TheHourMan

We've confirmed with several servers that VOIP can have a negative effect on server stability. If the fixes in this build don't fix all your issues with black boxing or lag, please consider moving to Discord for your voice chat if possible, and disabling VOIP server side for a smoother experience until we figure it out.
 
Potential fix for instances of blackboxing on servers, where a client would be waiting endlessly for the server to send chunks (after already connected). Added splash-screen logos for General Arcade and Noiseworks. Fixed the PlayerBumpPlayer option. Added some new melee sounds. New weapon breaks, gore assets, long blade, short blade, umbrella among others. Fixed the game version string being different in some languages, breaking multiplayer. Fixed corpse inventory being 50 instead of 8 in multiplayer. Fixed sheet ropes destroyed by zombies not being synced in multiplayer. Fixed barricaded doors not visibly shaking when attempting to open them. Removed unused lines from the Linux dedicated server's start-server.sh. Fixed microwaves continuing to run on the server when the timer expired. Fixed the /additem server command not working with underscores in the item type. Fixed "Server Statistic" debug ui errors when the server's -statistic period is zero. Added exception handling around IsoChunk.AddVehicles() to fix the server dying when adding vehicles. Rewrote IsoChunk.isGoodVehiclePos() to handle vehicles at arbitrary angles, and to check for collisions with vehicles on neighbouring chunks. Fixed randomly-placed corpses being naked in multiplayer. Changed the PauseEmpty server option default to "true". Fixed zombies not becoming corpses sometimes in splitscreen multiplayer. Fixed a Lua error adding a saved splitscreen player in multiplayer.  
New MP statistics UI is added to admin powers. Byte buffer for SpriteRenderer was increased for debug mode to show whole population map ShowMpInfo admin power enables/disables statistics gathering
Server disables statistics gathering if no requests for 10 seconds

Good work guys  all of the impatience in the community may feel stressful, but it's a very good sign. It means you have an excellent track record for quality and that what you've shown is so good that it became a priority in those people's lives. Be proud!

Talented screenshotter!
 
This update will not go live this week, no.
 

Howdy, pardnerz! This time, we’re taking a look at one of the most subscribed Project Zomboid mods of all time: Filibuster Rhymes’ Used Cars (a version of the mod for Build 40 can be found here.) The mod’s description promises a “handful” of new vehicles, but you’d have to have pretty big hands to fit all 90+ new vehicles! 
 

 
The vehicles all spawn naturally within the base game’s “traffic” and replicate the simple but beautiful graphical style of our existing cars.
Along with a variety of new sedans, compacts, SUVs, police cars, and pick-up trucks similar to the vehicles we’re used to, the mod adds heavy box trucks and flatbeds, fuel trucks, big yellow school buses, military Humvees, and some more retro cars like rusted pick-ups and a certain famous rear-engined German car from the 1960s. Filibuster even went to the bother of creating fictional lore-friendly names for his vehicles, so they fit even more snugly into our game. 
 

 
Each of the vehicles have unique handling characteristics and add more options for vehicle strategies. Should you pick the reliable old compact, the speedy sports car, or the huge and roomy but tediously slow truck? (You should choose the nippy Pazuzu truck, objectively the best vehicle in the mod).
 

 

 
We headed on down to Filibuster’s lot and, after agreeing to a sweet deal on a 3-wheeled Chevalier Dart, got him to answer a few questions for us about himself and his mod.
 
Filibuster

 
Hello Filibuster! Who are you in real life?
 
I’m pretty much just a slacker with a fat diabetic cat. Nothing too exciting, honestly.
 
How did you first discover PZ? Why do you like it?
 
I got it way back on Desura. I really like more slow-paced hardcore survival games, stuff where you’ve gotta plan a little bit instead of just going buck wild. I rarely stick with a game for more than a few weeks, but me and my friends played Build 40 multiplayer for like three months straight!
 
How did you get into PZ modding? Did you have experience making or modding other games previously?
 
The most experience I had with Blender was smashing together two models like a caveman beating on rocks to add some arms to the gun models in System Shock 2. Most of my modding in other games has been simple stuff like changing weapon damage in config files.
 
When did you start developing your used car mod? How long have you spent making it? How has it changed and developed over time?
 
