Rathlord

Air conditioning isn't really capable of freezing someone. Air conditioners have their effects limited to fairly high degrees (usually about 55 or 60 degrees Farenheit). Even if you were to override this, they must also have the outside cooler than the inside to function. Otherwise, they'll do nothing. So even if you ran it in winter, with the override, it still couldn't cool the house any colder than it is outdoors.

https://www.funerals.org/frequently-asked-questions/142-embalming-myths-facts The idea that corpses are dangerous is largely a myth propagated by the funeral industry to con emotionally compromised mourners into spending exceedingly large amounts of money on embalming, a "service" that isn't required or even beneficial in the vast majority of cases. Yah, it's a disgusting and completely unethical industry. In almost all cases corpses are not a hazard to your health. They do, on the other hand, smell quite bad. I'd like to see them have more of an effect on the character's mood and mental health than their physical health.

For a game that's kinda meant to be a pretty realistic sim game, I'm not sure that really fits with the idea. Might make more sense if it was an arcade-y shoot-em-up.

Sorry Mac guys, I'll see if I can duplicate this bug when I get home from seeing my family. Sitting on runway right now.

Visual representation is a little tough just because of the size of the sprites and the work that'd be involved trying to implement it in a clear way. I actually made this exact same suggestion (being about to right click and check status quite a long time ago, let's see if I can find it... Here it is! This is from the original PZ forums before we were on this site!

I don't really see why that sandbox option is there to be honest. Then why does the motel sign say "wifi" in 1993? I dont remember WiFi being used for computers in the early 90s. http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/646628993994739951/4AE1C9777D50748844B67D5A0DE9CA0610301729/ There are some few idiosyncrasies in the game, and that isn't necessarily the only one. Some of this may just be design oversights (it shouldn't be taken to prove or disprove anything, is what I'm getting at). However, we also have no evidence given by the devs either way that the timeline in which PZ takes place (clearly not our own, or we wouldn't be here) necessarily involves everything happening chronologically as it did in our own. Perhaps wifi was invented earlier. Perhaps not. Who's to say? All I'm saying is, we shouldn't make any assumptions.

I'm guessing it feels wonky mainly just because it looks a bit odd compared to how you're used to seeing it. I'm not... necessarily... discounting the suggestion; it may just be more aesthetically pleasing to keep the banks clear; I'm not sold either way 100% myself. Just happened to notice the thread and thought I'd mention it- growing up in the southern US, I've seen quite a few waterways from tiny creeks to massive rivers, and I have the pleasure of being able to see them in fairly uninhabited areas. Unless it's very sandy, the foliage usually goes right down to the shore and many times even into the edges of the water.

This is the Ohio River, which I believe is what the river in-game is meant to be based on? Maybe it should have more vegetation to begin with. But, in short, unless you're in a major flood plain, things can and do grow on the side of rivers. And it is mostly mankind that keeps it from being that way in other areas

Sometimes micromanagement for its own sake can detract from the fun of the game. Realism is surely important, but I think this may be one of those times we just need to assume your character can get it figured out without burdening the player.

There is a certain rocker with a signature guitar shaped and painted like an axe…

So it's decided, we're getting Dungeons and Dragons. But we already have Dungeons and Dragons!

Baycon the thing to consider is that with Minecraft and Terraria, they are not hardcore games. Creeper sneaks up on you at night, or a zombie in Terraria and murders you? Oh well, respawn. Zombie sneaks up on you in PZ? Too bad, you just lost your whole world and your character. Can you imagine if that were the case in those two games? There would be rage. Now, that's not to say that there's not a place for darkness in PZ- I, at least, feel that there certainly is. It's just important that deaths feel fair, and that it's something tweakable. I honestly feel the old darkness was great, except for the fact that it varies immensely based on each persons computer. Those are issue that need to be resolved before the darkness comes back. That's not to say that it won't come back- I very much hope it does. Also, something you might not know, the light level varies based on moon cycle in PZ and I believe it starts with a full moon. So those of you with shorter average life spans may not see how dark it can actually get.

