King-Salomon

Hello all, for your viewing delectation today we have an extended gameplay compilation from the internal test build – the roughest edges/bugs now sufficiently quashed to allow for it.
As we explain in the vid we still have a fair few issues to chase down in the coming weeks: strafing issues, character wheeling meaning it feels quite imprecise with the turning circle, general combat issues where some weapons feel too slow/fast etc.
We also still need to plug in work on rotational blending, MP hook-ups and the work on the zoom that led to the sharper-looking models we showed off in past weeks. None of which are overnight affairs.
So you can see what work we still have to do, we’ve used some subtitling to underline some of the issues as and when they crop up during the gameplay.
All that said though, it’s really feeling fun to play – and to look at. So, here we go.
Also added to the internal build this week is an experimental system to help with gun aiming – which will also come alongside a general tightening stuff like the shotgun radius, before we fully overhaul firearms in a future build.
Please note a) this might not end up in the main game or primary game modes depending on how fun it feels, and b) the colour is WIP and will be toned down in any full release.
We have also done work on attacks to feeding zombies, and added more zombie-like stances to zeds eating dead bodies. We are also in the process of adding smashed glass that lands after you break windows, which will then prove a hazard if you fall on it during your escape – or of course don’t wear shoes and do a John McClane over it.
Short but hopefully sweet! See you next time!
This week’s night drive from Spicy Eggplant. 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 guy who writes the Thursday blogs is having a fun time with a screaming baby, a wife with bad toothache and another child intent on destroying things – but the good news is that there’s some cool stuff to show you today, and a sudden brief window in which to write about them. And so, onward…
There’s a lot of general smoothening of rough edges happening on the build at the moment, and to give you an idea of what sort of items these are then currently on the internal ‘Top Three Issues!’ Sasha Shit List are: jolting walking animations on initial start-up, inconsistency with the directions of melee attacks and the way that timed actions (farming, pouring, building etc) have to play out before you can defend yourself from roaming zeds.
In amongst this necessary fixes, though there’s also some fun stuff being added to the internal playable test build. Primarily discoveries that will make it a more varied and interesting experience when exploring your surroundings.
 
BODIES EVERYWHERE
In the next build we will be adapting the lore slightly (hopefully forgivably) by making it so that the zed impulse to bite someone who’s unturned isn’t entirely removed after their death. Idle zeds will be slightly attracted to human corpses, and will crouch to feed – meaning you can sneak by or attack without them noticing you as easily. This can be seen in the vid below:
Meanwhile the same event can be added to our growing roster of interesting scenes we can spawn in random houses, which can be seen in the below screenshot– which is also a good example of how neatly ChrisW’s cutaway system will be improving the game.
In the current build the discovery of survivor bodies can be quite crude, with bleach or alcohol bottles scattered around willy-nilly for example. With our new systems we can also quite easily add in bodies that tell a clearer and neater story. Even if it’s as simple, and tragic, as someone who died from self-inflicted gun wounds.
[PLEASE NOTE THIS IMAGE IS WIP, AND CLEARLY DEBUG – POSES ETC WILL BE MORE VARIED AND IMPROVED]

 
OTHER NEWLY IMPLEMENTED ANIMATIONS
Here’s a quick vid that shows off the ability to pour out liquid from a container, the ability to sit on the ground to have a rest, and an idle that shows the survivors warming themselves in front of a heat source.
Crikey, this game’s quite dark isn’t it?
  MODDING POTENTIAL
We will be releasing our new AnimZed dev tools to the community when we release this version (perhaps even when we are still in IWBUMS testing if the documentation is ready) and just wanted to touch on the sort of thing that could be done quite easily with them once they’re available.
For example, a while ago Martin made us some skeleton models. These are primarily intended for use when exposing bone under character flesh when mortal body damage occurs. Likewise, bodies that have been feasted on may have exposed limb bones where the flesh has been picked clean – and on top of that there’s always the opportunity for crawlers to be dragging skeletal bloody legs across the floor and for more damaged zeds to be appearing in Six Months Later and beyond.
All that’s still to come though, and as a quick mod experiment on his birthday (when he should have been having a day off) RJ decided to have a look what they’d look like if used in-game in their entirety.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN EXAMPLE, AND NOT A REAL GAME FEATURE
The results are a bit rough still, but we’re sure you’ll agree: Boom, there’s the beginnings of a Harryhausen or fantasy mod. Good times to come hopefully.
This week’s fast food order from Lazy Joe. 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. Also OMG have you seeeen Xonic’s Mall map? It’s super-good. Please check it out.

Hey all, here’s a quick round-up of all the work that’s gone into the internal dev branch of PZ this week.
First off, we’ve had some significant improvements and fixes made by Bitbaboon Mark to the core animation blending system. He’s fixing a whole bunch of issues, snaps and glitches that have been vexxing us for many, many weeks – digging deep into the code, and doing a total rewire where necessary.
In prior Thursday vids we cut around these uglinesses as much as possible, but they still reared their heads. Snaps between character animations, jarring moves when turning to certain compass directions while strafing, and various other ugly things that we just couldn’t account for were plaguing us – but have now finally been fixed, leading to a 100% smooth animation blending system.
Zac’s prepared a video demoing the new blending – although please note he’s running in debug, so this doesn’t represent gameplay. It’s only to show off the smoother animation blending.
Zac’s own work continues on the torn clothing system, allowing us much more visual indications of damage and clothing wear and tear (quite literally).
As well as putting a player’s newly scavenged/treasured Spiffo shirt at risk of damage, this will allow much more variety with zombies in particular. Romain has been adding code to implement this new system to further randomize zombie’s clothing conditions, and tie potential clothing damage into the various game systems for the player.
Here’s another Zac video demoing this new functionality, we’ll look to get a video of it in context of the game mechanics later on.
Beyond this in the world of TEA, Mark is now starting work on his much awaited rotational blending system – having secured the foundations with the work outlined above.
This will allow us features such as wheeling/turning for characters, allowing the player to turn on the spot (by stepping in a circle), or to turn realistically while walking/running just like people are used to in the big boy AAA games.
We will of course prioritize the feeling of control and immediacy that people are used to as much as possible, we don’t want the controls to feel sluggish, but we hope it will make the characters control and look much more like they are part of the world.
Speaking of, please note, that we’ve decided to put the high-res model rendering work on ice for a week or two, since there were still numerous issues with it that meant it wasn’t suitable to put into the main line – and also it kept getting further broken by the flurry of additions and changes from the team’s work described above.
We feel it would be best approached toward the end of Build 41 dev just before IWBUMS, at the point we could get extra resources on board to get it working right. As such all videos until then will use the traditional character resolution.
At the TIS end, meanwhile, other work this week includes the addition of new clothing items such as a poncho, hoodies, scarfs, aprons and swimming outfits. RJ also now has hair and beard styles being associated with zone costumes (for e.g. so you don’t tend to get military zombies or cops with hippy hairstyles and big beards).
Martin meanwhile has been busy with new anims and costumes, hawaiian shirts, several new combat animations, and has extended the logo decals to cover even more in-game stores and brands.
OTHER STUFF
Next week Xeonyx will be starting work on main map polish (signage, roads, widened garages). A big priority for us in this is to provide adequate warning to drivers that sharp turns are ahead, particularly on the highways between towns. So where possible, he’s also going to explore smoothing out the corners with diagonals if they allow it – although sadly it’s not currently possible for any roads that have curbs or markings.
We are looking to merge in Yuri’s water tech into the main line tomorrow, and will be focusing on balancing colours and other aspects of the effects as per internal team and community feedback once we hit IWBUMS.
Given the amount of moving parts in this build already, we’re considering bumping revamped fire effects to build 42 as it still has significant work left to do, and as such Yuri will then be joining in on the efforts to bring build 41 to the IWBUMS stage. His primary missions will be in reducing general car sizes and also nixing the annoying way that cars can sometimes be lost after computer system crashes.
Finally, It is very important that this reddit post gets upvoted. Please do so if you can.
This week’s motel horde from AfterLife. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here– so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Hey all, let’s go for a quick trip around the various continents of PZ development and see what’s been done in this, the week commencing 18th March.
Romain has been busy continuing work on adding new zones and costumes, adding work costumes for various franchises and shops found in the game, from Gas2Go, Fossoil, PileOCrepe and many more, as well as integrating more of Martin’s anims, including 3 new variations of zombies thumping on objects.
He’s also added support for characters to lower and raise hoods on hooded clothing, for example hoodies and certain coats, and several new idle animations used when the character has injuries. Please note we will likely add more variation in future, as well as anims specifically for more serious injuries as the one shown..

EP has been doing a lot of work on zombie behaviour, stopping the zombies all piling up when moving toward sounds, and various other pathfinding issues that have existed for a long time but now look and feel more problematic now we have the shiny new animations.
Zac has been continuing work on expanding the toolset and systems to provide more functionality to the rest of the team. His work on masking out different parts of clothing items has resulted in several extremely useful features.
First, it now allows us to wear pieces of geometry clothing on top of other geometry clothing – as opposed to being a texture drawn over the character’s skin. This used to be impossible: the clothing worn underneath would always poke through the geometry of the clothing on top, especially when moving.
Our old solution to that was to only draw underclothing as textures directly on the character model, which unfortunately led to the side effect of them looking like body paint and lacking the bulk of real clothing. Now we can easily turn off areas of the clothing that are covered, so we are provided with many more options.
Zac has also used this masking support to allow for rips and holes in clothing. This said, it’s not quite finished yet, as he needs to apply the inverted mask to the underclothing and to make it visible inside the hole. As such, at the moment, we have a kind of Invisible Man effect when holes are used.
In the meantime he’s also fixed the bug that was causing several of our weapon textures to draw incorrectly, which was down to pesky non ‘power of two’ sized (256×256, 512×512 etc) textures causing issues, so now support for those have been added.
This picture sums up all of the aforementioned things.
(Please note: the trousers used in this instance are still of the skin-tight texture variety!)
Mark meanwhile has been at work smacking down a few of the low level blending issues, and it looks like he’s finally tracked down the cause, which was an old optimization that wasn’t sitting well with the animation system overhaul. It’s been removed now so we will be discussing other TEA approved optimizations to help keep us running at a decent speed in potato land. Now the blending issues are fixed, we’ve gotten rid of all the little snaps and jumps in the character’s movement, which should make things look all the better!
Finally, ChrisW’s Sims-style cutaways have been merged into the main build and have been working really nicely – and EP has also smuggled in some oft-requested niceness in that garage doors can now be opened.
(Cars don’t fit in them yet, and the sound is not quite right yet, but that’s a battle for another week!)
This week’s pic is by Vampel!! A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here– so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Hey everyone! Time for today’s Thursdoid! This time will be another rather hastily put together one I’m afraid. And to boot the internal development build decided to break today shortly before I was due to record a video, so hurray! After a few hours of trying to get something together I’ve had to go ahead without.
As alluded to more vaguely last week, fearless leader and Thursdoid writer Batsphinx was last week unable to Thursdoid as he and his wife were busy delivering their new daughter Samantha onto their bathroom floor at 4am (shout out to Nick at the 999 emergency services who talked them through the ordeal!) and as such for the next few weeks he’s getting some rare but well earned Zomboid-free time to be kept awake all night and be milk sick upon. Congratulations Will from everyone in the team!
So it’s left in the meantime for myself, coder and much less organized Thursdoid writer to take over.
Usually I’d be bribing you with an awesome montage gameplay video with new Zach music to take your mind off the piss poor rushed together Thursdoids, but since that’s not happening, I’ll try go into some more details on what’s going on in the team this week! There are still some neat tech videos to show off.
TEA TOOLS AND TECH IMPROVEMENTS
Zach continues his great work adding more tools and features, this time to allow Martin and the other devs to quickly add and test new costume pieces through the AnimZed editor and preview them in game.
  Meanwhile, Mark is getting to the bottom of some low level blend bugs which have resulted in various issues and snapping that has been causing problems for a long while. We’re hoping future videos will have that extra smoothness and polish to the character motion because of it.
FIRE IN THE DISCO
General Arcade side, Yuri has been continuing his visual effect work, this time turning his attention to the outdated fire effect. He’s really in the very early experimentation and getting his particle system up and running, so the results are FAR from complete and extremely experimental. We were going to hold on showing until we had textured particles and blurring and further balancing done, but since our gameplay video fell through I thought we’d show where it is. So please no assumptions about size or colour or detail or untextured squares, any other aspect being final, as we already know this is far from complete but are excited to see how the tech is progressing:
GAMEPLAY
The team continue to work on tying the new animations, clothing and models into the game. Romain has been working solidly polishing up the combat and other in-game actions, I’ll let him speak for himself because ‘yum free Thursdoid words!’:
And that’s your lot! Actually didn’t turn out as bad as I was anticipating. Thanks again and apologies for the video letdown, we’ll try get something sexy for next week to make up for it!
This week’s pic is by us! A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here– so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Hey hey it’s Thursdoid time, this week may be a bit short as there are interesting things afoot in the Indie Stone family that means certain usual Thursdoid writers cannot be with us today (hence the worse than usual pun!), however we still have some cool videos to show!

