Deep Sea Diver

Evening all, here we all are again. Let’s take a stroll through the development Event zone.
Crafting Overhaul Recap
Now the vast infrastructure overhaul of the crafting systems has been merged and opened up to the rest of the gang, we’ve had a crack team of coders working solidly on implementing the various new post-apocalyptic profession tech trees, workstations and recipes that will provide for a vast amount of options for crafting and building in B42.
 
As a summary for anyone who isn’t up to date on our overall goals, the crafting overhaul is intended to provide the following things to Zomboid:
 
Give Zomboid a more feature rich end-game.
At present, long time players of the game often find they run out of objectives once they get a well-stocked and secure safehouse. We want to provide many more objectives a settled survivor can undertake to improve their safehouse, or indeed a community of players.
More things to build. More opportunities to craft. More ways to be creative.
 
Provide a way for servers to be able to run indefinitely without the need to wipe or respawn loot.
At present the gameplay loop relies so much on looting the map for items that servers run into problems when most urban locations are looted. These either cause servers to rely on unrealistic loot respawning, or to frequently wipe the server.
We want servers to be able to run well into the ‘Alexandria years’ and for players to experience life much further within the post-apocalypse in an interesting way that feels and plays different to the early chaos.
 
Provide believable post-apocalypse professions that would emerge in a post-technical post-apocalyptic society.
If it’s been 30 years since the apocalypse, making a new character who is a burger flipper ceases to make much sense.
As time ticks by from the initial infection, we will retire pre-apocalypse professions and introduce post-apocalypse professions that mirror pre-modern professions such as blacksmithing, tailoring, butchering and so on. We are also tying these skills into relevant modern day professions where applicable.
 
Provide more community cooperation in multiplayer (and NPCs in B43 and beyond) with different interacting professions that can contribute to a community – as well as provide much more extensive crafting and building, encouraging trade and other interesting player interactions.
We want to give players more interesting choices of professions and activities to contribute to a survivor community, and allow for players to cut more unique and interesting niches for themselves within a survivor group or community.
 
Part of this is reshaping how the skill and XP system work to both make individuals less capable of mastering everything, while making their initial potential a lot higher without grinding if they spec into a particular skill heavily.
 
Simultaneously, meanwhile, we still need to be providing sandbox options to allow solo players to master more skills and professions so as not to cut solo players from all the new content and things to do.
 
Provide a framework for players who want to focus more on community building and player interactions than zombie survival, so that they can optionally run servers with a more traditional wilderness map based survival game or extensive tech mods.
While zombie apocalypse will always be our core focus for the vanilla game, we want Zomboid to provide a breadth of survival mechanics and content that, especially with mods, make a solid foundation for many other varied survival experiences outside the looting and zombie gameplay.
 
This includes making provisions for the full range of possibilities in terms of tech and progression modpacks and overhauls that will add mountains of new ways for the community to play the game.
 
Our tech tree is built from the ground up with the assumption that it is taking place on a wilderness map without any civilization – to ensure that there are no holes.
 
In normal gameplay, close to the apocalypse, it’s expected that players would be able to skip huge portions of this tree by using scavenged technology and supplies from the crumbling modern world. However, with the correct knowledge and skills, players will be empowered to fill any gap if that loot and technology is not available to them.
 
Let the modders be all they can be.
Finally, we also believe that the crafting systems themselves are solid and foundational enough for the amazing modders in our community to run absolutely fucking wild with – and we honestly cannot wait to see what they come up with.
 
Recap over
Now we’ve recapped our general goals with the crafting overhaul, we’ll introduce you to some of the work on three of the profession trees that we’ve been in the guts of this month.
 
Blacksmithing
One of the new post-apocalypse professions that will be available for players, blacksmithing will allow for the comprehensive working of metal to provide players the ability to craft many items that are unattainable outside looting in the current build of the game.
 
The initial work has been based around providing the ability for someone living in the wild to be able to work with metal using a primitive furnace and forge made using rocks and clay, along with higher tiers being producible later on as players progress.
 
