Toshis

There could be server setting - skill book read speed multiplier. Especially useful for larger servers, where it is unlikely that every player will hit fast forward at the same time.

There could be server setting - skill book read speed multiplier. Especially useful for larger servers, where it is unlikely that every player will hit fast forward at the same time.

Happy December Thursdoid, and a big hello to all the new survivors who’ve jumped on board in recent weeks. This week we’ll be doing a quick check-in with the various different departments who are at work on Build 42 and providing a little freeze-frame of exactly what’s being worked on.
First though, we would be remiss if we didn’t inform all fans of raccoons, soft toys and ‘both of these things’ that: the Makeship campaign for the Spiffo plush has been EXTENDED for a full extra week due to everyone getting all excited about it.
 
If you are interested in sliding under a closing door then reaching back for your fluffy Spiffo, like Indiana Jones, then final orders can be made here:
Okay, so let’s go round the Zomboid houses. Starting with… the sound team?
SOUND DEPARTMENT
Formosa (formerly Noiseworks) have a lot of different things on the brew – work on new music and music systems, all the new actions and items for B42 (switchblade, firecracker etc) and clearly all the animal stuff which they’ll be starting on in due course.
 
Something else they are starting work on, however, are ‘acted’ character noises – pants and puffs recorded by real life actors to add a little more depth and feeling to the game, not to mention a greater feeling of ‘real’ when you are standing next to a character who has exerted themselves or is being injured in MP.
 
This will likely be an option you can turn off if you find it intrusive, but the Sound team believe they will provide an extra layer of immersion for Knox Event survivors. The sorts of things they’ll be recording will be: effort noises for window and fence climbs, sleeping noises, pain noises when bitten or scratched, vomiting, sneezing coughing etc.
 
ANIMS DEPARTMENT
As those who read this blog might recall, we’ve been screaming out for a big brain to come in and lend their clever thoughts to some of the movement bugs and issues in our anims system for a while. Previous attempts to find a Chosen One didn’t work out, and as such since the 41 release we’ve had a significant blocker in terms of improving our animation system and our animation tools.

There has been significant rejoicing, then, that our friends at Ever Curious Entertainment have lent us their own big brain Steve North – who has been deep in AnimZed of late, and should be providing a range of changes and improvements that will help out our animator Martin no end.
In terms of a player-facing end result, this means that in B42 hopefully there’ll be better blends between anims to tighten everything up and make things look smoother. It could also, potentially, improve the responsiveness of controls and give gameplay a slightly tighter feeling. We’ll see how it goes when the fixes go in.
 
FIRE DEPARTMENT
Work on integration of the previously in-dev fire system continues, this week with the introduction of new mechanics like burnable oily surfaces and development of fire spread in save games and MP code.
 
We are also experimenting with visuals in that a more pixelated fire looks better in-game, and also will be having a VFX artist joining us for a time in January to further improve its appearance in our isometric illustrate-y looking world. It’s already looking a smidge better though.
 
 
MAPPING DEPARTMENT
Lots of fun new locations appearing from Xeonyx and Ayrton in the map channel, including this little doozy…
ANIMALS AND CRAFTING DEPARTMENT
Over to RJ, resident of a country doomed to failure in a World Cup football match this coming Saturday.
 
“Right now I’m prepping my stuff so it can be put in front of our testers. I’m trying to improve the ‘meta’ part of the system that governs them when you’re not in their direct presence – primarily how the feeding trough and water troughs are managed while you’re away. That’s my main focus at the moment – but also need to add some polish to the genetics when animals breed, and I’ll be moving onto animal sickness soon also.”
 
Now onto Turbo, a resident of a country who will most likely be getting spanked by Argentina at the moment this blog goes live at some point this evening.
 
“I’m getting stuff ready so that other team members can jump into the more stable parts of my craft branch and help expand it, and plug stuff in. First, though, I’m going back over my crafting stations, and doing some refactoring – in essence adding a lot more automation to the way the system works in the code.“

“It should be worth the extra thought that’s going into it though, at the bare minimum you should be able to create a new station purely through scripting alone. If a certain station requires it then custom logic or a custom UI panel or element can easily be added – it should be as great for modders as much as ourselves.“
 
BLAIR ALGOL DEPARTMENT
If you are/were aware of Blair as a prolific PZ modder, it will come as no surprise that on the team he is a WHIRLWIND of cool ideas and always has multiple gameplay tweaks and features on the go – and has struck up an amazing combo team with our ‘Loot Placement Artiste’ Baph.

