Zebulon

tl;dr: We like it. It's not going to change and we provide you the ability to change it yourself, if you care enough about it.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of bites being a guaranteed death, as I too have concerns that it limits gameplay somewhat. Though even if this were changed to something between what you suggest and 100% death, it'd only really be useful to people who were new to the game, who didn't know that it'd ultimately kill them. 99/100 people would just re-roll even if it were softened.

But, you do have to respect the game's setting and the fact that bites being lethal makes PZ very unique among zombie games. It feeds perfectly into the tagline of "This is how you died," adding further to the experience and enhancing the thrill of the game. PZ itself goes out of the way to discourage you from fighting zombies in close quarters, meaning your bites are really your own responsibility. We also provide sandbox options and modding if you really don't like it.

Well it's not possible and never was.
It was made up to give you false hope that there was a chance. There was a bug which let you survive but it's always intended as 100%.
 
If there's anything unlikely to be conceded in, it's this. Sandbox is there for a reason, why people refuse to use it is beyond me.

MULTIPLAYER WORK
We’ve had a full complement of coders back on the internal 41 MP build since Tuesday, following the Russian May public holidays. Last night’s traditional Wednesday Night Internal Test was a bit of a washout due to a completely unrelated bug relating to an XP change not being compatible with MP. This has now been fixed, and we’re doing a Thursday test to see how things have improved, and things seem to be going well so far! A few issues but definite improvements. We’ll be doing more fixes and a bigger test tomorrow, so hopefully we’ll be in a good place for improvements for next week.
 
SOUNDS
Work from the Noiseworks sound design crew continues to arrive for our assessment, with Michael from Noiseworks plugging them all into the mainframe. It’s become increasingly evident that some of the NW gang are becoming quite partial to our game (even playing it for fun!) and as such ever more interesting and well developed sound design keeps on appearing. This isn’t always the case when you get separate teams in to work on existing titles, and makes us really appreciate having such solid (can we say ‘sound’?) chaps working on PZ.
 
Noiseworks stuff is being done separately from more general dev duties on PZ. Other departments aren’t being held back by this
    CURVES
Kukrapok, creator of the Cherbourg map and a member of the boat mod team, has been part of the official PZ team for a few months now – so we thought it might be an idea to let folks know what his initial task is. (Not least because it’s a real ballache of a job, and he could probably do with a little community cheerleading!)
 
You may have noticed that the roads that criss-cross the Knox Event zone aren’t exactly standard issue – 90 degree turns result in many car/tree incidents, broken bones and worse.

As such, Kukrapok’s current task is to provide for both official and community mappers when it comes to better and smoother curves and corners.
 
“After I was taken on by TIS, I was quickly tasked to create new tiles in order to add 45 and 22.5-degree angle roads.” explains Ayrton/Kukrapok. “This should prevent players from crashing into a tree too often when they encounter a sharp turn. Even though, I’m sure there’ll be still plenty of opportunities for each of us to wreck our newly fixed cars. (I see you Speed Demon thugs!)”
 
These angles are not just restricted to the corners themselves. It should also allow us to have much more natural roads between towns, instead of a network of long 90 degree roads, we could have more interesting angles and smaller turns during road trips to make the world feel and look more natural to drive around.
“The task is a long one, as it requires a certain number of tiles to be created in order to have proper transitions in between all new angles and this applies to street curbs, terrain blends, traffic lines, etc.”

“However, the result will improve the whole map eventually, and many modded maps, while also providing a smoother driving experience and a more natural feel to the map. Below is an example of 45-degree transitions of street curbs.”
Overall this task has involved the creation of 1133 new tiles (!) with most of them providing a mathematical brain ache to complete also, so many thanks to Kukrapok for his devotion to the cause!
 
This week’s foggy scene from Stean on Steam. Trying saying that five times with your mouth full. 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!

Hi all, something of an intermediate dev blog this week as the work outlined in this coder-speak blog to remedy zombie teleportation in the internal build of 41’s multiplayer is still underway.
 
The tldr of this is that we’re moving the ownership of nearby zombies to the client rather than have it governed by the server – and in the following vid you can see the work-in-progress functionality of this.
 
Here you can see two clients connecting to the server, the server determining which client owns the zombie, and then the server changing the ownership between them. When it swaps the first client sends its prediction of the zed’s movement to the server, and the server then sends this information to the second client.
 
It seems to be working well, but has also has bugs that need addressing like incorrect ownership changes, some static zeds and some attacks not causing damage. Yuri is pleased with the progress so far though.
 
This isn’t part of the main internal MP test build yet, it’s being fixed up elsewhere, so we haven’t been doing any high population tests this week – so no Naruto run videos today we’re afraid.


Elsewhere Turbo has been further improving our chatbox – picking up the baton from General Arcade’s Stas a few years down the line. Quoth the Turbo:
 
“I’ve been restructuring the underlying chat system to accommodate for the various new features that have been suggested by testers: this includes a different way of handling the streams, adding new features, and fixing up some things that were broken such as radio.”
 
“The chatbox UI is getting a complete overhaul, most UI elements are new and tailored specifically for it – for example the text pane is now a javabacked UI element specialised in handling chat messages.”

“This new pane has fast paginate and caching methods so it can more easily handle a big history of chat messages then its lua variant. It also has new features such as text selection, links, timestamp indentation to name a few. I’m also adding various options to let folks customise how they want it.”
 


Meanwhile SFX development continues apace over with Noiseworks, with tying new noises to footsteps currently on the agenda (each different depending on what footwear you have on, and what you’re walking on). RJ meanwhile continues to work on the player-vision systems and stealth described last week.
 