Things have been progressing very nicely with the animation build, the entire team beavering away happily implementing the multitude of anims and costumes, as Zac and Mark from TEA have continued their work on the tech, ironing out the last few issues with the animation blending, as well as providing some extra cool tools to help us implement and debug the animations (as well as the modders once it releases!)
In the game implementation side of things, we’ve started to get all the inventory icons in and implementations of all the weapons that will appear in the game (though more may come before release), crafting, looting and various other things are implemented.
Videos speak louder than words though, and let’s get a taste of some new Beever while we’re at it.
(please note due to remaining issues to resolve, this video does not contain the high res model rendering shown last week)
In other related news, this week we’ve been spending some time getting all the <REDACTED>  future build content up to date with the animation build, so we’re ready to go with full team development on it as soon as animations is complete and out there.
That’s it for this week folks, sorry for the short Thursdoid but I’m sure you’d rather I was hammering away at anims than stressing about writing words here and hope the videos satisfy your appetite. Normal business will resume next week!
This week’s meeting of the minds 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.

Hey all, some Thursday dev updates from anim-land.
CHARACTER MODELS AND LIGHTING
Last week we discussed the issues we’d been working on around how character lighting is handled – which caused characters in the anims build to glow, not get lit properly by their environment and have a blander two dimensional look.
We have now fixed this, and done a bunch of balancing to the lighting and shader coloration that everyone will hopefully find much improved.
During this process we also focused on another prominent issue: that the character pixel resolution when zoomed in was extremely blocky and lacking in detail. Due to the ways that our initial zoom system handled things, characters were too harshly pixellated. This caused them to be extremely jaggied compared to what it was in the old days, when we were rendering characters to an off-screen sprite before placing them into the world.
So, this week we’ve been doing some significant work on changing how the game handles the zoom, which in addition to fixing this issue should ultimately lead to slightly more optimized rendering of the game – as well as providing the character models much more detail to play with.
As ever, please keep in mind that we’ll continue to balance/tweak to make sure characters fit their surrounds as well as possible – as well as adjust the models themselves seeing as you can now see individual facial features much more clearly. These caveats notwithstanding, however, we’re pretty happy how they’re looking.
The branch with this system on it isn’t complete – navigating indoors presents issues, mouse input hit-testing isn’t fixed up yet, and we’re having issues with seams between tiles when zoomed out – so it’s not quite ready for integration into the main test build. Here’s a quick video of us running aimlessly around zombies under lights to show it off though.
(Along with some new Zach Beever musical accompaniments!)
OPTIMIZATION
This week Zac has been back on optimization duty. Here’s the latest vid of him doing his routine optimization test of sequentially spawning new ten-strong crowds of zombies.
Next up, here’s a video showing further optimizations to multi-threaded rendering and Mouse Input handling where zombies are cycling through their behaviours using the new dynamic state system.
FALLING OVER
Finally, over to RJ at the ‘tying it all together’ animation coalface.
“Right now I’m working on combat animations, weapons and blood– adding stuff in and fleshing things out. One thing that’s new and that people might be interested to see in action, is an effort to make sure players can’t dash through hordes without getting slowed down.”
“As seen in the video below, we’ve now added bumping against zeds. Colliding with one or two while you’re running isn’t dangerous, you’ll just get slowed down, but try running through a horde and you’ll stumble and fall – leaving you temporarily exposed to the encroaching zeds. We might add in a few more different sorts of animations for nudges/pushes, but right now it looks like this:”
“Elsewhere this week, I’ve also been making sure that zombie behaviour is working correctly – fixing bugs with them following, thumping the environment and also behaving as expected when acting as crawlers. I’ve also added a better way for zeds to react when you drive over them and knock them over, and have added my ‘clutter’ improvements to the loot spawning system to the internal test build.”
This week’s trip to the mall from Kate. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here– so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Hey all, another busy week in Build 41 development – so here’s a few of the different things that people are up to.
An area that was proving strange in terms of 41 development was that somewhere along the way some of the visual fidelity of characters had been lost – and simultaneously, somehow, models looked far more buff/hunky than intended. Feet, also, seemed a little on the large side. After a bit of a dig, this week we finally located a bug in the exported model data that explained it.
Due to this bug, the lighting of the characters was broken, which resulted in very washed out characters with little lighting shading – which in turn removed definition that made muscles look bulkier. This has now been fixed and will, after re-exporting all the clothing, allow us to achieve much better character model rendering and lighting than we’ve shown off previously during this recent leg of anim development.
With that said, this Before and After shot should still be taken as WIP. We have a lot of the definition back, but we’ve still not balanced the colouring, saturation, definition and lighting. We’re now in a far better position to polish though, and future Thursday screens and videos should look MUCH improved. This screenshot is taken with evening light.
Next up, a key aspect of PZ mapping is zoning – which we primarily use to mark up areas that are (for example) suitable for foraging and car spawns. Now however, with different clothing for zombies, we can flag which parts of the PZ map can spawn which particular zombie – or which group of particular zombies.
This, then, is how we can spawn only guards and orange jumpsuit-wearing prisoners in Rosewood prison.
(Please note the following screens still have slightly wonky colours and lighting)
Likewise, RJ has created a ‘wedding’ spawn zone over one of the churches on the map – which ensures that all zombies inside it, and outside for the selected area, have a very high chance of dressing in smart clothing, with a guaranteed bride, groom and church minister amongst them.
This system will allow us to have many and varied different pockets of particular zeds – police in police stations, military in military areas etc. Likewise, we will be examining the best methods to make sure that zeds in bathrobes or not wearing clothes are only found in homes and home bathrooms in particular.
(It should be noted that aspects of this will also involve a very slight rewrite of PZ lore in terms of the outbreak, but we had intended to return to the radio/TV broadcasts soon in any case).
RJ has been experimenting with this system while waiting for additional work on rotational anim movements and programmable anim-speed support in AnimZed from Zac and Turbo – but has also this week worked on knife attack animations, and tying survivors and zeds getting bloodied to them in-game.
This has also involved us adding some additional combat skills, and in the process removing the skill point system. From Build 41 onwards skills will automatically level up when you gain the XP requirements, as we felt the manual skill point system never worked particularly well and would do so even less with many more skills.
Elsewhere Mash has begun creating icons for new clothing and weapons, Will had begun setting naming conventions for them, and Connall has continued to implement new timed actions. Yuri is finishing off adapting his water/puddles into Zac’s revamped shader system, and starting to make plans for fire improvement. The other Zac meanwhile, Young Zach, continues to deliver new South-tinged music, and Xeonyx is currently chasing map bugs in his now complete Kingsmouth Island challenge map.  
We’ll try and get a gameplay video showing the improved lighting, blood and blade combat next week, have a good one until then!
This week’s home on the range from Old Gregg. Bailey’s. Mmm… creamy. Soft creamy beige. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here– so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Hey all, this week has largely comprised of bug-fixing, optimization and general necessary busywork around what was discussed and shown last week, alongside the compilation anims vid.
That said we have implemented zombies that get covered in blood, which can be seen below, and are continuing to tick items off the list from Connall and Turbo’s vast timed action spreadsheet. Screenshots of which can also be seen below.
Please note that in Build 41’s final form blood will slowly accumulate on zombies and player through combat, though clearly a certain number will be gory from the word go.
(It should also be underlined at this point that we’re now in the process of working out exactly which anims will be included in the first release, and which won’t – ducking behind fences and wall-hugging, for example, is a confirmed ‘not 41’ at this point as we want to get the fundamentals right first.)
CONTROLLER BETA
Stas has been going great guns with our public controller beta, and we’re now well into the bug fixing and polish stage. If you want to check out the latest version, number 14, details can be found here. We’re approaching the end of this work now, and would like to thank Stas and General Arcade for all the great effort that’s been put into this aspect of the code.
MAP EXPANSION
While the rest of the team works on Build 41, we currently have three people on map content. Mash is developing our take on Louisville, while RingoD is providing her with variations on our current housing models so that its suburbs don’t feel too cookie-cutter.
Here’s a rare glimpse of a WIP urban location that’s been prised from Mash’s iron grip, shown with the understanding that the release will be a fair few builds into the future
Seeing as the main map expansion is still so far away, however, we now also have the New Denver creator Xeonyx working on new locations that will come as a part of new challenges in the main game. Here,for example, is the main resort building on the fictional paradise island of Kingsmouth.
This week’s parking lot pyre from David8 [FOR 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.
 
