King-Salomon

NEW

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

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

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

Since its been a while since I properly gave a mod status update (beyond discord chats or random workshop comments), its probably time to post one on the b41 / ORGM 4.0 update. There's still a ton of work to do before we have a working beta.
WARNING: long read below....
 
First thing worth mentioning is that OrMtnMan has stepped back into the fray and has been a massive help in getting things ready.
 
With serious changes to the vanilla firearm code + movement mechanics in b41 the very core of the mod is no longer valid. The firing logic no longer fits, nor does its old methods of dynamically calculating many of the stats and how the firearm interacts with the players movements. Most of the mod needs to be redesigned (and re-imagined) from scratch.
 
When b42 comes around with the hunting and further firearm changes, we could very well be in the same position we are now...having to rewrite everything again. Given the fact we need to redesign now, and possibly again in b42, both me and OrMtnMan agree the time is now to make some serious design changes to minimize the potential damage from future updates. Thus ORGM has been split into 3 separate projects:
 
Realistic Firearm Framework
All firing logic, core mechanics and everything that makes ORGM truly unique has been split into a new project, the Realistic Firearm Framework (github link) or RFF. All Zomboid specific code and concepts have been removed. Instead of calculating stats like range in PZ tiles, or damage in PZ units, it does calculations in a more natural format (feet, ft/lbs energy, fps velocities etc). 
 
This will insulate the core mechanics and concepts from any future PZ changes, and allows for automated testing of the code components and logic, something much more difficult when the code was littered with PZ specific functions and concepts.  New features can be added with a drastically reduced testing period.
 
The RFF is designed to be a application independent framework for realistic mechanics in any game or application that supports Lua, from 2d turn based strategy games to 3d FPS. (naturally open source, MIT license)
 

The Data
The second project to come out of the split is the data sets. The list of guns and everything we know about them, as well as cartridge specifications. For the last few versions, ORGM has defined is weapons based on the physical properties (feed system types, features, barrel lengths etc) instead of PZ specific stats.  The data for v4.0 is massively larger then previous versions of the mod, and since there's nothing Zomboid specific in the data, having it specifically tied to ORGM didn't make sense. These datasets can't really be included in the RFF either, since we'd like to avoid including trademarked names in a opensource framework.
 
So the data is being separated and placed in a database format, that should eventually be a useful resource for shooters and gun nuts in general.  Right now theres over 170 calibers registered in the data, complete with SAAMI and CIP designations,  pressure ratings (both SAAMI and CIP), nominal bullet diameters, twist rates, cartridge capacity, links to wikipedia articles and CIP TDCC chamber and cartridge diagrams and specifications. 
The gun data likewise gets more in depth then previous versions,  listing multiple variants (almost 100 AK's atm, thanks to OrMtnMan's assistance), fire modes, barrel lengths, sight types, finishes, rail systems, stock and grip types, and lots more...
 
Not all of the data will end up being used in the mod, but its giving us a wide selection of items we can include later with most of the work already done.  At some point I'll provide a link to the data sets for people to browse, but not yet.
 
 
ORGM
With the separation of the core logic and data, the mod becomes a bridge (or interface wrapper) between PZ and the new RFF core, translating RFF stats (like projectile velocity and energy, or reaction times) into PZ specific stats. UI elements, context menus and all the PZ specific stuff will be contained and isolated in the mod.
 
 
When PZ changes any potential damage to the mod will be limited and much easier to fix. On top of that, we'll be able to include features and mechanics in the core RFF that PZ may-not-yet support (but possibly will) such as mechanics for shooting from the hip or prone, allowing us to get ahead of the game. The drawback to the new design means a longer initial delay of a working 41 version. But hopefully the new mechanics and the even crazier level of detail will make it worth the wait. Lately I've been attempting to add a basic (but remaining realistic) interior ballistics simulation that would allow for accurate handloading mechanics.
 
 
 

Next time if you'd prefer you can wait until MP is released and not be able to play SP at all in the meantime.  Your call.

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

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

Forgot to increment the version number and we have reduced devs today due to OMG FINALLY rest time, so forgive the lack of version change.
 
– Rebuilt jassimp64.dll with statically-linked c++ library (removes dependency on msvcp140.dll).
– Fixed exception in MouseState with 2-button mouse.
– Fixed lua error with climb-through-window context-menu command.
– Fixed solidtrans objects next to windowframes-without-windows being solid.
– Removed 3D-models and 3D-corpses options to fix invisible zombie bodies.
– Removed AutoZombieManager.java which adjusted the number of 3D models based on performance.
– Fixed exception with “New Roof-Hiding” = No option that causes black screen outside.
– Fixed “welcome to build 41” being off-center.
– Possibly fixed rainbow-colored bodies on Mac OS.
– Possibly fixed failure to load bob/bob_idle animation on Windows using the Turkish (and potentially other) locales.

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

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

 