How do Survivors, another Monday and the Build 33 IWBUMS process is still making pleasant progress. We’ve just released Build 33.5, the details of which can be found right here. Oh, and if you’d like to join in with the 33 Public Test and aren’t familiar with the procedure, then click on through here to discover IWBUMS secrets. Let’s go over to our French correspondent Romain ‘RJ’ Dron to find out the latest. So which of the primary bugs have been crushed by the time of this 33.5 build, and which are still to face your wrath? Well I’ve been working alongside EasyPickins on the bug-smashes, and our main goal were the Linux build crash and some co-op sound nonsense. For instance, only Player 1 was able to hear sound and stuff like that. Overall 33.5 is way more stable, basically, thanks to EP! So what’s the current status in terms of Steam Server creation bugs? Well, that’s an EP fix again. We’ll see with this new release if everything is working as intended, but I have a good feeling about it. Are you turning your attention more towards the difficulty aspect of 33 now? How do you expect First Week, Survival etc to change as the IWBUMS progresses? Yes, I am – but that also involves watching the forums and gauging the temperature of what people think about how it is currently. So that’s both players coming into it, and long-established hardcore players. As such it’s a gradual process, but cool types like LeoIvanov are really helping out with balancing and experimenting with the sandbox options. I’m also thinking of adding more sandbox presets to help with it. Stuff like the frequency of meta-events, an option that will make the population more uniform after a set amount of days etc. What other ways are you polishing the build? Right now I’m having fun (and occasional difficulties!) with FMOD Studio, which is basically a sound mixer with tons of possibilities. So for example, I can randomize the pitch of alarms, make their distance fade more realistic and also play with thunder – so when you’re far away then it’s less dramatic, the pitch is lower and all that fun stuff. It really give us the power to do lot of things, some of which you can already experience in-game with choppers. Zombie sounds are also in the pipeline, as we can make their noises more in tune with their aggression levels. Just as in something like The Walking Dead, the noise of zombies when they’re idle should be very different from when they’ve been alerted by a passing survivor. All the zombie stuff probably won’t come for build 33 as we need more zombie sounds, primarily for the female zeds, but it’s all on the table now. Now, let’s head over to Holland for a report from Turbo ‘TurboTuTone’ TuTone. I’ve committed a bunch of fixes to 33.5, including an updated spreadsheet adding narrative content to Initial Infection and various fixes and corrections. It should also be a lot more legible now. There’s also some new tweaks too, which can be found below. Lights and Furniture Movement I’ve added something to movable lightsources that gives you the option for the bulb to be taken out, or for a new one to be installed. So basically aside from the standard white bulb there’s now coloured ones that are a little rarer. During use bulbs have chance to break and by default won’t work outside, but with an Electrician skill of 5 then with a screwdriver and electronics scrap then you’ll be able to craft a battery connector. This is particularly handy for those outdoors lamps which then can operate at a base gate entrance or such. Oh, and here’s a decoration tip: this also works on some awesome rare movables that can be found like the neon sign. Radio Updates In 33.5 and beyond radio devices will eventually break after prolonged usage, and they can now be dismantled in return for constituent parts like wire, aluminium and (depending on skill) receivers and transmitters. This means that you can now craft radio devices too, if you’ve taught yourself from some enthusiast magazines called Guerilla Radio. As ever, your proficiency in electrics will have an impact on what you craft – allowing for wider channel ranges, transmission ranges, better power usage etc. When you’re level ten you’ll also have a chance of crafting ‘exceptional’ devices too – which are of the highest tier, have great stats and enable UI stuff like the distance meter for the incoming signal. I know that myself and Will would also likee to thank Moose65 from the TIS forums for his AMAZING help in searching for the wide variety of typos within the radio broadcasts, and would also like to direct your attention to this excellent guide to the new system by Woodward. Thanks guys! This week’s featured image from Conehead the Barbarian over on Steam. The Centralised Block of Italicised text, would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox.

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying it's an issue that needs to be approached carefully, and not as easy as you seem to think it is. I'm saying we tried darker nights and with the current system it can't work without ruining people's experiences. I'm saying you don't add a "simple" option in programming, and it might behoove you not to call things simple if you don't understand the complexity. Please don't put words in my mouth, especially since I said a lot of the issues could be resolved by adding a gamma slider at some point. Next time please read my post a bit more carefully.

At one point the game had pitch black nights and we had an endless torrent of people complaining about it. The problem is further exasperated by the fact that no monitors are the same, making it very hard to control exactly how dark things are, and the fact that shaders influence the light and color (which some people will have enabled and others won't) and you have a pretty tricky situation. Some of it could possibly be mitigated by having a gamma slider but that's not currently in the works so it's hard to say if that will ever be an option. Just a heads up that we've been down that path before.