Of course there will also be modern equivalents of these workstations available within the world map for players to exploit too, but as stated earlier we are filling out the crafting tech tree always from the very bottom, with the assumption that players do not have access to any looted supplies whatsoever.
Please note that we are currently exploring a new design for building mechanics, in our attempt to get away from using right click menus for everything. We are hoping for a nicer building interface since we’ll have a huge number of extra building projects for the player and just cramming them all into right click menus will get more and more cumbersome as time goes on.
With these facilities simple iron implements can be produced, such as nails, as well as the tools required to build the next tier. Additionally it can be used for simple assembly and maintenance tasks.
This second tier is approximately “Medieval-ish”, the furnaces are built using stonemasonry, consisting of dressed stone blocks and cement; there is a proper blacksmith’s anvil; and also a quenching bucket.
With this more complex and durable tools can be crafted, as well as a higher level of maintenance.
And yup, want to be the most popular person on a server? Crank out sledgehammers for your friends!
Finally in this area, for steel production we need to make coke, produced from charcoal.
This dome kiln can be used to produce both coke, and also charcoal from wood.
 
Wood charcoal is important for this branch of crafting. The heat it produces is good for working metal, but it’s also carbon and had effects on ferrous metal being forged. It will be able to be produced through other means than just the dome kiln, but can be produced more efficiently in higher quantities when using one.
 
Pottery / Stoneworking
We featured some of the possibilities with pottery in a previous Thursdoid however a big benefit of working with clay (as well as stone) is for additional options for building.
 
PLEASE NOTE: there’s anims, tile artwork, SFX and lots of other polish missing at present.
 
 
As well as stone or clay full-size walls, the extended building options from these systems will allow for paths, roofs and decorative elements allowing for player built communities to really feel like a settlement and provide options for security to keep the zeds at bay.
 
This will of course be a balancing concern for us, but we feel with sufficient effort and skill a survivor should be able to (very ultimately) erect walls that zombies do not simply attempt to walk through and bash their heads on until they fall over.
Brewer
The last profession we’ll cover today is the Brewer, who has numerous valuable things to bring to the table. While at present alcoholic drinks may not have too much direct impact on gameplay, we will be providing more benefits and downsides to the partaking in alcohol.
 
After all, we imagine it would be a likely bit of escapism for many a zombie apocalypse survivor, and there’d be more value still added later down the line once the NPCs and the accompanying psychological overhaul we have planned at the same time.
 
In the first instance of this, however, the Brewer profession also allows for the creation of a rather vital way of preserving food.
 
 
CAN BE HAPPY UNDERGROUND
Last ‘doid we showed you building developments high upwards into the sky, this time we’re going deeper underground as there’s too much panic in this town.
 
For those unaware, Build 42 will come with two sorts of below ground floor. First off we’ll have the Permanent ones that will always be attached to locations on the map. These will generally be familiar locations, places of interest, businesses and secret military complexes.
 
Today however, we’ll be looking at our Randomized ones. We currently have 119 of these designed: some empty and desolate, some full of loot beyond your wildest dreams, and some that make you seriously question the mental state of the previous occupant. Here’s a fuzzed-up image to whet your whistle.
These will be basements, bunkers, panic rooms and Waynes World sets that you will be delighted to discover spawning on your regular looting sorties – and they will appear within whatever houses could potentially fit them in and still look natural. The frequency of their appearances will also be governed by a Sandbox option.
 
We’ll also have a long list of designated spots within buildings on the map where a random basement will fit, these spots will be assigned and a random compatible basement will be placed in the world on world creation.
 
Here’s a quick video to show some of our favourites off but first a few familiar words of caution!
 
This is WIP, stair placement within buildings will improve, and likewise the steps will look more natural in the way that they appear within the house. We may also look at hatches etc as time goes on.
 
MODDING
Lovely Aiteron’s mission of tidying up, reorganising and adding new utility to our front-end UI continues. Notably he’s currently improving the Mod Manager which, as an ex-modder himself, he is ideally suited to do.
 
Here’s a quick video showing his changes.
 