 

Hey all, a few WIP videos and updates from the team’s collective work inside the anims code for Build 41 this week.
ANIMATIONS
This week a lot of progress has been made with the TIS coders implementing the game code side to tie in the new animation system to all the game systems. RJ has been handling the combat system, tying up all the weapon swing, zombie reactions and various other related anims, and the system is getting close to the quality of the earlier videos of animations you’ve seen, though now tied 100% into the PZ combat, character and simulation systems.
Connall and Turbo have been concentrating on non-combat related animations, such as reading, chopping wood, painting, eating, crafting,and the countless other in-game actions characters can do in-game that were previously performed like a stock-still robot with a progress bar.
EP has been doing his usual precision striking all across the code base, wiring up the character creation system, connecting model clothing to inventory items in the world, and fixing issues and integrating the codebase across the board.
In the mean-time TEA are optimizing and improving the AnimZed toolset with our requests the more we use it, and alongside general animation requests and polish Martin is experimenting with the gore potential of the system with visible guts hanging out of the front of  zombies and such.
There are still numerous bugs and issues as long as all our combined arms, and it’s hard to get a sustained video without issues and glitches popping up, so here’s a carefully curated compilation to give you an idea of the where we are.
If you see something that looks wrong or glitchy, or think ‘hmm, there should be more variation anims in that…’, then we’re probably already on it. 
CUTAWAYS
ChrisW’s sims-style cutaway work has really started to approach the point where we can see the vast improvement it will make to visibility in buildings. There are still a few small issues to address,not least we may still need to explore transparent doors and tall furniture (such as wardrobes or fridges) in certain circumstances to avoid obstructing the view of the player, but we’re very excited to get this in as it makes the experience so much more solid.
GROUND WATER
Yuri has been putting the finishing touches on the puddle system, as well as tying it into the 40’s climate stuff, and we’re super happy with how he’s been able to add that visual spark to the water effects in the game.
Our next plans for Yuri’s visual effects overhaul couldn’t be more opposite, as we’re finally getting some visual love and attention put into fire, one of our most ancient and jankiest looking systems. We’re excited to see what he does with it, and at the same time as a visual boost, we’re planning on rebalancing the way fire works to make it behave more sensibly and better simulate its spread over different materials and tiles.
This week’s group shot from Corusuke3. 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.

How do all, another fairly exciting week behind the scenes over here.
After the extensive amount of time TEA have had with our initial animations system – rebuilding and completing the framework (not to mention vastly improving it, making it more moddable, better optimized and with a better suite of tools to go with it) we’re locking in the gameplay that’s still absent, and polishing the look of it.
In our older anims videos what was seen had little capacity for game logic under the bonnet, and was essentially playing anims, sounds and bloodsplats at the appropriate time, without all the tie-ins to game systems that would control health, endurance, skills, stats, perks etc
As such, while TEA continue to work on rendering, optimization, animation states and general improvement and upkeep – the TIS side of things have split into the different areas of the game and are bringing everything up to scratch.
So, to start with here’s Zac spawning 550 or so zeds, and doing a walk-around to test some optimization stutter fixes, and the new dynamic state system that means they’re not all swaying alongside each other. Zeds here are passive, and won’t attack Zac until he attacks them first. Remember: We’ve not yet added costume rarity so please no more comments about the spiffo suits and jockeys! 
On the TIS side, then, EP has finished going through the entire game and creating the overall structure of states and transitions using the new TEA developed version of the animation system. He’s also cleaning house in terms of a lot of the old out-of-date sprite-based logic, and numerous other things to help pave the way for further anim integration.
Turbo and Connall have both been working through all the game’s systems, particularly those activities that have timed actions such as fishing, looting etc, to make sure they all work with the new system, and implement any new animations to use.
RJ is working with the combat system, and making sure that the combat system you’re familiar with from older videos works properly within the improved TEA animation framework.
While all this goes on Animator Martin is providing feedback, improving animations and creating new ones whenever changes, replacements or hole-fills are required – while the rest of the team provide direction and feedback too.
Hopefully we’ll be able to show more and more ‘expanded gameplay’ vids as the Thursdoids go on – but this week we don’t want to show stuff with obvious rough edges that we can polish relatively easily in the days ahead.
Elsewhere, meanwhile, Yuri and ChrisW are working on general engine improvements. So here are two examples of their work, although please remember that they are still highly WIP – and if you see any weirdness then we are aware of it. First off, here’s Yuri’s latest work on puddles that build up during rain.
And here’s another quick cheeky screen of ChrisW’s work with Sims-style cutaways, that should make interior exploration easier and clearer.
Finally General Arcade’s Stas is now reaching the ‘wash and brush up’ stage with his controller build, so if you want to jump in and give it a whirl and give us some final pointers / gameplay feedback then now is officially the best and most enjoyable time to do it. Update12 was released today, and beta joining details can be found here.
This week’s home renovation from Musaka. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

This week has seen the final team members who’ll be working on version 41 moving wholesale into the new tech – so it’s a relatively brief blog as much of the week has involved introducing the new systems, tools and workflow to the wider team.
It’s an exciting time, and so far it’s gone pretty well. Backstage right now animation states are being hooked up to animations – so hopefully incoming weeks you’ll be able to see more and more gameplay in what we show, as opposed to the more testbed stuff that TEA have shown in recent times.
With that in mind, here’s a couple of vids from Zac, first off a walk through downtown West Point to test some of the latest optimization work, and the improved shaders that remove a lot of the bleached-out-ness from proceedings.
(You might be able to spot a few zeds in outfits from future map additions too, and also please forgive some of the float-y zeds – they should get fixed this week).
After that, here’s another zombie spawning vid – in this testbed instance with a zed-count upped to 510 before they start turning into impostor sprites on the periphery of your vision. (Please note that the brief pause before each spawn batch will be optimized by pre-loading the data).
Right now, Zac is looking into some further threading optimization as, bizarrely, better machines were having some stutters – the general plan being that TEA will continue to make engine, tool and optimization improvements while everything is bound together.
Some work that will remain in the non-anims realm andtransferred later on meanwhile (due to the ongoing public beta test) is Stas’s work on improved controllers. He released the latest test version today, and is now well on the way to fixing up all of the inconsistencies reported by our willing bunch of community testers. Check here if you would like to join ‘em.
Finally, last week we showed an example of the Sims-style cutaways that ChrisW is working on – but it was very WIP and we probably didn’t underline quite how much it would improve the visibility inside buildings. With that in mind, then, perhaps this image will be a little bit more explanatory.
This week’s snowmelt from colic2005. 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 MailingList that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct toy our mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Hey all, quick run around the houses talking about who’s on what this week.
In anims-land for Build 41 Zac’s been looking at optimization, which we’ll be coming back to pretty routinely from this point – as we want to make sure everything is nice and smooth. Here he’s sorted out some locks in the render thread, and from the Before and After you can see a marked improvement in quality.
He’s also working on getting the shiny helmet / coats / leggings shader effect going for different clothing items, and also investigating with Mark as to why over the course of development with the animations system we’ve lost some of the earthy colours and harsher lighting that tended towards a slight over-saturation and bleached effect that doesn’t quite make the new character models fit the scene.
Animator Martin, meanwhile, is looking at all the different locations we’ve got on the map (and those still to come) and creating new outfits to discover in their cupboards and lockers – and likewise to find the local zeds dressed up in.
In other news:
Xeonyx, the creator of the much-loved New Denver / Slocan Lake map, is now working on Challenge Maps for the main game. These, including the Film Studio map we’ve discussed previously, will most likely be a part of Build 41. His current mission is a fictional map called Kingsmouth – a ‘paradise island’ vacation resort in the Caribbean. The map will feature vast hotels, seaside locales, a military installation and much more – but we’ll go quiet on it for now while Jamie gets on with his work. Here’s a quick screen from the map editor though.
Chris W continues his work on improving visuals within buildings – aiming for more Sims-style cutaways and the removal of the circle stencil we currently use. Here’s a quick before and after of the start of this work – the second image showing walls in the foreground cutting away to skirting height – with smooth transitions curving up to full height.

 
Meanwhile:
Yuri is working on improvements to the way we render the ground surfaces, especially road textures that have been rained on, to complement his recent improvements to how water appears in-game. (This said, right now, he’s shackling a hilarious car physics demon that’s sprung up on an internal server.)  Stas just released an updated Controller Test beta for those helping out with our gamepad improvement scheme. If you are interested in getting a free PZ code for your troubles, then join our band of testers.  While BitbaboonMark does some TEA-side code repository movements and merging: RJ is doing some improvements to food crafting and prepping a (non-anims) forum test for his new loot table improvements, EP is doing some very exciting experimental work with a new player map system and Turbo is plotting his next move after the successful integration of his weather/shaders in Build 40. (Most likely picking up on his work on in-game devices, or maybe those seasonal sound effects we discussed before). Community stuff:
We’d like to direct your attention to the new Hashima Island map by Woldren, a map based on an IRL location you might recognise as the place where James Bond shot a woman who had whiskey on her head in Skyfall. It’s pretty damn cool.
We’d also like to direct your attention to the Redboid server, which had a season refresh/reboot/restart yesterday and is a grand place to start your PZ MP adventures if you haven’t done so yet.
If you run a PZ server and would like a shout-out in a future blog, then please get in touch. And while you’re at it -please use these values in Bitbaboon Steve’s recent networking optimization options, as they certainly seem to be helping those currently using ’em.
ZombieUpdateMaxHighPriority=50
ZombieUpdateDelta=0.5
ZombieUpdateRadiusLowPriority=45.0
ZombieUpdateRadiusHighPriority=10.0
This week’s infested neighborhood from Dark Oracle. 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 MailingList 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! Merry impending Chrimble.
On Tuesday we ran a pretty successful Community Megatest using our new MP networking system that Bitbaboon Steve has concocted for us. Users generally reported a much smoother experience in overall play, and had a lot of fun with the storms, snow and admin-created blood moons.
This said, we did see a few potential issues around mega-hordes and vehicles that we need to investigate deeper – so didn’t want to inflict our Megatest settings as default ones on players over the Xmas break until we’re sure they’re the right ones.
To this end we’ll be running more Community Megatests in the near future, with different system settings – and some handy network debug tools that Steve is currently coding into the system.
We have, however, also released it into the public build today in Build 40.43 for server owners to play around with – and have already heard some positive feedback. In essence, and with a video deliberately set to explain it best, it looks a bit like this:
In this video there are the two visible circles around the MP player, and then the mini-circles which appear around the zombies. Essentially: every time a circle appears around a zombie it means it’s getting a position update over the network from the server and then wired into your game. The client’s zed placement signals are received – and then the game knows where to show the zed.
The essence of the system is that server operators can now adjust the circle of ‘close dangerous zeds’ and the circle of distant ‘no trouble zeds’ – and the update times. This will cut down on the network traffic taken up by faraway zombies on your screen, and reduce strain on servers as a whole.
[Please note that this vid is an example only and made to explain the system – we haven’t judged what the best radius for these circles are yet and will be running a series of Community Megatests to help us judge what works best.]
So… here comes the science!
In the vid the low priority (larger radius) dictates the zombies which are going to update on the update delta. So every x seconds they will get an update, and in the video you can see these as the pulses. [It’s set purposefully long on the video to highlight it].
Meanwhile the high priority zombies get updated every server frame, and it will send out the closest Y zombies within the smaller circle around the player.
ZombieUpdateHighPriorty is the radius around the player for sending the high priority zombies. ZombieUpdateMaxHighPriority is a cap on the number of high detail ones to send, and it will send the closest zombies to the player up to this limit. ZombieUpdateRadiusLowPriority is the maximum radius to send the lower frequency updates to – at 45 this is essentially the entire screen at 1440p fully zoomed out. ZombieUpdateDelta is the time between sending these lower frequency larger blobs of zombies In the Megatest the values we used were, so if you run a server give it a spin with these and see how it goes:
ZombieUpdateMaxHighPriority 6
ZombieUpdateDelta 0.7
ZombieUpdateRadiusLowPriority 45
ZombieUpdateRadiusHighPriority 20
The next Megatest, meanwhile, will use a smaller high priority radius but a larger cap – to see how it all responds to hordes. It’s all a balancing act, really, so let us know how you get on if you have a play with it yourself.
Sorry for the technical stuff! Here’s some Build 41 stuff to compensate, along with something seasonal that will be one day be stashed in a cupboard in the mall awaiting the Xmas season.
Grant and Zac have been finetuning the clothing and animation modules. Clothes are now shader-driven and individual Clothing items can have custom shaders for special fx. Animations now auto-reload when modified from the Editor, and Martin has also been hard at work adding new clothing outfits, and adding more variety to existing outfits. Here’s a quick vid.
That’s about it for today but Russian holidays mean that Yuri and Stas will continue their 41 work over the Western Xmas on current issues with upturned vehicles and the gamepad bindings screen, respectively, while there’s plenty of other stuff bubbling under too.
There will be a Thursdoid next week, but it’ll be a brief one featuring anything people have done over the holidays, and then back properly in the New Year. Have a great one if you’re celebrating!
This week’s Walking Dead-style not belonging here from non_curo. 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 MailingList 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. Merry Xmas etc hohoho