I sometimes get into creative phases that last a while. I used to just waste time in games like Space Engineers or Interstellar Rift, then get disgusted with myself for wasting so much time. When I started modelling a few cars sometime in 2018, I just kinda went wild, ignored my girlfriend for like two months and threw a buncha models together into a pack. I can’t really tell ya how much time’s gone into it all together, but it was definitely a lotta fun.
 
It all started with a boxy, torn looking model that didn’t even light up and snowballed into 70 or 90 something vehicles and trailers. I’ve lost count! Most other stuff has just been keeping up with the game’s new features. I’m really not looking forward to vehicle interiors and animated doors and stuff, oh man…
 
Your car mod is one of the most popular PZ mods of all time. Do you have an interest in cars in real life? If so, what’s your dream car?
 
Man, I never expected the mod to blow up like it did! It’s crazy to think that something like 90k people are using it. 
 
I used to be super into older muscle cars. I had a 1971 Impala for a good few years. It was beat to shit, had a rusted-through leaky vinyl roof filled with Great Stuff™ foam, no working AC, but I loved it (still do) and wanted to add it to the game. I also had an ‘83 El Camino and a ‘68 Bonneville, but I think I’ve gotten to the point where I prefer the ease and comfort of modern stuff. Old stuff is so much easier to work on, though. (Like, the engine compartment of my Impala was an empty aircraft hangar compared to my Corolla!) 
 
As for my dream car? I used to really want a 1968 Buick Wildcat or LeSabre convertible. Now I’m thinkin’ I’d like another El Camino.
 
Do you have a favourite from your own vehicles in the mod? Have players given feedback on their favourites? Or least favourite?
 
Shoot, that’s kinda a hard choice. I guess I’m more drawn to the Suburban and the Blazer when I’m playing. I’m pretty happy about some of the references I’ve put on stuff, like the moving truck or Pazuzu box trucks. A lot of people seem really thrilled over the military stuff and easter egg vehicles I’ve thrown in there.
 
How difficult is it for you to model new cars, and keep them consistent with the style of the base game’s graphics? How long does it take you to debug them?
 
Making new cars has gotten a LOT easier since I first started. I still have to Google half the stuff I’m trying to do on Blender. I’ve never been super artistic, so the texturing was more of a science than an art to me. I tried to copy the vanilla style as much as possible and it worked out somehow. If the game didn’t go for the low poly style, there’s definitely no way I could match it.
 
Scripting and debugging the vehicles was actually more difficult than modelling them when I first started. You’d have to change a few settings for, like, tire locations, start the game, test, close it, change, start, test, repeat. Thankfully, TIS added some tools to debug mode that make it super simple now!
 
How have you found the PZ community? How helpful has their feedback been? Is there anyone in the PZ community you would like to give a shout-out/thanks to?
 
I’m not really the most social dude, but I’ve had lots of helpful bug reports. Sometimes when I add in a buncha stuff, I miss some really small, stupid little thing that screws something big up. It’s definitely nice when someone catches that.
 
And heck yeah, I’ve got some people to thank! Super early on, Soul Filcher helped me out with getting the models to load. Then Fenris Wolf wrote pretty much ALL the code for the old model loading system and made it super-efficient and simple for even someone like me to understand!
 
My buddy Blair (Planet Algol) has been helping me with fuel trailers recently. And by helping me out, I mean he literally wrote all the code for it!
 
Shout-out too to Hurley who helped test the last version, and MrDanny who’s been really nice and helpful to people in my Discord who are learning to mod.
 
And Charger? You get a shout out just for being Charger.
 
Finally, an obvious one, but I’d like to thank the devs for everything, ESPECIALLY the debug tools!
 
What vehicles or vehicle features would you most like to see added to the base game?
 
Repainting vehicles and customising parts would be great. Like, some having carburettors and others having fuel injection, some having a manual and others having automatic transmission. I think it’s probably already in the works, but being able to add like a luggage rack or big f-off bumper would be awesome too
 
Other than your own, which mods/maps do you enjoy or find interesting?
 
Besides testing, I haven’t actually played much in the last few years! Back in Build 40, ORGM was/is a must. Clearing out Fort Redstone was super memorable, too. The hospital there was packed to the brim with zombarinos. We had to go outside because we kept getting sick from all the bodies! Wild times, man.
 
What’s next in your modding plans? What’s the dream?
 