Finally, as it has been a little bit of a drydoid this week while we wait for the new client zed structure to be ready for the main MP test branch… our mappers have reached a point with our version of Louisville where it would be sensible to do some more testing for feel, bugs, look and performance.
 
It’ll be a big task both testing and zoning (adding foraging/zed story/etc areas) the map, so we want to be doing that simultaneous to its construction rather than in one big lump at the end.
 
And for testing, really we need zombies – so this week we extended the current map’s zombie heat map to make sure they can spawn. The whiter the area, the more zeds will appear.

(USUAL CAVEAT: Our version of Louisville is still heavily in production, and isn’t going to be releasing any time soon. That said, it is now in the middle distance – rather than just peeking over the horizon)
Here’s also a nice little gif nasKo cooked up for us to show the existing map underneath better.


Thanks everyone! And, again, a big welcome to all the new players who’ve been getting into PZ recently.
 
What’s more a MASSIVE massive thank you to all our existing survivors who have been so supportive and helpful in providing hints, tips and answering their many questions. Times like this really underline that our community really is rather special.
 
This week’s renovated motel from Razor. 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!

I think so far there was one problem is that the view from driving are still too short for players, I can't keep my speed up to 60, because I can't stop getting crash into on something,
 
I think mabye if we can change our view from the driving to look even further ahead will be good, I mean we already able to do that by aim our weapon, so why not make this one too? just use our mouse to contorl our view, that will be good, right?

Hello, I'm new to the forums. I figured I'll use this post to upload screenshots of the large map I'm working on. I want to do a 1 to 1 full scale build of my home city of about 110k people. So far I'm almost done mapping out the roads, which I have been using as the system of measurement. 6-8 tiles for a 2 lane road, and 14-16 tiles for the 4 lane highways. Finding the right zoom for google maps was a bit of a challenge, but I've managed to figure out how close I have to be to get all the side streets and little roads/footpaths. From there I planned on using satellite view, street view, and just walking around town to accurately get house colours, fence heights, spacings and all that.
 
SO, considering the massive scale of this project, I was wondering if there are any engine limitations for the amount of cells? I couldn't find anything other than old posts saying something about 255 being the limit(understandable there). Is that still the case? So far the map ends  up at 13 000 x 13 000 pixels to get all the landmarks and surrounding area in at the proper scale. Is this too big?
 
I've attached a low resolution image of the city overlay without road detail(one test). Being the only civilization in any direction for a while means this place has everything, schools, hospital, gun stores, multiple shopping malls with a large one in the center, fishing, hunting, camping, and a large city that never really grew out of its "small town" feel so it has very few buildings over 2-3 stories. I'd want the map to be as accessible to as many people as possible so I probably won't want to add any custom files aside from Canadian or locally specific themed stuff. Any input would be appreciated!

Hey all, welcome to this week’s Thursdoid!
 
MP NEWS
Our weekly Wednesday test went a teeny bit worse than last week, which was a little disheartening at first – however don’t fear too much, as it transpired this was mainly down to the last of the new features required for the MP release going in this week that were still a little untested and broken, and not down to any new issues with the net code. The initial version of the stealth system that will allow players who are hidden in dark corners or behind fences to have a chance to remain hidden to other players went in, and there are still many goblins to exorcise, leading to players being unable to spot players next to eachother. Likewise, changes to the safehouse system had various issues that slowed things down. And yes, bloody teleporting zombies! We’ll get into those in a minute.
 
Here are a couple of highlight videos from the test session!

Andrei and Yuri are still working on the systems that we hope will vastly improve the zombie experience, and eliminate all zombie teleporting that could potentially impact the player, however these did not make it into the Wednesday test and its possible may not make it into next weeks yet.
 
As we draw closer to the finish line, it’s becoming clear that just saying ‘we’re still fixing teleporting zombies’ isn’t enough to get across the work ahead, why it’s taking so long and so on. We hear the frustration and so thought we’d go into a little more detail.
 
This week we thought we’d go on a bit of a deeper dive into what our goals are for fixing the zombie movement and providing a near single player experience in zombie combat, as well as the general problems we and any multiplayer game face. Hopefully after it you will appreciate why this is such a tricky puzzle to solve and why ‘teleporting zombies’ are currently a thing, and how we plan to mitigate it, as well as some comfort that this effort will lead to something pretty special when we finally pull it off.

 
ZOMBIE SYNCRONIZATION CONUNDRUM AND CHALLENGES
The first thing you need to know about with latency, is it’s impossible to know where a character is in a game-world NOW on a PC that is running in another country. The latency means there’s always an inherent delay and thus often in games there needs to be a bit of illusionary duct tape applied to ‘make it all make sense’. You take a headshot at a character in an FPS, well the other player is NOT at that location by the point you take the shot.
 
But you have to pretend they WERE still at that location, to make the experience make sense for the shooter. This is why for example you have peeker’s advantage where a player can run around a corner and shoot someone before they even see that player run around the corner. It’s also why you may run around a corner out of line of sight of an opponent and still get shot. It’s a pain in the ass but its just an immutable law of online gaming.
 
There’s this idea of ‘truth’, where things are truly said to ‘be’ within your game world, and while this is often the server’s responsibility, sometimes it needs to be determined on the client. Of course this is also where hack vulnerabilities come from, since clients can be altered.
 
