onelove

Hmm... the first animated animal became a fly,
I thought that the first would be pigeons and other birds.

Hmm... the first animated animal became a fly,
I thought that the first would be pigeons and other birds.

Hmm... the first animated animal became a fly,
I thought that the first would be pigeons and other birds.

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!

Where is the news? It's Friday already.

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

I see that there will be Dual pistol system (or am i wrong?) if yes,  are we going to get proper animations of pistol shooting? (and how is it going to work , one pistol shoot at a time?)
NGL , dual pistols are something i would like to play a lot.

Where's my Tank in Muldraugh?

Hello everyone! A bit of a featureless Thursdoid this week, Noiseworks have been knee deep in the music system overhaul the past week, and we’ve nothing to show in a video, so we’re afraid this will be a multiplayer-centric blog this week. However we have some encouraging news from the latest Wednesday test. The phrase of the day is ‘careful, measured optimism’.
 
Please note that there’s still a laundry list of ‘stuff to do’ before we’d be comfortable putting it out there, however it feels like the last big thing, the client zombies that we’ve been talking about over the past while, is starting to feel like its getting very close. The testers reported ‘10000% much better, speaking of combat.’ and ‘Aye combats definitely 100% better & fun’ which is extremely welcome news.
 
However there are still issues to resolve, with a horde at one point completely disappearing, and a couple of very odd glitches with zombies sliding across the floor quickly when aggroed by a second player that will need to be resolved as these are the types of bugs that could ‘get someone killed’, the prime sort we want to avoid.

We’re planning a much bigger test on Friday, now the issues with the zombie syncing have mostly been resolved it makes sense to open it up to bigger player counts, so we’ll let you know how that went next week!
 
After we finally get the last few issues with zombie syncing finished off, there are numerous other things we need to make sure are working solidly, car physics being a prime one, as there’s been many a death or being permanently stuck inside cars caused by iffy network transmission of physics forces. Again, a prime example of what we need to avoid.
 
There seems to be some other issues relating to night-time having a weird effect on zombie visibility, meaning zombies can get extremely close without becoming visible. For a while it appeared this was related to the client zombie stuff, however it became clear this week this is likely a bug affecting single player too and is purely down to the game logic for spotting zombies, and so we’re pretty confident it won’t take too long to fix.
 
Ah, during the writing of this blog I notice a code commit where it has been fixed. So there.
 
There will likely be a whole host of other, more minor, problems — all we can promise is when it comes to less severe problems, we will draw a line in the sand as close as we can, and not be needlessly perfectionist about getting them all fixed up (we want this out there more than you do!).
 
However, as we’ve discussed before we still want the first version to represent some level of quality, being one of the biggest opportunities for Zomboid to really break into the mainstream there is a lot at stake on providing a positive and fun multiplayer experience, and not squandering the opportunity we have by releasing something broken. So we have to be careful to get rid of any bugs that are likely to cause extreme frustration or annoyance to players or appear extremely broken, as like it or not IWBUMs very quickly gets treat like the official release regardless of its ‘opt-in beta’ status.
 
In addition, we need to make a pass over the VOIP system, which can be a bit echoey and weird at times, and make sure its solid as we feel that player’s abilities to talk clearly and immersively to each other will be of prime importance to Zomboid’s success once multiplayer releases, especially given the recent rise in popularity of roleplaying in games.
 
Once we feel we’re extremely close, we’ll be having some form of short-term public single server test to really see how far we can go with player counts that are difficult to reliably attain behind closed doors.
 
We also have some plans as we did prior to build 41’s initial launch into IWBUMS, to get some more publicly visible testing via streamers in the week or two before release, which we hope people will enjoy watching (as we will, amongst gritting our teeth and sweating), but again we need to make sure the multiplayer comes off well for such public exposure as that. It should however provide us with a bit more last minute feedback on fixes and tweaks still needed and measure how the build will go down, as it proved incredibly useful prior to 41’s initial IWBUMs release.
 
So while today’s news is extremely encouraging, and the trek ahead seems a lot shorter today, please be aware there are still several stepping stones ahead that need to be navigated. Though the one that we’re feeling very close to jumping off of is, as far as we can see, one of the most unstable, awkward and yet important stepping stones to date and we’re extremely glad to be close to getting off of it!
 
Slow and steady wins the race though, you know our style by now, and that it’ll be worth it in the end even if its a royal pain getting there.
 