 
So what’s seen here? Well, amongst other things, the following:
Mod and map order. You will now be able to change the load order of enabled mods and maps, which also comes with an auto-sort for available mods. Share your presets. You will now be able to share your preset of mods (with specific mods, and the load order) and your friends and/or players on your server will be able to take it and use it themselves. If some mods are missing, then the game will flag it and show links to the ones that are uninstalled. We have added special version tags that will be required for mod compatibility for B42. This is due to the massive changes to the game likely invalidating a large number of mods, and the potential for serious bugs if people attempt to run with those designed for B41. Hopefully in this way things will be clearer through the B42 Unstable process, and sailing can be as smooth as we can all muster it. The game’s use of ModIDs has been altered to be appended by the workshop ID of each mod. This adjustment is aimed at resolving server issues that result in file mismatch errors when users attempt to connect, due to various mod versions sharing the same ModID. This happens on the Steam Workshop a fair bit due to re-uploads and modpacks. Now, with the workshop number attached to the ModID, only the “correct” version of a mod will be loaded by clients connecting to servers. We’re hoping that this will then lessen frustrations with said cursed file mismatch errors whenever you’re in an area of mod self-conflict. We are also working on a new modding API and new modding guide for 42. It’s currently unclear whether it’d be released alongside a 42 Unstable. It’s certainly in the works though. LOOTED HOMES
An area of the game we need to improve is the feeling that ‘something happened here’. We have burned down houses, survivor homes and our costume zeds – but we don’t have much that says people who were panicked were once here.
 
As such now we will be including a random chance for homes, stores and businesses to have been looted – with items strewn over the floor, general detritus and litter, and sometimes graffiti on the walls too.
 
(There’s no graffiti that says ‘Hit them in the head!’ just yet, but we are a video game so give us time on that one I’m sure it will happen eventually.)
 
 
 
FUN NEW ITEMS
At the same time as the big ticket new systems, our coders and art team like to dripfeed fun smaller stuff into the test build. Recent additions have been:
 
The Military Manpack Radio. Works when worn on the back, in addition to other radio usages.
New fluid containers that use the revamped crafting systems that deal with liquids – so for example the canteens use the new tech where they’re a single script item definition with procedural textures and icons, similar to how clothing items work.
Backpack sprayers that are fluid containers, that should prove useful for farming. (And also get us thinking about flamethrowers, once we have the time to get back into the fire rework.)
OTHER STUFF
The Sound team hit an impressive milestone the other week, with them hitting the total of 50 music tracks that have been re-written so that they work within 42’s new and awesome dynamic music system. Our thanks, as ever, to the fabulous team at Formosa and everything they do for the game. Taking over a building, but still a clean-freak even though the world’s gone to shit and appearances no longer matter? Well worry no more, as 42 will allow you to wash away and scrub the grime and graffiti to make your safehouse look and feel spotless. Until the blood starts to drip again, clearly.  
 
HAPPY HALLOWEEN WOOOO
In keeping with all the other game studios and publishers providing ‘faintly spooky content’ at this time of year, please take this offering of deer skellingtons and a baby deer skellington.
 
We trust that you are now suitably unsettled, and please note that it took about a minute to get our pre-existing animal skellingtons into motion. We haven’t spent all month on the skellingtons.
 
 
 
We’ll see you back here next month (details on the temporarily monthly Thursdoids here) for more cool stuff.
Thanks again all x
A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here

I never took zombies as the polite considerate type, yet they are very patient with other zombies getting in their way and stepping carefully over their fallen comrades. I think their behavior would be more realistic if they were to jostle each other, perhaps simply slamming bodies together like they do with barriers in their path sending the other zombie stumbling away or even falling over sometimes. Additionally when zombies trip they should be stepped on by zombies walking over them, maybe even tripped over by said zombies. If enough zombies trample a fallen zombie it could start damaging them even, and perhaps the damage from sprinting zombies should be greater than that of shamblers.

I'd love to see the depression system get some attention. Right now unless I eat bad food or sit around all day in game, my character doesn't get unhappy. There's no need for anti-depressants. 
 
It would make sense that doing tasks your character enjoys would be a comfort to them. Doing tasks they don't like would weigh on their mood. 
 
My hope is that when NPCs are added that this system will be overhauled. The interactions between fellow survivors seem like great opportunites to expand this. 
 