Things get a bit worse when you consider the scenario where you have hundreds of entities moving around. In old B40 multiplayer, the server was always the source of truth for where zombies were, and clients were always looking at out of date information. They never attempted to ‘guess’, using client side prediction, where zombies were GOING to be, which would have helped a bit.
 
There’s also the issue of server load, one that players on b40 servers will be all too aware of. Imagine 50 players, all in different areas, in different towns, with different areas of the map loaded up. Now your VPS server is suddenly tasked with running the AI, pathfinding and logic for 50x the amount of zombies a single player client has to be, as well as other tasks of updating the world, streaming, altering and saving the map data. This is in a nutshell why our servers operated so poorly compared to many other multiplayer games.
 
Even Left4Dead, a game that people marvelled at the zombie counts, variety and consistency in multiplayer, had a static map and only 4 players, all of whom were usually in the same area and experiencing the same zombies. Further more one zombie being in slightly the wrong place wouldn’t lead to an insta-death situation because the players were immune to being infected. So yeah, an isometric indie game we may be, but this is a humongous challenge and a big achievement when we get there.
 
So yeah, lots of challenges to overcome, and approaching this problem we’ve made various steps, with the current work hopefully being the last piece of the puzzle.
 
STEP 1) Not just client prediction, but client simulation.
So first we thought: Instead of just sending positions the zombies (or players) are in, why not say where they are GOING and let them go there themselves, using the client’s own AI algorithms. Periodically checking in with the server to make sure the server hasn’t ‘changed its mind’, and teleporting the character or zombie if they deviate too much from the server’s ‘truth’?
 
This is a great first step, as it’s resulted in the complete removal of the juddery, flickery, rubber bandy movement of every zombie and player, marching in lock step with positions a struggling, overworked server is managing to spit down to clients in its busy schedule. It’s why in general zombies and particularly the much less predicable players movement was so janky in B40 MP. Now our characters are butter smooth in their movement at all times, moving very much as they would in SP because they are, effectively, running the same code.
 
PROBLEM 1) So that’s great, but now we have a new problem. It’s very possible for characters to end up, due to unexpected events that have not yet reached the client, in very different positions to where the client believes them to be. What does this mean? Well, we need to teleport zombies to where they ACTUALLY are. So whenever one of these butterfly effect ‘divergences in the timeline’ happen, we have to detect that has happened and correct the record so the clients agree again on where the character is.
 
Why do these divergences happen? Well it all comes down to latency again. Imagine two players with 200 ping each. Player A shoots a gun. It takes their gunshot 1/10th of a second to reach the server, where it registers and dice rolls are made to determine if zombies respond to it. A zombie responds to it. Meanwhile, on Player B’s client, that zombie is happily walking toward Player B. It takes a further 1/10th of a second for that zombie responding to the gunshot to reach Player B’s client, where it is told instead to walk toward Player A. Problem is now the position it is walking from is different. Either we teleport the zombies every second to keep them in as close to the right position as possible, or their positions will begin to veer further and further from the server ‘truth’ and we have to do a big teleport to adjust. It’s a bit of a catch 22 situation.
 
So this is the problem we’ve been trying to overcome since then.
 
STEP 2) CLIENT (soft) OWNERSHIP
A big thing we wanted to fix was the potential for lag bites, this is instrumental to making such a harsh game where a single bite can end your character work in a multiplayer environment. It should NEVER be the case that a lag spike results in a zombie teleporting next to you and having bitten you twice between two frames of your game.
The solution we came up with for this is for the client to ‘call the shots’ about zombies that are close to them AND chasing them. This means for all intents and purposes, a single player on their own on a multiplayer server, when engaged with zombies, will have a COMPLETELY single player experience with that zombie. There’s no potential for lag bites.
 
Of course, this does open the door to client side hacks, and this is something we’ll touch on later in regard to our plans, but given PZ is generally a more PVE oriented game than say DayZ or any other game which is a more solidly PVP experience, we feel this is the sensible route to take, and we can deal with protecting from hacks in another way.

PROBLEM 2)
So this works, and makes a huge difference. There are two problems it causes or exacerbates, however: Firstly, the moment that a zombie becomes ‘owned’ by a client causes one of these aforementioned teleports, to get it into the correct position the server says it is before the client can start accepting the zombies position on the client as its own ‘source of truth’. The other problem is when multiple players are present, we now exacerbate the problems with clients disagreeing on zombie positions.
 
This is where we are at currently, and now we’ll go onto STEP 3 which is currently in the works, will likely take a little while as its the biggest and boldest strategy yet, but hopefully once it’s in and balanced we’ll be looking at a much smoother online experience, and the remaining issues to resolve will be much more minor by contrast and we’ll be gearing much more toward sending this out there to you lovely people.
 
STEP 3) COMPLETE CLIENT OWNERSHIP
Again, this will likely lead to further vulnerabilities to hacks, which we’ll address later. However, the ramifications for this are huge.
 
First off, it has to be said that on an internet with more than 0 latency, getting rid of any corrections of character positions is impossible. We’re not looking to eliminate teleporting zombies completely, that’s a fools errand. It’s just a case of making it as mild and inobtrusive and non-immersion breaking as possible, and removing any potential for these corrections to lead to a player’s death.
 
The current plan is for zombies to be completely simulated by clients, and clients alone. With the server acting more like a caretaker who looks over the zombies in a much broader sense. When a character moves into an area of the map, and zombies are spawned, they will simply run on that client. The server will simply dish out where these zombies are, and leave the client to it. This will mean to that client, there will be no teleports, no lags, the zombies are identical to single player zombies, end of story.
 