Blair and I have a gun mod in the works. It’s mostly modelled and planned out, we’re just waiting for changes to the vanilla game to get a little more stable so he doesn’t have to redo a bunch of code. We’ve had another idea floating around for a long while too, but we’re gonna keep that under wraps for now. It’s not gonna be a roadside picnic, so it might not even pan out. But I gotta admit, my ultimate creative dream is to make my own game!
 
Thanks to Filibuster for taking time to answer our questions! You can find his car mod here.

How do all, let’s get on into it.
MP WORK
This week we were excited to welcome a new MP Strike Force team member into the ranks from General Arcade. Aleksandr comes to us with a lot of experience in Java projects, and will be working alongside Yuri and Andrei for the foreseeable future.
 
Whereas before our own team of testers and volunteers were putting the MP build through its paces, now the TIS team are working on mainline SP releases we have also separated testing duties – and GA have their own branch and testing channel populated by two other bright, shiny new faces – Oleg and Mikhail.
 
This allows us to concentrate on the more imminent 41 releases (Noiseworks, 3D items etc) while allowing General Arcade to come to us with cleaner builds for wider internal testing when the time is right – as opposed to our previous weekly TIS-side sessions.
 
Recent work has concentrated on combat between zombies and groups of players, though the guys have also hooked up a few things like thrown objects etc that had been left untouched thus far. As in the current build the latter still looks like the jankest thing in the game currently, but will do for now until we have time to input throwables that at least look like they obey the laws of physics.
 
“Last month we implemented a system in which zombies would visibly react to hits from their target player, but attacks from other players present would only create splashes of blood and drops in health” explains Yuri. “Unfortunately, this didn’t look good at all. You never felt that you’d hit the zombie if you weren’t its target, as it wouldn’t play a reaction animation.”
 
“As such, we allowed the zombie animated reactions to all players – but made it so that the super-close zombies within 5 in-game metres of their target would be far less likely to be distracted by other players. To add some texture to this, however, zombies also now have an aggro level – meaning that if attacked sufficiently within a short time interval a zed closing in on its target will change its target. The server now calculates aggro level for each zombie and sends a ZombieControl packet to change the owner.”
 
“We also put a lot of work into our syncing of zombies falling to the ground – which when allowed to happen out of time can lead to increased desync. Our first implementation was working fine for solo players, but when multiple players were attacking zeds the fall position was being rewritten and there was confusion between all the different clients. We believe we now have a solution for this by concentrating on the attacks of the target player, which the team are now testing.”
 
“We have also been fixing bugs discovered by our QA team, like players not being able to kill each other, debugged issues of corpse teleport, worked on various aspects of throwables that were not already implemented and many other issues.”
 
  NEXT 41
We don’t want to mix in too much more to the upcoming 41.54 version of the IWBUMS public beta feature-wise, as it’s already pretty packed. Likewise we also need to make sure that everything going into the 3D items behaves visually and performance-wise, so it’s going to be at least two weeks away most likely.
 
This said we are SUPER jazzed by how the 3D items are looking in-game, and look forward to being able to provide more varied in-game starting / zed story scenes to bring more variety to the map.
 

 
Please check out the entirety of this vid showing a player-decorated safehouse, and also note that since this was taken RJ has added in first iteration of a system that allows you to drag an item from your inventory and place it more accurately on the floor, and to rotate the item using the R key.
 
WIP NOTICE: You may notice when the camera is panned the 3D objects don’t match the 2D tile positions perfectly. This has been a longstanding issue with vehicles and zombies, but has never really been this noticeable as there’s been less of it to see on-screen. We’re setting Zac and his magical maths abilities on this fix tomorrow, and will also be looking to match the lighting of the 3D objects closer match the 2D tiles before release. Despite all this, we hope you’ll agree that it looks awesome.
 
  Oh, also clearly there’s Noiseworks sounds in here now too – we’ve covered the revamped PZ soundscape enough in the past now, but everything the NW team have done up to this point is now in the internal test build.
 
Phase two of their work is starting next week, alongside fixes and required changes brought up by our internal testers and agreed by the core team. Here’s a quick ‘latest’ vid on that front. (There’s some debate internally on the shotgun ‘bang’ noise – so please treat that aspect as WIP for now.)
 