In MP if a player is injured, infected, sick, or killed around them it could have a negative effect on our moods. That seems like an easy addition. Did you see or hear a player character get killed? If yes, then did you kill them? If no, then player gets a negative mood adjustment. That guy you just spent weeks/months surviving with was killed when he was looting a car because you asked him to check it for smokes. That'd probably be a downer. 

as it is i think that the current depression system is rather unhuman like as its a one type for all where as depression affects different people differently.

adding different characteristics to the player character would havefer a more enhanced game experience by adding demeanor this are just a overlay to help people understand what im going for,
hardworker - building, dismantling, fixing, or doing increases happiness but things like books and magazines aswell as other current have no effect
ADHD - less effected by stress and depression overall but increased stress and depression when leveling new skills, being in areas that are unmarked on the map and car alarms/house alarms = insta stress
lazy - depression increases the more you do
alcoholic - alcohol greatly decreases stress and depression

the main idea of this is to help add economy into the game by adding greater need and less need for some items for some players

just wanting to share an idea, i could come up with more but it depends on if this suggestion is well received 

Hello all! Here’s a rundown of what’s been going on this week. But first:
 
For all those not interested in multiplayer progress, since we went so MP heavy last week with our deep dive, we thought it only fair to give you something non-MP releated, and a little more than we’d normally tease. Here’s a little taster of a few sounds from the Noiseworks team!
 
Please note that these are previews of sounds often in isolation, without zombie vocals, footsteps, or often ambient sounds. They are also still in WIP so don’t fret if you feel any of the sound balancing seems odd in isolation. They are all meant to be part of a much broader soundscape. We’ve also already discussed slightly lowering the squishiness of non-kill hits for e.g.

We think you’ll agree they sound great and, crucially, the sounds being synced exactly to the action make all the difference in the world! We’re super excited to see what comes next!


Also note the soundtrack in this video is not quite the same as you might remember! We have started receiving separate multi-tracks from Zach for the soundtrack to the game, essentially the individual instruments for all the tracks you know and love! And the plan is for Noiseworks to use these to create a more dynamic and flowing soundtrack that fits the events in the game much more closely rather than just playing tracks one after the other. Maybe pulling in the drums on their own here, adding cellos at a key moment after that, pulling back to quiet at a tense moment, bringing in a string trill when a zombie approaches as you crouch behind a fence, and so on.
 
However young Zach is very busy with his life at the moment, so it may take a while to get the entire soundtrack off of him so its not clear when Noiseworks will get to work on the system. we’re looking forward to it greatly though!

 
MP UPDATE
The Wednesday test this week was a little different, given that the client driven zombie rework is still in progress. The main focus was stealth between players, given RJ has updated the build with the more in-depth version of our stealth system. A few highlights from the session can be seen below, heavily including what looks like some special kind of ‘run’ that those anime fans seem to like so much!

 
Some testimonials:

“The main focus was on the functionality of stealth. It still needs some fixes indeed, but it’s slowly becoming something it’s meant to be.  
We had a lot of fun with sneaking from behind and attacking each other. Ninja-mode-on session. Hiding names is a good new feature, however, hovering mouse would give player’s position away. And some blinkings while sneaking. The rest was great! 9 Narutos\10.”

-
 
“I’ll have to say that it was remarkably (but albeit not entirely) stable and i was able to play uninterrupted for sometime, being able to drive around and get into car chases with others was wonderful i know i am starting to see something wonderful take shape”

-
 
“The sneaking is a great mechanic. Like NAME REDACTED said, he was invisible for me but afaik this is already known“
 

Hopefully next week we may be seeing the new client zombie code drop in in at least its initial form, and we should have a much clearer idea of what lies ahead in terms of the stuff discussed last week.
 
Stealth will be a big deal in PvP situations, allowing for players to crouch behind fences to set up ambushes, or sneak into an enemy base if there aren’t vigilant guards keeping lookout. There’s quite an intricate system for determining if a player is spotted, and requirements for them to become ‘unspotted’, however now it’s a case of ironing out all those bugs and making sure no matter how ‘ninja like’ no player can ever do a jig in front of another and remain invisible. It should always make sense.
 