The further beauty of this is that the server no longer needs to stress itself to high heaven trying to process the AI for all these zombies, all it needs to do is a much lower effort tracking of zombies to make sure no naughtiness is taking place and zombies aren’t behaving in an odd way that suggests they are being fiddled with on the client via hacks. Suddenly, you have a server with say 64 players, the server is now handling AI for 0 zombies, instead of potentially thousands or even tens of thousands. Who knows what player counts we could entertain as a possibility without having to worry about the exponential rise in zombie processing per player as we have done historically.
Outside server load, this also means that players enjoy a completely single player experience, at least if solo. There are still a few complications when it comes to multiple players witnessing or interacting with the same zombies however.
 
If player A) is being attacked by a zombie, and player B) then hits that zombie in the back. It’s very possible that player A and player B will disagree where that zombie is. However, now, the ‘truth’ is where player A) says it is.
player A is being attacked, so the zombie is player A’s zombie. player B) hits the zombie in the back (perhaps not being stood directly next to it since player B thinks the zombie is half a tile away). So the zombie turns around and attacks player B). Now in our current version, with the soft ownership, what would happen here? The zombie would teleport to where player A believed the zombie is, meaning it would teleport on player B)’s client, the player who tried to rescue his friend, and potentially teleport to their side and take a bite out of their neck. That’s broken and awful.
However, the new system will always choose the client that is targeted or influenced by the zombie as the ‘source of truth’. So player B’s ‘incorrect’ position for the zombie will now be considered ‘truth’, and player A in this circumstance would be the one to witness any teleporting. This doesn’t matter however, because player A is in no danger from the zombie, the small fade in / fade out position correction has zero chance of negatively impacting them or leading to them getting bitten.
 
So ideally, there’d also be less of these teleports in the first place. This all comes down to improving the prediction and allowing clients to be closer in their ‘guesses’, but its just not possible to ever get rid of any teleporting without reverting to the much uglier laggy, jerky and rubber bandy movement from yesteryear, our goal is just to minimize it as much as possible, and as described above, organize it so that when it happens it’s always in case where it will never negatively impact a player that it happens to.
 
There will be also considerations made to lag, so a player with an extremely high ping will never be responsible for zombies that aren’t directly impacting them if a lower ping character is close by.

 
MP INITIAL RELEASE PUBLIC SERVERS
So the gist of everything above is, once we do get the first IWBUMs out there, we’re going to strongly recommend it purely as a co-op or whitelisted server experience. We’re not going to be able to adequately protect from shady behaviour without delaying the build even further after implementing this stuff, but we strongly feel giving players the ability to run co-op games or closed servers with friends, is more important than holding out and delaying for something which will be cast-iron protected from spoil sports who like to ruin fun on public servers. We hope everyone agrees with this decision, but we will of course do all we can during development of this system to add safeguards in there and expand that after the first release.
 
The benefits outweight the cost massively.
 
So that’s all for this, quite different, Thursdoid. Don’t get used to them as they take a lot of programmer time to put together, but we just figured that with the mounting hype and frustration at waiting for MP, a deep and detailed insight into what this ‘teleporting zombie’ stuff we keep talking about is all about and quite how high the bar we’re hoping for the zombie combat experience will be.
 
Thanks again for all the support we’ve seen from streamers and their communities, as well as of course our own. It’s been a tremendously exciting few weeks and we hope to get MP out there to you all as soon as possible! Love you all.
 
This week’s mourning cowboy courtesy of grenskei 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!

Okay so we’ll be doing the April Fools at the end of the blog, and it’s the bit where we say that the Community Penisham Festival is cancelled this year due to Covid.
 
Penisham is NOT cancelled. It remains very dear to us.
 
So anyway – Friday was probably the biggest day so far in Build 41 MP development as it was a stress test with a full 32 player server. And, huzzah, it passed the test.
 
Our focus for the past few weeks has been server stability, and 32 players reported a smooth experience (for some the smoothest so far) with only two lag-waves. These edge case server wobbles were then addressed the next day: the MP Strike Force able to terminate them with extreme prejudice using data dredged from the server.
 
We also had a Wednesday Night Internal Test last night, with a more restrained 17 players, which also went well in terms of smoothness and stability. For this we had also managed to fix the bigger test’s most annoying bug – that of some dead zombies spawning replicas who would then go in for the kill.
 
So a big test passed BUT (sorry) now we have that apparently stable test bed there are still issues we need to go back and improve/fix before a public beta release can be considered.
 
Primary amongst these is a return to issues of zombie teleportation that we previously paused on when it became evident that first and foremost the server operations needed some TLC. There are also zombie clumps that visibly spawn at the edge of the screen, random skills/XP loss and various other irritations. All these, then, will be the MP Strike Force’s mission in the coming week.
Here’s the changelist that was being tested last night, what was being tested for the bigger group on Friday night was essentially last week’s changelist.
 