Here’s some fun stuff that’s recently gone in for testing from the world of KEYS:
 
Zombies will now only have a key, or a key ring with a key in it, for suitable buildings that they spawn in or near to. Prison Guards can have Prison keys, inmates cannot. Employees of a business can have a key for it, customers cannot. More keys will spawn in buildings, not just for the building, but also possibly for nearby vehicles. Sometimes those nearby vehicles may also have a key for that building in the glovebox. When a vehicle spawns a key (in its glovebox, on a zombie, or on the ground) it has a chance of being accompanied by a key for a nearby building as well. It’s ensured that only cop zombies get the cop car keys – although Survivor zombies could have anything. Building keys may well come pre-named according to the sort of building or business they unlock. We are doing more fun stuff with Key Rings in general, watch out rabbits!  
So in essence: it will be possible for your survivor to find a locked building, find a key for it in the glovebox of a vehicle parked nearby, and then find a key for that vehicle inside that building. The keys may also be on a Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Keyring.
 
A Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Keyring may, or may not, have a minimal boost to your Luck. We will never truly let on.
 
Also: new options to let you mix in your runners with your shamblers:
OTHER DEPARTMENT
Clearly this isn’t everything – we’ve also got optimizations, basements and other fun stuff lined up for 42 but there’s not a huge amount of news on these beyond ‘it’s all coming along’. Hopefully we’ll have a few more updates on these in our next pre-Xmasdoid.
Fanks all love yus x
This week’s good use of 41 fire from BoinXaysa. 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.
Now, the Central Block of Italicized Text demands: go and buy Dwarf Fortress on Steam! The original, best and most brilliant simulation there is – and ever shall be.
 

Evening all.
 
NOW
We released 41.77 into the stable beta last week, which fixed up linux servers and also improved client to server connections by preferring a direct connection to the server.
 
It was mission successful in most regards, but a minority of users still had issues connecting – which we have been addressing over the past few days via hotfixes in the Unstable beta.
 
If you were one of the frustrated souls impacted by this, then let us know if you are still suffering on Unstable (hopefully not) on this thread on the Steam Board.
 
Our current plan is to get these final people back on board the connection train, then move onto releasing the final 41 patch into the freshly vacated Unstable beta next week.
 
We’ve now locked coder submissions to this patch (necessary fixes aside) and the final changelist looks like this.
 
LATER
We’ve blogged a bunch of stuff that we’re working towards getting into 42 now, but this week we thought it also worth mentioning that work has re-begun on the fire revamp.
 
The fire revamp is something that got a lot of coverage in ‘doids around two years ago, so it probably predates the knowledge of a fair few readers who have come on board in more recent times during B41’s MP launch and consequent hi-jinks.
Work on revamped fire had to be put to one side in favour of bolstering the Multiplayer code team, and ever since then it has been sitting on a dusty shelf and getting a little stale.
 
The tldr of it when last we left it runs as follows:
A realistic spread of fire, with combustible materials that make sense. A system that takes into account temperature, material types, weight, volume, surface area, heating energy, cooling energy etc A set-up on both a solo map and an MP network that means that the game can ‘remember’ what is going on in terms of a spreading fire when players leave the area. Fire spread that uses the direction and speed of the wind, with in-game rain helping with fires being put out. Improved effects and visuals.  
So what now? Well a nice chap called Denis is brushing off the unfinished work – and has brought it all up to date with the codebase two years later. This task is now complete, and this video shows a quick summary of where we got to.
 
 
So where does this leave us? Well it doesn’t make it a confirmed 42 feature, we are already going to be packing a LOT in, but it does make its inclusion more likely.
 
We want to improve the visuals still (we are still not happy with whether it fits the game scene), and we want Denis to take his time getting to grips with the codebase and what can be done with the system still. Likewise we’ll be working on new anims for zeds and players who have caught fire, and the sound team will be providing all manner of sizzle noises.
 
So this is basically us waving a flag at you to say that we hadn’t forgotten all this cool shit, and it’s back off the shelf and receiving some active love and attention for later on down the line.
 
WELCOME KIRRUS!
The team would like to officially welcome Kirrus to the TIS locker-room! Kirrus has been a long-term contributor, helper and ‘cool head in troubled times’ throughout the history of Project Zomboid – but has never been officially on the team.
 
He’s now a full time member of the gang, and our new Sys Admin. Big Spiffo hug incoming!
This week’s office space from Sr.Cannoli. 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 dev and want to work with us, especially if you’re an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.

