-MaVerick-

Smells like World War Z...i really didn't like that movie compared to other Z heavy ones. While I can see some gameplay features, I prefer my Zombies the classic way. Bunched up, but not piled up like some meatstairway..

Heya everyone, so today we’re pushing the 41.69 patch out into the Unstable beta. This is a the first release of a wide-ranging version that touches many parts of the codebase – including some fairly foundational stuff to improve the smooth running of MP, some handy new hooks for modders and many and various different fixes and improvements.

 
The full and unexpurgated changelist is pretty vast, but a quick topline run-through of its contents will now follow:
 
In MP: improvements to car physics, admin improvements, anti-cheat fixes, better handling of dead bodies, PvP and safehouse fixes, fixed grass growing through safehouse floors and much much more. VHS fix – an end to the peril of one-time-use video tapes on servers. A raft of Steamdeck compatibility improvements. New items, new forage finds, updated 3D models, new hair types and more. Scarecrows and Lab Skeleton ‘mannequins’ that can be kitted out in player clothes.  


 
Quality of life features: renamed Skill books, better item placing, movable minimap and many and various other things. 3D items now shown as textures rather than models. As such they now slide around less when the player moves, and have far less of a performance impact when all piled up. New/improved tag system for modders, and other general mod-side improvements. Added ambiance noise for different areas on the map tied to particular buildings and items, such as a little bit of mall muzak.  
Relevant ‘power down’ noises for the above-mentioned sounds to flag the power/water cutting out.
    New sounds for arcade machines, gas pumping, vehicle headlights and car window opening (both via handle and electric windows). Also BBQ noises, campfire sounds, fireplaces and more zed trip/thump stuff. Improved treatment of inside/outside sounds depending on whether doors and windows are open or closed. Loads of UI and controller improvements that are universally handy, but have primarily been put in for (you lucky!) Steamdeck users. 41.68 works okay with the new handheld device, but 41.69 should provide some vast improvements. Lots of general balance, including a spotlight on foods and recipes. A shitload of general fixes.
We would be hugely grateful if players could move over to 41.69 and report any oddness or hiccups, and likewise to inform the creators of any mods that have been broken.
 
We have done our best to bypass disruption, but in such a wide-ranging patch there will always be mod toes that the code has unavoidably trodden upon.
 
(Creators of radio/TV-related mods should especially pay attention to the MP VHS fix, as it may cause some issues.)
OTHER STUFF
Elsewhere work continues on Build 42 and 43 content continues, with RJ still focusing on farm animals, and also the introduction of some basic AI versions of wild beasts also. Please consider these WIP!

  Also coming to you today with a WIP tag (as we are working on far better player directional ‘strain and lean’ animations rather than a repeated ‘pull animation’) is a video from Aiteron showing his current work on the fishing update.
 
A lot of work these past few weeks has also been into making it work online, and our testers have been having some impromptu fishing competitions already.
 
Here, also, you can see:
 
Water splashes (visuals WIP) to show placement of groups of fish, ultimately we plan to move to a more constant surface disturbance to show the positions of fish at any given time, as well as use the current splashes instead when the fish is struggling on the line. Lines and hooks that can be changed on the fishing rod that have an impact on your fishing. A fishing net you can catch items in, and a new ‘generic trash’ item that can also become snared up in your tackle and provide you with a random item (not always a shoe!)
    In the land of MP meanwhile the Strike Force are currently working on vehicle smoothness, and rare strange physics during and after vehicle collisions. They also have some imminent plans for better hit-fall position prediction, which should make corpse placement much closer to how it looks in SP.
 
We are also partway through a longer term process of making the inventory system completely server side (or rather authenticated server side) to avoid any kind of item spawning cheats. This is something we really need to do to close up the potential for item hacks on MP servers.
 
It will not likely appear for a while, most like coming in a major build rather than an iterative patch as it is a major piece of work and will also come with the potential for mod breakage for mods that spawn items directly on the client.
 
(We’ll make sure to keep it unstable a good period to give mod authors a chance to fix when it rolls around, and will provide some method for modders to legitimately spawn items recognized by the server when needed.)
 
This week’s stand-off from Viиicius. 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.

Hey all, here’s a general update from TIS Towers on various things. We do hope this finds y’all well.
 