Strider, Kirrus wasn't trying to insult you. The point of that comic link is not to be insulting. It's to help people understand that the right of free speech is something that protects you from the government. You do not have free speech on this forum. That's not to say we censor people- but it is to say that when you agree to join these forums, you agree to be bound by the rules of them- rules which you have flagrantly violated again and again. I always feel bad when I have to ban people- always- not matter how horrible the person is I've got to ban. But posts like yours make it much easier on us, because you show us where your priorities are. If your priorities were to have a positive experience on our forum, or even to give helpful feedback to us on our mod staff, you would have just PM'd Kirrus, myself, or any of the other staff. But you didn't. You showed that your true priority is escalation and attention. You were offered a way to discuss the situation and have a favorable outcome, but you turned that down in favor of making a public spectacle. As much as I hate to dampen your mic drop at the end of the post, you won't be taking part in our forums any more willingly or otherwise. You've shown that you are incapable of respecting the rules or the human beings who work every day to make this forum the great place it is. And while this post isn't as egregious as some, it is the final straw for you; and you're right, we're not going to forget about the stuff you've done in the past. We'd be idiots if we did. We can only forgive so many times before our patience is worn out. I appreciate your passion about the game and your participation in the community, but you're making it a worse place for people. Sorry it had to come to this. General reminder to everyone that if you feel something a moderator or admin does needs to be discussed, please do it by private message. Doing it in public just derails threads. We're willing and capable of reviewing our actions if someone feels we've erred. Thanks everyone.

Hello survivors! A bit of a ‘getting on with it’ Mondoid this week as, as you can expect, we’re all busy bees working on the latest IWBUMS. IWBUMS 33.2 In case you were barricaded under a rock you’ll knoe that we’re currently in the midst of a test of a (still incomplete) build 33 on our I Will Backup My Save branch, and as expected work continues on both fixing up what is currently in the IWBUMS branch, with Will working on getting the initial infection TV and Radio into the game, as well as bug fixing those pesky typos and other bugs. Turbo is fixing up the issues that have been reported with the furniture moving system. Meanwhile RJ has been continuing with the sound system fixes. Here’s a few words from RJ himself on his build 33 stuff: “Build 33 is on his way on our IWBUMS branch, we released a patch already so we’re on 33.1! Bugs still exist, but it’s mostly balancing the new sound engine and difficulty. Some report that Survival is way too hard, still need to know if it’s REALLY too hard or it’s just people having bad luck or not skilled enough to play Survival (which is meant to be hardcore ), but for those people, the normal mode should be ok! So this is a hard piece to balance, but it’s progressing! About sound, it’s the same, I balanced them a lot, made the reverb better outside, but still need to work on it so it doesn’t feel like your under a big metal dome! Annnnd I also hear you “what about Steam Server update!” Well, I’m on it too, I fixed some bugs for multiplayer caused by the new sound engine, and I’m trying to get that steam server working, it’ll be probably for this week, maybe tomorrow with some luck! In the meantime I may release another patch with bug fixes/balance, it’ll depend how well the Steam Server bugs are progressing… So it’s getting there, build looks pretty solid so far and I think we’ll have bug fixed rather soon for a public release!” CREATIVE We’ve still got a bit of finishing off to do on the new Creative Mode systems. The latest addition was a virtual object system which allows for tbx, tmx or clippings, as well as road segments, instead of being placed permanently within squares on the map, instead to be made into virtual objects which are placed on the map, but do not destroy the tiles they are placed on, only override them while the object exists in that place. This means they will remain an moveable object you can drag around without permanently distubing what goes underneath. The original reason for this feature was to make the creation of road networks much easier, as it opens up the ability to have simple nodes that connect to eachother, and to form the actual tiles of the road and pavement virtually, calculated over the top of the base game map data. These can then be tweaked and changed as the map is expanded without having to clear out areas of the map. There would be of course a performance hit incurred due to lots of these virtual objects, so at some point these will need to be turned into permanent things on the map, and how that happens has yet to be decided. Either players / servers will have the option of committing these elements permanently to the map once the creators are satisfied with them, or maybe when the player runs sufficiently away from the object so that it streams out, it’s not clear which is the best option for simplicity / performance. The roads are the pretty much last thing to get right, apart from a few fixes for making sure everything works on multiplayer, before Creative could be added to the IWBUMs. Hello! Remember you can sign up to our newsletter to get this stuff direct to your inbox! We would like to remind you to visit our wiki, and thank Moss from the Steam forums for the title image. Rest in Peace Fort Moss.