In my opinion there are two major things that help build atmosphere in the game - sound and lighting. Sound already got a big improvement and thats great, but it feels that lighting and shadows is lacking in the game (for example buildings/structures not casting directional shadows, no ambient occlusion etc). For example, if there is barrel standing next to a wall, you could make that wall area next to the barrel a bit darker. Currently
 light in game looks monotonous.
 
Also, just curious, are there any plans to shift game more into 3d? For example walls/structures being 3d instead of 2d sprites?

Now then, survivors. Let’s do the thing.
 
NEXT
This week we released version 41.77 into our Unstable beta. This is primarily aimed at fixing the Linux crashes that have been plaguing server hosts, and so far seems to be a mission success in that regard.
 
It also improves client to server connections by preferring a direct connection to the server. Servers now have two ports for clients to connect to, configurable through the server options. The game port (UDP 16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (UDP 16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection.
 
We’ve had a successful wider test of 41.77 with more than 30 people on a server without any crashes, and we’ve tested a modded setup afterwards as well.
 
Upon release there were servers running mods with 41.77 just fine, but unfortunately it seemed that some mod setup constellations caused conflicts that resulted in black screens for some servers.
 
We have just pushed a hotfix we believe will resolve this.
 
If, however, you run a 41.77 server and you are still experiencing players unable to log on (only seeing a black screen) then please send us: the list of ModIDs (specifically the “Mods=” line from their server.ini, the workshop= line, and your server logs.
 
Posting these in the forum release thread or in our Discord techsupport channel would probably be best.
 
Likewise, any reports of ongoing server instability or general misbehaviour – please let us know ASAP.
 
THEN
We’re still adding tweaks and polish to our final B41 patch that we’ll put out once the current network improvements are fully tested, released and stable.
 
This is the current changelist, with notable additions in the past few weeks on show here if you already read up on what was incoming in our last blog.
 
OOH, 42
Build 42 will be a very big update, and it will appear a sizable amount of time after Build 41 is fully wrapped. We’ve announced most of the things that we currently have brewing for it, but there’s one thing we’ve only hinted at so far – and which is very likely to feature.
As regular readers may remember, a while ago we wrote a blog called Techdoid that detailed some of the big engine improvements we have slated for 42.
 
Amongst them is a new rendering pipeline which allows for entire chunks to be cached with a depth buffer, which will afford us MASSIVE rendering and scene construction improvements and should rid us of all the performance issues we’ve been plagued with due to the isometric draw order over the years.
 
 
There’s also a new light propagation system, which allows for light to naturally leak through doors and windows, providing much more atmospheric and believable lighting
  We also got rid of the 8 storey limit on chunks: specifically we allowed each chunk to have its own unique defined height up to 32 levels.
Finally, we discussed that we’d fixed the many areas of the codebase that used static casts to round the player’s position to determine what chunk or tile they were on to using Math.floors instead. This method allows for negative coordinates to work where prior the calculations would have failed if the player was stood on a tile with a negative coordinate.
 
This in theory will allow for us, or modders, to build north or west to the same extents as we currently build to the east and south, effectively quadrupling the maximum size the map could be extended to and open up a great deal of extra land to populate should we need to in future.
Whilst all these features are gamechangers in themselves, they were also done in service of another very specific feature we’ve had planned for a long time, which required each of them to be made feasible in any way.
 
The current in-game lighting system means that the indoor ambience levels are defined solely by the time of day. If it’s daytime, the ambient light levels inside a building are above zero, giving just sub-daylight levels, even if there are no sources of natural light that should fall on a tile just by virtue of it being day. That wouldn’t work very well if we were wanting to do… a certain other feature.
 
The previous eight level hard limit and high rendering cost of multiple levels was rather restrictive if we were to… want to do a certain something.
 
The lack of support for negative coordinates for character positions? Well that was IMMENSELY restrictive if we… were to want to do a certain something.
 
A few people may have been able to read between the lines of what all these lead toward. Many more will have just watched the video already.
  The plan we have for basements and sub-levels is an interesting one, as it will provide a lot more replayability to the game map, which is otherwise completely static at the moment.
 
Essentially in 42 we, or modders, can list positions on the map (along with staircase orientation) that have the space for a basement and can be allocated the potential to have one. However, no basements are placed within the map itself.
 
When an area is streamed in for the first time, an appropriate basement ‘building’ created in the building editor and exported as a binary file is selected randomly from the list of all possible basements and will be injected into the map as it is loaded.
 