First off a quick heads-up on the forthcoming 41.66 patch. It’s now content locked, and is now receiving required fixes reported by our internal testers. We will look to put it out into a new unstable beta branch as soon as we can.
 
The full current changelist can be found here for those interested.
 
Next up, a few details on our Build 42 work.
 
As previously mentioned the core MP team will be sticking with Build 41 patches to improve life out on the servers for the immediate future, but work on the next big build has nevertheless now begun/continued in earnest.
 
Already announced for Build 42 was a major expansion of late game crafting and a major focus on game balance – details on which can be found here.
 
There are a few other irons in the fire for this build too though. As ever, no ETAs on any of this.
 
We are very much still in the early versions of this build, and indeed much of the late game crafting update is currently in the ‘pen and paper’ planning stage. More on this in future blogs.
 
ENGINE TECH IMPROVEMENTS
We have recently taken some time to get rid of a bunch of our longest standing issues with the game’s engine.
 
Whilst this is definitely not a b41-style level of disruption, we’re digging deep inside our renderer and looking for ways to get rid of the quite severe problems that have been baked into our engine for a long time in terms of both capabilities and performance.
 
Performance
Of course, the biggest issue our engine struggles with daily is the extreme CPU and GPU heavy requirements of having a map composed of so many unique tiles, shaders and other stuff without the ability to use a z-buffer to let us render in an optimized way like most 3D games.
 
Ironically the fact that its ‘a simpler looking 2D game’ is what works against using a lot of the power of the GPU to render the map fast. This results in large FPS drops, particularly when zooming out due to the mind meltingly inefficient draw method that the ISO perspective forces on us.
 
We’ve had a few rather bold ideas on how to solve this, using the caching of chunks that have already been rendered, which we hope will vastly increase the FPS in B42.
 
It’s early days, but looks promising. This tech requires heavier use of the GPU memory, however, so it may be that this optimization will only be able to benefit cards with a few gigs of free VRAM. We’ll have to see which generations of GPUs will be best able to leverage it when its dev time is a little further down the line.
 
Speaking of not being able to use a z-buffer to render things in an optimized way: in actual fact, we’ve also been working towards being able to use a z-buffer to render things in an optimized way.
 
This essentially frees us from having to slot the draws of zombies, vehicles or players in between the appropriate tile draws in ‘back to front’ order.
 
We’ll be able to simply draw all the characters and vehicles on-screen at the end, their pixels then discarded if they are deeper into the scene than an existing building object’s pixel.
 
This should massively optimize the rendering speed of zombies, and allow us to sort them by materials. It will free us to use cached chunks indefinitely, until the lighting or cutaways demand a change, rather than rendering all the tiles individually.
 
We have had some surprising FPS results in 4k on max zoom, however we also expect this will likely fall a lot in practice – once the work is complete and everything is drawing. Please excuse any visual glitches at the moment!
 
 
Due to all this, in B42 it currently feels safe to assume that zooming out will have significantly lower performance penalty – and that higher resolutions will become more feasible for at least mid-range GPUs, and possibly lower end GPUs too.
 
Variable Chunk Heights
In the game, since our very earliest builds, we’ve been limited to 8 storey buildings. This was primarily because the height was global, and increasing this would incur a penalty to performance across the entire map even if that extra space was not used.
 
The other issue was simply performance when drawing those extra floors. If we’re struggling to render the amount of tiles we already have, adding extra tall buildings would be a big mistake.
 
Thirdly, there’s something to be said about less being more in terms of gameplay. However, this hard limit of 8 has long been a thorn in our mappers’ sides, as well as for our mod community.
 
Seeing as it looks like we’ll be able to solve the performance issues discussed above, we’ve now added a variable chunk height system which will allow each chunk of the map to define its own max height.

This means that in Build 42 it’s looking like a particular area could have floors up to 32 in height, should the mapper desire it.
 
Four way stairs
Currently, due to certain tech limitations, we only have stairs that rise in north or west directions.
 
This is annoying, and we’d like to get rid of this limitation for numerous reasons. We’ve done some mock-ups of how stairs would look in the other two directions, and think we’ve found a way to make it work.
 
They look a little odd, however functionally being able to have stairs in any of the four directions would give mappers and ourselves much more freedom in building design.
 
Map Coordinates
Another limitation that has been very longstanding is the fact that negative map coords (expanding out the map in the negative X and Y directions) is not possible in PZ – due primarily to some TIS naivety early on in development.
 
