistic etc?
“A fair amount of my stuff has the goal of making the game harder, and a lot of my mods that could make the game easier, such as tactical gear stuff, are made with the intent of using them with other mods that make the game harder. For example, some of my grenade mods would make PZ easier when used with vanilla zombies, but if you look at those mods in the context of using them with Terror Zeds they don’t seem so overpowered.”

“Almost all of my mods are made with the goal of using them for my super ridiculous hellhole server. Worse Searching, Even Worse Looting, and Worse Vehicle Condition were made with the idea of complicating and slowing down the initial player looting rush and the smart rascals clean out towns in a matter of hours.”

“A lot of other creators’ mods make the game easier and, although that’s not my bag, I think it’s great that those options are being generated for people who want that out of the game.”

 
Other than your own, which mods do you enjoy?

“It’s hard to get into this without leaving anyone out by accident! I have a lot of respect for the usual big names, Fenris Wolf/ORGM, Filibuster, Paw Low, SoulFilcher and Snake.”
 
“Eerie Country is my favourite map mod. It wonderfully captures horror movie vibes and I find it such a pleasure to play in. The Scrap Weapons/Guns and Armor mods are something I find really charming and fun. A guy called Madman Andre has been quietly releasing a lot of great food/”realism” mods.”
 
“Oh, and Nocturnal Zombies! That mod is an absolute treat and the gold standard for enhancing zombies in a multiplayer environment.”

 
What’s next in your modding plans? What’s the dream?
“Oh lordy, I have so much stuff on my backburners right now. I’m working on Apocalypse Machines that adds more post-apocalypse style vehicles and wrecks to the game, as well as a suite of mods that add shipping containers, animal corpses, hidden caches etc. and multiplayer stuff for faction and base raiding play. I’m also making a Mars base map/total conversion, as well as more endgame/raid dungeon style map content in the vein of Lab Complex Alpha.”


“But my dream is to properly mod in monsters when animals are released and make a game like PZ crossed with Escape From Tarkov, but it’s an insane irrational monster apocalypse like Stephen King’s The Mist. Alligators, mutant dinosaurs, zombie alligators, zombie mutant dinosaurs, off-brand Terminators, Lovecraft knockoffs. I can’t wait!”

 
Thanks to Planetalgol for taking time to answer these questions in such great depth. Next month Pat will be digging into one of the most exciting user maps currently available – so stay tuned!“