We could add tags to make it pick an appropriate category of basement to fit the specific house, though right now the code has it set as completely random. Each basement has stairs leading up from its ‘top’ floor and these stairs will be aligned to the correct position when it is injected into the map.
 
This means that despite the map being static, any areas with basements will yield surprises in every playthrough. This will also, clearly, cause the least disruption to the existing map development, modded maps and everything else.
 
Whilst most of the basements will be modest basement rooms, that will have their own unique layout and lootable containers and will change on every new world and be populated with our own collection as well as any collections of mod basements that are subscribed to.
There may be a few, however, which are more extensive, the player could happen upon a super rare and extensive underground complex. We have 32 levels to work with that can be distributed in any way above or below ground per chunk as required, so there’ll be few limits particularly in what modders can do with this.
 
We can also hardcode some specific basement levels, so we could say provide key buildings within the map with bespoke basement levels that fit that particular building and will always be the same on every map.
 
Also, with the new light propagation system, you better bring a torch – because unless there are light switches, its gonna be dark even if it’s daytime!
 
We’re also considering the possibility of other sub-surface structures, such as sewers for locations like Louisville. We’re still researching what would be appropriate and sufficiently realistic for this, however, and it’s not certain what could/would appear in b42 beyond what’s discussed above at this stage.
 
SPIFFO: BEYOND
If you are a Terraria player then right now you are likely enjoying the amazing Labor of Love update, and maybe you’ve even discovered a certain someone has made the jump into another game – heralding the beginning of some sort of Spiffo Cinematic Universe.
Our endless thanks to everyone at Re-Logic for letting our little dude spread his wings (or spin his tail, I guess) and treating him so well.
  This week’s stunning outdoor scene from Citro. 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 dev and want to work with us, especially if you’re an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.

Okay, so here’s a run down on our current basic plans for finalizing Build 41, and then beyond.
NEXT
We’ve left Linux server operators hanging out to dry a bit over the last two weeks and feel awful about it – especially ones with larger/busier servers.
 
41.73 came with crashes on Linux servers, and the version with the updated Steam API we put into the Unstable beta in 41.74 turned out to bring in as many issues as it solved.
 
As such Yuri and Andrei are currently working on another approach that will be going into Unstable beta (and then Stable) as soon as we can muster – which will have the crashes fixed, and should also have increased networking performance and improved connection stabilities for everyone. We’re hoping to conduct an internal test on it tomorrow.
 
In essence the game will now also use direct communication with dedicated servers, instead of going entirely through Steam’s own networking. This should improve things for all players on dedicated servers – including the Linux servers that were sadly the canary in the coalmine that flagged up the fact that something needed to be done here.
 
Again, our apologies to those impacted – we are thinking of ways to repair some of the damage done during the outage and appreciate your frustration.
THEN
We have a staging branch backstage that all our coders are feeding aspects of their work that they wouldn’t want people to have to wait until Build 42 for – so no big features, but instead a lot of fixes and balance.
 
We will also be trying to limit mod disruption and big/controversial changes, as this will be the version that we leave folks with for quite a while when all of us are 100% working on new features alongside the existing 42 team. (Apart from anything urgent we might need to attend to on 41, clearly).
 
The sorts of things we’re currently testing for this patch include: many and various visual issues with the cutaway system, colour blind accessibility options, better crate highlights, many recipe improvements, better ways for the game to handle car alarms and (hopefully) fixes for sounds cutting out in busy MP situations.
 
There’s also some new 3D models where we’ve had icon mismatches, new tooltips to better explain what different items can do, weight/encumbrance rebalancing on some items, the lighter/Molotov fix we mentioned last time and many and varied other fixes. We’ve also done some work improving the in-game server browser that we would certainly like to include as well.
There’s a lot of other stuff too, but you probably get the gist. Nothing that’s going to rock the boat, but also enough stuff to keep the boat sailing until we reach the glittering shores of 42.
MAP NEXT
While we can’t and won’t go into forensic detail on which towns and what design themes we’re going for, it’s perhaps time to talk about the next map expansion – which will most likely hit with 42.
 
Xeonyx and Ayrton are essentially pushing the map out on all sides, apart from beyond the game’s traditional Ohio River boundary.

The map team are returning to fictionalised versions of real places on the Kentucky map – Riverside and March Ridge being entirely fictional. We don’t want to name exactly which ones, but it might be worth mentioning one of them will be Ekron.
 
The location currently commonly known as Ekron within the community is not supposed to be our version of that place, and (for reasons that will become explicit when viewed on the PZ map) is internally known as Fallas Lake. We will erect a sign in Build 42 to make this information more prominent.
 