Howdy almost-yuletide survivor.
PATCH 40.40 RELEASED
Today we released our final (sort of, read below for more on that) patch for Build 40. Full patchnotes can be found here, but this covers stuff like:
Improved darker nights, and less washed out night-time interiors. Car headlights and flashlights will be more of a necessity now. Sandbox settings also updated, so you can adapt it to a brightness you desire. Improved appearance of weather effects when in a building. Moon calculations re-added to game to govern night brightness. Extended disassemble ability to many more items,including: fridges, ovens, more chairs, washing machines, lockers, fitness equipment, metal barrels and some missing shelves. Some balanced player actions related to injuries, sleeping, window-breaking and bandages in a saucepan. Fixed whisper problems in the new chatbox, stair teleports, rain rather than snow in Winter is Coming, community translation font issues, plumbed sinks not working in MP and various other issues. 40 MP NETWORK STUFF
While the rest of the team move into the animations build and version 41, we’re leaving optimization specialist Bitbaboon Steve investigating what easy-win MP networking improvements we could potentially still patch into 40.
The first of his discoveries, the removal large number of empty and unnecessary data packets being sent over the server, has been released in 40.40 and should be a mild salve for current lag issues but his investigations also came up with an idea we thought it’d be wise to test out with a forthcoming IWBUMS beta and Community Megatest.
Essentially, Steve has been working on some server configurable optimizations for zombies in multiplayer. Since vehicles, performance in multiplayer servers has seen added strain (particularly in handling zombie hordes) and we’re hoping this might improve matters.
In essence, we’re about to release a test version in which there are several configurable options to allow server owners to fine-tune how much zombie data is sent to their players.
There will now be two ‘player client zombie awareness’ circles: the first a smaller radius that defines at what tile-range zombie positions are sent to clients with a high precision in every frame, and then a second larger radius in which the zombie location information can be sent to clients less frequently. Server owners will also be able to play with how much time there is between the low frequency updates.
On low population co-op servers these values can be set pretty liberally, so the players are getting all zombies in the visible area smoothly. But on high population servers that experience lag issues, server operators can sacrifice the smoothness of zombie movement in the distance (or even cap zombie visibility completely over a certain distance) in order to VASTLY reduce the amount of internet traffic they produce when lots of players are involved.
We think this will sharply decrease the amount of work the server needs to do and should lead to a much better player experience with a little bit of visual compromise toward the edge of the screen. Distant zombies might pause a bit or appear to teleport slightly between updates, but these movements are also something we’d hope to blend better (and make far less noticeable) with the added functionalities of the animations build. Server operators can decide on their own level of compromise too.
This work is pretty much done, and as such we will add it into the IWBUMS beta as soon as it’s clear there’s nothing from 40.40 that needs hot-fixing. Please keep your eyes on the forum if you want to participate in a special Yuletide Megatest.
41 ANIMS
This week in TEA-land Grant has improved things dev/modder-side with live texture reload, through upgrading the Filewatcher mechanism. It now watches the media folder instead of polling individual files, and is much more efficient. Upon a texture filechange, the game now reloads it live and in-place. This should make iteration times on textures much easier and faster.
Zac, meanwhile, has fixed up AnimZed for Animator Martin to the extent that he can now get a lot more variation on different individual outfits. Take these cops for example:
Martin has also been creating a better range of skin tones for player characters, to allow for better customisation should people desire it.
OTHER STUFF
Stas has just updated the Gamepad Test beta with a lot of fixes, for our lovely select bunch of gamepad testers. If you fancy helping out with this part of PZ work, and earn yourself a free code, then enquire within. RJ has been tinkering with in-game loot, and has occasionally been popping into the PZ Discord to look for willing testers. The overall plan is to have more information in the game code in terms of what’s a desirable item, and what’s junk – so we can then fill containers with a lot more realistic junk items even on higher difficulty levels. He’s also experimenting with having more specific containers in homes for more specific items (all the cutlery in one drawer, male clothes in one wardrobe, female in another etc) but the jury is currently out on whether it actually detracts from the looting gameplay. ChrisW’s work on in-building Sims-style cutaways and the abolition of the dithered circle view stencil continues. As seen here both with, and without. Today’s warehouse horde from Frank. 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 PZWiki 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! OurDiscord is open for chat and hijinks too.

IWBUMS 40.40
 

Added missing textures for fractured bones. You now can't splint a chest.
Fixed server options not showing
Fixed still being able to stack up wooden stairs.

clothing looks really cool guys  
 
someting I am thinking about when I see all the great clothings...  do you have a regulation how often some kind of clothing combnations can spawn on zombies?
 
Thinking about, the small towns into the game should only have 5-10 police officers, maybe 5-10 fire fighter, 5-10 nurses in total etc not spawning 100 police officers ingame in 1 year time frame... Zs should be 99% time ordinary people, maybe nearly 25% of them in sleeping gear (as they were attacked in unaware in sleep) - even a huge % of people with special jobs would have been killed while they were not at there job...
 
how will you handle these?

Less weighty blog than last week, but hopefully some good stuff still lies within. Read on!
BUILD 40 PATCHING
We’ll be releasing a new IWBUMS version for the next (final) Build 40.37 patch either tomorrow or early next week. This will contain a few quality of life improvements and the required chatbox whispering fixes, but the main feature will be the improved darkness and more colourful internal lights that we showed last week.
CONTROLLERS TEST
We are extremely grateful to everyone helping out with the current Controller improvement beta, and Stas has been using everyone’s feedback to fix bugs and streamline the system. It turns out that there are a lot of people very passionate about us getting this right, and it’s making the test process feel worthwhile and fun.
Stas has just released Controller Build 6, and at this point most show-stoppers and major irritations have been removed. So if you’ve been holding off on helping out, it’s a good time to join.
Details on what we need to know about the Controller build, and download instructions, can be found here. Everyone who gives active feedback will be receiving a free PZ Steam code as a thank you, so jump in if you fancy it.
BUILD 41
This week TEA and Martin have been doing a lot of work on clothing layering – unlocking the ability to wear items of clothing beneath, or on top of, other accessories and outfits. This has also meant that ‘one piece’ clothing like dresses, overalls and similar have become an option.
“In the below video you can see me mixing and matching outfits, and layering them as I please,” explains Zac.
“Every Outfit now supports a list of base textures for Top and Pants, and every ClothingItem also has its own base texture that it applies to the character mesh. So you could, for example, wear a t-shirt with an apron over it – and then a jacket on top. With this same combo you could also wear jeans and calf-high boots.”
“This allows for: gowns, dresses, miniskirts. Boots, sneakers, slippers. A vital choice between boxers or briefs etc.”
“Using the cloth layering system, you can even choose whether to wear your boots over- or under your jeans – or your underpants on top Superman style. Though, this said, the actual in-game UI implementation of this will still need to be done – currently it’s done through AnimZed.”

Finally, here are a few other outfits that Martin has come up with using the outfit editor and some of the new features highlighted in Zac’s video.

In other 41 duties, meanwhile, Yuri this week continued his work on the new water visuals, and has rewritten the code for calculating the direction of water movement so it reads where water should be still and where it should flow. He’s also excluded swimming pools and other such bodies of the water from the system, so they’re not automatically given a shore.
This week’s foggy junction from KostyA4247. 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. Also, if you were one of the kind folk who supported us in the recent Steam Award voting then thank you very much! It really is appreciated.

Hey everyone, lots to get through today soooo…
PUBLIC BUILD 40 PATCHED
We’ve just patched Build 40, which is now up to version 40.36. Primary improvements you’ll notice are:
Local text chat now audible/legible from a distance, and no longer obscured. Weather period frequency throughout the whole year increased, and more heavy weather. Car alarms now attract zeds again. Chat now logged on server (format will be improved later) Less getting wet in inappropriate places There’s a fair amount of other stuff too though, details on which can be found here on the forum.
NEXT 40 PATCH: BETTER NIGHTS
One of the biggest problems with Build 40 on release was that the new time of day, and time of year, shaders didn’t play very nicely with the lighting system. Flashlights, internal lighting and vehicle headlights all suddenly look very washed out. Players who venture out in the dark weren’t having as much fun as usual.
As such, Turbo has been working on an improvement that we want to get into the current public version before he moves fully into Build 41. Vids of this can be seen below.

We hope you agree that it looks far, far better – and more than a little scarier to boot.
“In the above videos the ambient values have been changed along with the colours during dark periods (night/storms)” Turbo explains. “This fixes the headlights, flashlights etc and makes darkness look better in general.”
“Also seen below is some improved and indoor lighting during dark times. In the initial Build 40 release my shader overlay coloring messed it all up – so now the shader coloring is disabled when you’re indoors. This did come with the problem that when you’re looking outside you wouldn’t see darkness or weather effects, however, so I’m now using the mask cut-out I created for rain to overlay an external colored texture too.”

“Before we patch I will probably adjust storms a bit too though, as currently they lose a bit too much of their storm tint.”

BUILD 41
We’re transitioning the PZ coders over to the work that TEA have done on animations for Build 41, but in the mean-time guys like Zac and Grant are continuing to improve tools and, in the case of Grant, do some optimization of the anims codebase.
“I’m doing a lot of work on the new clothing tech at the moment” explains Zac. “Using AnimZed wearable bags like backpacks are now visible on the character, and characters can equip custom clothing meshes on top of the base rig.”
“This allows outfits such as baggy jeans, coats, dresses, hoodies, jump-suits, and so on and parts of the base mesh can be now be masked out to prevent clipping and/or overdraw. When this gets to the modders then it’d be fairly simple to even do something like replace a character’s hand with a pirate’s hook or something.”
“It’s all customized for each clothing item, using the paper-doll UI inside the new ClothingItem Editor. There’s also random tints for more variety in the clothing too.”