For the maths-minded out there: casting a player’s x, y, z location to an int to work out what tile they are standing on will return the wrong value if any of those coordinates are a negative value.
 
There were thousands of places where this occurred in the codebase, and they all needed changing from a static cast to a math.floor, so that they will work in negative dimensions.
 
Making negative map coordinates possible means that we, or modders, will feasibly be able to build northwards and westwards, and opens up a huge extra area of potential map area to expand to.
 
It likewise also puts other cool stuff (back) on the game dev table that we’ll discuss at a later date.
Light Propagation
We have also been updating our lighting system.
 
In the current B41 we have an ambient light level that’s inherent to every tile within the map – though slightly reduced indoors. Light sources are only capable of lighting the room that they are in.
 
Locking yourself in a cupboard with the door shut currently results in the same light level as you’d get in the living room with open curtains.
For B42 we are rejigging how lighting is calculated, to make a much more interesting and realistic light propagation system.
 
Now being in a room with no windows, even in broad daylight, will leave you in the darkness. The evening sunset glow will encroach through the window and bathe your room in a red tint, creeping back toward the window and dimming as the sun goes down.
 
Interiors of buildings will lighten and darken with the daylight based on how much exposure to the bounced light they will feasibly receive. Opening a door to a lit room will bathe the outside corridor in light, and so on.
 
This is all still development in progress, and it maybe requires tweaking of light intensities, colours and fall-off ranges.
Please also excuse any glitches you see, this is all still very much in the oven!
 
 
OTHER BIZNESS
The map team continue their awesomeness, with lots of map polish currently going into the current Knox Event map – including electricity pylons and cool new locations like this. The Noiseworks gang continue with their improvements of the PZ soundscape, with their current mission being to provide background sounds that provide different ambiance for times when the electricity and water are on, for when they are off, and an audible change to signal the exact moment when the turn-off happens in-game. Currently awaiting integration are also 14 new music CDs, 14 movie VHS tapes, 20 new TV show tapes and 44 home recorded tapes too. You will be delighted to hear that these include several new sequels in the much-lauded Dog Goblin horror franchise. Our thanks to Brat Pen for these. The curator of the online PZ map project, Blindcoder, wants to let you know that he’s on the case with updates – and apologises for delays caused by Covid and irl fun/games. His blog here. Our thanks to him for all his amazing work also.  
 
This week’s flamingo fun from Cute Cappuccino. A changelist of all our pre-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!

Hi,
 
First of all. I love you're game.
Me and my friend are playing on vanilla on our own dedicated server. Server settings on zombie spawn are same as apocolypse mode,
we base at the farmhouse on coordinates: x8608 y8819 
there is a dirt driveway from the road to the farm. It all starten with a zombie with a green shirt that was on our driveway. im gonna call him greenzombie.
we tought nothing of it and killed greenzombie. Later we drove trough our driveway with a car and saw that greenzombie again. but now he had twins. lots of twins. We tought it was kind of funny that there where like 12 greenzombies that where pestring our driveway. but our fun turned bad. Greenzombies kept apprearing.  but is was nothing we couldnt handle
 
a couple in game days later we where driving from our base to rosewood we took a right out of our driveway and went south.
when we where driving on the road we saw the greenzombie horde. and when i say horde im talking like the zombie horde alpha showed rick in the walking dead times 2.
it was insane. our game totaly lagged out because of the zombies. there where litterly thousands. all greenzombie.
i was unable to take a screenshot of the full horde. but we made some screenshot of a couple of zombies we kited. you can see them in the screenshot. 
i will try and provide a screenshot of the full horde so you can see how insane this greenzombie horde really is. even if it costs me my life (in game, not IRL). 
 
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198100925648/screenshots/
 
Version: 41.65
Muliplayer
Dedicated server
no mods
reproduction steps:
??