Hey everyone! First off, for various reasons we’ve decided we won’t be doing an organized stream this week. We know this may be disappointing to some, but comes for several good reasons – not least because a now days-long internet outage at one of our dev locations.
(And, not ideally: the one hosting the build machine… which has made it more difficult to quickly get builds to internal testers this week. Though it hasn’t impeded development in any other way, thankfully).
Since we feel we’re very much on the cusp of the 41 IWBUMS too though, we don’t want to overshare and for everyone to get too familiar with the build before it goes live, and streams themselves while extremely useful to us and exciting to those waiting can get in the way of development and add an extra stress to the team on top of all the existing scrub, fix and polish.
INITIAL IWBUMS CONTENT
There’s now a complete feature and balance lock on what will make it into IWBUMs, and what will drop in later on during the public beta process.
As we’ve discussed before: this first build will be completely SP only, and MP support will be turned on during testing while we Community Megatest some more more robust multiplayer support with less rubber banding and stalling.
Unfortunately the high res zoom stuff didn’t make the IWBUMS cut-off, there were few too many remaining issues still meaning it’d be safer to drop in at a later date once IWBUMs releases.
Other things like split-screen, sprinter zeds, the tutorial, some challenges and various other elements outside the main game will also be disabled or diminished – all of which will need work to bring them up to date with the new animation system and systems surrounding it during the beta.
Likewise Yuri’s new fire system (currently getting various new VFX effects created for them by a specialist in Canada) will also drop in during the pubic IWBUMs beta period.
ZOOM
Regarding the aforementioned high-res zoom system, shown off notably toward the end of the DrunkOnLife stream, we’ve seen some confusion as to how this will impact performance. Despite the fact it is ostensibly called ‘high-res’, and improves the clarity of characters at full zoom, we actually seen evidence that this will lighten the rendering load a great deal, especially when zoomed out significantly.
The new zoom system gets rid of the highly inefficient FBO supersampling that was used for zooming out (often rendering at 4k resolutions on 1080p resolutions) and instead simply scales all the textures it draws on the 1080 viewport.
This causes various artifacts and issues, however, seams between the tiles when zoomed and such – which is the thing we wanted to fix before IWBUMS but just didn’t have enough time.  Once these are sorted, the only visual ‘side effect’ will be the higher resolution models.
We will also look into ‘faking’ low res rendering via shaders, for those who have an issue with characters being higher res than the environment, but we anticipate the majority will enjoy the extra character detail. Initial reactions to it have been very favourable.
ZED ROTTING
Meanwhile, while all this is kicking off, Mash has been looking into improving the detail across character models. At first we looked into doubling the resolution of the textures to provide more fine detail, but as it transpired even on high res max zoom, this extra detail would be lost –general improvements however have still been made.
One key thing she’s been working on is improving the zombie decomposition, and providing extra visible stages for decomposition over time.Here is one of the zombie skins, and the first three (WIP) states of decomposition:
Obviously these too will drop in during IWBUMs, but along with additional ‘dead rotting juices’ overlays for clothing alongside holes and desaturation, we hope to make zombies progression as they decompose a lot more interesting and gross – especially in later builds when players boot up games and scenarios that occur later in the PZ timeline.
MOVEMENT
There’s been a lot of balancing and discussion in response to the streams and tester feedback over the past week, trying to get the last kinks worked out of the system. Big things include finally nailing a thorny issue we’ve had with the character taking a small step toward a zombie when attempting to quickly run in the opposite direction.
This was responsible for several streamer deaths over past weeks, and in the words of the anonymous tester whom has been very concerned about these issues for weeks now: “Reaction to control is excellent, and the character’s turns are delicious.” – which was music to our ears after weeks of concern about tightening up the character movement.
Other areas we’ve been tightening up are knife attacks, making sure that stomps and floor swings never seem unfair in the hit box detection, and so many others that have led to rather impassioned discussions and various tests behind the scenes.
MAC VERSION
We were very relieved to see that the Mac build, something we expected to be on fire, seemed to work fine for the most part. However,there were a few issues related to the character shader system making the character look rather odd with some clothing combinations. Investigations are ongoing.
NEW SPIFFOS
New Rimworld-esque game-style options mean new Spiffos: huzzah! Here he is in all his glory.
This week’s image from an excited Frenchman again. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Okay so first off, here’s the ways this week that you can inspect our work on Build 41. TWO WAYS, in fact.
Number one: streamer Drunkonlife has a stream scheduled for Friday (tomorrow) at 10AM CDT / 4 PM BST – international timings seen here. His Twitch channel, meanwhile, can be found linked here.
Number two: Project Zomboid regular Mathas has also had access to the new build and his first video from it can be found below.
As will be seen in Drunk’s stream, and as can be seen in Mathas’ vid – especially with some performance chugs towards the end – there are still some bugs to iron out.
Overall, however, these early testers seem to be having some fun – although Mathas clearly didn’t know about the new ‘sneak’ button so we need to flag that up a little more!
DIFFICULTY
A quick note on difficulty – as it was a hot topic in the comments beneath Cromulent Archer’sYouTube vid. We have been very insistent recently that we want to make the game harder – which is why bites from behind are more fatal, why three or more zeds can pull you down to the ground etc etc. This was the original ethos of PZ, our ‘Dark Souls hard’ Survival mode, and we don’t want to compromise on this.
However, there have been valid points from fans of combat in previous builds that not everyone wants to play with such lethal zombies that discourage combat most of the time. As such, we’ve been brainstorming the best way to cater for everyone – and have landed on a play-styles concept inspired by the amazing game Rimworld.
Survival will remain top of the list on the game selection screen (but will be renamed ‘Survivor’), which will then be followed by ‘Fighter’ and ‘Builder’. These names aren’t final, but in essence Fighter will provide a more combat friendly balance: still challenging, but with risks of combat balanced closer to Build 40 for those who want to get their frustrations out on zed heads.
‘Builder’ meanwhile will cater for those who want a more chilled experience: building, farming and exploring without too much peril from the zombies themselves.
We hope that this will calm the fears of those who like to play the game with different play-styles, and to whom our hardcore Survival/Survivor mode is something of a turn-off.

(It also shouldn’t go unsaid that we plan to have the current public version, 40, available as a Steam beta and to be known as ‘PZ Classic’ – so if anyone ever fancies going back and having a play with the old game they always can.)
HIGHER RES MODELS
Since we introduced the new animations, we needed to make a change to allow characters to interact with each other better. Before, 3D characters were rendered onto off-screen buffers, shrunk down and drawn in place in the tile world just like the age old 2D character sprites.
This meant that characters could never interact in a 3D space in the way that 3D characters should. For 41, we changed the system to render the characters directly into the world in isometric 3D space. This change can allow for example, a character’s arm to be around another character’s neck: something that would never be possible before.
This, however, came with a downside: we used to be able to render characters larger, and shrink them down when rendering them in place, to obtain nice anti-aliasing. While the character animations and clothing look a lot better in the current streams and vids, they were a bit more ‘bitty’ and pixelly than before. Aspects of it still didn’t look great despite all the other improvements.
As such, and as mentioned a few months ago, one thing we’ve been working on is to fix this. We demo-ed it earlier, but unfortunately it was so bug-ridden that we up until now we didn’t truly expect that it’d make it into the first rounds of IWBUMS testing. We’re hoping now, however, that this will not be the case.
It’s all about zoom. Since zoom was first introduced, it’s worked in a rather inefficient way: using way too much texture memory and potentially causing additional strain on some people’s machines. Zooming used to work via creating an off-screen texture for the game world, and scale that texture in and out as you zoom. Therefore, at further out zoom levels you’d be often effectively be rendering 4k resolutions on one set to 1080.
These vestigial remnants of really old code were holding back the game in various ways, particularly because the 3d character’s resolutions were limited by the resolution of this zooming texture,exacerbating the character pixelation described above.
As such, in a side-branch to the current internal test build, we’ve pulled out all the zooming code, and restructured the way zoom works: now zooming all the tiles properly through opengl’s projection systems.
Now, there are still some things to resolve: implementing mipmaps and a few other things to avoid any shimmering when zoomed out, filtering changes to avoid blurriness and so on. However now our rendered characters are not bound as before, and we can render higher resolution characters that are generally more pleasing to the eye and should hopefully reassure the few people who pointed out issues with the characters in build 41. [Ignore the brightness difference here by the way]
Note this particular example still looks pretty good on the left, however on more complexly coloured and patterned clothing, this resolution often led to characters looking a lot less pleasing. This increased resolution, as well as looking much smoother, will allow us more scope for character customization and detail, such as tattoos and other things we previously deemed we didn’t have enough resolution to do properly.
This week’s image from a Frenchman rather too pleased with his zombie zoning work, but it is pretty cool yes. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Understand, this is just 'a build of a game you're waiting for' for you - this is our livelihood, reputation and future. It's not ready yet, it still needs a few important fixes, and even then it'll still have millions of bugs for you to find in iwbums. We're not releasing it until we're confident it is as close to playable that the reaction from the majority will be positive since a lot of people treat IWBUMs as 'complete' and have been waiting for years for this, and will think nothing of bad reviewing our game out of visibility if on their first play, beta or not, they don't like how it plays with all the changes. We want it out there ASAP and are not holding it back out of some evil sadistic glee, we're holding it back only as long as it takes to get our 'MUST BE FIXED BEFORE IWBUMS' list of serious issues wiped out, and just because you may not have seen these issues in the relatively short time you've watched someone (who had instructions on what to avoid) play doesn't mean they wouldn't cause you and many others serious issues if we released today.
 