Tulpa. As mentioned before, we don't ban people for criticizing the game. You can see plenty of examples (have a gander at this thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/520518053449950851/ ) of people criticizing the game- harshly, even- but we don't ban or even threaten to ban them for that. Nor was Enigma threatening you in any way. I, on the other hand, am threatening to ban you (just so we're clear). If you continue throwing personal attacks at people and posting vitriol about the devs and the community, you will be removed from our community. I have no problem with you criticizing the game or even the staff. But you can do that without name calling, harassment, and straight up lies. This isn't you being oppressed or cyber-bullied. This is me telling you that if you don't obey the rules of the forum, you will be banned as per the rules of the forum. And, just to clear things up for you, banning people who are assholes from our community isn't cyberbullying. It's banning assholes from our community. https://xkcd.com/1357/ People here are willing to have a conversation about the points you're making, if you can keep your scathingly hateful attitude in check. I'd be more than willing to address your points about single player vs. multiplayer and the others. If you'd like to have that conversation, feel free to come back and make another post with all of the hate removed. If all you're here for is to attack TIS or try to throw things in our faces, enjoy your last post. If you reply with another tirade of anger, you're going to be gone.

Hi all! The primary Build 33 development streams have been crossed and it seems to be edging ever closer to the Public Test IWBUMS release hatch. Creative Mode, as mentioned last week, will most likely follow shortly afterwards. In the past week there’s been a fair amount of boring behind-the-scenes work like ‘getting the build to work on different machines’ that saw the inestimable EasyPickins plunge his hands into the mainframe and tinker with .dll files until everything was shiny. This was successful (huzzah!) and the full roster of our internal testers are now playing, and all are thankfully reporting that they’re having the most fun they’ve had with PZ for a long while. As such, we’re now in full-on ‘correct and polish stuff the big obvious stuff that IWBUMS testers will spot and report in a single, solitary second’ mode. This includes stuff like checking difficulty levels on each new scenario, adding in clearer UI instructions to furniture movement, improving the TV UI screens so you can’t change channel without the device being turned on, making sure Erosion levels and radio signals are correct for relevant parts of the timeline you start in… the big clear-cut stuff like that. Oh, and this is a contender for the best bug we’ve had since alcoholic watermelons: it’s an easy fix, but right now when chairs are dropped from your inventory they become Lilliputian. So right now it’s basically all the things we know need correcting that we know we can remove from the (glorious) wall of noise that’ll happen when the build hits public testing. Plus, there’s stuff to do like tying the new systems of each merged dev branch together – like giving television feedback noise the FMOD 3D ambience treatment, adding ‘people who left the television on while running/dying’ houses to the building randomisation factor we have in 33 and other smaller loose ends that need to be tied into attractive knots and bows. Over to RJ and Turbo for their own thoughts: RJ: From my end right now it’s more balancing than bug fixing, the bugs I do have in the pipe are pretty small. The balancing is pretty tough though, and comes in two forms: balancing sound/music and balancing the new difficulty settings and scenarios. In terms of sounds I have some reports about people not hearing ambient stuff without headphones, so I want to add a new volume slider to raise up fridge hums, water drips, birds, the wind etc. The kind of stuff you don’t really need to have, but add so much coolness and… well… ambiance. I also need to play with the ‘normal’ sounds like guns, zombies, light switches etc. Right now clicking light switches aren’t audible if you’re far away, guns have too much reverb, stuff like eating should be louder for the player rather than someone standing next to them in MP. Stuff like that. Thankfully though, with the new system all this sound balancing is pretty easy, I just need to test everything, with good headphones (2.1, 5.1), with bad ones, without headphones and then push a build and find out what the internal testers are hearing. I really want everything in the right general area before we open the gates to the wider IWBUMS test. Then there’s the difficulty stuff. My basic plan is that in Six Months Later the zombie apocalypse is really hard at beginning, but becomes surmountable. Survival, meanwhile, should let you in a little more gently but then raise itself up to a nightmarish late game. There’s stuff I need to fix, right now in 6 Months Later you spawn with all the curtains shut and peek out into the world (which feels awesome) but the zeds also have a habit of rushing you while you do so! Overall though I think the late game feedback I get when we release into IWBUMS will be really valuable, as it’ll need people playing for a long time and reporting back. Turbo: Yup. The current build is almost a go for IWBUMS, right now it’s just some (minor) bugfixes here and there. Also, movables needs some tweaking in terms of key layout changes to make it more straightforward, plus a bit of radio UI fine-tuning. Once all those are merged in with the main build there are still some final additions and functionalities that are either disabled or left out currently – these could easily be added during public testing if necessary though. It’s stuff like frequency scanner upgrades, recording onto VHS and audio tapes, learning recipes and gaining experience from instructional TV shows, the swear filter option and TV entertainment having an impact on moodles. I’ll see what I can fit in before the red button is pushed, and after! That’s about it for this week. We’ll likely allow Twiggy to do a bit of Unified 33 streaming later this week so you can see how everything is being wrapped up, but that’s it for now. One final tidbit though in that as we mentioned last week we’ve now got General Arcade back in working to simplify player interactions with starting servers and getting easy co-op games going. It’s a pretty huge job, though, so it’s not something that’ll be dropped into any iterations of 33. It should be a treat though. Till next week! This week’s featured image from Arinkov77 over on Steam. The Centralised Block of Italicised text would also like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. It adds that it hopes you all enjoy Fallout 4 when it unlocks.