(please note: on the spot turning animations are not in the build yet but will be before release!)
WATER STUFF
Regular Thursdoiders will know that Yuri is currently working on the improved appearance of water for Build 41. Below you’ll find what it looks like currently, but here’s a note on what to look out for:
A ripple effect has been added to the water, that will let players to see the direction and speed of the wind added to the game in Build 40 on the water’s surface. The water shader now accepts data for flow direction and speed for each tile in the map, so rivers are now more realistic. In the video you can see how the water flows more slowly near the bank, and also how the flow of water smoothly changes its direction along the river. Three water ‘visual quality’ options have been added. There is now a high and low quality option for both dynamic water and static water. Low quality dynamic water puts a very small load on the GPU, so it should be okay on most PCs.
You can also see Yuri playing around with the different debug values for this system here.
PUBLIC CONTROLLER BUILD TEST

We’re currently running a beta for the work that Stas has recently been doing on gamepad controller improvements, and folk have been contributing some absolutely brilliant feedback.
If you enjoy playing PZ with a pad want to join in, and earn yourself a FREE PZ CODE, then simply visit this thread, install the controllers beta, play for a few hours and answer the ten questions we’ve provided.
This morning we released a new version of the Controllers build using your feedback, and Stas has quashed many of the bugs that were irking people. So now is a great time to join in.
Please note that currently only PC players can run the build, and also that the joypad back-end system, configuration and bindings have been completely rewritten from the ground up. In the process some aspects of the controls and default bindings have been changed in the rewriting process – if you have any issues with the default bindings and behaviours of the controls we’d like to hear about it.
NEW DENVER UPDATED – NOW SLOCAN LAKE
A quick shout out for Xeonyx, the creator of the wonderful map mod New Denver – which has recently been renamed as Slocan Lake. Jamie is now making Challenge maps for the main game, the first of which will likely appear in Build 41 at this point, but wanted to bring his most famous mod creation up to date.
The new version of Slocan Lake now has vehicle spawns and lootable maps, and no longer covers up areas of the vanilla zomboid map. You can find it here.

“With the additions of the towns of Silverton and Rosebery,” explains Xeonyx, “I felt it necessary to change the name of the map mod to Slocan Lake BC to better reflect the region the map takes place in, and not just the first town that was completed.”
“Players can now choose to start in one of the three towns as opposed to just New Denver, and with vehicles being added it makes for easier travel between places. I’ve also added forage zones to let players to gather supplies, even when they’re kilometers deep in the bush.”
“Traveling players will find the map no longer covers parts of the vanilla map (Farmlands, Rosewood Prison etc) and has been pushed South. So if you find a road going South off the highway here, this will take you to New Denver.”
“I’ve also added lootable maps to the mod, so you have maps of Silverton, New Denver, Rosebery, Full Region Map and Golf Course Cards out there to find. I also added in the real world street names on the town maps for players wanting to better navigate, and clearly to underline how the map mod is a 1:1 scale recreation of the real life region where I live.”

This week’s pile-up from Maris. 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. Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving to all our American survivors!

Hey all – a few quick things while we continue to tidy up the public Build 40 that was released two weeks ago, and TEA do their animations things backstage for Build 41.
IWBUMS BETA PATCH
We currently have the next 40 patch in beta, and we just released 40.35. We think this now covers most of the primary irritations in the current version: muffled local text chat, some run issues, some issues with MP savegame conversion, wonky door construction and indestructible stairs.
On Tuesday we also released 40.34, which also covered issues with car alarms, building, chatbox integration, errant zombie attractant car honks and forced car-re-entry on MP reloads.
Once this is released to public we’ll hopefully pretty much there with 40 now, although Turbo is still working on improving his shaders for internal lights, headlights and flashlights – and Bitbaboon Steve is joining us again tomorrow to double-check there aren’t any easy-win performance hang-ups he can resolve.
WATER IMPROVEMENT
General Arcade’s Yuri is currently working on the improved presentation of water for Build 41, and while still experimental it currently looks like this.


Now, a few things to mention:
This is still a WIP, and it’s a fair criticism to say it looks ‘too good’ (if such a thing were possible) when compared to the static hand-drawn land tiles. However, from this we intend to tweak the specular, colour and reflection for balance, and indeed perhaps add a subtle effect to the land itself. Yuri still needs to optimize this system, and in the videos the character is invisible due to the ongoing merging of animations into other dev branches. The endpoint of this water presentation revamp will also be to specify water zones through the PZ map tools that specify water flow direction, instead of only taking wind direction into account for the animation. In this way we can have the river in Riverside very clearly being a flowing river, and standing ponds and lakes looking far more settled. GAMEPAD REVAMP TEST BUILD

We currently have General Arcade’s Stas working on a new controllers build, and we’re now at a point at which we need to hear feedback from PZ survivors who like to play with a pad, and/or in split-screen, about how it’s playing.
If this is you (and you’d like to be rewarded with an extra freshly minted PZ Steam code for a friend, enemy or loved one) then we have a new test beta for you to try out – and ten questions to answer from your experience of a few hours of play on the build.
To learn more about the Controllers test build, the free PZ Steam codes for active participants, and to find out how to access the beta then click here.
Please note however that currently only PC players can run the build, and also that the joypad back-end system, configuration and bindings have been completely rewritten from the ground up. In the process some aspects of the controls and default bindings have been changed in the rewriting process – if you have any issues with the default bindings and behaviours of the controls we’d like to hear about it.
This week’s emergency service from kortes. 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.

We released Build 40 last Tuesday, and gave it a first hotfix on Thursday. We currently have the next patch in a public IWBUMS beta channel – and if you don’t mind then we’d love you to jump over there and see how it plays. Primary fixes/changes include:
More frequent changes in weather systems as the weeks tick by, and a little more extreme weather. We were concerned that people weren’t seeing enough of the new weather events, particularly rain, and so things should be more variable with this patch. We would still love to hear feedback on the current build’s weather too, and if you’d like to let us know then the relevant thread can be found here. Some restored/improved chat functionality, and admin commands. Sandbox options for snow on the ground, and rain/fog fx intensity. Fixes to player wetness: you won’t get soaked inside tents anymore, and likewise driving with a smashed windshield will get you wet. Fixes with crate-stacking, car horn/alarm radius, MP door and tree shake, construction issues, vehicle reflections and various other stuff. We aim to release this next week, although also plan to look a few other areas including issues with the muted appearance of indoor lights, flashlights and headlights during night scenes.
In terms of build 41 TEA have provided all the guidelines and reference materials for our own coders to get to grips with what’s required of them, which in time will also be released for modders. We’ve also got an irl meet-up for our Europe-based team coming up soon, where we’ll be discussing the changes and what other cool stuff they can bring.
In the meantime this week Zac has continued to improve the AnimZed dev and modding tool alongside Animator Martin, and now has the Clothing module bound in nicely so Martin can quickly add new costumes and ultimately bind them to in-game inventory items.
He gave us a quick demo video to show the system in action as seen below, being able to quickly switch the player’s costume with the external tool. Please be aware, though, that the tool is just demoing costumes and items held in hand. It hasn’t been set up with all the custom animations for holding weapons, so the guitar will obviously not look as wonky in the finished thing.

General Arcade’s Yuri is already inside the anims build, and working on his new water shader. These are the current fruits of his labour, although currently the system doesn’t know where water borders can be found on the map. It does work as a proof of concept though (faaar down the line! like: real far) for localised flooding.

We’d also like to thank Clerkius who made this cool fan-made trailer for us, which shows off the game really nicely – so we thought we’d spread the link a little wider;

This week’s featured image (that we’ve used to make a pun on a Dickens novel that starts out with a lot of fog as a vague attempt to make use of a degree in English Lit) from ♔Потерянная.ѡℛ. 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 v10.5b has been released!
 
Which includes ...
 
- Updated Clothing for build 40
- Fixed Cooking Beetle Grub
- Fixed Crop Planting Bug
- Thanks to everyone who helped!
 
Enjoy!

NEW
Simulated weather and climate system - recreating true-to-life weather patterns through 365 days of the year New shaders for times of day and seasonal effects Storms that move over the map Fog and mist that clears during the day Rain and snow now look like they hit the ground. Rain then disappears, and snow fades out. Improved snow and snow effects. New isoRegions system to detect an enclosed area - player-made or dev-created - to keep weather effects on the outside New player character temperature system New Chatbox. Primary features include separate chat streams (safehouse, local, global, etc), customizable chat and more intuitive usage and commands. It's hopefully a lot more convenient now. New system to convert objects placed by mappers so they can be used as functional game objects. This covers items like barricades, campfires, rain barrels, traps, composters, crops etc. New functionalities for the PZ sound system. Formerly modders couldn't override sounds in PZ FMOD soundbanks, so when players find certain sounds are too loud or annoying (heartbeat, zombie alert, flies, level up noise etc) it was hard to raise/lower them independently. Details about all the game sounds now go into media/scripts/sounds.txt. A new in-game UI allows users change the volume of any sound they feel is too oppressive. Winter is Coming game mode now works with new climate system. Seasons still impact on this mode - 'Summer' highest temperature is 0 degrees centigrade, and winters may drop to -30. After 3 full days a powerful weather period is generated, that will always feature a blizzard. New MP Admin UI added: an Items list viewer in the admin panel. It can be used to quickly search through, and spawn, items. New C++ version of ZombiePopulationManager. This system is what governs the placement and movement of zombies when they’re not directly on your screen, and this updated version should be an optimization for SP and MP – hopefully helping out lower spec machines and busy servers. Reflective windows on vehicles Skybox generation for vehicle reflective windows. This takes into account: the time of day, the Global illumination color, fog, cloudiness, precipitation intensity, wind direction, wind speed and the temperature of the ambient air (as in winter the clouds are lower than the ground) Added 'sway' wind sprite effects for trees and vegetation that increases/decreases with wind speeds(default on, can be toggled off in options)  Added 'shake' sprite effects for hits on doors, chops on trees and zeds/players walking through vegetation. Added new Spiffo survival guide entries about weather. Added new clothes: Long shorts, Jacket, Padded Pants, Padded Jacket Thunder sound now plays to all players when an admin bans a player banned, a thunder rumble is heard when one is kicked. Game now saves the last five console logs in a /logs/ zip so users can easily upload errors even after they've restarted a game Added more checks to online usernames. They now must be three characters long, and not contain any of the following character: ; . ' ? \ Added new server option AllowNonAsciiUsername (default false). This can be set to true to allow the use of non-ascii characters in the username, such as the Cyrillic alphabet etc..) Game now checks username in lowercase when accessing the database. So if your name is BLARG, but you type BLaRG you will still join. Commands can now be temporaly disabled with DisabledCommand annotation. Disabled connections, grantadmin, removeadmin, servermessage and thunder commands. Help also disabled for these commands by annotation Added climate and weather MP admin panels. Many climate values can be now be ticked to override what's happening on the map. Values set by admin will override any values set by climate system, weather and mods. System also shows current weather information, and gives options to stop it. Added BloodSplatLifespanDays server option to remove old blood-splats. Added a 'Revert screen settings' feature after 20 seconds for when newly selected resolution settings are incompatible. Added a way to edit admin powers (invisible, godmod, no clip, unlimited carry, various cheat...) in the MP admin panel. Added in-game Sandbox options editor for server admins - this will allow server admins to change in-game settings that do not require a restart. Updated community translations. Also updated translations with the display names to aid the process. Added a way for outside signs to have light (check room under it if they have electricity). Added lights to neon signs. Added buttons to server-disconnect screen to return to Main Menu or Quit to Desktop. Added separate Shadow extents from vehicle extents to allow for better shadows Updated fonts to bold to aid readability. Added a way to edit Admin powers (invisible, godmode, no clip, unlimited carry etc) in the in-game admin panel Added back the Lowest lighting-quality display option. [Lowest lighting quality now doesn't use the circle-stencil and doesn't draw a second pass of floor shading, so it is a help to low-spec users.] Added Display option to disable the new roof-hiding feature for low-spec users. Shaders now used to draw wall + stencil + lighting in a single pass. Difficult to tell how much FPS boost this results in, but could help. Client now displays the first lua or script file that does not match one on the server to aid user diagnosis of things going wrong with MP Updated menu screen with vertical rather than horizontal options - due to problems with taskbar in latest Windows Updates. Added a UI to display status and error messages when attempting to connect to a server. Vehicle dashboard now displays headlight icon in red if headlights are switched on but aren't working. Added tooltip for Light Fire when Notched Plank is in inventory but not the other item required for lighting a fire. Added Loot All and Transfer All commands to the inventory context menu when using a controller.  
BALANCE
 