 
 
Other smaller fun/necessary stuff going into 41.54 will be:
 
A fix for those pesky framerate chugs you can get after long journeys in a vehicle (hurrah!) Visible flies over corpses (and, later, rotten food etc)  
 
Some required nerfs to knife-fighting QoL improvements to multi-stage building Better lighting effects from emergency lights, to go along with the better Noiseworks sirens. (Sirens not playing in this vid, but oh well it looks good)  
 
On top of this there’ll also be Turbo and Pat_Bren/Will’s VHS and CD entertainment system – which we’ve covered in previous blogs and is also now in testing.
 
Pat and Will (but mainly Pat, in all truth) have provided 3900 new lines for the new system, which should keep the translators busy.
 
ALL THINGS LOUISVILLE
As we’ve mentioned before, our PZ version of Louisville is now certainly on the horizon – so we thought it might be a good idea to check in with our map team to provide you with a clearer idea of what to expect when it does arrive.

Q. To what extent is Louisville based on reality?
A. Mash:
 
“Initially Binky made the general layout follow reality for the most part, but from that base I took some liberties- some larger than others. For gameplay reasons I wanted to have our (necessarily smaller scale) LV to encompass the types of neighbourhoods you might encounter in any city: the “bad neighbourhood”, the “business district”, the “rich area”.”
 
“As such, the locations of these are not at all based on the real Louisville. For one thing, the city on our map is much smaller (though still relatively huge), so we couldn’t really adhere to reality. The main goal was to make map exploration more fun and engaging, and having varied neighbourhoods that might not be totally realistic but makes organic sense within the map is part of that.”
 
“I think there won’t be much recognition of Louisville and it feeling just like the real world one when you are exploring it on the ground, but that said you will see some recognizable buildings here and there, such as City Hall.”
 
“We are also taking some inspiration from real world districts when we are designing some of our own, for example I know that Xeonyx has loosely based our version of NE Louisville (home of our new Grand Ohio Mall) on the St. Matthews district east of real world LV, and his old town district around Fossoil Field is based off the real world’s Smoketown and Phoenix Hill.”
 
“As I said previously however, in terms of being close to reality it’s better to think of our version of Louisville to be closer to our more recent additions to the map, rather than having the veracity of places like Muldraugh and West Point”

 
Q. How does it differ when you’re designing a city, as compared to when you created PZ’s smaller towns?
A. Mash:
 
“The size of the city and the new map makes things exponentially more complicated, which led us to choosing to knuckle down on identifiable themed neighbourhoods which would benefit a game like PZ more clearly. From this we then had to make sure it transitioned from one area to another in a way that made some sort of sense. The smaller towns are, for the most part, fairly uniform in feel within each individual location.”

 
Q. Clearly with PZ you are limited to seven storeys and a rooftop – is it frustrating not being able to go higher?
A. Mash:
 
“I think things are pretty relative, and since buildings are only 1-3 storeys in other locations, the 7 storey buildings of our Louisville give a good sense of size and, I think, allow for pretty identical gameplay as if the game had even taller buildings.”
 
A. Xeonyx
“To me, being limited to 7 stories isn’t really a problem. It doesn’t negatively affect gameplay, and the buildings offer a nice mix of high risk/high reward while still retaining the feeling of a large city.”

 
Q. What are your favourite new buildings and locations?
A. Mash:
 
“Some of my favourite buildings I want to leave as a surprise, but one of my favourite areas is the university area.”


  A. Xeonyx
“The scale and design of Louisville offers many new playstyles and challenges to experience, but if I were to pick a favorite new location, it’d be a tie between the gritty industrial district, and the South Louisville district which was designed to be similar to the real life Auburndale district.”

NEW NOLAN MOD
Some areas that we are very aware that PZ needs some improvement in are those related to accessibility – some stuff we’re okay at, some stuff needs a lot of love.
 
For this reason we just wanted to take a second to highlight Nolan’s new mod – which will be of massive help to those who are hard of hearing.
 
Likewise it’ll probably be handy for those who like to PZ while doing another activity, watching TV or similar, where you’re not always glued to your speakers for audio cues and clues.

So, all in all, if this is something that you need improved in PZ, then for now please please check out the Sound Direction Indicator. Thanks Modding Hero Nolan!