(copied from the blog post so it is in here)
 
Yes, you read that right! As many will know we’ve been aiming for a December release for the multiplayer. As Xmas approaches, we have been fighting each day to get a build we feel the community will enjoy and feels stable enough for players to enjoy the multiplayer.
This build contains:
16 player multiplayer, dedicated server and co-op MASSIVE map expansion, including Louisville to the north of Westpoint and Valley Station. Like silly huge. Check it out! In-game mapping system. Search mode and foraging system. However, we never quite reached the polish we’d have liked to have put it out on IWBUMS proper. There are many smaller to medium priority issues we are aware of but don’t feel justify holding the multiplayer back, but still mean we’re not comfortable officially calling this a full IWBUMS release.
It’s become clearer that having wider testing on the build would be invaluable, and in addition everyone including ourselves wants that satisfaction of something being out before the Xmas holidays after such a huge unending slog.
As such this is the decision we’ve made as a compromise to try and make everyone, including ourselves, happy, while still ring-fencing this build away from the more stable IWBUMs build.
This will also give mod authors a chance to adjust to the new build, too.
As such, we’ve released a public test build on a new opt in branch. Go to steam properties for the game, select the betas tab, and select b41multiplayer.
Along with that the dedicated server update is on the dedicated server branch b41multiplayer. Since IWBUMs beta has long been considered the defacto version due to the huge improvements, we felt the need to distinguish this further into its own steam build, to make clear it’s not to be considered to be a full first release.
Please be aware that while we’ve made great efforts to get this build as stable as possible, and are confident the majority of players will be able to have fun playing, there’s only so much we can do with an internal test team, many of which are volunteers.
There will undoubtedly be issues, possibly ones that could lead to player’s unfair deaths or loss of characters or their belongings.
If you are not comfortable with this, feel you’d get angry about this, and would write us stern letters about this beyond a friendly bug report, we strongly recommend you wait until January when most of these issues should have been resolved and the official IWBUMS beta will begin.
However, we know everyone has been patient in awaiting the release of MP after the six month delay, and we’re satisfied that the quality of the build is sufficient that those who have been waiting will be capable of having fun gameplay with each other, and at the same time we’ll be able to glean important bug reports about what is still requiring fixing that are very difficult to obtain from within a small internal test team. As long as understanding this is an opt in public test.
IMPORTANT
Public servers are NOT recommended. Whitelisted and co-op servers are strongly recommended for the best experience. There will likely be exploits and hack vulnerabilities that will probably make public servers a nightmarishly annoying place to be. We’ll look to address these in future builds.
The build will be hard locked to a maximum of 16 players. While short of the 32 we were aiming for, we feel from our internal tests that the server will be able to deal with this without too much strain while we improve stability for higher player counts. Our ambitions are much higher than 32, too.
It’s possible too that players may need to reduce zombie counts on MP servers, their numbers at specific sandbox settings often exceeding that on single player settings for reasons we’re not yet clear on. As a rule of thumb you should go a step below your usual prefered settings.
If you’ve run B40 co-op games on your machine, it may require deleting your old server saves to be able to host in B41. Delete everything in %UserProfile%\zomboid\saves\multiplayer\.
Also if people have difficulty connecting to servers, please try validating your local files in steam properties for the game. Because steam sometimes sucks and leaves old versions of files and this will cause mismatches with the server.
We request that anyone who shares news of this release to anyone please forward them to this blog post, so that we can properly contextualise the release and any potential issues that may crop up. Anyone streaming or making videos of the build, please state clearly that this is a public opt-in test rather than a full IWBUMS beta release.
We hope you all have fun! Have some Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!
 
https://projectzomboid.com/blog/news/2021/12/b41-mp-test-41-60-branch-released/
 
 

Happy Thursday all. Things are ticking on okay over here, hope things are well with you.
 
MP STRIKE FORCE
For those out of the loop, the last few weeks of dev-time on the Build 41 internal test build has been centred around moving control over nearby zed placement from the server over to the client.
 
As you’ve seen in previous dev blogs the previous system was allowing 32 players to run around and have fun smoothly, but instances of zombie teleportation were still present – along with their game-ending and game-breaking bites. As such the transplant was made, and for the past two weeks the team have been stitching the new organ in.
 
Last week’s test started out bright, but soon turned into a bit of a mess-on when players congregated in the same area. This week, after a week of pruning, a small scale Wednesday Night Test felt much better.
 
Over the last week Andrei has been fixing up some problems involving players seeing different inventories on zombies, as well as some odd naked zombie behaviour when they are being run over by cars, and some fixes to combat desyncs involving more than one player.
Yuri meanwhile has been working solely on the zombie desync issues, improving the code that teleports desynced zombies into their correct positions to try and do this when the zombie is not visible to a player.
 