Here’s a few WIP screens of some of our future locations to keep you all going.
ALSO
Other things currently being worked on for B42 inclusion that we haven’t mentioned before are:
 
The Sound Team are working on sprinter zed growls and screams – our first inspirations here will be the Dawn of the Dead remake but we will iterate until we get it right. Formosa have also created a variety of bullet impact noises (on cars, dirt, glass, plastic, trees, walls and wood) that we will be integrating come 42, alongside the further improvement of the dynamic music system. They will also clearly have their hands full with the cows, chickens, sheep, improved fishing and many and various new post-apocalypse items and actions that B42 will bring along with it.
  RJ is currently experimenting with rats, which could also become part of the Knox Event alongside domestic animals. Martin, meanwhile, has been working on animal transportation – namely new trailers and potential new vehicles.
  Pat_Bren has been expanding the breadth of different TV and radio channels available to tune into at the start of the outbreak, and is now moving onto some other frequencies that players might be lucky enough to come across later on within the PZ timeline too. Right now he’s added Public Access TV, a Music channel, a Sports channel, a movie channel, a new entertainment channel and a radio station called Upper South Radio.
  We can’t remember if we showed it before, apologies if so, but seeing as RJ is back working with his rats – here’s what a PZ rat looks like when it bugs out with human hair.
Thanks all, and thanks for your patience. We’ll see you next time.
This week’s foggy overview from the Universe of Gamer. 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 dev and want to work with us, especially if you’re an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.

If you think PZ UI is complicated, you havent tried EVE online PZ UI doesnt feel very comfortable to use, but its certainly not hard to understand, how someone can be daunted by it is beyond me...

I would like to add something. You know that you can lower your car side door window and shoot to the left or right when sitting inside? Well, I found a car, which was missing front windshield and tested if i can shoot in front of the car and it didnt work. It would be a nice detail if it did work.

Today we are releasing version 41.72 to the Unstable beta.
If you need directions to this, then here’s a handy gif!
 
As always with the Unstable beta – be aware that some mods might break.
 
We don’t anticipate a huge amount of disruption with 41.72, but should any of your workshop mods become non-operational then please inform the relevant creators – and be patient while they find the time to update their wares. They have jobs / families / lives too!
 
So what’s in 41.72? Well the changelist can be found here on our forums, and there’s a lot of small tweaks and fixes to scroll through, but we’ll detail the main stuff here also.
 
It’s always HUGELY helpful for us when people, and server owners, jump over to the unstable beta – so please dive in and let us know how you find it.
 
41.72
Lots of general stability and security work has gone into MP – and specifically work on vehicles when you are driving alongside (or are a passenger sitting next to) players with far higher or lower pings than your good self. The first of several layers of polish to the game’s food and recipes. New foodstuffs, improved containers, expanded recipes and all manner of different things to put together to feed yourself and your doomed friends. Various elements of balance too and, as mentioned before, no more footballs that can be jammed into a toaster. Fellow co-op, faction and safehouse member positions can now be seen on your in-game map should you choose to enable it. An improvement to the way in which mod errors are reported. A list of mods has been added to the pause menu, and whenever one is erroring out then it’ll be flagged within the list. This is going in alongside an improved lua error log that shows whether any files reported in call stacks are being overridden by mods. This should help modders and our support teams no end. The game’s foraging system will now understand polygonal foraging zones on the map, rather than rely on its former basic rectangular brain. This should help with decreasing the amount of non-forageable spaces on the map. A slight tweak to zed pathfinding, which means zombies targeting players have a higher priority in the game code than those shambling around more aimlessly. The final large map export that we’ll be doing before Build 42, most likely. This is primarily to fix user reported map bugs, but also contains improved farmsteads, scarecrows (that might be bugged and appear as mannequins currently – sorry) and improved Louisville upper class districts. Alongside the above there are various new tiles going into the game: including baby cribs, heavy factory machinery, standing floor lamps, farm related tiles, ATM machines, heavy safes, medical related tiles, and car wash tiles. For MP: new admin powers and tools – for example a brush tool that will allow server chiefs to create tiles, walls, fire, smoke, water etc. in-game. Also: a thunder trigger, better synced health panels, improved vehicle/trailer spawning, player weight changing and heightened control over zombie movement, zed spawning and locked doors. New loot maps for Louisville – which previously didn’t have any. There are nine different maps in all, due to the size of LV, which all unlock the area they show in your in-game map – alongside a wide range of different survivor ‘treasure map’ annotations. A smidgen of improvement to corpses. More of these will now be ‘fake dead’ zombies, alongside improvement to their rotting – such as the chance of spawning maggots in their inventory and on the floor around them. Handy for fishing! Polish to player emotes and idles. Better representation of weapon-part upgrades. Generator/battery improvements. New action music track. Fixed blood appearing on destroyed objects, and about a million other fixes – best to check the changelist!
  JOBZ
While we have your attention: another quick flag to the fact that we are back on the hunt for an Animations Engineer / Technical Wizard.
This will most likely be someone from the AAA game development space who has pines for joining a close-knit team of indie devs.
If this is you, or someone you know, then our job page lives here!
 