  Thanks everyone next week we’ll have a Mod Spotlight on that beautiful creature Filibuster Rhymes, and in the dev blog following that there’ll be lots more goodies including a first full look at TIS newbie Eris’ awesome improved foraging system.
 
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!

I think the half-baked release of Cyberpunk 2077 was a pretty big indicator that the video game communities unanimously wished devs would stick to "we'll release it when it's done" and not a minute earlier. Thank yiu.

THE BAD NEWS This week we have been playing the MP build extensively, to try and get a clearer and more solid idea how much work would be required to get it into a state we’d be comfortable releasing, and have increasingly become aware that it’s not good enough. We have been too optimistic, and for that we are extremely sorry.
 
Advances have been made, and the quality of where it is going is clear from our many tester testimonials and gameplay sessions, but since the (vital) transitions to zombies on the client it is not even close to the quality that the game or our players deserve, even for a beta. Furthermore, the deeper we’ve looked into it, the more systemic issues deep down have reared their heads.
It needs more time in the oven. We simply cannot release it half-baked. You don’t have to look far in gaming to see what can happen when you do.
 
We recognise that (especially in the past two weeks) we have been making cautiously optimistic noises – but put simply the more we played, the more we became aware of deep-rooted issues that it would be near-impossible to fix in a ‘live service’ situation. 
 
Project Zomboid has every chance of being extremely popular when we release MP – it’s something that we’ve read from people everywhere, and increasingly something we’ve quietly believed ourselves. As we’ve said multiple times in the past, the multiplayer release of 41 is by far the most important build in Zomboid’s history, and if we don’t stick that landing it would be bad.
 
As it stands the MP build we’re playing internally isn’t robust enough to cope with potentially huge floodgates being opened upon it. Support requests, tech queries and bug reports would simply drown us – and the player and community experience would be poor in the absolute extreme. 
 
We had a big meeting with General Arcade, and went through everything that could (and should) still be done to make PZ a MP game that could both stand the test of time, and a huge launch day. Something that would keep multiplayer servers populated and not result in disappointment for our community that have been so patient for so long.
 
This will likely be a much longer wait than we’ve been hoping, and particularly in light of the last two weeks of misguided hopefulness over improvements that while exciting, in the cold hard light of day still are far short of what we would dare release. 
 
We have long shied away from giving any form of ETA, but in the interest of ensuring we are not stringing anyone along with vague notions of a timescale Thursdoid after Thursdoid, we have agreed with our MP team that anything up to six months should be the ballpark we’re now aiming for when it comes to getting a Build 41 MP release into player hands to a level of quality we’ll be confident it won’t blow up in everyone’s faces. 
 
We know this will be of disappointment for many — and we’ll likely receive some flak for this decision — which is understandable, especially given the noises we’ve been making in the Thursdoids recently. 
 
But we ask those that are upset by this news please to bear in mind other recent releases that people were begging for, and getting increasingly hyper-frustrated at the frequent delays — only to finally have it in their hands, as they facepalmed and asked themselves why the hell this wasn’t held back further??
 
That’s what we’re doing — because we’re lucky enough to be in a position we’re able to do that, both financially, as well as without marketing spends or boardroom pressure forcing our hand, and we are committed to the fact that while we feel the pressure from the community’s frustrations at the wait as well as our own desire for it to be ‘done’, we will not allow that to blind us to putting something out that will end badly for both us and our community that want to see the game grow. We may get a bloody nose for delaying it further and for this long, but we’ll take that gladly to ensure that doesn’t instead happen on release–as that’s a bloody nose we might not recover from.
 
This has been an immensely difficult week for us — people sometimes forget that we want this build out there too. It’s not just a game to us but our daily lives, and the march toward a multiplayer release — the moment we’ve desired to see for so long vanishing away months into the distance, and the prospect of continuing that climb for another six months is heartbreaking to us. 
 
Nonetheless, it’s 100% the right call — we will not waver, and when all is said and done and multiplayer has been out for months and everyone is playing it, we promise everyone — ourselves and our community — will be glad we made this call, instead of releasing in a soon forgotten whimper. 
 