Last night enough bug fog had been cleared to reveal other smaller-scale issues, but we feel like we’re steadily closing the net around them, and the testers seemed a lot more positive in the playability.
 
Early indications are that the client driven zombies have the potential to work well and the system seems to be for the most part operational, however all the situations where this can go wrong need to be isolated and fixed up before any true benefits can shine. As before, we’ll be scaling up player numbers as each thrice/twice-weekly test goes by – each time flushing more and more gremlins out of the system.
At the moment the transferal of zombies between clients when multiple players are present is sometimes rather bumpy (resulting in pathfinding complications, ‘Force Push’ zed deaths and disappear/reappearances) but its getting better as every day of work goes into the new system.

The server is now no longer taxed at all, which is hugely cool, and means that when we nail this and release 32 player servers, they should require a lot less in terms of cpu and memory to run, and our upper limit on player counts after that are undoubtedly going to benefit from it.
Here’s a quick vid of the testing from last night.

OTHER STUFF
Nothing huge of note to show you visually (or audibly) this week, everything is very ongoing, but perhaps just a quick rundown of ”who else is on what” for a few PZ workers when it comes to builds in/around the vicinity of the mptest build will be handy – so you know what else is in the works in terms of nearer-future zed survival.
 
The Noiseworks continue there complete overhaul of the PZ soundscape. Our amaze-o composer Zach Beever has supplied them with our whole soundtrack, including files for each separate instrument, and right now they are nose-deep in elegant new ways to mix it all together and match to the action. They will also be delivering the first batch of new vehicle sounds tomorrow, which we can’t wait to hear as (let’s face it) our current ones are prettty shit.
  Turbo’s chatbox improvement project continues – giving you more customisation options, improving legibility and improving (fixing) its implementation with in-game devices like radios.
  Fox and Aitor, our graduate coders, are working on better in-game item categorization and fishing QOL improvements respectively. We’re big fans of the Crashed Car Mod here at TIS towers (as indeed should you be, do check it out) and it’s made us realise that we have our burnt out wrecks on the road, and we have our low quality/dented cars, but we have nothing in-between. Having write-off car wrecks extremely common over the entire map doesn’t fit our current or planned lore, but having a few fender-benders and t-boned cars certainly will.

As such Martin is taking a break from a new range of ‘taking cover’ animations that he’s been working on for a future build, and has started doing a range of front, right side, left side and rear ‘smashed up’ variants of each PZ vehicle. These will then be later used as more atmospheric ‘vehicle stories’ in which you might come across (for example) a front-damaged sports car that’s piled into a side-damaged police car in a barricade – alongside all the relevant zombies.
 
Finally, wrap your ears around this tribute to the PZ theme from Exxhy. Amazing work mate, really cool stuff.
 


This week’s emergency service call out from IU.A.TI Cave Troll. 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!

Steam can be a very special place with many people thinking in special ways. Looking at the forum, your moderator staff are handling stuff very good and sometimes entertaining. So who the fork cares about negative feedback from steam? Don't move back because of such people.
 
Problem is, people don't want to do research. They want it the easy way. That's why you still got newcommers asking about why this game seems dead in steam forums every now and then. I can only advise you to use what you've been given via steam. Extend your reach, keep it up to date, get new players that way.

‘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!

See also: https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/2998799976100600200/
 
Long story short, it's a lotta work.

Happy new year dearest community and dev team <3 

Smells like World War Z...i really didn't like that movie compared to other Z heavy ones. While I can see some gameplay features, I prefer my Zombies the classic way. Bunched up, but not piled up like some meatstairway..

Everything comes at a cost. GoG got it's advantages, but for as long as i can think of, it has always took it's time when it comes to patches. I dunno if thats because GoGs verification process is taking so long or maybe it's the patch distribution with their system, who knows.
 
While it's not great, I wouldn't go full double post about it. If that is your biggest gripe, come to steam. 

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

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

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

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

Thanks guys, your hard work is very appreciated!

41.46

NEW

PERSISTENT ZED OUTFITS
- Zombie appearance is now mostly preserved when reloading.
- Added Zombie.Outfit.Random debug option to disable persistent outfits and choose random ones when zombies are loaded.
- Added AttachedWeaponDefinitions class to avoid parsing the Lua table every time a zombie spawns.
- Rewrote ZombiesZoneDefinition to avoid parsing the Lua table each time a zombie spawns.
- Fixed the police barricade vehicle stories not checking for a wide-enough zone properly, preventing them from spawning.
- DebugChunkState displays all the zones at a location.
- Moved client/Definitions to shared/Definitions. server/recipecode.lua uses ClothingRecipesDefinitions.