A big change that comes with stealth is us defaulting to only showing the nametag on mouseover. This is for many reasons, not only so that a player in the dark even if you could see them will not instantly be recognizable, and could even escape notice if you just assumed they were a zombie milling about outside. It’s also a key component in our attempts to improve immersion with the smoother character movement, and to make stuff like RP feel a little more natural than everyone having floating nametags cluttering the screen.
 
We have some extended plans for this system, a kind of ‘identification system’ with face recognition range and clothing recognition range, players formally introducing to eachother and such (all configurable in server obviously), that could lead to some fun infiltration tactics. There are some RP friendly items we’re discussing too which may lead to some fun gameplay, though disclaimer its not certain they will be in the first builds!


 
Other things:
  The mapping tools are set to be updated, including all changes made since build 41! This has a few new things that mappers have been craving, new tile sets and the like, as well as support for newer features such as river flow directions, QoL improvements and so on. We’re aware that we’ve been a little lax on documentation on some of the modding processes, its been very much all knuckles to the grindstone of MP of late, but we do have plans for some additional support for modders, particularly those trying to crack 3d rigged / skinned models, its just we’re wary of diverting some key people’s time at the moment!
 
Daniel Grusuk, known as YellowExxhy on Discord, has made this amazing rendition of the PZ Theme! Listen and be amazed!
 

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

It’s been an up and down week in terms of MP development for Build 41. Last week’s moderately successful Wednesday Night Internal Test Session (W.N.I.T.S.) was followed by another on Friday (F.N.I.T.S) – which was… not moderately successful.
 
People had fun, but issues (now fixed) with Turbo’s new more compressed savegames made life difficult. Meanwhile, several of Andrei’s additions to the code have now had to be taken back into the garage for further work and testing – as we were seeing far more desync and zed teleports than we have had in previous test sessions.
 
The good side of obstructions like these, though, is that it gives you more evidence of what’s going wrong – and where to fix it. Andrei has already fixed aspects of what was running haywire, and has debugged the core zed teleportation issue to get it fixed today.
 
The memory leak we mentioned last week has very likely been making our life harder too, and this week Yuri has tracked it down to the server working its way through masses of packets that have been queued up outside it, causing delays and a build-up of negative server energy.
We imagine this is one of the core issues that’s plagued us with high population servers throughout the life and times of PZ MP. It’s basically a ‘cascade’ effect, one moment of high stress and load and it will get clogged, and being clogged just makes it worse and it gets more clogged. A vicious cycle until it all falls apart.
 
As such Yuri has spent much of this week installing ways to track this event and protection / filters around what’s fed into server at crisis moments – which currently amounts to potentially hundreds of different perceived ‘bugs’ in the MP game that are really just ‘the server isn’t able to send out replies to keep the clients synced’.
 
Our hope is that once we open the server to a wider tester audience again we will have far more stable foundations to play on, and this certainly does feel like the way the wind is blowing. So, hopefully more happy-sounding news next week.
LAST NIGHT
Although it was a relatively low playercount we had a deliberately smaller W.N.I.T.S. last night (putting up with the irritating zed teleports) and had a lot of fun.
 
Here’s the changelist of what had gone into the game over the seven days that preceded it.
 
Items of note include a killer optimization from Zac that gives a 2x boost to the animation system itself (so the anims, not the game entire) which is especially helpful around zed hordes.
 
Overall on the smaller server it was clear that general work on melee combat and PvP has come along leaps and bounds. RJ is also putting in some improved hit reactions from Martin to help with the PvP over the next few days.
 
So, fingers crossed, this will be replicated on larger tests once Yuri and Andrei have smoothed over their current respective entanglements.
Here’s a video highlights reel.
 
That’s about all this week though in the background we have also been doing some tidy-up work to improve it when folks plug in/out peripherals and controllers, and also setting things up for a future big improvement to our soundscape – news of which we’ll let you know about in due course.
 
Finally, if you haven’t already, please check out Aiteron, iBrRus and friends’ AMAZING boat mod: the AquaTsar Yacht Club. It truly is a thing of wonder and a massive addition to the community’s modding scene.
 
A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

‘Allo peeps.
 
So! Quick run-down on where we’re at.
 
IWBUMS Public beta version 41.50 was released on Monday, and received a hotfix today.
 