Reduced the the impact of loot modifier sandbox option on easier difficulty. Increased the height of tooltip progressbars. Added being able to rest/sleep on picnic table (considered as a bad bed.) Added missing Raspberry Shortbread, CookieChocolateChip" & Candycane items to the loot table. Added a way to dismantle car wrecks (burnt car) with a propane torch & a welding mask. Gathered metal material will depend on your metalwork skill. Added missing nutrition values to medicinal herbs and condiments. Disabled zombies sprinters in MP (if speed is set to Sprinter, it'll be set back to Fast Shamblers) Lowered the alarm clocks a and digital watch wake up distance. Added "Very Low" choice to CarSpawnRate Sandbox option. Increased VOIP range  (fade and falloff) Bowls of soup now affect thirst. Wood barricades require two nails. Previously in SP 2 nails would be used, while in MP only 1 would be used. Changed in-vehicle visibility cone for when player drives through weather effects. Cone now extends based on darkness value. Player can now sleep in a car that has its engine running. Added Packaged=TRUE to Remoulade so nutrition info is visible. Renamed Disinfect Bandage recipes to Dinsinfect Rag for Ripped Sheets. Increased the distance zombies spawn in newly-seen rooms when the player is in the same building. This is to fix zombies spawning right in front of (or sometimes around) the player in the large open rooms in the Mall. Renamed Metal Tube into Metal Pipe. Removed Pipe (plastic one) from recipes/dropping table, and now use Metal Pipe instead. Improved the appearance of crafting tooltips. Frozen food no longer allowed as the primary ingredient in evolved recipes. Can no longer use rotten bread slices when cooking level is less than 7. Added several missing vehicles zones (McCoy, Fossoil) & improved gas station vehicles spawning. Car-battery charger is now placed on the ground and interacted with using a context menu. Transferring water from an object to an inventory item now requires equipping that item. The amount of water to transfer is calculated in start() instead of when the action is queued.  Repair Engine and Take Engine Parts now show progress bars and flash Success/Failure. Drunk moodle now has an impact on driver steering input Updated map to improve zombie density in some farmland and rural areas.  Changed First Week in One Week Later and adjusted settings to make sure that new players aren't given too easy a ride. You can now improve wooden door frames as you would walls. (This won't work on previously built frames though). Players can now be harmed when hit by a car. DamageToPlayerFromHitByACar sandbox option added Added chevrons on character screen next to the weight to indicate if weight is increasing or decreasing. All vehicle doors may be locked/unlocked from inside without requiring a key. Single tile doors can now be blocked from opening/closing by obstacles - as it is with double doors. Piped items (sinks, toilets, baths..) now require a wrench to be moved. A moveable item requiring no skill now have a 25% chance of breaking instead of 75%. After placing a water piped item you now need to plumb it back before being able to use it (require a wrench & a building or fully enclosed player built house). Weather now impacts on chances of starting the car (specially on low quality engine, the colder, the harder is to start).  
MODDING
 
LoadVehicleModel lua function and re-calc spawn chance added to aid players who want to mod in new/individual cars. Mapper-placed generators are now functional objects when first loaded. Changed spawnchance for vehicle type definition from an Int to a Float. Added mod options for climatemanager  
FIXES
 