We have a LOT riding on this release going down well, we've sunk a TON of money into its development, and we need it to be positive and help push zomboid further out and get attention for something other than horrible bugs making it unplayable. Just because you think you'd be satisfied with it from the streams you've seen doesn't mean it wouldn't go down like a lead balloon and potentially screw us up going forward toward NPCs. We're already anticipating some pushback from some about the Survival difficulty and weightier controls and don't need game breaking bugs risking too much upset after such a long wait. We just need a week or two more to make sure we release the IWBUMs right and that's not going to change.

Hi everyone, blog-writer has been drenched in the vomit of children tonight so it’ll be short with occasional sweetness. (Even if the actual smell of the blog-writer is quite sour.)
Item 1: We’re going to have weekly streams of the internal test build up until the public IWBUMS beta release. Last week’s with Mark.exe went really well, and was also super valuable in terms of all the team being present together to watch out for bugs and frailties.
(Because of the usefulness of seeing the game played for an extended period for us, they’ll only be English language streams we’re afraid).
This week, then, it’s the turn of Cromulent Archer.
The Cromulent Archer will be streaming tomorrow (Friday) at 6pm Eastern US time – which equates to 10pm GMT, and 11pm BST. More international timings here. The vid will then also be hosted at his home on the YouTubes.
So what will have changed from last Thursday’s Mark.exe stream? Read on, MacDuff…
POST-MATCH REPORT
Overall the stream went very well, with almost every comment we’ve seen being positive about the longer look at the animation build: unedited and unfiltered. Something we were anxious about!
Viewers got to see Mark limp around in a panic after a thigh injury, get eaten multiple times while reading his chat, dress up like your dad, sport a Spiffo backpack, and nearly but not quite wear a dress.
The stream was, however, hit by a few gremlins: some graphical resolution bugs, errant zombie behaviour giving him a much easier time than he ought to have had, and a crash due to a vehicle bug that we’re still in the process of ironing out.
Mark, in fact, had to turn vehicles off for the remainder of his playthrough – and it’s likely Crom will have to do similar tomorrow. However, the flow and steadiness of the gameplay encouraged us that beyond technical gremlins like these it’s getting closer and closer to being ready for the wider IWBUMS audience.
As well as looking into said gremlins, then, we’ve also spent the week improving zombie grouping and attraction rates (rural surviving was just too easy for Mark, despite the tougher multi-zed combat) – while EP is also doing some exciting work with general pathfinding, although this will be a big change and as such might not be something that’s part of the IWBUMS beta on first release.
Zac, meanwhile, has been spending more time on his optimization efforts, his AnimZed performance tracker and horde-handling – which is all part of our ongoing effort to bolster the new build’s playability on lower-end systems.
CURSOR-Y MENTION
Not a biggie, but still one that’ll have an impact – but we’ve added an optional isometric cursor when aiming, that will allow new players (or those who struggle with estimating the direction of facing from the mouse cursor when aiming) to see in isometric space where their mouse cursor is situated in relation to the ground plane of the character
Since characters do not automatically turn as much now to engage zombies, having an accurate idea of the character’s facing is more important than ever, and we’ve tried to make something as unobtrusive as possible.

Sadly due to what seems to be an LWJGL 2 bug we’re unable to turn the mouse cursor off when the cursor is visible, but it still looks pretty neat. As you may notice, we’ve also got the custom cursor system working so we’re finally free of the ‘default windows cursor’ lack of polish we’ve had on display for a long time. The shown cursor is not final however, and we are working on a more zomboid appropriate one as we speak.
MEANWHILE IN ART LAND
There has been a changing of the guard in terms of map creation. The remainder of the work on our version of Louisville will be undertaken by Binky and RingoD (who initially landscaped the overall ‘ground map’ of the area) – in order to free up Mash to improve the look, feel and general feeling of variety of the game in general.
For example, her first mission is to add overlays thanks to EP’s addition of an overlay system to TileZed. So, for example, at the momen tshe’s adding numerous overlays to help make walls and floors look more natural and less tile-y.
Cracks and worn away mortar around bricks, peeling off wallpaper, and other details will  appear throughout the entire map, and with Mash’s 100% focus on art instead of having to divide her time between that, buildings and assembling and dressing the map, she’s hoping to improve the visual detail of the Zomboid game world dramatically.
A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Hello, so slightly different Thursdoid this week.
The big question in the community is currently ‘when IWBUMS beta?’ which, while we are close, we don’t like to give a concrete response to as gremlins always have a tendency to leap from the woodwork. No worse release estimate, than a missed release estimate. (That said: weeks, not months for the IWBUMS beta.)
So, instead, we thought the best thing to do would be to let the community see the current internal test build ‘live’ – so you can all see the current version with all its blemishes, and hopefully most of its coolnesses.
As such from an intended start-time of 9pm BST tonight Mark.exe will be streaming the current internal version of PZ Build 41.
Mark.exe’s channel can be found here.
A handy international timezone guide to when 9pm lands in your country can be found here.
We hope that the build is relatively clear in terms of show-stopping bugs BUT there have been a few crashes reported from testers during the day.
PLEASE be patient with us, and with Mark, if there are any technical issues that rear their heads – this is a work-in-progress version and not even officially a beta just yet.
Movement animations, if they look weird at all, are very likely on our ‘to polish’ list. That said, fingers crossed y’all will enjoy it.
MEANWHILE
Far and away the biggest change this week came as a result of some serious discussions about the responsiveness of the main player controls.
For the entirety of anims development the mission had been to balance the increased realism of movement and increased presence with the slight lag of control you have from the character moving realistically: with character footsteps actually accounting for movement, instead of an internal switch that’s flicked the moment you press a key.
Many AAA games have a slight delay in movement, even extremely amazing and popular ones such as Red Dead Redemption 2, so overall we thought this was a noble aim. The end results of which however, amidst a lot of positives, led to grumbling from internal testers. This week then, we experimented – tightening it further. Trying to push it to its very limit of control responsiveness, without the animations looking robotic.
We tightened blend times between standing idle and walking, tightened blends when turning etc, and now we think we’ve found a much tighter balance. Most of the internal testers, re-accustomed to the weightier movement through extended play, were already pretty much satisfied with what we had – but all now agree that the tightening of these screws has made things better.
As such we’re now feeling a lot more confident that, after some adjustment period once both beta and final version are live, most established PZ players will have far less issues over how animations have changed the feeling of mobility within the game. Which has come as a relief.
FINALLY
After we showed off ‘combat while moving’ last week there were community concerns raised that it would be very easy to ‘kite’ the zeds – continually batting them off and keeping yourself safe from the horde.
This… is less of a problem now.
A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!
When IWBUMS does go live please note that the hat shown in the linked video is a posh lady’s wedding hat and NOT a sombrero. This is of paramount importance. Thank you.