This included new items, better silhouette visualisations for overflow zombies in large hordes, some balance changes, some QoL functions for mouse double-click in your inventory and… Spiffo’s Secret Special Sauce II which can be seen below.
 
We’ve got another minor hotfix cooking for tomorrow, but barring anything urgent or more required hot-fixes this will be the last update to IWBUMS for a little while.
 
Backstage the current internal MP branch is about to be merged into our mainline, meaning that all devs will be working on the version containing our MP work while we get everything in the sort of shape that we feel is ready for Community Megatests.
 
As such after this there won’t be any big patches until MP itself is ready for wider testing and a full IWBUMS beta release.
 
We’ve got various folks working on future content, art, mapping and optimizations beyond MP (and clearly they’ll be jumping over too) but for the next little while the focus will very much be on getting 41 multiplayer out of the door.
 
We currently have a big internal MP session scheduled every Wednesday evening for the foreseeable future, so we can be sure that you’ll always be getting the latest status on a Thursday, and last night’s went well but was more a bug catalogue session than play session.
 
(Hopefully next week we’ll be able to show something a representative of how the game is playing currently, and apologies for not being able to do so today)
 
Over the past week we’ve been syncing death states for zombies, reading, bandaging, drinking, eating, wearing and unequipping clothing. We’ve been fixing safety system issues, doing some work on PvP, fixing climate bugs in the admin panel and… all sorts of other ‘tying things together’ work while Yuri and Andrei continue to improve the overall online player and zombie experience.
 
It’s a very exciting time, but we recognise that it’s a frustrating one to be sat outside of. We will continue to do our utmost to keep you involved and informed every step of the way. Thanks all.
 
This week’s example of the death of the High Street from koekto1000. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

excited, especially for the sawn-off double barrel and more spear goodness
 
R.I.P worm diet

Lag Fightin'

How do all, let’s start with the team coding MP for Build 41 first this week.
MP STRIKE FORCE
This week Yuri and Andrei have been working on improving character movement in high ping scenarios, using a tool to simulate different levels of lag. This tool can simulate ping, lost packets, packets that appear in the wrong order, duplicated packets and throttled packets. Every different sort of errant packet, basically, and mixes of each one besides. 
 
Anyone who has played B40 multiplayer will know quite how laggy, teleport-y and nasty high ping situations could previously get with PZ. As such, tackling this issue has been a very high priority for us – and we’re really glad to have seen some good improvement over the past week of dev.
 
First, just for reference, in this first video you can see what the situation was in last week’s build. 

(In case anyone in our audience has trouble envisioning what a ping represents in real-world geographic terms, 300 ping is about what you’d expect from Australia to Europe.) 
 

Now, here’s a video from this week after many improvements – though please bear in mind that there are still issues to resolve here.
 
 
 
So, known issues: at 3:50 if the ‘climb in window’ packet happens to be lost it can cause the character to get really far behind. There clearly still needs to be some improvements to allow characters to catch up better if they fall behind.
 
Otherwise though (even with 300 ping with an extremely unreliable connection that’s throttled and losing packets left and right) in our testbed situation the experience is much smoother and much more immersive than we could ever have dreamed of with the current public Build 40. We’re sure it will continue to improve up until release too.
TRAILERS AND TOWING
We’ve been playing around with our physics library, off and on, for a while now – primarily multi-wheel support and other differently shaped custom vehicles for future addition: tractors, military stuff, trucks etc. 
 
Now, a little while ago an amazing modder called Aiteron appeared on our forums experimenting with car towing.
This prompted us to realise that (before we got to the military etc) moving some of this background experimentation into expansion of the current car physics system would also be a relatively low risk (yet cool!) thing for our non-MP devs to add into Build 41 while we wait for the completion of the multiplayer rebuild.
 
In IWBUMS beta patch 41.46, you will be able to attach other cars and trailers (initially one trailer model, with a ‘covered’ and ‘uncovered’ variant) to your own vehicle and tow them around. How well you tow them, however, will be dependent on weight and the power of your vehicle. Likewise you’ll be able to tow other vehicles as well.
 