ADDED TRAILERS
1) If in debug use addVehicle("Base.Trailer") to spawn a trailer.
2) Park a vehicle with it's rear end near the front of the trailer.
3) Looking at either the vehicle or the trailer, use the vehicle radial menu and choose "Attach Trailer" (the plus-sign icon).
Vehicles should have an attachment named "trailer" that is aligned with the same attachment on the trailer itself.
Vehicles without this attachment will connect somewhere on the rear of the vehicle.
Editing attachments on vehicles is a new thing in the vehicle editor.

- Added support for multiple collision shapes on vehicles. This is to support the trailer hitch extending forwards of the trailer's body. Shapes must be added in the vehicle's script.  They can be edited in the vehicle editor under the new "Physics" section.
 A maximum of 10 shapes is supported, minus one for physicsChassisShape.
- Updated the vehicle blood and damage textures. Damage and rust textures are applied to the trailer. The blood texture doesn't currently appear, however.
- Simulate a rope when towing cars: breaking too much at full speed and your towing car will bump into you.
- Added uncovered trailer Base.Trailer.  Base.TrailerCover is the covered version.
 The uncovered trailer FBX is missing the second UV channel.
- Trailer brake lights will come on when the vehicle towing it's brake lights are on.
- Added 4-wheeled advertisement trailer.
- Added 'world' attachments to some weapon models so they are positioned better when on the ground.
- Added new advertising trailers. The "Set Script" vehicle debug-menu command picks a random skin.
- Added trailer car crash story.

NEW ZED STORIES
- Sometimes in forests, at the beach or next to lakes, you'll find people who were zombified doing different activities.
- Beach party, fisherman trips, forest campement...
- BBQ party
- Sexy time (!)
- Hunter camp
- Trapper camp
- More!

GENERAL
- Added beer can & beer bottle item.
- Recipe tooltips now display available items in white text above unavailable items in grey text.
- Stop emote animations when the "Cancel Action" key or the controller B button is pressed.
- Added more gun attachments models, fixed missing ones.
- Added ammo straps as clothing item. Can be worn, exist with shells or bullets, can increase reload speed (shells for shotgun/bullets for the rest).
- Added possible bullet vest on police outfit.
- Added several new hair cuts
- Added new beard styles.
Added a HairOutfitDefinitions.lua definition file:
- Allow to spawn some haircut only on specific outfit.
- Force some haircut on some outfit (ZombiesZoneDefinition.lua take precedence over it)
- Added some outfits for Zed Stories.
- Implemented new hats/eye patch (icons, functionality etc).
- Added the JOIN_IDENTICAL_VERTICES option when loading models.  This can greatly reduce the number of vertices in a model.
- Updated translations.

BALANCE

- Damage to car parts from melee weapons now made more accurate to type of weapon
- Changed damage from hitting zombies with car: speed exponentially increases damage. Also made attempts to stop sprinters hammering on the rear of car and destroying it too fast.
- Whiskey bottle with water weight now more in keeping with whiskey bottle weight
- Decreased the gain in drunkeness from drinking beer bottles/cans vs. spirits
- Made alcohol->drunkeness slightly more potent when character has an empty stomach
- Disassembling Lamps now gives a Lightbulb
- Log Stacks recipes to always use 2 Ropes, instead of 1 Rope per Log
- Beverage can now be prepared with only sugar
- Sugar and coffee now drainable items (due to be reverted in next patch due to internal rethink)
- Hood/bonnet now repairable with metal sheets + screws or torch
- Uncooked pasta or rice in a pot/pan of water will now eventually rot 
- Balanced trunk and glove box capacity on vehicles and trailers
- Increased watch spawn rate on zombies.