And here’s your highlights vid:

Here also is a fun (staged) vid our friend Mad Dan recorded.
TESTER TESTIMONIALS
 
“I’m in South America (Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil) and even though my internet isn’t good I could play real smoothly! I did have some issues when I was travelling by car and the map couldn’t load fast enough, but the fight mechanics are perfect now. It’s hard to handle with multiple zombies, in a good way, and pvp is realistic. It’s definitely better than b40, I couldn’t even take a step in West Point in that build with lots of zombies.”
“I think you should remind everyone that there’s still work to do, as there definitely is, but for the first time last night I could fight a group without a lag spike, and twice at that! Now that I’ve tried some co-op looting I just can’t go it alone anymore. It’s awesome.”
“The smoothest session in terms of driving. No stuttering. We saw it once which lasted a half second, maybe. Server didn’t hiccup even once. Everything was great, but clearly there are the telepor zeds which are a known thing so I won’t mention it again. And the chat with icons is awesome. Sims MP came true!”
“I only had a short time to test, but the main thing I saw out of place was that zeds walking around seemed to disappear? It happened a few times. I also had one topple over a fence with some weird desync issue. It kinda floated onward along the ground a bit, before snapping back to the fence, only to re-topple. Still, it’s a very smooth experience overall.”
OTHER STUFF
 
Turbo has moved over to MP polish now that he’s fixed up his old work on isoregions (the code that stops fog and weather effects entering houses etc) which wasn’t playing nice and causing various bugs. His domain is the chatbox, which was once upon a time the domain of Stas all that time ago. He has already added some fun stuff, in amongst beginning work the various tester requests we’ve already received.
 
  Parallel to, and not stepping on the toes of, MP development we have Noiseworks getting new sounds ready and plugging them into our existing FMOD framework. This week they’ve been doing female zeds, primarily, while Michael has also been putting the guns into the game properly. Last week we showed a shotgun, so this week let’s see something with a little more pep.
    We regret to inform you that the Community Penisham Festival has been cancelled due to the ongoing Covid pandemic.
  If you’re a fan of the work of PZ ‘Cool Modder’ Nolan Ritchie, the creator of the Superb Survivors mod, then you might be interested to hear that he’s just released his own game on Steam. Freedom Physics is a physics sandbox – where you can create your own gravity-infused game levels with a full suite of tools and nifty gadgets. Give it a whirl, and if you’re interested in the man himself then check out our own mod blog about this talented chap..
 
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!

Evening all, small-ish Wednesday night MP test last night, with a max population of 17 people – and it went pretty well.
This week the Multiplayer Strike Force have been concentrating primarily on server stability, profiling and improving our fake clients – giving us ever more handy data that can tell us where crashes and snarl-ups occur, and why.
 
This has already borne fruit today by revealing the cause of a server hang that threw all our players into the void at the end of the test session – and which Yuri has now fixed.
 
Tomorrow we intend to populate the build with the biggest number of players we’ve had so far, 32, and again use all the code spelunking tools we’ve built-in to track whatever goes wrong, why, and when.
 
It’s this sort of stress test that forces issues out into the open, which may well also impact on smaller co-op games too – especially after long periods of play. So if you’re a player who just wants to play with one or two buddies then please don’t assume we’re being frivolous with this kinda thing.
 
That said, clearly we do want to slick on all levels. The current thinking is once we know that the server doesn’t shit the bed at 32 players, we can concentrate on fixing up the game-breaking and life-stealing issues we’ve seen in getting to that point. Primary among these, although now reduced from earlier test builds, are instances of zed teleportation. (A stable server will also make fixing these far easier than it would have been a few weeks ago.)
 
Our aim would then be to gear up for a release with those 32 players as a hard cap. After that, we will go back and look into extending this to 64 players once the new MP build is already out in the wild. Trying to do all this upfront may delay things, and also it’ll be easier to conduct community Megatests in this way too.
 
Other issues of note we need to fix at the moment, to give you a gauge on what’s going on:
 
Killing a zombie sometimes spawns another one at the same position you just killed it. This is beyond irritating. Sometimes characters reset – losing skill points, professions and traits. After a crash characters and character placement is reverted by an hour or two Separate from general teleport issues, sometimes a static zombie will fade out and move position Various sync issues in spear combat Zombies getting stuck on cars / slowed down too much by each other Other undiscovered issues lurking in the darkness Here’s the changelist of what was being tested last night.

Here’s a quick highlights vid:

TESTER TESTIMONIALS
(Dev note: these testimonials are on a slightly lower population server to normal. Tomorrow’s wider internal test will put the build through its paces more than last night’s did.)
——–
“First let me start by saying that I purposely played alone to “imitate” being in a public server… and because we’re not exactly organized. I’m pleased to see that the experience has become more stable, especially when it comes to combat with small groups of players and in some cases the driving.”
 
“This is not to say that there weren’t any major issues though, as these usually appear the longer the server stays on – though this time I did have less of them. Things are getting better, but there’s still a lot of work to do.”
——–
“The latest MP testing was an overall pleasure. It went way smoother than expected, felt polished and played as smooth as single player 98 percent of the time. It still had a few bugs, but with each week of testing the devs keep improving the overall playability.”
——–
“At one point I was watching Pink Gator’s back while he was disassembling the police station door. It. Was. Awesome. The scope of what you can do through collaboration is so much bigger than anything you could do in single player and I love it.”
——–
“For me it still plays a bit like the other tests, my only gripe with this test now is that not only are the zombies teleporting but they’re instantly respawning right after you kill them while downed, you can farm loot this way but it’s inconsistent and extremely risky as they spawn right behind you.“

“I’m still rather impressed how multiplayer, despite having 200+ almost 300 ping, plays like singleplayer. It’s extremely responsive, apart from those damned teleporting zombies and respawning zombies.”

NOISEWORKS
Simultaneous and parallel to the MP work (and not stepping on its toes, as explained last week) the Noiseworks team continue with their total revamp of PZ’s soundscape. This week they’re finishing objects and Items, designing and implementing some of the weapons, designing female zed noises and making plans for the music.
 