(PLEASE NOTE: vids are WIP)
 
 
 
 
As mentioned previously, this also includes added support for multiple collision shapes on vehicles – primarily to support the trailer hitch extending forwards of the trailer’s body. This should also benefit modding greatly, we hope.
We’re also currently also experimenting with a three segment physics rope, that seems to be working well at the moment – and likewise some other future trailer variants.
 
Again, absolute mad props to Aiteron for showing us just how cool this function could be in-game. We’ve been talking to him this week, and he seems a really cool guy with some great future mod ideas to boot.
 
Likewise, in towables, we have great new potential here for both devs and modders alike – as already shown by this amazing companion mod to Aiteron’s own towing mod that appeared a few days ago. This has been created by IBrRus, and features oil trailers and caravans you can live out of nomadically. (Features like these won’t be the sort of thing we’ll be including ourselves, for a long time anyway, so we’ll be sure to help Aiteron and IBrRus get their mod contents adapted over to our own updated game physics systems before we release 41.46 into the IWBUMS beta.)
 
We didn’t get enough testing done on the current internal build of 41.46 to consider a release this week (and likewise some of this still needs polish/work) but intend to put it out at some point in the next.
MODDING MODELS
As many PZ modders will no doubt be aware, there is currently no clear path available to mod skinned meshes for Build 41 – ie. meshes with animations, limbs, walking etc.
 
Internally, we use expensive software that’s not really accessible to modders so until now we’ve held off releasing our source models – so people haven’t been able to model their own completely unique characters, clothing (outside texture changes), or create extra animations. (It may be some clever people out there have found a way regardless though.)
 
Over the past few weeks, then, we’ve been massaging the pipeline of getting a PZ character into Blender and then out into the game with relative ease and lack of fuss. The challenge then: to have characters exported using blender’s export tools, then renderable and animatable within the game itself.
 
This has been, to put it mildly, a pain in the ass. Blender’s exporters don’t play too friendly with our engine.
 
As such, Zac has been spending time trying to bash our engine into a state where it can alternately load these blender exported files and play them. There’s been good progress, with each iteration looking vaguely more human and less disturbing, though there is still work to be done until the characters match perfectly or even look like they obey the laws of physics, but its clear we’re getting closer.

Close enough to be able to show you these videos of Zac’s progress anyways. We’re hoping that this will be licked at the start of next week.

 


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

Hey all! Probably a substandard Thursdoid this week, our usual wordsmith is in the midst of a school holiday childcare in middle of pandemic moment so isn’t around this week. However will go through a few things nontheless!
 
MULTIPLAYER
This week, Yuri has been fixing some issues with zombie damage not transmitting properly, leading to zombies never dying in MP (kinda a big deal lol), some issues with animation syncing that would lead remote characters to be visibly stuck in that action forever.
Here is a vid of some of these fixes this week:
 
 
As you may be able to tell from the combat around 1 min mark, there is still a little work required getting the zombies not to intersect with the characters with higher pings. Stuff like this will improve in the run up to release and probably after that too. Andrei is on it!
 
We also discussed the possibility of lowering the streaming range for multiplayer a tad, and see how much we can reduce it without introducing popping in zombies. It may be we will consider removing the furthest zoom on MP as this would afford us the potential ability to massively reduce the memory requirements per player. This is potentially something we could do based upon server load too, to give us way of scaling RAM usage a lot more forgivingly especially on high pop servers. Our quest for affordable 64 player servers continue. Though we’ll of course make sure gameplay isn’t negatively affected too much by this.
 
ELSEWHERE
RJ has been working on the outdoor ‘survivor stories’ that are the equivalent of the specific situations you can find within buildings in the current build. We petitioned for ideas on our twitter last week – and there were a lot of great suggestions, and I can see numerous of those suggestions have made it in. Obviously we’re not going to spoil a lot of these as they will be there to discover when playing, but here’s a little taste of what you may find when out and about.
As you can see he’s still working out a few specifics like making sure the terrain and tall grass is unaffected by the placed stories but these will provide extra immersion in the world while exploring and will be expanded on going forward.
 
Martin has been working on weapon attachments to use on RJ’s weapon attachment system, its unclear when these will be introduced but will add greatly to the variety of customization of weapons!
 