ANIMS

- Added Zombie_WindowLungeHitReact.X.
- adjusted bob_sitground anim to finish on correct pose
- tweaked sitting anims to blend a little better

MODDING / DEV

- Added support for custom decals, clothing and outfits in mods.
    Each mod may have it's own copy of these files:
        media/fileGuidTable.xml
        media/clothing/clothing.xml
        media/clothing/clothingDecals.xml
    The above mod files no longer override the game's files with the same name.
    Mod decal groups and outfits with the same name as one the game defines will override the game's.
- Added support for custom beard styles and hair styles in mods.
- Added a new script item property named AcceptItemFunction which specifies the name of a Lua function to test whether an item is allowed in a container. 
    This is in addition to the existing OnlyAcceptCategory property which tests InventoryItem:getCategory().
     For example, to allow only medical items in a First Aid Kit, add a line to clothing_bags.txt:
     item FirstAidKit
         {
            ...
            AcceptItemFunction = AcceptItemFunction.FirstAidKit,
         }
     And add this function in a Lua file:
         function AcceptItemFunction.FirstAidKit(container, item)
           return item:getStringItemType() == "Medical"
         end
- Changed Color.HSBtoRGB() to return a Color instead of Integer[3]. If you want the integer values, use Color.getRedByte(), Color.getGreenByte() and Color.getBlueByte().
- Challenges may define a function named getSpawnRegion() to allow multiple spawn points and spawn regions. Previously only a single fixed spawn point was supported.
 See the commented-out Kingsmouth.getSpawnRegion() function for an example.
- A challenge's AddPlayer() function is now called when creating new players in existing games.
    This is used by the CDDA challenge to start new players naked and injured, for example.
- The "OnEat" item-script Lua function is now called with a third parameter named 'percent' to indicate what percentage of the remaining amount of the item was consumed. Also, the function is called before the food is consumed.
    See OnEat_Cigarettes() for an example of how it is used.
- Fixed unrecoverable TextureCombiner errors when a texture couldn't be loaded.
    Missing textures are displayed as a red and white checkerboard texture.
- Display the filename of an asset that fails to load in the exception message.
- Fixed multithreading issue with OutfitRNG. ImageData constructors throw exceptions instead of catching them now. 
- Fixed not properly reloading modified textures that previously failed to load.
    This doesn't handle texture files that were previously missing, only ones that failed to load.
- Added a two-second delay before DebugFileWatcher handles changes to modified files.
    This is to address two things:
        1) The file may still be being written by another application that is saving it.
        2) Sometimes there are multiple events for the same file, such as a "create" event followed by one or more "modified" events.
- ISSliderPanel now checks for shift-clicking instead of whatever key "Run" is bound to.
- Changed puddles rendering to use vertex buffer objects, reducing the number of calls needed to render them.

CUTAWAY FIXES

- Fixed stretched window cutaways 
- Fixed vents not cutting away / turning transparent like other objects
- Fixed Short walls in Prison not cutting away in a nice way
- Fixed Double door cutaways - were previously offset on a building
- Fixed stairs not cutting away properly