We've had one guy that I know of make it over a year. Maybe two. In the last three years of PZ development.

Aye, it'd suck for you to have to explain that to people. So instead let's just agree not to do that and break the terms of use, eh?

Like I said, we don't try to police the wiki. It's up to the users.

I don't want to speak for the devs directly, but I feel safe saying we'd rather they weren't public at all. However, like I said, we don't try to control the wiki content so at the end of the day it's the decision of the users whether they want to or not. Maybe I'll ping one of the devs and see if they'll put an official word in here.

Sorry, but that really does seem to come off a bit as condescending. Unfortunately, I've yet to see any of the developers comment on better trait descriptions, even when I brought up the point several times when feedback was asked for traits. Again, its kinda hard for people to give accurate feedback when you may not even know if its working (like night owl) or what it exactly does (lucky is one of those traits that requires you to check the wiki or forums for what it actually does). If your able to decompile and check the code so you can personally know what resilient does, then congratulations. But it shouldn't be assumed that everyone is capable of doing that, and I'm sure several people would like to at least have a bit more knowledge for how some traits work (again, exact numbers don't have to be revealed, but for example, if prone of illness meant you were more likely to catch zombification, regular infections, and/or colds, that would help evaluate it much more), and which ones are currently completely broken. When the only source of information that we do get comes from somebody else decompiling the code, what else are we suppose to assume? In what possible way could that post be construed as condescending? In what way do I make myself appear superior to anyone in that post? There's a whole thread for trait feedback. Just because they haven't answered you personally doesn't mean they're not reading it, and they don't owe you anything. Actually, I haven't decompiled the code at all. That's not something that's even in my skillset (though I could probably muddle through if pressed). I can just ask the people who wrote the code. The point, though, is that in a singleplayer driven game, telling the player all exact information isn't necessary or even good game design. Having some stuff left a mystery is good, and drives better gameplay. You can figure out resilience by yourself, without ever touching the sauce code, if you put your mind to it. Clarity is super important for games that are designed to be competitive, but that is not the case with singleplayer games like Project Zomboid. Unraveling the mysteries makes the game less fun. TIS isn't catering to min/maxers, they're catering to people who want a deep, atmospheric zombie game. Is there room for improvement in the trait system? Certainly! But does that mean everyone should just know every possible thing about all the traits? No. That'd be terrible game design. I'm trying to tell you in a circumspect way that resilient does do something. In return, you've accused me of being condescending. I think from now on, I won't even give any hints when you have questions. And if you have feedback about the game, maybe be respectful when people are trying to help you. Cheers.

There may well be a middle ground, but that's one that I would hope would be in the developer's hands to find rather than have their hands forced by the community decompiling their code. And to leave you with a question, do you think I'd take the resilient trait if it didn't do anything? I assure you, I know how it works. Just food for thought.