Fixed character info UI exception when admin assigns a profession to a formerly profession-less player. Fixed mousewheel not scrolling the ServerWelcomeMessage textbox in the server-settings editor. Fixed ancient font kerning bug. Fixed "Loading..." message appearing briefly when continuing an existing save. Fixed resize bug with the server browser that made the tabs unclickable. Fixed missing scrollbar in the New Game screen. Fixed duplicate scrollbars in some server-settings editor lists. Fixed "Lage Metal Shelves" typo. Fixed house with missing walls near 14070,5200. Fixed rendering hidden moodles every frame. Fixed unused duplicate ISInventoryPage.refreshBackpacks() Fixed UIElement.DrawText(x,y,alpha) not using FBO_ALPHA_MULT. Fixed bug that could result in invisible 3D corpses. Fixed invalid RGB values used in TextManager.DrawString(x,y,str) Fixed GC created while loading files and some related to textures loading. Fixed unoptimized TextManager.getFontFromEnum() Fixed splitscreen players not being able to wake themselves up with less than two controllers active. Fixed exception playing zombie sounds when a zombie's current square is null. Fixed server sending smash-window packets to distant clients. Fixed outright carmageddon when vehicle ids become negative after a long time running. Fixed "Drop" option appearing for non-droppable moveable objects in inventory. Fixed not being able to pick up corpses behind tall windows. Fixed previously-clicked buttons sometimes remaining highlighted when redisplayed. Fixed "Peanut Butter and  Sandwich". Fixed the info button in the character-info screen titlebar not displaying the help text for the current tab. Fixed calculation of the amount of condition restored when fixing things. Fixed syncing of the remaining uses of ingredients with CanBeDoneFromFloor recipes. Fixed syncing items in vehicles or containers with CanBeDoneFromFloor recipes. Fixed sledgehammer being primary weapon over axe or baseballbat when pressing the "equip handweapon" hotkey (default 1). Fixed being able to equip weapon while running. Fixed lack of ability to plaster and paint a wooden pillar. Fixed campfire spawning items. Fixed painting a wall not removing a blood splat on it. Fixed progress bar not showing when adding an ingredient in an evolved recipe. Fixed not being to craft battery connector for some movable items. Fixed GameClient.receiveItemListNet() using short instead of int ids. Fixed "Level Up" button in Player Stats admin UI not updating target player. Fixed IsoObject.save() handling of Attached sprites. Fixed exception reading a map chunk when an object without a sprite was saved. Fixed client exception taking a bag off the ground shortly after transferring items to/from it. Fixed being able to dig graves from a vehicle. Fixed wrong nutrition value for PanFish. Fixed various wrong container items spawning. Fixed not being allowed to take more dirt from the same spot. Fixed appropriate tiles not being seen as "Gravel". Fixed carpentry/metalwork/walkto context option being available while inside a vehicle. Fixed being able to dig with hands and shovel from a car. Fixed a bug when trying to eat an item that was no longer there. Fixed carpentry door option not being disabled if nothing could be built. Fixed typo "You killed 0 zombie" into "You killed 0 zombies". Fixed server sending (most but not all) vehicle packets to distant clients. Fixed server sending multiple packets when brake lights turn on/off. Fixed deaf players being able to hear car radios, players with deaf trait can still read/hear TVs if facing them due to closed captions. In splitscreen, text displayed above a non-deaf player is visible to a deaf player. Fixed "buffer overrun" error after sitting on the server-disconnect screen for a while. Fixed players becoming trapped upstairs by forbidding building floors (and metal roofs) above/over stairs. Fixed being able to move the health body status everywhere. Fixed some wrong/missing parking lot zones. Fixed campfire container icon not being displayed. Fixed speed controls clock button being too fast. Fixed client sending 20KB checksum string to the server. Fixed the the first spawned vehicle not having a schematic in Vehicle Mechanics and having a very basic "switch seat" image Fixed zone mask textures for all vehicles - ensuring correct doors, rear view mirrors and hoods. Fixed wrong calculation of WaterShutModifier & ElecShutModifier sandbox options. Fixed SystemDisabler.doAllowDebugConnections being set to true Fixed headlights on Sportscar being incorrectly positioned Fixed bounding rectangle for character collisions being smaller than physics collisions for vehicles. Also Remade transfer areas vertically, and not parallel to the vehicle. Also also Changed the shift of areas. Now the hood and trunk area is shifted in parallel of vehicle. The areas of doors and tires shift vertical. Fixed physicsDelay and physicsDelayServer transmitting incorrectly Fixed Function UpdateLimit.Check incorrectly calculating delay time. Fixed the game client periodically requesting a full update of the car for which the coordinates are transmitted from the server. This caused the car to twitch. Fixed Van sliding around map even without brakes and tires Fixed debug log message "VID=__ force=__" on server Fixed vehicles that can be rammed to turn over and float above zombies Fixed shell texture being set to null for special vehicles Fixed vehicles missing uninstalled Trunk lid / Hood textures; when uninstalled, these parts look visually repaired Fixed 'Cone of light' from vehicle headlights being too narrow Fixed not being able to get into cars that are tightly packed in parking lots Fixed getting in a car door on the southern side causing the car to overlap the player entirely for a brief second Fixed the game becoming unresponsive when standing next to a vehicle that is turned on its side Fixed Van/VanSeats missing textures for uninstalled rear doors Fixed Van/VanSeats missing textures for uninstalled middle doors Fixed stationary cars getting hit by another car in MP rubber-banding back to their old position This involved Yuri changing the algorithm for synchronizing cars on the network. Fixed NullPointerException in zombie.iso.objects.IsoWaveSignal.AddDeviceText(IsoWaveSignal.java:152) Fixed plants clipping through the car Fixed trash sprite being rendered above the car Fixed visual anomaly after re-loading a Host server and driving Fixed passengers sometimes not being able to exit from vehicle after travel. Fixed the wrong render of "Random" - Button In "Customise Character" menu Fixed colliding with a zombie head on, while they're in their walking state, letting you push them indefinitely Fixed zombies hit by a turning car snapping to a different position Fixed how, on a dedicated server hosted remotely, zombies take a very long time to react to vehicle sounds and movement Fixed issues with how Zombies walk between several sources of sounds. Fixed incorrectly displayed position of vehicle after collision with another car. Fixed cars floating to the ground when spawned Fixed some car texture issues Fixed the game sometimes not reacting to some keys (V and Esc) Fixed horn (Q or V menu) causing popping sound, as if several were being played at once Fixed clicking repeatedly while the game is saving can causing it to lock up Fixed the missing hood and rear view mirror being incorrectly displayed on PickUp vehicle. Fixed cars showing damage texture on parts but not in Mechanics menu Fixed some standing zombies not reacting to collisions with vehicle in MP. Fixed the 'Hours until death from zombie infection' not starting at the exact moment infection occurs. Fixed ambient sound emitters being played every frame and clogging the FMOD command queue. Fixed sound file name instead of GameSound name in AttackVehicleState. Fixed UIElements not getting onMouseMoveOutside callbacks sometimes. Fixed selecting text in UITextBox2 with the mouse. Fixed BaseVehicle.emitter not being removed from SoundManager.emitters. Fixed "0-12 hours" Sandbox setting killing instantly. Fixed server database editor not handling special characters in strings. Fixed some vehicle sounds not being sent to remote clients when the local player has the Deaf trait. Fixed vehicle exit positions not being blocked by obstacles properly. Fixed various door and window sounds not playing for remote clients. Fixed metalwork crafting sounds not using GameSound name. Fixed players with Deaf trait sending repeated sounds to other clients for some actions and creating HORRIBLE NOISE. Fixed mechanics UI delay in showing textures when opened for the first time. Fixed UIElement.DrawTextScaledUniform when textures are in a .pack file. Fixed multithreading bug with animation loading. Fixed missing RotateObject GameSound. Fixed inventory tooltips overlapping the mouse pointer near the bottom-right corner of the screen. Fixed street signs not showing the collided-with sprites Fixed NullPointerException in WorldSoundManager.getBiggestSoundZomb() Fixed usernames being case-sensitive, leading to duplicates (Hicks, hicks, hICKs . . . ) in the database Fixed game characters with names in different registers being loaded as one and the same character Fixed position of Toggle Stove button in loot window titlebar with larger fonts. Fixed the new GameSounds UI not working with the controller. Fixed the lack of SFX when attempting to push a stationary vehicle out of the way. Fixed getting out of the van ejecting you a tile or two away Fixed admin commands not working with ' " '.  Fixed setaccesslevel not working anymore.  Fixed not being able to modify steamid column in whitelist viewer.  Fixed not being able to see some columns (including steamid) in the admin's whitelist viewer. Fixed setaccesslevel not being usable on a non connected player who's present in the whitelist. Fixed it not being possible to enter vans through rear doors. Fixed issues with adding/removing gas from a vehicle. Previously the time wasn't proportional to the amount of gas being transferred and Gas Can didn't need to be equipped first. Fixed equipped empty Gas Can was remaining equipped as an empty gas can after siphoning. Fixed the Server Workshop Items connect-to-server UI having issues when the scrollbar is visible. Fixed farming tooltip rendering with different font sizes. Fixed ac/heater draining the battery when the engine isn't running. Fixed LayoutManager making a window visible without adding it to the list of windows. Fixed host losing admin accessLevel in splitscreen. Fixed swinging a weapon at a broken window granting the player XP. Fixed ac/heater draining the battery when the engine isn't running. Fixed Stick Trap using the wrong "closed" sprite. Fixed bad things happening when using the "Level Up" button in the player-stats admin panel. Fixed player not facing campfires when performing various actions on them. Fixed player animation not playing when opening a barricaded window from the non-barricaded side. Fixed missing context-menu option to remove metal-bar barricades. Fixed second farm-plant sprites not being used. Fixed not being able to place medicine cabinets over low objects like toilets. Fixed exception with sprites that have one of lightR/lightG/lightB properties equal to zero. Fixed many duplicate invisible sprites being created for unspawned erosion objects. Fixed erroneous "user XXX will be kicked because Lua/script checksums do not match" message. Fixed not being able to set access level on yourself Fixed the Admin cannot not being able to edit item and containers on players in admin inventory view screen. Fixed game crashing in FMOD_Studio_EventDescription_GetPath function with exception: getPath() != FMOD_OK Fixed Admin can removing an item from a player's hand, but it not removing the item from the game character. Fixed an Admin not being able to open bags in the players inventory from the admin inventory view screen Fixed the character's appearance not updating when the admin removes clothing from the inventory. Fixed IsoGridSquare.haveElectricity() sometimes returning true when it shouldn't. Previously the IsoGridSquare.haveElectricity variable didn't work correctly when two or more generators touched the same square. Fixed calculation of food age/freezing/thawing when the player turns a generator on/off. Fixed exception when zombie climbs through a window or over a fence and the chunk on the other side is unloaded. Fixed Survival sandbox presets having car locked & car alarm to "Never". Fixed "Base" module not being selected by default when using the items list UI. Fixed wrong calculation of unlimited capacity. Fixed BodyDamage.RestoreToFullHealth() not setting temperature to 37.0 degrees. - Fixed old lighting bug that caused flickering in some situations. Fixed evolved recipes using WaterPot as base item - they now require the WaterPot to be at least 3/4 full Fixed not being able to place or build things through an open doorway. Fixed creating ".project_zomboid_2.9.9.17" hidden folder on Linux Fixed target-picking cursors (such as the moveable-tools cursor) getting in the way when the player attacks. … Fixed SGlobalObjectSystem error when a thumpable is destroyed. Fixed name of sound that plays when a carpentry objects break. Fixed barricaded doors being disassembled and leaving the barricade behind. … Fixed Multiplayer Players UI and invite-friends UI being too transparent Fixed lighting not updating after teleporting in multiplayer. Fixed vehicles texture names in scripts being lowercase and uppercase in file system Fixed LoadGameScreen exception with the demo. Fixed bug with lightR/lightG/lightB sprite property value "0". Fixed update() getting called for MainScreen (and all its descendant UIElements) while in-game. Fixed FMOD Occlusion parameter not being set to zero when starting sounds. Fixed engine speed not setting to the engineIdleSpeed value when player press the brake button. Fixed vehicle turning radius when accelerating is very large Fixed not being able to add players to Factions when they were connected before you on the server. Fixed the /createhorde function crashing servers by limiting zed spawn to 500 Fixed AddItem command needing username to generate an item. Username and count no longer required. It's optional now. Fixed small car idling at 2000 RPM Fixed profession change by Admin transmitting to all players in MP. Fixed addvehicle "Base.SportsCar" "EnigmaGrey" command not working without quotes Fixed player not needing an account password when connecting to a server. Fixed not having the "edit admin power" button in the admin panel. Fixed some spawned tiles by Erosion not being able to be removed. Fixed commands that have no parameters send 'wrong arguments' message Fixed Items List Viewer layout with larger fonts. Fixed profession icon overlapping trait icons in the Info panel. Fixed missingpzexe.jar and sqlite-jdbc-3.8.10.1.jar Fixed presence of old unused java libs Fixed co-op host being allowed to enter commands in the Lua debug console when not admin. Fixed car/tire_explode -> VehicleTireExplode. Fixed headlights providing a cone of lights even if they're off / broken. Fixed empty wine bottles not being refillable with water. Fixed sound delays and volume issues by rebuilding .bank files. Changed short sounds from Streaming to Compressed and longer sounds to Streaming. Fixed Server Toolbox appearing underneath the top-left icons. Fixed resetting fatigue, endurance, and body temperature to default unless in God Mode. Fixed connect-to-server ui not resetting the game to singleplayer in case of error. Fixed connect-to-server and xp-bonus arrows animating at high speeds at different framerates. Fixed obsolete items showing in the Items List Viewer. Fixed nutrition info in Food tooltips in debug mode showing when the Tooltip.Info debug option is checked. Fixed potentially having more water than was available at the start when cancelling the pour-on-ground action. Fixed water bottles not filling to capacity when less than 1 unit could be added. Fixed vehicle brake-light texture indicating working brake lights when the battery is dead/uninstalled. Fixed vehicle radial menu allowing headlights to be switched on/off when the battery is dead or missing. Fixed the game unpausing after hiding the changelog UI. Fixed missing vehicles_pickupvanlightsburnt.png Fixed issues with vehicle horn, lights, alarm and siren when the battery is dead or uninstalled. Fixed "ERROR: model texture "f_hair_White" wasn't found" on Linux and Mac. Fixed NullPointerException in IsoWindow.handleAlarm(). Fixed player equipping an already-equipped water bottle when filling it. Fixed Stone hammer not being usable when upgrading wooden walls. Fixed sheet rope typo. Fixed garbage-creating debug code in ZombieUpdatePacker. Fixed player not being able to see nearby zombies when very tired and/or panicked. Fixed frozen food spawning in freezers long after the power goes out. Fixed Invisible checkbox in Admin Powers ui not setting GhostMode on the server and several other places set GhostMode=invisible. Fixed gc with WorldSoundManager.getBiggestSoundZomb() Fixed zombies hearing players from far away. Fixed upgraded door frames blocking player movement. Fixed the delay before right-clicking starts aiming being shorter at higher framerates. (At 120fps, right-clicking to bring up the context menu could often initiate aiming.) Fixed player entering attack stance when pressing the Control key while the mouse is over the inventory window. Fixed the player aiming when the mouse is over the inventory tooltip Fixed fire and smoke sprites being drawn as part of the floor - being covered by snow etc Fixed items that should spawn in bags sometimes spawning in the container the bag is inside. Fixed adding bait to traps not working. Fixed 'Plays Baseball' trait not working properly. Fixed not being able to make a pot of soup with a canned mushroom soup. Fixed not being able to refill an empty Propane Torch Fixed 'GameServer.hitZombie() doesn't handle vehicles being hit by players' issue Fixed BodyDamage.FoodSicknessLevel going below zero. Fixed slices of Cake and Pie not inheriting stats from the original item. Fixed sound-related exception when smoking cigarettes or drinking from a bottle. Fixed a second-story room in the Mall that wasn't considered a room for plumbing/electricity purposes. Fixed zombies being immune to attacks while staggering backwards. (This is an OLD much-complained about issue in MP, so yay.) Fixed zombies with 3D models not facing the player when shoved. Fixed News.txt not being read from mods. Fixed passengers being able to fall out of a moving car in MP and be run over if they disconnect briefly Fixed a bug in SetPlayerLocation() which caused unnecessary work to be done. Fixed some tile properties in newtiledefinitions.tiles. Window frames with HoppableW/HoppableN. Wooden Bench -> Sturdy Bench. White Simple Chair -> Grey Plastic Chair Fixed seahorse cafe windows with invalid smashed / glass-removed offsets Fixed being able to display duplicates of some admin panels. Fixed gun sounds not being heard far enough away in multiplayer. (The radius is only set to 20 in FMOD.  Setting 'distanceMax' in sounds.txt. Overrides the value in the .bank file. Mods will need to set this value as well.) Fixed barricades not being removed when a window is destroyed by a sledgehammer. Fixed players with Deaf trait hearing house alarms. Fixed position of speed-controls in debug mode (which forces the clock to be visilble). Fixed player not facing microwave or stove when checking its settings. Fixed two bugs with spawning a random zombie in a barricaded bathroom. Fixed clean/disinfect crafting tooltips saying "Destroy" rather than "Use" for bandages/rags. Fixed two exceptions when pressing keys while the game is loading. Fixed speed controls briefly appearing in the wrong position when starting a game. Fixed not being able to sleep when not tired or recently slept when the server option SleepNeeded is false. Fixed being able to place multi-tile furniture where walls intersect the furniture. Fixed being able to place tents on squares that are blocked by vehicles. Fixed failing to check for trees when building some carpentry objects. Fixed learning from TV/radio when asleep Fixed not being able to create new username. Fixed unnecessary 'ban steam id' when banuser is preferable Fixed Coordinates parameter being used with 'add vehicle' command Fixed wrong calcul in Nutrition values (it'll be now easier to gain more weight if eating high carbs or lipids food) Fixed "Survived For" showing on the character screen if the player doesn't have a watch. Fixed weight display from being a float to being an int (no more 80.14 but only 80.) Fixed 'add vehicle' command not giving a vehicle to a player who hadn't included their name. Fixed wrong calcul in startEngine process. Fixed multiple VehicleFailingToStart sounds playing. Fixed scaling of lines when zooming indoors. Fixed some map issues: A house had a grass floor, a trailer had a TV on the same square as a kitchen counter, a building had no light switches in two upper floor rooms. Fixed doors/radios/tvs/windows sometimes having different states on clients and the server. Fixed ReleaseSafehouse command Fixed and refactored Grant Admin and Remove Admin commands  Fixed incorrect trunk size of vans with seats. Fixed wrong calcul in chance of uninstalling part resulting in sometimes damaging the part where it should be impossible. Fixed some ingredients left at -1 hunger reduction when adding them to a recipe. Fixed exception when a vehicle crashes near a fire. Fixed loot sometimes respawning too soon. Fixed "map_zone.bin could not be saved" multiplayer error. Fixed weight-gain and weight-loss indicators appearing at the same time. Also fixed increased weight-gain. Fixed McCoy vehicles not spawning. Fixed red font for system messages and shout being hard to read Fixed exception when plastering walls. Fixed wrong calcul in failure of damaging part when installing it. Fixed missing some vehicles definitions (Fossoil wasn't spawning + a few variant of existing models) Fixed wrong distributions table for some vehicles (postal vans weren't spawning anything) Fixed positions zombies stand at when surrounding a vehicle. Fixed some soap items not being able to clean clothing. Fixed crowds of zombies launching vehicles like bottle rockets. Vehicles can still be jostled around by large hordes, but shouldn't go flyingoff at high speed anymore. Fixed errors loading vehicles whose script is no longer defined by picking a random script. Fixed coop server not starting if -cachedir= didn't end in "/Zomboid" Fixed ISEquippedItem exception when not in debug mode. Fixed not being able to open a vehicle's trunk at certain angles. Fixed exception when a zombie's square is null. Fixed an old SpriteRenderer bug, not sure if it hurt anything. Fixed appearance of selected hot/cold items in the inventory/loot windows. Fixed food temperature possibly going above/below container temperature. Fixed some UI layout issues with jumbo fonts. Fixed long strings overlowing comboboxes. Fixed some minor map bugs - light switches, doubled-up TVs, a building with no wall on second floor Fixed using string.match (string contains) instead of stringStart for the item list. Fixed some map bugs: missing walls, missing lightswitches, duplicate TVs. Fixed covered gas station that was considered interior. Fixed unnecessary old chat-transparency display option. Fixed issues with on-screen server messages (using /servermsg command) - horizontal position was relative to the chat window, display time was depended on framerate, font now larger. Fixed missing "Ticking clock" animation while the char sleeps is missing Fixed some debug code running that is disabled in multiplayer. Fixed vehicle skid sound not playing in multiplayer. It only plays for the driver currently; remote clients won't hear it. Fixed vehicle damage to prone zombies being too low in multiplayer. Fixed broken vehicle door locks being lockable/unlockable using the dashboard icon (and vehicle menu). Fixed car collision box blocking a door even if a char can come up to it Fixed wash clothing recipe not working. Fixed file encodings in translation files. Fixed dropped items are drawn above the car Fixed empty water container staying equipped when pouring water from one item to another. Fixed propane tank remaining equipped after inserting into a bbq Fixed rendering issue with Physics.Render debug option as other things such as vehicle areas wouldn't render. Fixed vehicle y-coordinates when spawning in long horizontal zones. (The long horizontal zones at gas-stations were spawning vehicles at the wrong y-coordinate) Fixed unused vehicle code. Fixed issues with adding/removing gas using gas cans. Fixed unnecessary allocations and file access related to non-existent textures. Fixed zones overlapping any cells in a map directory not being removed before loading that map's objects.lua file. Fixed speech from second player in splitscreen being displayed over first player. Fixed small trees causing crashes but not being removable Fixed car engine turning off as soon as battery is removed Fixed crafting recipes losing their favourite status when game language is changed Fixed police sign showing higher on tile when placed Fixed radio saving last lines of broadcast so broadcasts didn't replay in full upon load Fixed bushes only draw with floor when in a car. Fixed too few vehicles spawning in some places. Fixed vehicles being usable through closed doors, fences and walls. Fixed removing a metal-bar barricade giving a metal pipe. Fixed metal-bar barricades requiring three bars but only using one. Fixed error message when having no perks to move an item in tiledef. Fixed collapsed stacks of food not splitting into separate stacks when freshness changes. Fixed berry/mushrooms not being sorted into separate stacks by freshness. Fixed Delete key not working in the load-game screen.  Fixed problem with a DuffelBag items distribution.