Here’s a quick example of what they’ve done with the shotgun. (Please forgive the animation bug!)
LOOT SPAWN
TIS friend Baph has been doing some interesting experimentation with loot spawn and distribution – which we are mentioning now as a ‘heads up’ to modders as if testers smile upon it it’ll likely be going into the game. (We will endeavour to provide any new templates etc to modders prior to release so mods can be suitable adjusted if required.)
 
“I’ve taken the procedural container system used for places like Giga-Mart and residential kitchens and started applying it to the rest of the map.” explains Baph, when prodded. “Locations that previously spawned random grab-bags of loot (like Spiffo’s) should have their contents sorted into relevant lists. If you’re looking for a bladed weapon or some fresh-cut chops, try looking around the kitchen of any place that sells meat (i.e, not a bakery) for the meat-cutting station. If it’s baking supplies you need, look for where the sacks of flour are stored– they’ll probably be next to a rolling pin.”
 
“Convenience stores, corner stores, and gas stations have had their shelves’ contents sorted so loose cigarettes no longer mix with the lollipops. Players who visit the pharmacy already have an idea of how the shelves are laid out: Some have snacks, some have drinks. You’re less likely to find medicine in a gas station but it’s not unheard of– ditto car supplies in a Zippee’s. If you want the most of a particular kind of item, it’s best to stick to the relevant business. Gas station tylenol is a ripoff anyway.”
 
“Medical locations now sort their contents into tools, medicine, and doctor-related stuff like gloves, masks, and scrubs. Bars, beauty salons, butcher shops, cafes, and liquor stores all take the same approach. Giant ‘catch all’ loot lists should eventually be replaced with tailored selections of items that are relevant to the location they’re spawned in.”
 
FINALLY
A big Spiffo ‘Hello!’ to all our new Brazilian players this week, who seem to have been attracted to us by the hijinks of the mega-streamer Alanzoka.
 
PZ has seen a ma-hoosive bump in streaming this week and we’d like to thank all the guys and gals on Twitch, Youtube and various other video portals who’ve supported us over the years to get to this point.
 

This week’s sinister mannequin friends from Dan the Man. 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!

I wanted to make a list of new items that could be added, and some features! And I also apologize for my bad english and words I wrote wrong
 
- Items -
+ Leather jacket
+ Leatherette jacket
+ Secateurs (The big one´s)
+ Sub-machine guns (In Police and military locations)
+ Lawnmower (To turn on, and attract Zombies)
+ Gas burner
+ MRE 
+ Chainsaw
+ More fruits (Mango; Lychee; Blueberries; Raspberries; bag of frozen fruits; etc)
+ More vegetables (Olives; Cucumber; Brussels sprouts; bag of frozen vegetables; etc)
+ More herbs (Bell pepper; Curry; Nutmeg; etc)
+ Energy drinks
+ Plate´s (To put food on it of course)
- Features -
+ Peeking around a corner (Maybe with the mouse wheel)
+ Beeing able to throw almost every item (To attract Zombies to the spot where the item hit the ground, or braking a window to create even more noise)
+ Zombies see you much worse in the dark, when you wear dark clothes, but also see you much better in the dark when you wear light clothes
+ Open and close Jackets so you dont get to hot
+ Make zombies not follow you by walking around a fence when you jump over it. ( Its hard to explain, I try my best. When you jump over a high fence, they walk around the big fence to get to you, but I personaly think they should lean against the big fence)
+ Throw items over a big fence, when you have a item as secondary like a gas can
+ Using the toillet
+ Brush teeth (When you dont do that, you can get sick after some days)
+ Beeing able to bath
+ Hide under a bed or a closet when its almost empty-complete empty
+ Jumping out of a window (Look against a window, press the button that you use to sprint and then beeing able to jump out) It could be usefull if you need to make a quick escape
+ Beeing able to wrap barbed wire around a baseball bat
+ Able to play CD´s on the  CD player
+ Able to play with toys (Jojos; Board game; etc)
+ Beeing able to find DVD´s and put them in to those big boxy TV´s or in a car and watch/hear a movie or what ever is on that tape (To get rid of boredom)
+ Beeing able to sit on a couch/chair and eat something on the table
+ You eat faster when you eat with a spoon/Fork
+ Suicide (With a gun. And maybe even add the feature, that when you are brave you have a higher chance to kill yourself. And cowards dont want to suicide because they are to scared. And maybe have a higher chance to suicide when you know you will turn. And when you try to kill yourself with a knife or in general with something sharp, you have maybe like a 0%-5% chance of doing it, because your character is to scared of the pain)
+ Not beeing able to sleep when a TV is on near you (But you can fall asleep when you are extremly tired)
+ Get unconscious (Of Pain)
+ Some Zombies are bigger than others, or some are more fatter than others, and thus are slower, or maybe some are a bit thinner and thus easier to make them fall and maybe they have less health
 
 
 
- Vehicles -
+ Motorbike (And maybe have a high chance to find a motorbike helmet in the trunk)
+ Bike
+ Scooter (Some maybe foldable)
+ More Civilian cars
+ Dirtbike (Especialy very loud, but good on off-road)
+ Trucks

I think what the person I replied to wrote was very offensive to the people making the game.
I don't understand the argument you're making about me repeating that a task is trivial, when the argument was that we're not fixing trivial tasks fast enough, to begin with.

An animator who is fixing an animation isn't somehow going to take care of beef jerky code, so that comparison doesn't really hold up, either.
Acting like you're getting a fixed animation instead of the animator somehow working on multiplayer architecture is a bad comparison in the same vein. 
I understand the frustration with the long waits on NPCs and/or MP, but throwing around accusations and demands of someone being fired over [insert thing you personally care about not being fixed] surely isn't the way to go about it.