This week’s exciting and no doubt doom-laden story-via-map from Athiuk! 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 dev and want to work with us? Details here.
Oh, and Spanish-speaking community! Be aware of a biiiig PZ streaming event on Twitch starting this Sunday, hosted by @EscocesSL. Spiffo hopes everyone has fun!

Eating a worm or a bowl of pasta takes the same time. It'd be more logical if eating a worm was fast and a bowl of pasta was slow. Maybe depending on hunger gained? Or weight of the food?
 
Also, if you eat half of a bowl of pasta, it'll take the same time as eating an entire bowl of pasta. It'd be more logical for it to take half the time.
 
Once you've eaten half of the bowl, if you choose to eat the remaining half, it'll once again take the same time as an entire bowl, but if you cancel about halfway through, you'll have eaten the other half completely, showing that the extra time is wasted and looks more like a bug than anything else.
 
I also found out while testing that if some piece of food has less than 1 hunger left after you're done eating it partially, whether through cancelling the action or eating half/a quarter, it disappears. Eating half of a worm makes it disappear completely. But you've only gained 1 hunger. I'll make a separate bug report.

Pot of water is inside active microwave. If you want to clean bandages, character turns off microwave and takes out the pot, but if you want to sterilize bandages, it can be done without turning off microwave and taking out pot.

Arent you concerned that Project Zomboid might lose its original vision of zombie survival game and shift more into some sort of farming simulator game?
 
Edit:
I mean, I am all in for deep and complex game mechanics, but growing and milking cows, growing chickens and picking up eggs? I dont know, it can be a nice side detail, but not the main focus of the game, that a lot of development time is spent on.

Hello survivors! Today marks the beginning of one of the most significant and important periods in the modern world’s social and religious calendar: the Steam Summer Sale!
 
Because of this, all you existing survivors will no doubt get a little swamped with all the fresh meat turning up for the PZ grinder.
The Zomboid community has always been amazing in terms of supporting new players, and this time won’t be any different, but our tech and support teams will be working flat-out – most likely.

As such we just thought we’d say that (entirely fictitious and non-existent) bonus Spiffo points will be available for those who jump into threads to give advice or survival tips to survivors fresh to the Knox Event.
 
Likewise if you are one of the aforementioned noobs: hello! This is a dev blog we do every two weeks.
 
PATCH 41.72
We are still working on the next update to Build 41, which we are hoping to release to an Unstable beta as soon as we possibly can.
The hold-up (we were originally planning to put this out two weeks ago) is due to us wanting to smoothen out MP issues that arise when driving alongside (or in the same car as) players with a far higher or lower ping than yourself. It becomes very stop-start, and quite unplayable.
These are essentially the edge-case ramifications of the necessary decision we made to remove physics-calculations from the server, but there are a lot of people playing PZ these days so edge-cases aren’t an inconsiderable number of players.


The MP team have put a LOT of work into improving this over the past two weeks, and as soon as we’ve had a successful internal test with their latest changes we will feel in a position to punt the build out into unstable.
 
A top line of major changes in 41.72 includes: fellow players optionally visible on the in-game map, new loot maps, new SFX and a new music track, polished emotes and a new way for players to be able to identify exactly which mods are misbehaving when they throw errors. Also an admin brush tool letting server chiefs paint items and walls etc. onto an ongoing game, and reams of small issue bug fixes.
 
Additions that have gone in over the last two weeks also include:
 
A huge amount of polish to the game’s food and recipes from BlairAlgol: filling in illogical gaps, expanding recipes, making foodstuffs previously absent from food crafting part of the system and making sure that you can no longer store a football in a toaster. Also a fair amount of food-related balance and common sense additions. An improvement beneath the hood to foraging – meaning that the game will be able to recognise polygonal foraging zones on the map, rather than the more inaccurate squares and rectangles it currently works from.  
The map team are also currently gearing up to do a final export of the current Build 41 map ready for the 41.72 unstable release. This will contain all the polish recently mixed into the main map, after which the team will turn to concentrate purely on mapping new areas beyond the current boundaries.
 