We may take our time, but we get the job done in the end. Hopefully the almost unanimously positive reception to the long awaited animation update proved that to be the case. I honestly believe we wouldn’t be where we are today if we weren’t just as strict back then on what we put out, when everyone was chomping at the bit to play it, bugs and all, and couldn’t fathom why we were being so careful and protective for such a long time. Now people have had it for a long while, no one would want to go back in time and have us retroactively release the anim build 6 months earlier than we felt comfortable doing so, and risk it crashing like a lead balloon and damaging the game’s reputation and future. Our caution led to the most success Zomboid has ever enjoyed. We know the same will be true about multiplayer when people are finally playing it.
 
We’ve discussed with GA about getting two more internal QA engineers the MP team will have direct access to day to day while working, to allow them to more quickly diagnose and test stuff with more players outside our TIS internal tests. 
 
They are also on the lookout for additional resources for the coding team to speed things up. Though it’s worth pointing out that this will require some significant time to learn the codebase and get up to speed for any new developer, which is why it was never a practical solution before our decision to commit to this longer delay with which to capitalize on another coder. 
 
We hope with the changes we make, along with many organizational changes to improve our internal workflow with GA, we can deliver something sooner, and will of course continue looking for new avenues to speed things up — but for all intents and purposes we’re committing to this period of delay to make sure it is definitely achievable and no one should be under any illusions of expecting it sooner. 
 
 
THE GOOD NEWS
It’s not all bad news however. This longer and more defined schedule of getting MP up to scratch makes it clear that we can’t just continue this release drought in the meantime. 
 
Therefore we are going to start releasing IWBUMs builds with new content in the interim, rather than holding back until the MP build is complete as was our original plan.  
 
We will be removing MP elements from the current trunk code that would interfere with the single player game, and releasing a six month backlog of changes, fixes, optimization and upgrades waiting to go into the game. LWJGL 3 and java 15 upgrades in particular that will improve performance and compatibility, not least a new fancy garbage collector we’ve never had the opportunity to use before that should all but eliminate any periodic pauses that have plagued our game in the past.
 
After this, we will be starting to release additional content builds to tide the community over in the wait. We have to be somewhat careful on the style of content we add, so as to not make the MP work more complicated and hold it back further, but stuff you should be able to look forward to in the coming months include:
 
Noiseworks sound overhaul. Noiseworks are due to provide the first complete version of their ‘round 1’ additions to the game, replacing all sounds in the game, for testing and feedback from TIS. Those keeping up with the Thursdoids will have a good idea of what this will bring. After some testing, and adjusting sounds to tester and community feedback, we’ll be getting this out to you as soon as we can. Noiseworks will then be continuing with adding additional sounds, and a procedural music system, which will bring even more atmosphere to the game.
  Map updates. We’re pushing toward a release of Louisville, which nears completion outside some zoning work and bug-fixing. It’s unclear how much time remains to polish this up to releasable standard, but it seems very likely it will drop before multiplayer. Non-90 degree roads with curves, improvements to the existing map, and even perhaps beyond our original scope of the map now our mapping team has grown.
  Several other really cool gameplay features. We’ll talk about them in the coming Thursdoids when we can feel confident they will drop in the interim period.

  THURSDOIDS
Speaking of Thursdoids, a primary piece of feedback we’ve had from the MP team has been the detrimental effect that the weekly cycle of blog updates on MP progress has had on the development process. 
 
A weekly development sprint, where results are desired to show off or talk about makes it much harder to work on longer term improvements. To be honest this is not the first time this has been brought up or felt by the TIS team, the weekly blogs have always stacked a lot of pressure on our shoulders, only ever being 7 days away. But we are both immensely proud of our weekly blogs, and have found them to be a huge part of keeping our community content and informed. Truth be told, we have also been somewhat nervous that reducing their frequency suddenly may be perceived by our community as some kind of winding down, rather than something that would improve development in any way, and so have long been resistant to change.
 
However, in the interest of aiding the MP team in having the time to do longer and less interrupted work on features without the pressure to provide small incremental improvements that clearly haven’t been enough to make the leaps to release that are needed–we are going to make the following changes to how we release Thursdoids over the coming six month period.
 