We have about a thousand things on our lists and we operate on priorities. There are only so many hands we can have on deck, and thousands possible little tweaks that might all be small minor changes that could be done in a quick manner individually, but we have a countless amount of them, as evident by the amount of fixes that roll in with each patch. Sometimes things slip through the cracks as well, but the fixation on a certain little thing over all the other little things that DO get fixed with each patch is something that's simply kind of misplaced.

Yeah, I'd like some things to get addressed over others, too, but I'm not going full Karen about it. There are ways to point these things out without the sort of attitude we've seen there. I don't understand how it's okay to ask for someone to get fired just because a low priority item was not fixed, already, when every single patch is full of fixes.

EXPERIMENTAL/NEW
Added a new keybinding: Manual Floor Attack:
 
- Default to LEFT ALT.
- When you attack (hold RMB to aim, press LMB to attack) if you hold LEFT ALT too then you'll force a ground attack - even if there are standing/walking/attacking zombies close by. 
 
This also comes with an option called Manual Floor Attack - which entirely disables auto detection of prone attacks meaning that use of LEFT ALT is vital:
 
- If set to false, your player will /!\ NEVER /!\ do a prone/ground attack on a zombie unprompted, you'll have to manually either press LEFT ALT & attack to them with your melee weapon on the ground, or SPACE to stomp while standing over him.
 
NEW
- Added rain / snow visibility options: Always, Outdoors only, Never.
- Added a new SECRET zed story
- Added ZoneStoryChance sandbox option.
- Added a new anim to drink from wine/whiskey.
- Added new drink bleach anim.
- Polished and improved Spear Charging at zeds
- Added a way to choose player 1 if there are multiple players in a save file. This can be done in the Load Game screen by clicking on the "MORE..." button. A new player may also be created in an existing savefile this way.
- Added NewMusic_KeepMoving to sounds_music.txt.

BALANCE
- The "Wash Yourself" tooltip displays the amount of soap and water used.
- Fixed "Wash Yourself" happening faster when insufficient soap was available.
- Strawberries fertilizer resets to zero after harvest
- Can no longer get benefits from smoking cigarette partially and cancelling
- Spears now break after fewer kills (around 2-5 vs 15-20 before) at level 0.
- Can now make tent kit using wooden stake.
- Washing machines and Dryers now operate for a little while even when clothes are already dry or clean, as real world appliances would.
- Removed the need to uninstall Trunk lid / Hood before they can be repaired
- Now only spears can attack through wired fence/chain link etc.
- Spears have bit more chance to break when impaling.

ANIMS/MODELS
- Adjusted wine bottle to not clip through player head during drinking anim.
- Adjusted WhiskeyBottle.X to work with new drink anim so it doesn't clip face.
- Rescaled molotov to fit new bottle size.
- Re-exported WhiskeyBottle.png and Molotov.png to 64x64.
- Re-adjusted glasses clothing item to be proper reflective glasses, icon currently placeholder.
- Adjusted ski goggle clothing item to again be either reflective or dark version.
- Made the spear attacks use an upperbody mask so to reduce pausing during attack.
- Swapped out attacking on floor with spear for a new anim, Bob_AttackFloorSpear.X.

MODDING/DEV
- Added loading mod files from the media/AnimSets directory.

- Added optional versionMin= and versionMax= lines to mod.info so mods can specify which versions of the game the mod is compatible with.
        Build 40 will not be patched with this for now. 
        If the mod only works with version 41 or newer, add this line to mod.info:
               versionMin=41.0
       If the mod only works up to a certain version of build 41, you would use:
              versionMax=41.999
       Obviously replacing the ".999" with the build number.

- Added DefaultClothing.lua to specify default clothing items for outfits that have default pants or top.
       Previously, these were hard-coded in Java.

- Only save RADIO_SAVE.txt if the contents have changed.
       This is saved every 10 game-world minutes.
       This is done on the main thread; we should avoid doing disk I/O from here.

- Added OnCanPeform:XXX property to recipes specifying the name of a Lua function that will be called
 to perform additional checks on being able to perform a recipe.
 This is a more general solution than the NearItem property (that was used for blacksmith recipes).
 The function takes two arguments and should return a true or false.
        function CanPerformMyRecipe(recipe, playerObj)
              return playerObj:isOutside() and RainManager:isRaining()
       end

- Added Tooltip:XXX property to recipes to display additional text in recipe tooltips and in the crafting ui.
       This can be used to let the user know about additional requirements when there is an OnCanPeform function.
       The value should be a translation name.  The translation text may have multiple lines separated by "<br>".
              recipe MyRecipe
              {
                     ...
                     OnCanPerform:CanPerformMyRecipe,
                     Tooltip:Tooltip_Recipe_MyRecipe,
              }
       Tooltip_Recipe_MyRecipe = "Must be outside.<br>Must be raining.",

- Added possible forced hair/beard color for outfit in HairOutfitDefinitions.lua (bandit/punk will have a chance to have more "crazy hair color").
- Added blood clothing type to every possible body location, so you can easily mod a new clothing to protect X or Y parts:
- Example, i want to do metal socks that protect both feet and lower legs, i'll simply add a BloodLocation = Feet;LowerLegs, in the item script.
- Full list of per-bodypart location: Bag (back), Hands, Head, Neck, UpperBody, LowerBody, LowerLegs, UpperLegs, LowerArms, UpperArms, Groin.
- Each location will cover both left and right parts if needed.
- Thanks modder Flash for the idea!