"
A big aspect in build 41 has been the combat balancing. We wanted to make the one on one combat feel a lot easier, where fighting with groups would be much much more deadly.
This however has been too successful if anything, and we ended up with groups being SO deadly it was actually near impossible to survive a few fights with small groups, which ended up way too punishing even for ours, the most masochistic of gaming communities. (Sorry)"
 
To reiterate, you haven't played build 41. You're comparing it to 40, but as we've stated repeatedly, the entire combat system has been 100% replaced, rewritten from scratch, from what you're playing already, so we're balancing based on that, not what you're currently playing. Where you can get grabbed and bitten at a moment's notice. Where if at any point three zombies get close to you they will right there and then drag you to the ground and kill you instantly? Where any zombie that sneaks up behind you is almost guaranteed to take a chunk out of your neck? Where basically ANY 1v2 fight are not only difficult but ends 99% with you getting a bite the moment you swing at one of them, are unable to move, and the other gets into range during your swing?
 
Without the strafe moving, build 41 was literally about 10x harder than build 40 that you're playing, and everyone including extremely seasoned players in closed testing agreed it was way too punishing and would piss everyone off, and every one of them to a man/woman were celebrating the strafing combat as 'that's the last piece of the puzzle, and exactly what was needed', and you're making judgement calls on balance we're doing to build 41 based on 'it already being too easy' in build 40 - its kinda frustrating as I said above we're considering the ramifications of strafe moving on kiting etc to make sure it doesn't break the difficulty, just provides more scope for players to avoid certain death within their first few encounters.
 
We already stated we're going to ensure that difficulty is not compromised by kiting, we're balancing hit damage, zombie reactions, chance of knockdowns, speed of backward strafing, all manner of things to make sure strafing is not OP. But the game being IMPOSSIBLE to survive for a decent playlength was not good balance either. Our end goal for the balance is it will be deadly to try and fight against 3+ zombies with a start character. But taking on a couple of zombies at once you'll have a chance of getting away alive, and killing a single zombie on its own will be not too bad providing it doesn't get the jump on you. We have a very specific plan for balance and the goal is that groups will be much scarier than they are in build 40, but if we go too far (how it was prior to this addition) it will turn off all but the most skilled players and even those may get extremely frustrated before long.

After last week’s big vid bonanza it’s something of a ‘techie’ behind the curtain blog today, but hopefully there’s enough to keep your proverbial up.
CROWD RENDERING
With the animated rotation tech front largely under control, we are now working on the next big ticket item we’ve been wanting to get in pre-IWBUMS.
Any good apocalypse needs a good healthy horde of ravenous undead. That said, please ignore the fact that all the above ones are bald. Call it a comeback I guess, or more likely a bug.
Zac’s current challenge is to be able to draw large quantities of articulated, walking, shambling, crawling, eating, and swarming zeds at a reasonable frame rate. Right now it’s okay-ish on a decent system, but wouldn’t stand up to a huge amount of zombie horde herding – which we know is a favourite pastime of PZ players.
Crowd Rendering is a collective term that involves a number of techniques that take advantage of the large numbers of crowds to make the process much more efficient.
To know where to aim, however, it’s a big help to have intimate knowledge of just how the PZ engine is performing, and where the hot-spots are. Toward this end, we are adding a Performance Analyzer module to AnimZed.
Instead of a general list of hot-spots from a broad sampling of the running game, this will allow us to see a sequence of frames and the story of each rendered frame from start to finish.
We will know what happens in the RenderThread and the UpdateThread, from start to finish, and will be able to measure the cost of each step, and validate the benefits of any optimization technique on a step-by-step basis.
Or, at least that is the hypothesis. The initial implementation is the bare bones required to get us some useful data. If it proves useful, it will be allowed to stay and get improved as we go along through the builds of the future – not to mention help us optimize in other areas of the game.
COMBAT IMPROVEMENT
A big aspect in build 41 has been the combat balancing. We wanted to make the one on one combat feel a lot easier, where fighting with groups would be much much more deadly.
This however has been too successful if anything, and we ended up with groups being SO deadly it was actually near impossible to survive a few fights with small groups, which ended up way too punishing even for ours, the most masochistic of gaming communities. (Sorry)
As such, due to the new animation system’s ability to allow animations to play only on the top half of the body, RJ has made a change that allows you to strafe while shoving and swinging your weapon.
The upshot now is this has added a whole new element to combat, instead of being rooted to the spot for the duration of the swing, the player has more tactical options for positioning. It still needs some further bug fixing and balance (we may consider applying some malus to damage when moving during a strike if it’s necessary) but overall it’s working really well.
OTHER STUFF
We’ve clearly got a lot of internal testing going on at the moment – and it’s spotlit a few issues we need to clear up. (Although they’re arguably not IWBUMS-delaying at the minute, so don’t worry about that aspect of it). A prominent one is looting not playing nicely with rotationals, and causing a ‘Robocop turn’ at the end of player pathfinding to cupboards, lockers etc. Elsewhere we’re polishing a lot of the changes between movement states and bickering about keypresses, toggles and other aspects of player input. All the fun of the fair. Yuri is back on his work on improved fire visuals. This won’t be a part of the initial IWBUMS release, but we probably will want to be integrating it during the IWBUMS beta process – as it’s the last graphical overhang from the earliest days of PZ and currently looks ugly as sin on the new models. Internal testing of the extremely WIP (many builds far distant) Louisville map went really well, with a good variety of buildings being felt and general city size seeming expansive. It has, however, also been fruitful in showing us that to ‘feel’ built-up then things have to be tighter on-screen – so we will be removing a lot of the parking lots we previously had in downtown areas, so it all feels more compressed. Radio silence, bar the very occasional screenshot, on our version of Louisville shall now recommence! This week’s boardroom meeting from VOVKA. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Hydrocraft v.11.1 has been released!
 