We will be doing bi-weekly Thursdoids (that’s every two weeks). These will likely be more content-packed, and have more time spent writing them. They will hopefully provide much more bang for your buck and less likely to have us repeating ourselves.
  We’re only going to focus on multiplayer development every other Thursdoid, allowing the team to have a solid month to make longer term, deeper and more substantial improvements without worrying about us coming knocking for stuff to show or test. The alternate Thursdoid will focus on the single-player interim updates, features and fixes coming in the shorter term. That all said if we do have cool MP stuff to talk about, we’ll be sure to let you know regardless of what week it falls on.
  We’ll see how these Thursdoids go down over the coming months, and will decide based on that what to do once multiplayer releases whether to go back to weekly Thursdoids or to carry on with bi-weekly.
 
Thanks for reading, and apologies again for the major misstep in our recent enthusiasm. While we did state it was ‘cautious optimism’, we regret letting short term improvements and perhaps a bit of wishful thinking colour our blog updates. Sometimes you just get lost in the weeds and an uptick one week is deceptive to how much work really remains. We hope the firmer date will give solace to those who check week after week to frustration, who are largely only interested in multiplayer, that they can safely put our game aside for a while, and when to start looking again. And to everyone else, we hope getting fresh content again will help the time pass that little bit quicker.

 
Much love
 
The Indie Stone

Yeah misread. '...features going in this week' meant internally. It'll be very clear when it's out and not just mentioned in a line that people could miss.

Let’s start off this week with something exciting that’s not piped straight out of Build 41 MP testing.
 
Long-time readers of this dev blog might recall that our writer / creative director / dogsbody Will wrote for renowned horror sci-fi game Alien: Isolation a few years ago.
 
Alien Isolation is widely seen as a cult classic for a variety of reasons, but its BAFTA award winning sound design is one of the most compelling. The noise of the creature in the vents, Amanda’s trainers treading and squeaking on the floors of Sevastopol, the way you’d strain to hear where it might be approaching from, the subtle beeps and whirrs of the machinery around you etc.


 
Will really got on with both of the main sound guys on the final approach to the Alien project’s release, Byron Bullock and Sam Cooper, who both very generously allowed him to hold their BAFTA on the night they won it.
 
While Sam remains at Creative Assembly, Byron went on to start up a company called Noiseworks with another Senior Sound Designer from the CA Total War team called David Phillipp.
 
Ever since then we have pined for Byron and the Noiseworks team, dearly wishing that Project Zomboid could one day have soundscape with the same stratospherically high quality bar as Alien: Isolation.
 
And so…

   “We are excited to be working on Project Zomboid and can’t wait to craft an immersive and compelling sonic landscape for all of its survivors!” said Noiseworks Creative Director Byron Bullock when requested for blog content.
 
“We plan to re-work the entire sonic landscape and have plans for some pretty awesome zombies, detailed and highly-dynamic world audio and an overall exciting soundscape that helps immerse players in the world of the Knox Event Exclusion Zone!”
 
We currently have a roadmap plotted out for Noiseworks over a period of many months, and their work will not be appearing (or mentioned in blogs) for quite a long time.
 
What with their Technical Sound Designer Michael already in the guts of our new FMOD project, however, and us deep in discussions with Byron about how zombies should sound, foot-steps, the ambient sounds of Kentucky nature etc etc we wanted to share the news so you know about the team-up.
 
We know we rarely discuss stuff that won’t be a part of our current build, but in the instance of teaming up with another group of experts and widening our skillbase we thought we’d make an exception. Exciting times!
 
41 MP TEST NEWS
Now back to your regular programming. We had a small W.N.I.T.S. (Wednesday Night Internal Test Session) last night, with the intention of holding a wider one on Friday.
 
Overall we had improved (but not fixed) zed teleportation issues, but we also had some annoying server instability that suggests more work ahead – we need to investigate this and that some of the work we’ve been doing on map-load / driving issues need a good, thorough debugging.
 
When there was less than five players a generally improved experience was reported, despite one super-distant player reporting some lag issues early on. Hopefully the latter was caused by the aforementioned instability, but we shall see.
 
Here’s the changelist for what we were testing last night, for those intrigued by the nitty-gritty.
 
And here’s a quick fun video of what went down. As you can, hopefully, see the close combat with zeds is really starting to come along now.
Friday’s test will again shake fresh issues out of the bug tree though. There’s still much to be done.
 

OTHER STUFF
Zac has been wringing out a few more chunks of performance gain from the 3D animations. His shared SharedSkeles eliminate the need for 99% of updateModelTransform calls on IsoZombie (blog writer does not understand this I’m afraid) which should give a 33% boost to overall animation performance on IsoZombie crowds. A video, with before and after!
 