There was never 'more' varieties, in fact the older versions had quite a bit less. The number of bullet types has effectively doubled from the older versions.
 
2) The list not displaying properly is annoying but its hardcoded into the java files. Without implementing completely new tooltip code (something I plan to do at a later point anyways) theres not much that can be done about it.
 
3) WD-40 and its intended use is set to change for the v3.10 branch, currently it works as a 'repair item', where in the next major update when cleaning the firearm becomes important its more of a 'maintenance item' (sort of)
 
4) As mentioned before, the attachments/components (aka: 'modules') is going to be completely redone. At the moment all guns technically have those 5 slots as they are part of PZ's base code (canon, scope, recoil, clip, stock).
The new planned system will work much different, where these components will be more like a branching tree structure: those components (modules) will have slots for attaching more.
Using a shotgun as a example, a recoil pad attaches to the stock, that stock can be removed and replaced with a pistol grip, and suddenly there is no more spot for a recoil pad. Barrels on many shotguns can be swapped: Some have a built in choke that can not be removed, some barrels have threads allowing you to attach a threaded choke.
The current attachments/components I do not waste time working on these when I have such a massive over hall on how that system works planned.
As for the Inspection Window, the current version was very much a early prototype and no where near its final version, and will hopefully go through some drastic changes in v3.10.
 
5) The reason it doesn't allow for this is it seriously complicates the code and runs the risk of creating some extreme bugs.
 
 
As I said the upgrading of this mod from the old legacy version is still very much a work-in-progress. Many parts of it have been ignored or left under developed while I work on more important parts that need to be developed first. The parts that I do still need to work on will be gotten to eventually when its their time.

As mentioned in recent weeks, we’re now on clean-up duties before the release of Build 40 – which will then be patched with whatever’s necessary, before the animation branch being worked on by the guys over at TEA is fully merged into the main dev codebase for work on Build 41.
Last week, on IWBUMS beta 40.21, we put in the reflective windows skybox to better show season/day/night (and in prep for a future build’s reflective water), and also included Turbo’s more natural-looking snow, which can also be seen in the featured image above.
In the mean-time we’ve had several other test builds backstage, and are now putting out beta version 40.25. The full changelist can be found here, but the headlines are below.
Weather patterns are now more random, generally shorter, less intense in terms of screen darkness and have more periods of clear sky. Cloud patterns seen on the ground have been updated, and have new textures – night has been improved. Ground snow accumulation has been improved and updated, also working better when snow is turned on with admin/debug tools. Weather periods can now also be fully modded, including a designated ‘modded’ stage which can be freely modified. Insulation properties of different clothing now more clearly shown in the UI. Spawns have been added for McCoy Logging and Fossoil vehicles, which weren’t appearing – alongside improved car spawns at gas stations in general. Fixed: various chatbox and admin issues, a longstanding MP issue in which loot was respawning way too soon, the weird tile visual effect with some zombie corpses, crowds of zombies launching cars like bottle rockets (!) and players sometimes being trapped in their car (and zombies getting confused) by Yuri’s invisible anti-clip forcefield.  
Megatest
We will be holding an IWBUMS Community Megatest tonight to see how many major irritations remain, and to gather info on the login issues that hampered the last Megatest – should the same problem arise.
If you would like to join in then keep an eye on the TIS forums. Free PZ codes for participants will be available (usual conditions apply) but please note that this isn’t a stress test so the required player number on the server might be limited.
 
Anims
It’s been a busy week for TEA preparing for the code merge of the animation build into the mainline development branch as soon as build 40 goes final. They have completed the vast majority of the tasks required for the handoff, at which point they will continue to work on bits of extra technology to make the main animation build development go smoother, and end up with better results, while the rest of the team beavers away converting the main branch’s character states to use their new fancy state system.
TEA have implemented all the character control and combat features that were present in the early animation build, but with the new elegant and fast to implement data driven state logic that will act as example for the rest of the team to use as a basis, as well as being a much more robust and bug free base than what existed before, so we’re hoping that while it certainly won’t be a quick task, with the entire team pushing toward it we’re hoping progress will be swift, and we can finally start showing more exciting videos on the Thursdoids with the confidence that they are finally around the corner. Animations represent a huge amount of work as well as a linchpin for the rest of the major features to be implemented into the game. Each build after and including animations (intermediary quick builds aside) on our roadmap to 1.0 and filling in those missing features everyone has been waiting for (yes, those). It’s going to be an exciting 2019!
After the hand off, TEA will be looking at some extra tech, such as animation retargetting, which will not only mean a much easier time for modders to implement their own animations and models by allowing animations to be adapted to slightly differing skeletons, but will also save poor Martin many many hours of reexporting hundreds of animations whenever we decide to add a bone to the skeleton (looking at you, backpacks!). In addition, they are going to look into finally getting the proper rotation blending working nicely, which has been a thorn in our side since day 1, and would if nailed allow for better turning and much more immersive turning animations. Though obviously it’s key that we retain the nice responsive character movement, so we’ll need to experiment with how to allow for animated turning without the character feeling sluggish to control.
 
This week’s snow scene from Taquitosito. 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.