Before we go, as always, here is a couple of fun highlights reels from the Wednesday testing!
 
 
 
 

Also check out this fun little news piece about a certain familiar ground-zero Kentucky town!

https://www.reddit.com/r/projectzomboid/comments/nqfy1i/how_to_pronounce_muldraugh_and_other_irl/
 
 
  This week’s Fort Minitown by Tedbeeeeeeeeeeeer on Reddit. 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!
 

As noted last week, we’ve been a little hamstrung by the Russian May holidays (over a week off, you lucky Russians!) and as such improvements and fixes to the client-side zombies we were testing last week will predominantly be on next week’s menu.
 
Client ownership should be the last largescale technical hurdle the guys face, and details on what’s being done and why can be found here.

As such, this week’s Thursdoid will be a Noiseworks SFX special – which will be of relief to those who aren’t interested in MP, but of irritation to those who are. Our apologies to anyone put out, but hopefully you’ll still share our enthusiasm for some of the cool stuff that’s being laid out below.
 
As we’ve mentioned before, Noiseworks are operating separately from the main team – with only occasional requests for us to put new hooks into the game where there weren’t any previously. None of this is slowing anything else down, so don’t fret on that account. Our thanks to Michael and Matteo from Noiseworks for their help with this week’s blog.

FOOTSTEPS
Right now in the game versions you’re playing there are around 72 different sounds available for an individual footstep.
When the Noiseworks overhaul is merged in there will be 3044.
 
Why so many? Well.. the game will take into account what surface you (or your friends) are walking on.

There are ten main surface types: Concrete, Grass, Gravel, Puddle, Snow, Wood, Carpet, Dirt, Sand, Ceramic and another surface category that’s essentially ‘footsteps heard upstairs’.
 
On top of this the new sound system will also take into account what sort of shoes you are wearing – if any. There are different sounds for each surface dependent on whether you are barefoot, wearing boots, or wearing more standard sneakers/shoes. 
 
Then on top of *this* each footwear type has been recorded in four different performances: a Sneak footstep, a Walk footstep, a Run footstep, and a Sprint footstep.
 
And in amongst all of the above? Well there’s also dry and wet versions for external sounds that depend on the RainIntensity values, and likewise surface modifiers for walking on glass and through puddles.
 
When you mix it all in with the rest of the SFX (like additional water drop impact details on harder surfaces like concrete) then it truly is, as the kids are told we say, ‘immersive af’. 
 
Here’s a vid!
 
Please note this is ALL work in progress, being heard without the full soundscape, will have volumes balanced, has an occasional audible ‘double footstep’ bug that will need a fix etc. etc.

WILDLIFE
We previously shared an ambiance video in which the natural world of Kentucky can be heard in amongst the various weather and world effects. What we didn’t say, though, was what was being heard and how.
 
Here it is reposted in all its glory. 

Essentially here we have a range of different mammals and bird species, all residents of Kentucky, that can be heard through the world. Their unseen location is completely dynamic, and spawned around the player randomly.
 
Each species sound has a different chance of playing that’s based on when you’d hear them in real life – so it depends on the season, the time of day and which ‘map zone area’ you are in: forest, deep forest, town, vegetation/field, close to water etc.
 
On top of this each different map zone has different ‘insect noise’ sound beds that depends on the time of day, while there are also random birds that will be heard in particular randomly assigned trees that are appropriate to your location.
 
Right now animals and bird sounds will start to peter out when the weather changes, or the wind picks up – and in future we would like the noise of gunfire (for example) to prompt noises of birds taking flight.
 
(Beyond this too, we would clearly like these sounds attached to real/seen birds and beasts – but we’re clearly not at this point yet.)
Right now Noiseworks have sourced around 70% of the bird/beast noises we need (some might be harder to find than others) but hooks are already present for all of ‘em.
 
Here’s the current bird list so you can get an idea of the breadth we’re aiming for: Wild Turkey, Grebe, Pigeon, Cuckoo, Sandhill Crane, Gull, Loon, Heron, Hawk, Eagle, Owl, Woodpecker, Eastern Phoebe, Kingbird, Shrike, Vireo, Bluejay, Lark, Swallow, Nuthatch, Winter Wren, Kinglet, Thrush, Catbird, Mockingbird, Sparrow, Grosbeak, Longspur, Bunting, Oriole, Warbler, Quail, Crow and Raven.