Which includes...
 
LUA Changes
- Added Hemp to Potted Planting
- Added Beer Can Packs, Jello Mold, Large Can of Coffee, Alcoholic Beverages Cookbook, Coffee Filter Box to Item Distribution
- Increased Baking Tray, Electric Clamp, Coffee Filter spawn rate
- Fixed Honey Barrel not turning into Mead Barrel
- Juices can now only be made with Fresh fruits
- Reduced MRE Spawn and will give less MREs per box
- Fixed Cougar Hunting
- Small changes to farming code that will (hopefully) resolve rare cases of Hydrocraft crops breaking on server crash
- Removed remaining HCTireiron associations
 
Added/Changed/Removed Recipes
- Bar/Drinks Overhaul - Need to read the Alcoholic Beverages Cookbook to learn recipes
- Rework of Irish Coffee recipes - now uses a Glass of Whiskey instead of whole bottle and does not use whole coffee recipient anymore
- Coffee Overhaul - New Large Can of Coffee item, can make Kettle of Coffee and pour into cups
- Renamed "Regular" Coffee (Coffee2) to Instant Coffee - Can make Instant Coffee directly with a Cup of Water
- Changed Katana sound - same sound as swords
- Increased Whipped Cream Can to 50 hunger
- Can now boil water in Canteens/Birch Bark cup
- Adjusted weight of Cookie Bags
- Making Gunpowder and base game bullets now require Gunsmithing Book
- Added nutritional value to Classic Canned Soup
- Added "Empty" Container for food recipes
- Added Chocolate and Vanilla pudding recipes
- Added Pipe recipes with Pipe molds
- Added Make Metal Bar recipes
- Added Bar Mold item & recipe
- Added Craftable Windows & Windshields
- Added Empty Ink Well & Ink Well recipes along with the recycle recipe
- Added Quill item & recipe & icon
- Added Recycle Aluminum (Empty Propane Tank) recipe
- Added All Pallet of Ingots - Pack / Unpack recipes
- Added dismantle recipe for Iron & Steel Pulleys
- Added Recycle Recipes from Iron Wheel & Steel Wheel
- Added Scrap Aluminum & Scrap Plastic & Scrap Rubber and respective recycle recipes
- Added Dismantling for Scissor Lift, Fork Lift, Van de Graff, SteplAddeder and Copy Machine
- Added Copy Machine with Generator item & recipe / Added Return Generator from Copy Machine with Generator recipe
- Added Brass Sheet & Brass Scrap and its respective craft and recycle recipes
- Added Rubber Belt item & recycle recipe
- Added Pallets of Steel Sheet, Copper Sheet, Rubber Sheet, Tin Sheet, Iron Sheet, Metal Bars, Aluminum Pipes items and their respective recipes
- Added Dismantling for Pallet Truck, Toy Wagon, Hand Dolly, Shopping Cart, Push Cart, Glove Box, Lawn Mower, Radiator, Projector, Bed Strings
- Added Coffee Filter Box
- Added Custom Smoking Sound (Thanks jiggawutt!)
- Removed PVC pipes to steel recipe
- Removed "Cut Steel Pipes" book recipes
- Removed 2 old recipes in Welding Textbook (Construct Barricades)
- Removed Hot Cuppa recipes and items (replaced by new Coffees)
 
Fixed Recipes
- Fixed Jar Homemade Yogurt Recipe
- Fixed Empty Baking Tray Recipe (Wrong name for Baking Tray with Fruit)
- Fixed Make Homemade Pancake Batter Recipe
- Fixed sounds when breaking Wood/Metal items (knives etc.)
- Fixed Grits and Cheesy Grits "Make bowl" recipe
- Fixed Juice packet not being used when Mixing MRE drink
- Fixed SmithingMag4 not returning correct magazine after reading
- Fixed Typo in Boredom value of HCMREmeal and HCMREmealside
 
Art Changes
- Added 2x Chicken Coop
- Added 2x Chicken Coop
- Added 2x Gardening Bench
- Added 2x Oil Press
- Added 2x Dissection Table
- Added 2x Grind Stone
- Added 2x Stonewheel
- Added Homemade, Chocolate Chip Cookie, White Chocolate Cookie Trays
- Fixed size of Workbenches, MRE Pallets and various other textures
- Fixed broken icon on Empty Evaporated Milk - Also properly named
- Renamed Pies, Pumpkin Bread icons to change state properly when Cooked
 
Tested bug reports - No issues found (build 40.43)
- Problems with bullets boxes - Hydrocraft add recipes to make boxes of 9mm, .223, .308 and shotgun bullets - recipe to open the boxes are included in base game
- Thanks to everyone who helped!
 
Enjoy!

Hello everyone! Another ‘just getting on with things’ Thursdoid update. As we work on the last remaining tasks required before IWBUMS, we’ll do a little run through what everyone’s been up to this week! There is some really cool progress to show!
Rotational Work
Zac, as we’ve said over the past few Thursdoids, has been neck deep in implementing a rotational blending system. The amount of work this has been has been pretty immense, requiring refactoring huge amounts of the game’s code which deals with character angles and rotations. After much work, he’s finally started to get to the stage where the rotational blending system is falling into place.