Easy has been experimenting with a way of saving all zombie clothes when zombies are streamed out, to fix the issue of zombies changing clothing and appearance whenever you return to an area, as well as to stop themed clothing zombies from losing their clothing when you leave and return to an area.
 
And that’s it for this week, please tune in next week for Thursdoid normalcy to have returned.
 
This week’s chilling scene from Asta_rogue on reddit. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, zomboys and zombettes – we just released a big update to the IWBUMS public beta today.
IWBUMS BETA 41.44
The changelist for 41.44 is here.
 
The tldr for the changelist, amongst all the fixes and balance, is:
 
A new fitness system from RJ – containing burpees, sit-ups, squats and the like. Regular exercise will see boosts to your fitness stats. Some decent optimization that should make built-up areas like West Point a little more free-flowing in terms of fps. Polished movement animations, seated animations while performing timed actions, anims for equipping and unequipping items and various others. A range of combat fixes, primarily dealing with the thorny issue of the game choosing a zed that’s down on the floor or an approaching zed as your target. Polish and tidy-up for: the water and drinking system, zombie target outlines, traps, incorrect loot spawns, the cutaway system and general UI stuff. Recently grown saplings now less powerful. Ability to chug mayonnaise from the jar now mercifully included. MP STRIKE FORCE
Here’s a quick video to showcase some of Yuri and Andrei’s work since last Thursday.
Andrei has been working on the sync of climbing through windows, and is currently looking at climbing sheet-ropes / falling and other things on a more vertical axis.
 
Yuri, meanwhile, is working on combat again. He has fixed up variations on zed speed – and is now looking at general movement, some odd variations in damage that zeds give/receive, and also issues with zeds who have reanimated from player corpses.
NU-FOG
The other coder side project we thought we would bring into the beta while MP work continues, alongside fitness, are Turbo’s fog improvements.
 
They are currently looking like what you can see in the vid below. We need to optimize and be sure that they don’t have an undue toll on performance (though they should be fine) but you’ll be able to switch back to our current fog easy enough if you have a lower spec machine.

  This week’s despondent waiting area from zeepl0ck. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Yes. Soon I'll be able to exercise while listening to Eye of the tiger, while running from hordes and watching tv in the breaks.

Let’s break with recent Thursdoid tradition and talk about MP progress first this week.
Or, rather, just show this video as it probably does more to underline recent advances made in the pursuit of multiplayer release for the IWBUMS public beta than can be put into technical-sounding words.
 
 
Elsewhere work continues on the next update to the IWBUMS public build 41 beta.

This patch will likely be out next week, though might take longer to cook dependent on feedback on the new fitness system from internal testers. Here are a few of the patch contents currently being tested:
 
Fitness. As described last week RJ’s fitness system – a way of training to boost physical XP, at the risk of overstraining and exercise fatigue getting in the way of combat skills, will be a part of public beta 41.44.

This week has primarily been about balance for the system, but something cool that’s been added are variants on the animations for lower level characters who aren’t used to the exercise yet and as such can visible struggle with it. Fit character sit-ups Unfit character sit-ups Fit character push-ups Unfit character push-ups Work on the ‘downed zombie vs. approaching zombie’ dilemma. One of the final larger kinks in the Build 41 combat system has been the game not knowing whether your character should be caving in the head of a zombie on the floor or (more likely) concentrating on an upright zed with its arms outstretched approaching at speed. We think we’ve remedied this now, but will likely need your feedback on how it all feels when we release.
  Optimization. EP, our resident code superstar, has made improvements to a foundational element of PZ’s code (property containers / isoflagtype) which has given a boost to many, many wider systems within the game. In internal testing this has had a noticeable impact on built-up areas such as downtown West Point – where we’ve seen significant FPS rises. This will also be of great use in the far-flung future when Louisville becomes part of the game.
  The ability to emote while walking, as well as general improvements to looped/continuous emotes like surrender. (And the eradication of the emote wheel lock-up bug)
  A tidy-up of our water/drinking systems, and specifically how it’s all presented to the player.
  Fixed various issues with guns – primarily those that weren’t racking after each shot.

  Turbo’s work on the fog system improvements we showed last week continues, and might be going into 41.45 – we will see how things fall.
This week’s indoor camping death scene from NightmareFrost. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

You've got a long tongue