There’s nothing huge in this map update, we are primarily releasing it so that all the map bugs the community have been reporting are fixed up before the team moves onto Build 42 content, but there are a few treats:
 
Improved farms and farmsteads in readiness for 42’s animals, these include scarecrows that can be dressed up in the same way as shop mannequins. Improved rich district houses in Louisville Various new tiles like baby cribs, heavy factory machinery, standing floor lamps, farm related tiles, atm machines, heavy safes, medical related tiles, and new car wash tiles. [And no, baby cribs are not a harbinger of baby zeds]  
We are now at a point at which it’s increasingly becoming a pain keeping 41 and 42 content separate on our internal build. We won’t be calling time on 41 patches any time super-soon, we’ll leave it polished and stable, but we’re certainly now well on the way the flipping the switch and working purely on Build 42 content. (Clearly we will still be able to return to implement super-important fixes and changes though)

42 CONTENT
We haven’t spotlit much from Build 42 recently – partly because one of its primary coders had been seriously ill (now recovered), and partly because a lot of what’s been done recently isn’t super visual yet.

However, if you’ll forgive the primarily textual blog, here’s a few updates on what’s been happening. First from our newly-healthy Turbo, who is responsible for our crafting update.
CRAFTING IMPROVEMENTS
“Hello! This is Turbo! As mentioned in earlier blogs, the new craft update introduces a good bunch of new professions, new items, crafting tree and profession work stations etc as well as some other changes to how the game code ‘creates’ and records things.”
“To explain what I’m currently working on and why, I’ll focus on a few aspects of the update:”
 
A) Crafted items that have more RPG-like variable attributes that are based on the crafter’s skill.
 
B) Stats of input items that may also influence the attributes of a final output item.
 
C) The fact that a newly crafted item will be able to be placed as what we call a worldobject, then picked up again to item form – with all its attributes transferred in the game code between the two.”
 
“As an example, we are currently working on crafting that will occur deep into the apocalypse: so a blacksmith may be making a hammer which requires a wooden tool handle and a hammerhead as the input. The wooden tool handle may have a ‘quality’ and ‘condition’ attribute with values that are based on the skill of carpenter who made it,  and perhaps for the ‘quality’ of the wood used by them. Likewise, the hammerhead may have similar attributes – based on the skills of the blacksmith who made it, and the attributes of the ore/iron used in the craft.”
 
“Mixed into this we also have to take into account aspects such as the skill levels of the crafter – and also take in a random factor so that not everything produced is of a uniform quality.”
 
“The attribute system I’m currently working on should help with these kind of things, and it will not only be used for the new stuff in 42’s crafting update – but we will also be able to refactor things currently in the game’s existing crafting systems to work with it all really easily.”
“Lastly, a simple use case example. (And this is an example – not a promise of item inclusion!)”
 
Consider a shotgun item that can be crafted with attributes like damage, range and condition – based on the skills of the player who has been upgrading, improving and caring for it. The shotgun is then crafted into a new shotgun trap item, where the attributes of the original shotgun are copied over. The trap item is placed on the world as what we call an IsoObject – and the attributes are once again carried over to it. The range and damage attributes are now being used for the trap’s code. The trap gets triggered a few times – lowering the condition attribute. Another player decides to disassemble the trap to retrieve the shotgun from it, and the newly instanced shotgun item copies the attributes from the trap – and we end up with the correct damage and range values as it was originally crafted with. However, it now also has  a lowered condition due to its activity while it was being used in the trap.”  
“With the new system I’m coding, this daisychain of steps can be achieved with very minimal additional coding required.”
 
LES ANIMAUX
“Hello everyone! RJ here.”
 
“Okay, so everything that’s outside of your current surroundings in PZ doesn’t really exist. It exists as ‘meta’ – it isn’t streamed in, and the game calculates hordes moving around in distant places.”  
 
“For animals, however – this needs to change somewhat. You need to be able to travel the distance of the map, but for the game to still remember things about them that don’t matter for shambling zombies. Animals need to age, eat and drink – if you leave them too long they can’t be in perfect condition when you get back. They, most likely, need to be dead.”
 