First a video:
This is only the first step, but we’ll hopefully be seeing the rest of the system fall into place soon now the stage has been set. Next will be adding the turning on the spot step animations, which allow the lower body to turn once the upper body’s reached its limit of twisting the hip.
In Zac’s own words: “We are getting closer to more organic character rotation behaviour. Previously, the character’s rotation was done by interpolating their rotation angle. This did not involve the character’s skeleton at all, making for some pretty robotic behaviour. The character’s feet just slide on the floor as they turn around.
The character’s internals have have been undergoing some heavy re-modelling. The animation system is now getting involved. Rotation is now split into target and twist. The character can now specify whether they are turning or not, and how far they can twist their body and how fast.
A good bit of math has also been written up for determining relative rotations, ranges, transforms, and interpolation.

Some states are suitable for twisting, like when standing still and aiming a weapon, while others are not, like climbing over fences.

The animation system incorporates these values into the skeleton. The twist is performed by rotations staggered across the character’s spine. ie. The twist starts just above the pelvis, the chest rotates some more, the shoulders, and then finally the neck. This makes for a more organic feel to the character’s rotation.
More work is still to be done, but this is how it looks today. “
Elsewhere, Yuri has been fixing up some final bugs on the MP save database system, that will not only make vehicles more persistent in the cases of crashes and game quits, but should provide us with some additional security against inventory hackers on MP servers.
After much internal discussion on what to give away to players in terms of profession costumes, Martin has been creating some additional branded t-shirts to go with various professions in the game.
EP has been up to some very cool stuff! It’s all still in the early experimetal phase of poking at the car model system, so no guarantees if it’ll be in the IWBUMs but its way too cool not to show:
That’s everything for this week!
This week’s fashion show from our very own MartinG! A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Ello ello. First thing first, the Steam Summer Sale is currently on – and it’ll likely be the last time you can get PZ in a sale before a price rise that will come alongside the animations build. So if you’re a bystander wondering about diving into the Knox Event, then now is probably a good time!
RUN SURVIVOR RUN
Since last week we’ve finally gotten sprint mechanics fully integrated into the game. The idea behind sprint is to differentiate between a ‘fast jog’ and a short term sprint at maximum speed. The two are being balanced as follows:
Fast jog: players will be able to maintain this for long periods, keep a level of control over their movement and stop quickly – but they will not be as fast as what you’re used to in terms of high-level PZ sprinting.
Short term sprint: a sudden burst at a maximum speed. With this the character will maintain a much greater pace, with the cost of more stamina lost, louder footsteps and a much wider turning circle.
In sprint you’d also have greater potential for accidents, particularly with clumsy characters if sprinting over/near obstacles or into walls. Those with high sprint/athleticism levels will be able to clear fences while sprinting – although clumsier and low skill survivors could well be advised to avoid this as a tumble/fall will be likely.
Please note that this has only been recently integrated, so the following vid is highly WIP! We’ll do a slicker presentation next week when it’s been more polished.
SIT SURVIVOR SIT
Next up: a progress report on a huge anim tech system that’s one of our ‘needs to be done before IWBUMS’ biggies. In this case, it’s pretty much been done now – albeit with one sizeable tech issue that needs resolving.
Anim masking means that when an animation is playing, it can be set to only play on certain bones of the character’s animation skeleton. The most obvious use of this being only upper body.
Before this tech, it was impossible to, say, play a reload animation while walking, or eat while walking. Martin would have had to animate ‘walking while eating’, ‘walking while reloading’ and also every transition animation possible. Now, however, we can play the reloading animation on the upper body while the legs continue playing the walking animation.
We’ve also done some reorganizing of the game code’s player states, to allow timed actions (those with a bar over the character’s head, used for everything including eating to reloading) to be able to be carried out at the same time as the character’s other major states used for walking, running etc.
As stated above, there’s still one big issue to resolve with this, which is a technical point relating to how the skeletons are organized within the game. The result being that items held in hands will not behave correctly in cases when the character’s hands have been made lower to the ground due to another anim – sitting for example. This makes actions like ‘eating on floor’ cause the item held in the hand to appear where it would be had they been stood up – which makes it look a bit broken.
There are still discussions going on as to the best way to fix this – a big chat between Zac, Mark and our gang is ongoing – but we’re currently looking for quickest way to remedy it when there’s such a vast animation set to get through.
Here are two vids showing some of these masked anims, with the usual “WIP!” warning lights flashing. Especially with the seated one. Reloading looks cool though, right?
And now here’s another vid that displays the floating-item issue that we’re currently working on.
Once the anim masking is 100%, the last big pieces to slot into place are hooking it all into MP and rotational blending – before polish and major bug fix duties. We’ve explained it before, but for clarity, this rotational system is required to allow:
Anims for characters to turn on the spot to any angle An anim for characters stopping while running and thrusting into a run at a different angle Anims for zombies hearing a player nd turning their head toward them, before turning and stumbling in their direction Any general animation that contains otation within them that needs to conceivably work at any 360 degree angle, and be able to blend between the base compass position animations provided by Martin. These are especially important to the game as right now the character turns with a turning circle like they are a vehicle, which makes them extremely awkward to move precisely indoors. It’s not obvious from the videos, but you’d find it annoying to play.
IN OTHER NEWS
ChrisW is still working with us, and is improving his cutaway system so it’s clearer where doorways and windows are – and are no longer big scary black lumps of probable doom.


 
EP has had a bit of fun, and has used the new anims and models system to create mannequins that can be moved into safehouses and dressed however a shopkeeper’s (or survivor’s) might like them to be dressed…
This week’s Terror for the Autons from Sasha. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Its almost like it was just added and it isn't the final version, isn't it?
 
Throw it out... Jesus. It's bad enough that though most obvious things always get called out, as though we are oblivious, to it, but to act like it's trash is taking things to another level.

Hydrocraft v11.0 has been released!
 
Which includes ...
 