- Catch the "Comparison method violates its general contract!" exception in IsoObjectPicker to avoid breaking the game.
       This exception can happen when compare(a,b) is inconsistent with compare(b,a).
       This doesn't fix the cause, it only stops endlessly throwing exceptions.

- Made IsoObjectPicker.ContextPick() a bit more efficient by calculating the score of each ClickObject once before sorting, instead of when comparing each pair of items being sorted.

FIXES
- Fixed police corpses sometimes having two holsters.
- Fixed the "Press A to activate controller" prompt in the main menu. It was only displayed when an XBOX 360 controller was connected, was positioned oddly and wasn't translated.
- Fixed duplicate items being created when climbing over tall fences.
- Fixed RMC ripping a worn out item ripping up another item instead.
- Fixed unrippable ankle socks
- Fixed colored furniture / paint signs being luminescent in the dark
- Fixed popsicle freezers outside buildings not consuming generator power.
- Fixed MaskEyes and MaskFull LeftEye/RightEye exclusivity.
- Fixed zombies not thumping barricade on the opposite side if the window was destroyed.
- Fixed exploit of being able to carry unlimited amounts by simply equipping another bag.
- Fixed the trailer crash stories only spawning advertisement trailers.
- Fixed spear charge not connecting when it should.
- Fixed spear charge not very often killing a zombie (wrong anim was played most of the time).
- Fixed being able to instant sprint after doing an attack if you were already sprinting
- Fixed various aspects of zombies losing interest in secondary/internal barricades etc (WIP!)
- Fixed exception loading map_meta.bin on the client.  This will break server map_meta.bin files.
- Fixed invalid spawn-regions Lua file being created on the server due to translations not being loaded yet.
- Fixed an exception filling an empty sand bag that is equipped in the player's left hand.
- Fixed dirt, gravel and sand bags not displaying a model when equipped.
- Fixed clicking the left mouse button hiding the splitscreen player's radial menu.
- Fixed hunger, thirst and sleep being enabled in the House In The Woods challenges.
- Fixed digital-watch alarms appearing on zombie corpses in House In The Woods challenges.
- Fixed temporary inventory items being created each time a zombie was hit.
- Fixed pressing the shoulder buttons on a controller - when the inventory window is displayed - interfering with
 items being dragged with the mouse.
- Fixed non-rendered floors not revealing levels below
- Fixed lack of sound notification when achieving a skill level (fitness & strength)
- Fixed being able to rip Favourite clothes
- Fixed "Lit Candle" not changing its name or state after being put out
- Fixed Metalworking menu not showing propane torch uses correctly
- Fixed not being able to defend from (or see) closet zombies eclipsed by door
- Fixed unavailable Double context menu option to put / take sheet rope on windowframes
- Fixed not being able to wear a hoodie with hood up + earrings
- Fixed connected vehicles and trailers moving around when parked. This was fixed by deactivating physics on the attached vehicles.
- Fixed large forces being applied to vehicles near fences. This was due to the HitByCar tile property on breakable fences.
- Fixed trailers attached to the player's vehicle not being saved every 10 seconds or when entering or exiting the vehicle. If the game crashed, the trailer could be left far away from the vehicle.
- Fixed being able to hit a zombies through a barricaded window.
- Fixed some spears having the bat sound when hitting with them.
- Fixed delayed sound of death when impaling a zombie.
- Fixed being able to cut grass/forage etc. while in a car.
- Fixed infinite loop when resting + doing fitness.
- Fixed enabling and disabling mods with texture packs not updating which textures the game uses.
- Fixed mod lua files in the server directory not loading after editing one in debug mode.

Thousands of things to do already in our trello, organized by priority  > simple thing you want us to do right now.

Asking for the firing of someone for some trivial balance, just after being warned for acting like an asshole over the fact that the map has never been a 100% mirror of the real world is just you being an asshole.

You're not banned because you point out things that need to be fixed or because someone is somehow "ashamed" because you point those things out. You're banned because you're being an utter twat about it virtually everything.

Makeshift/ Craftable clothing upgrades
 
item name/idea name: Improvised Body Armor kit 
 
have you ever wanted that extra bit of defense from being bitten or scratched, but normal clothes just don't cut it.
Well now that I have your attention here's my idea.
 
finding and using everyday household items like; Duct tape, Pillows, Belts, Books, Magazines etc. You can use those items to craft makeshift armor (Improvised Body Armor kit) for each clothing type (face, head, body, hands, legs, feet). the Improvised Body Armor kit can be applied to the clothing you choose, it will break once the clothing it is applied two's condition reaches zero or if you choose to remove it from said clothing; however with a higher tailoring level you have the chance of getting those items back spent making the kit. The higher your tailoring level the better the condition of the Improvised Body Armor kit.
 
There are some down sides to the kit(s). while a pillow or a book might stop a zed from sinking his teeth into you, you can't fit a backpack over a pillow neither can you crouch with one and with the books they add more weight of course they also tend to throw off your balance.
 
here are some reference images
 

With the tailoring skill in the game, I think it'd be a helpful addition to be able to make your own clothes instead of just repairing what you find. Sheets could be cut and stitched together into light & airy clothes like tunics or ponchos, perfect for hot summers late into the apocalypse. Additionally, tarps could be used for waterproofing existing clothes or even making cheapo waders to keep your legs dry. Later on when animals and hunting are in, pelts would definitely be useful for making winter clothes. Maybe even pillows could come into play as padding for warmth and protection.

Bug? Is the bug hidden behind this slick new slenderman feature?