“Not only are there lots of things to consider with animal, but there could also be a LOT of them on the map – although we’re current not 100% on our final list we have models for rats, squirrels, larger birds, deer and domesticated animals. So, even though the game knows everything about them and their movement – there’s a risk that when they’re properly streamed it might get too intensive for the CPU.”
“To avoid this I have coded it so that their stats (hunger, thirst, age etc) are updated every in-game hour. Realistically you’ll likely only have one or two cows, but if you want to breed rats for… some inexplicable reason you could end up with a ton of them. We don’t want players with 100+ animals having their stats updated every tick, or things could melt.”
 
“As such, animals won’t be updated real-time while they are off-screen (except for animals in a migration path, more on that below) but they will update themselves once you (or anyone else) returns to them. So be sure to fill up their feeding trough before you head out on loot run!”
 
LA MIGRATION DES ANIMAUX
“We don’t want wild animals to always spawn in the same place. So for creatures like deer, we need to have them follow a set path – as they usually do in real life. This is being done through additions that Tim has made to WorldZed – and where we can ‘simply’ draw all the paths that animals could take – with nodes all along it where they can eat, drink, etc.”
 
“It’ll be up to the player to try to understand and learn these paths, so you’ll know where you could find your animals to hunt. We can also perhaps provide lootable items that can mark up rough hunting trails on your in-game map too.”
 
“This aspect of animals will be updated in the meta though, as animals need to always be on the move and some animal paths will cross with others – meaning that a group of deer could decide to change its path if it chooses to.”
 
“A deer group will contain all relevant members of the deer family. If you kill the buck in a deer group, they won’t have fawns for quite some time – until they find another buck to add into their group. As such, it will be important for players to recognise what animals they should kill: which are still too young, which might be pregnant etc.”
 
“It’s not done for B42 yet, but we are planning tracking to an extent via the deer excrement they leave behind and its freshness – all discovered via the foraging system. This way you’ll start to know on your server/game, what are the path animals are currently on, and could quite easily track back to them to “collect” your meat. Again, this aspect isn’t 100% up for inclusion yet – but hopefully shines a light on our plans.”
JOB AD MK II
Sadly due to unforeseen circumstances we are back on the hunt for an Animations Engineer / Technical Wizard  – most likely someone from the AAA game development space who has pines for joining a close-knit team of indie devs. If this is you, or someone you know, then our job page lives here!
Today’s Rosewood base from Poffie_was_here. 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 dev and want to work with us? Details here.

A tiny detail, but it would be neat if could create your character as left hander.

A tiny detail, but it would be neat if could create your character as left hander.

There could be gun maintenance kits in game. Oil and clean the gun to reduce the chance of durability loss when using the gun and/or reduce the chance of gun jamming. (Also, there could be whetstones to sharpen the blades).

Game code doesnt allow to build gates on north and west facing walls. All the necessary materials are in inventory, tried claiming nonresidential building - no difference. Example:
 

 

 

 

 
 
It happened so, that garage doors are on the north facing wall and zombies busted it. Cant replace it, thats just really disappointing. Please fix this.
 
edit:
Tried south facing wall - it works, just didnt make a screenshot.

Game code doesnt allow to build gates on north and west facing walls. All the necessary materials are in inventory, tried claiming nonresidential building - no difference. Example:
 

 

 

 

 
 
It happened so, that garage doors are on the north facing wall and zombies busted it. Cant replace it, thats just really disappointing. Please fix this.
 
edit:
Tried south facing wall - it works, just didnt make a screenshot.

There could be gun maintenance kits in game. Oil and clean the gun to reduce the chance of durability loss when using the gun and/or reduce the chance of gun jamming. (Also, there could be whetstones to sharpen the blades).

On maps that you find, there should be random times where you find an annotated map with spots in the forest where people have buried containers of supplies that you can find using the foraging system when you are in the area. You'll need a shovel to dig it up naturally. 
Like, "Hidden my guns here." Or "Food stash 2 of 5 here." Or "My love" where you find a buried corpse and a love letter."

I wonder, will zombies attack animals?

If server was set to longer growth time (i think there is such option), then vegetables would stay longer in their "ready to harvest" state. By default in game cabbages take 2 weeks to grow, realistically it takes about 3 months.

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!

I aboslutely adore the new lighting. It adds a whole new level of gameplay. Clearing out a building after the powers out'll have so much tension. Needing a flashlight, or headtorch/backpack light type thing, to be able to safely clear it'll add so much more need for batteries, and flashlights. And one handed weapons thinking about it.

Mods like "Fear The Sun" will be much greater too, given how zombies will all be inside, in the dark.. where you can't see them.