Fixed Issues
Farming system revamp - crops do not stay in "Plowed Land" stage anymore (NEED to REPLANT all crops after update)
ISCompassMenu errors when right-clicking a stack of items
Attaching duct tape pouches and attaching/removing bags from dogs does not destroy content anymore (Thanks to tommysticks)
Added Jello Mix to Kitchen Counters and Supermarket Shelves Distributions
Added some missing translations for Trellis Farming
Recycling bags does not destroy content anymore
 
Added/Changed Recipes
Can now recycle 5 Unusable Metal into 1 Aluminum Ingot
Can now empty all Wooden Bucket when there is something in it
Integrated base game Metal Sheets into HC and removed duplicate sheets - renamed all to Aluminum Sheets (Old Hydrocraft PVC Pipes will be lost and Base Game Plastic Pipes will be
Integrated base game Plastic Pipes to replace PVC Pipes and removed original HC PVC Pipe, still called PVC Pipe
Can make Hydrocraft Pasta in Cooking Pots
Reduced Dark Chocolate to 20 hunger
Revamped MREs, also increased spawn locations and quantity (still rare)
Removed Cut Steel Pipe Recipe as Pipes now properly handled by Hydrocraft (was giving Plastic Pipe)
 
Fixed Recipes
SheetPaper to SheetPaper2 Recipe
Cat Food Open Recipe
TeaBag to TeaBag2 Recipe
Dried Cougar Hide Recipe Typo
Plastic Knife Recipe Typo
Soap to Soap2 Recipe Typo
Cat Male Recipe
Eating Potato Pancakes will now return the Cooking Pot
Fixed missing capital letter in Meat Cleaver and Energy Bar
Fixed Can of Whipped Cream - can now be refrigerated and does not rot at the beginning of the game
Fixed CanBeDoneFromFloor from various Recycle Recipes
Fixed Could not open Canned Cheese Sauce
Fixed Spirulina Powder Recipe - can now obtain powder by grinding it into a Mortar & Pestle (powder has no purpose at the moment)
Typos in Canned Food (Cannned)
Tomato sauce recipe now returns cooking pot
Fixed Mixed Candy throwing stack trace errors
 
Fixed Food Duplicating/Disappearing
Fixed Mashed Potatoes Recipes
Cookies Recipes
Pizza Recipes
Jello Recipes
Bread Recipes
Lasagna Recipe
Pastries Recipes
Soup Recipes
Dried Fruits Recipes
Jam Recipes
Jarred Fruits Recipes
Mexican Food Recipes
Pies Recipes
 
Fixed Art
Fixed Mussel/Mussel Shell
Fixed Open Canned Cat Food
Used placeholders for Powered Electric Multi Tool and Dead
Fixed Wheat Seeds Packet
Fixed Ready Potted Peanut Plant
Reduced Cigarette Butt size
 
Tested bug reports - No issues found (build 40.43)
Fishing with custom insects and food seems not to work properly and gives errors. (Tested Vanilla and HC Items)
(Tested MP) Sleeping in a tent, sleeping bag and car working
(Tested MP) Timer on animals does not seem to work (Player has to be in the cell for the timer to work) - also deactivated debug information in TimeTracker so you will NOT see the timer state changes in the console anymore. Found rogue character in file which "might" resolve some issues.
 
- Thanks to everyone who helped!
 
Enjoy!

Hello! Today we are celebrating animation technology to do anim transitions going into the codebase of the internal Build 41 test version. ‘What are these?’ I hear you cry. Well, we have a clever man in Australia who can explain. Over to Zac!
“Up until now, the character would go from standing, to walking,to sneaking, to running, to standing again. At every state change, there was no lead-in. We were using some maths to blend from one pose to another, but it really wasn’t enough.
“The change was still looking fairly unnatural in some cases. The character had an air of defying gravity, for example, when he/she suddenly went from standing still to full sprint.”
“As of now in the internal test build, we can add transition animations. So in the described instance it’s: StandingToRunning. This is where the character will change stance, shift their weight, and launch into a run. As a result it all seems much more lifelike.
So, check this out:
As you can see above, another area where this is helping a lot is in aiming animations where there’s an object in the character’s hands. Formerly, due to some complex under the bonnet maths, when it did this blend between the two poses you ended up with, say, a gun floating in the air between the hands rather than being realistically held.
Now, however, with this Zac anim-transitioning magic we can have a handcrafted tailor-made animation to make the character aim down the sights and bridge the gap between the two poses. So this makes everything looks much more sleek and cool.
Here comes the traditional disclaimer: although these videos are still looking super-cool we’re still not at a point we can release a public beta. There’s a bunch of optimization to go in, some MP and SP save system improvements we need to test and mix in, Zac needs to work on the rotation blending for wheeling on spot / zombie alert walking toward player angles etc.
We also need to work on zed hordes – pooling what states zombies are in, and sharing a smaller pool of zombie skeletons for the same anims so we get better performance when there’s a horde on-screen.
(Seeing as Zac was previously the guy who got two million dancing penguin models on the Wiithough, we’ve undoubtedly got the best man for the job.)
We should also probably fix the bug in the current build that makes survivors look like this. Maybe.
Slenderman likes to bake cakes This week’s character creation screen-created dictator from our hardy bunch of internal testers. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Wotcha, couple of fun things for your inspections today.
First off: same disclaimer as before. There’s still a lot of work to chew through on Build 41: Zac is currently doing necessary work on animation substates that will unlock concurrent animations, and will then need to work on rotational animations. We also need to do a lot of work to get MP up and running, and most importantly we need to optimize – as releasing into IWBUMS now would see it run like a hog on a lot of systems.
Yes, the build is looking great in the vids (which is a big yay, clearly) but it’s not ready for public consumption. There’s still too much broken, and too much unoptimized. The moment it is ready: we’ll open up the beta. We won’t hold it back any longer than we need to – but we’re really not at that point yet.
Anyway, with all that said, here’s some stuff that’s gone in this week:
BASIC STEALTH SYSTEM
We have animations for a more complex stealth system – including cover traversal, shooting from cover, rounding corners, wall hugging etc but as we’ve said before that will be coming in a later build.
What we’ve added into 41, however, is a first taste of it all – tied to a crouch/sneak toggle that’s currently on ‘C’ on your keyboard. Here’s a quick vid that can explain it all a bit better than using words.
Please note: just after recording this video we discovered that the character’s kneeling idle wasn’t playing while crouching when stationary due to a bug. Please note that the character’s visible profile over objects will be reduced more while stationary than what’s seen in the vid. And also make the position less brutal on the character’s knees.
Please also note: unless there’s a huge campaign against it, from within or without, we’ll likely stop zeds eating below the waist of the corpses they come across. It looks a little too much like a horrific sex act.
ZED SCENES
Build 41 will be slightly changing PZ’s zombie lore so that the initial wave of zombification occurred in a manner that people died a bit more quickly – to the extent that the zeds they left behind will be wearing relevant clothing and placed in situations relevant to what they were doing when they turned.
The new model and clothing system means that we can have randomized ‘scenes’ in houses to give a bit of flavor to what was happening in the home before/during the Knox Event, with some common and others rare. Likewise we can do the same for more horrific scenes that happened after the event itself, placed further down the PZ timeline.
To this end then we could, for example, have a small chance of having a home where there was a prayer meeting happening represented by a priest zed and 4-5 civilian zeds holding bibles.
At the other end of the spectrum we could suggest in another house that two people were being over-friendly with each other by having two zombies not wearing any clothes in a bedroom. Or simply that a bathroom zed was having a wash by having them appear in a bathrobe, or without clothes, in their bathroom.
Although it doesn’t look as visually appealing as we’d like it (one day we will hopefully be able to invest in a 3D modeler to work with us on items left on the floor) we can also scatter around bottle sprites, clothing sprites, books etc. to elaborate on the scene.
Here’s a few examples of scenes that RJ has coded in over the past week – covering sexy time zeds and sports-viewing male zeds, while band practice zeds can be seen in the header image of this blog.
Bedroom Zeds Male sports-viewing enthusiasts. If you can think of any of your own scenes that we could conjure up using the zed costumes you’ve seen in recent Thursdoids then feel free to chip in and let us know – they’re really easy to integrate, and can be as rare or common as required. Cheers all!
A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too! The CBOIT has also been promising a mate that it’ll flag up the cool new game Xera: Survival for ages now. And now it has.