FIXES

- Fixed not being able to choose a texture in the character-creation ui for clothing items that don't have models. For example, Denim Shirt and Leather Gloves.
- Fixed "Override:true" not working in mod recipes, resulting in duplicate recipes.
- Fixed the skybox texture not updating after fast-forwarding (F5 or F6 or sleeping).
- Fixed SkyBox.update() allocating Color and Vector3f each time.
- Fixed the Skybox.Show debug texture size changing when zooming.
- Fixed less than one unit of Twine being returned when destroying a Stick Trap.
- Fixed server-side STrapGlobalObject calling client-side CTrapSystem:sendCommand().
- Fixed items that weigh less than 0.005 being displayed as 0.0 weight. Now items weighing less than 0.01 are displayed as 0.01. For example, Screws.
- Fixed double metalwork doors giving planks and nails when destroyed.
- Fixed loading the SQL library from the user's Temp directory on 64-bit Windows.
- Fixed missing animation for unloading bullets from rifles without magazines.
- Fixed being unable to remove the key from the ignition when clicking on the key icon in the dashboard when the "Leave Key In Ignition" option is on.
- Fixed controller not being able to open Fitness UI (The controller Y button opens it from the health UI)
- Fixed sunstar motel arch cutaway.
- Fixed the police barricade vehicle stories not checking for a wide-enough zone properly, preventing them from spawning.
- Fixed closing the health panel closing after opening fitness panel.
- Fixed a multi-monitor issue on Linux.  Sometimes resolutions for the non-primary monitor were detected.
- Fixed errors cleaning bandages using a sink/etc.
- Fixed not walking to the water-containing object when cleaning bandages from a sink/etc.
- Fixed student zeds could spawn with 2 bags.
- Fixed muzzle flashes emitting no light during the day, even in dark rooms.
- Fixed the shovel not appearing in the player's hands when filling a grave, if the shovel wasn't already equipped.
- Fixed animation when burning a corpse with gas.
- Fixed exception in InventoryItem.synchWithVisual() when an item's IconsForTexture list is smaller than the number of
 clothing textures for that item.
- Fixed formatting bug in clothing_pants.txt related to Shorts_ShortDenim.
- Fixed the "Remove Broken Glass" context-menu option not being shown as disabled when the player is holding an item in the left hand.
- Fixed the health panel being shown when displaying the fitness ui, when using a controller.
- Fixed errors pressing keys during the "This is how you died" loading stage.
- Fixed FileNotFoundException when loading mods without clothing.xml.
- Fixed an exception turning an equipped radio on or off when a generator is nearby.
- Fixed surprise zombies in spawn locations, even though this was frequently hilarious. Zombies are now removed from the inside and around the building the player spawns in, when creating a new player in an existing game.
 This does not include reanimated player zombies. Also, house alarms are disabled.
- Fixed player not spawning in the correct location when creating a new player in an existing challenge
- Fixed getting max benefit (or harm) from smoking part of a cigarette.
- Fixed not being able to interrupt closing windows or smashing windows.
- Fixed the player turning when following a very short path.  Now the player will strafe to the new position without turning. For example, when smashing a vehicle window, the player would turn around, walk to the required position, then turn to
 face the vehicle again before smashing the window.
- Fixed vehicles dropping to the ground when loading or spawning them.
- Fixed PhysicsDebugRenderer not being thread-safe.
- Fixed zeds taking too long to stomp to death in certain conditions
- Fixed being able to build a floor on farming plots
- Fixed return items when dismantling of double doors
- Fixed doorframe going invisible when painted light blue
- Fixed male tourist outfit spawning wearing dresses/skirts.
- Fixed extreme length of required stomping on zombies in some situations.
- Fixed various map bugs
- Fixed untranslated names of burnt vehicles being displayed in the radial menu.
- Fixed some bags not playing "zip" sfx when interacted with
- Fixed painted boxes not showing color correctly
- Fixed having hood up and equipping hat replacing whole hoodie with hat, instead of removing hood and putting hat on
- Fixed not being able to "Put Out" BBQ
- Fixed non-centered multiple lines of text horizontally in the radial menu.
- Fixed split-screen rendering issue with puddles.
- Fixed a rendering issue with water that resulted in visible lines along chunk boundaries.(Water flow and speed weren't updated when adjacent chunks were loaded.)
- Fixed a bug where fixed capacity defined in vehicles wasn't used.
- Fixed Default Sprint key on MacOS being LMETA instead of LMENU.
- Fixed hedges not slowing players and zombies. (Players in ghost mode or noclip are not slowed by hedges or trees.)
- Fixed clothing condition and wetness resetting when switching from hood-up to hood-down, etc.
- Fixed the controller A button entering vans instead of opening the rear door to access the trunk.
- Fixed the wrong strafe angle being used when walking short paths.
- Fixed max capacity for vehicles not being saved.

Yes please! Those shows in the first few days are easy to miss and video tapes would be perfect to gather those skill points later or with a 2nd or 3rd character on the same save file. Kinda like books, just with a level of risk due to loudness.

Hello community,
 
while I quite enjoy some moody light effects when the weather isn't good, but this...
 

 
...this is a bit over the top. Correct me if some days are really THAT dark in america, but this is bug territory dark for me. Even my lights can't penetrate this sheer darkness.
 
Playing vanilla sandbox, only have tinkered with zombie related stuff afaik.

Hello community,
 
while I quite enjoy some moody light effects when the weather isn't good, but this...
 

 
...this is a bit over the top. Correct me if some days are really THAT dark in america, but this is bug territory dark for me. Even my lights can't penetrate this sheer darkness.
 
Playing vanilla sandbox, only have tinkered with zombie related stuff afaik.

I noticed this too when I gained access to a carport roof. The sloped roofs don't have any collision detection, but there is a flat floor underneat as some sort of workaround so you don't just fall through it. Looks a bit silly since you are kinda clipping through the roof, but it's something I can live with. 
Maybe that would be a way to counter your problem.