WEATHER
Next, we go over to Noiseworks’ Sound Designer Matteo Lupieri for the lowdown on how weather ties to the new soundscape.
“The weather system was an interesting one to work on!” explains Matteo. “We needed to take into consideration that as weather intensity changes with more wind and more rain, the whole world surrounding the player should be heard to react.”
“So when in a forest, the rustle of grass and trees can be heard increasing with wind intensity – and raindrops hitting the canopy will get louder and busier as the rain gets heavier. You will also hear trees creaking, and branches snapping and falling during storms.”
“We’ve also thought of the equivalent sounds in urban areas – so in towns you’ll hear metal signs squeaking and creaking more and more based on the wind intensity. Similarly, lakes and rivers will get agitated and start to form audible waves with stronger and stronger winds”.

OTHER NOISES
Next time we do a Noiseworks update we can inform on the current car noises (which we haven’t heard ourselves yet), the zed noises themselves (which we are being very annoying and prima-donnaish about) and the situational music revamp (which amaze-o Zach Beever is back in touch about and supplying original multitracks for).
 
It’s all super exciting and, we hope, interesting enough to warrant a blog while Yuri and Andrei are off on their Russian holidays.

 
This week’s Zeddy Mercury from TM_Monkey on Reddit. 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, a dev blog in a similar vein to last week’s really – with Build 41’s internal dev server having the player/vehicle/server stuff pretty stable and consistent, but with the core members of the Multiplayer Strike Force off in another room hammering away at a better approach to the way client and server treat the zombies themselves.
 
The first part of this work, which places control of the zombies and their placement on the individual client rather than the server (details here) has been opened up to limited internal testing today – albeit with known issues like zombies showing incorrect behaviours after changing target, zombies not reacting to player sounds etc.
 
So far so good on this, though we haven’t had multiple players on the internal server yet – as it only went up a few minutes before this blog was posted. More next week on that front, then.
 

We have, meanwhile, been carrying on with our Wednesday Night Tests – as the rest of the team have continued to add stuff to the usual internal test beta while Yuri and Andrei work in their separate chamber.
 
Last night we used the opportunity to bug hunt in a few new map locations that will be added at a later date, while other new stuff in the test build were:
 
Equipped bags, and bags carried in hands, impacting on player speed. Fuel stations no longer having unlimited fuel, and also having varied amounts of gas stored when you discover them. Improved sneak and player LOS functions from last tests. Park Ranger and Lumberjack finally getting their tree-walking bonuses. Many and varied MP/sync issues that needed tying together – removing bullets, disinfection, nutrition values not being synced etc.
Here’s a quick vid of last night’s playtest. General changelist here.
 
Meanwhile, although anything new to show will probably have to wait till next week, Noiseworks continue with their sound overhaul and Turbo’s chatbox improvements rattle onward also.
 
(The latter is also now being coded with its potential dual use as an original Fallout style ‘event info’ box for SP to get textual messages and descriptions over to the player that we have always wanted in the game – though this element of it certainly won’t be a 41 thing).
 

Apologies for not being an all-star Thursdoid this week, now the larger scale local client work has started to be fed in for testing things will hopefully start to pop again. (Pesky Russian public holidays notwithstanding).
 
Finally, a quick shout out to the return of our Mod Spotlight blog – which we’ll be doing on a monthly basis from nw on. This month Pat_Bren discovers that there is nothing (absolutely nothing) half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
 
Finally finally – we also very much agree with this sentiment. Y’all rock.
 
This week’s reclining hero from Frank. 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, 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!

I have a question. With the new animations in MP can there be a server option to hide players names overtop of their heads? Would make it easier if you were poking out of the trees/shrubs while in camo to make sure the 2 guys looking to introduce your head to a blunt object have moved on and not have a giant bullseye over your characters head if they look in that direction.

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!

Zombies are stuck in the car, look at the image, I made in Photoshop.
I wish the zombies would fly over the car, and sometimes get stuck on the hood.

Zombies are stuck in the car, look at the image, I made in Photoshop.
I wish the zombies would fly over the car, and sometimes get stuck on the hood.

Zombies are stuck in the car, look at the image, I made in Photoshop.
I wish the zombies would fly over the car, and sometimes get stuck on the hood.

Zombies are stuck in the car, look at the image, I made in Photoshop.
I wish the zombies would fly over the car, and sometimes get stuck on the hood.