Hey all, it’s been another week of fixes on the Build 41 internal build mainframe. As examples of what we’ve been nixing it’s like death screens not triggering, zombies snapping down on death, balancing speeds, removing ‘pet zeds’ that would follow you and never die, stopping crashes and stopping carrying a spear two-handed making your character look like they’d shit themselves.
Here’s a few more interesting nuggets of dev, though, beyond the more everyday corrective tasks.
CHALLENGES
We received the latest versions of the Film Studio and paradise island Kingsmouth map from Xeonyx, which have been fully zoned for zeds in appropriate costumes. After some quick work from Martin swimwear was also provided, so we can now have summer scenes such as this within Zomboid. Huzzah for Bikini Zeds – and indeed hunky Swimshort Zeds.
(Please note that in these screens Yuri’s new water shader has not been fitted yet.)
NU-GAMEPLAY
In amongst other stuff this week we’ve added in:
Improved walking/running through tree anims. Balanced the consequence of heavy load/exhausted moodles on walk/run speeds and animations. Added in glass shard injuries on feet if you choose to walk on the new broken glass barefoot. Allowing for some fun John McClane scenarios at some point in the future, we’re sure. Added Hunter and Fisherman outfits, dumbbell and barbell weapons, a Hunting Vest item and removed the floppy wedding hat from roaming zombies (thought to be a sombrero on PZ Discord) after more internal debate than is strictly health. A floppy wedding hat would not stay on a zombie after a period of several weeks, no matter how much the Frenchman pleads. Improved defending against zed bites if you’re attacking them back, and taking into account your weapon skill, surrounding zombies, fitness & strength. STEALTH NEXT
In the coming week we plan to be improving on the already implemented basic elements of the stealth system. While the significant full cover system we have plans and anims for will be implemented post 41 (so as not to delay the build too much) the crouched walk / run has been added and seen in previous videos.
This will lower your profile as well as reduce your footstep volume, so will lower your chance of being spotted by a zombie. It’ll also have other features, such as if you crouch walk or run alongside a fence, you will get further bonuses to visual stealth to reduce the chance of a zombie spotting you from beyond it.
This will obviously become a lot more interesting mechanically in future builds, but we hope this will make stealthy play more interesting, allowing players to plan routes along fences to help them stay hidden from the zombies about town.
LOUISVILLE SNEAK-PEEK
Seeing as there’s no vid this week, we’ve instead prised a new image from the Louisville map expansion from the iron cage of the Art Department. Please note though, as ever, that our version of Louisville is a HUGE undertaking and won’t be released in any of the forthcoming releases. It is still a long ways off.
This week’s featured image from the floppy wedding hat obsessive Frenchman. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too

Hi all, short Thursdoid as hopefully videos can speak louder than words. Here’s a couple of videos taken from the latest internal build.
We won’t tell you what’s changed beyond the general polish we’ve been doing, but please make sure your sound/speakers are turned up.
Second up, here’s another video showing off some more gameplay – but please make sure you make it to the thrilling/chilling dénouement to see some of the more recently tied-in animations.
Please note that, even though these vids are direct from gameplay and lookin’ pretty cool, we still have a lot of stuff we want/need to get in before we IWBUMS.
There’s body masking and rotational anim tech from Zac, Savegame improvements from Yuri, a fair amount of MP-poking to get it all operational, more optimization and a several other things besides.
This is all falling into place at the moment, but right now a playable beta isn’t imminent and we’ll only open it up when the time is right – and when we’re at a point at which we’re able to deal with the flood of new external feedback. Right now there’s nothing that we don’t already know needs fixing/improving – but as soon as it’s ready-enough, we will let folks in.
Elsewhere this week RJ’s done a lot of loot balance – in the new version you’ll find house loot separated into more realistic cupboards and drawers rather than appearing all stuffed in together alongside polish to various different anims alongside Martin.
In terms of ‘dev’ stuff too, we’ve got a new version of AnimZed through from Zac now (1.4.0) which is helping us track down various issues in the animations, alongside our own rejigging/smoothening as we go.
We’ll do a full round-the-houses of all the different devs next week, but for now hopefully the two vids are enough to go on. Hope y’all are well!
This week’s soon-to-be-mulched survivor from Nernemes. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

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

  LESSON LEARNED
There were a few lessons learned. Firstly, Math(s) is great – even when we got down to brass tacks and went old school on this issue.
The second was how helpful it was to observe, reproduce, and document every known issue in a visible list. Then performing a ground-up service and tune-up, systematically fixing each issue one at a time.
Finally, that it is important to have visibility on the internal workings of the system. Instead of relying on stop-start debugging, we need a mechanism for recording all state data as it changes over time, and present it in a human-readable format.
Thing was, the spreadsheet and curves were incredibly useful, but were slow and cumbersome to use.
So! We are now building a fully-fledged recording viewer as a part and parcel of the AnimZed dev and modding tool. Huzzah!
We’re sorry this has been such a technical Thursdoid, easily the most involved one we’ve ever done, but in amongst all the cool vids we’ve been showing in past weeks we wanted to spotlight some of the work that’s been happening that’s not quite as sexy. (Well, not mainstream sexy anyway.)
We also know that there are some among you who really dig this sort of thing – but apologise whole-heartedly if you’re not. We’ll be a lot less clever-clever next week, and that’s a promise/inevitability. 
This week’s winter that’s coming from eHxAtoMiic. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!