Meanwhile in MP land RJ and Martin have been working on PvP and new PvP animations, while Tim has also added some improvements to controller detection – which will hopefully improve a lot of gamepad compatibility issues.
 
Turbo meanwhile has been optimizing his fog and mist which, as has been reported by the community on several occasions – thank you, has a tendency to tank FPS at inopportune moments.
 
Finally for inclusion this week: ‘Rockstar’ Mark Wright is now nearly at the end of his mission creating 3D models for all our inventory items – so it’ll all look more realistic when seen on the floor. (Just as weapons currently appear when placed down)
 

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

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

• New hair styles and hair functions
Are there plans to improve (Obese) & (Skinny) body customization as well as face for various ethnicities and just not to be all clones ?
It would be pretty stylish to have a character that looks like Bob & Kate, and for later when implementing the NPCs, to have different NPCs on the face.

Ah and another question, is this a mistake, a homemade spear (0.4weight) is heavier than a tree branch (0.2weight), when you prune it to be sharper.
 

Hi all, here’s the latest from the internal test build of the Build 41 MP beta – which we’re working on and fixing up until it’s of a standard appropriate for wider testing.
 
Our current routine is for a playtest of 10, or so, players every Wednesday night – with a report the next day for the community. Which is where you find us today!
 
First off, here’s the changelist of everything that had been added for the seven days previous to last night’s test.
 
Second off, here’s a brief highlights reel from proceedings.
 
Last night’s test had a Prison Break theme, with a cross-country dash intended to test vehicles. It was a lot of fun, and again very valuable in terms of exposing bugs and showing what’s improved – and would could do with further refinement.
 
Key areas we need to focus on are:
 
There are still some occasional zombies that we have dubbed ‘superzeds’ that tend to teleport straight in front of the player and attack. Some players seem to get this more than others, irrespective of their own personal ping. Vehicle sync, player sync within vehicles and ‘player name drift’ during transit are all improved – but not completely. Physics bugs (video seen below) are also still present, but not quite as insane. Yuri is also still looking into ways to improve memory use and optimize map loading, as we suspect ‘traffic cone blockages’ on new map chunks will become more of an issue on higher population servers. Zombie death and corpse placement is still an issue – which Andrei will hopefully put in a fix for in coming days. We need to tighten up players in your local area, as sometimes the teleport we’re using to ‘catch up’ is too aggressive. This works fine, but will cause issues for PvP.  
Here are a few screenies from last night too:
 
NON-MP STUFF DONE THIS WEEK
Shift+double click can now be used on clothing items in the inventory to wear the item Newest earned skill level is now highlighted when the skill panel is opened New hair styles and hair functions Improved movables system – movables can now be dismantled from within the inventory.  
SPIFFO’S FINAL THOUGHT (AGAIN, AGAIN):
Although everything is looking very positive with the MP stuff PLEASE note that we still have a pretty long ‘to do’ list before we can consider a public IWBUMS beta release and Community Megatests.

We are sorry for being such massive teases with this stuff, but we hope you’ll agree it’s better than some sort of radio silence.

As an apology here’s an amusing compilation of the vehicle bugs that we’ve been stamping out recently.
 
 
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!

Okay, so TLDR after the last night’s Wednesday Night Test Session on the Build 41 MP beta is that the new MP is increasingly LOTS of fun, but there is still LOTS for us to do.
 
For those interested in the nitty-gritty, here’s the changelist for the week of dev-time that was being tested.
 
For those who would rather just see a few quick vids and screenshots of the developers, PZ server admins and modders we assembled to have a play of the current Build 41 MP, here’s some of the very same:
 
 

And, an example of one of the many bugs we still need to seek and destroy.


  And a few bits of tester feedback:

“The whole group of us met up around the campfire and then made a cross-Kentucky trek. As we lost more and more people the feeling of being in a zombie movie slowly intensified. We started out with like… a dozen people and then hordes split us, people got bitten, etc. All was extremely fun and engaging. Despite a few bits of lag/desync, it really played extremely well. Issues seemed mostly to be fussy visual ones.&rdquo

“It really was a blast, overall it’s very playable at the moment. There’s some desync with players sometimes, some slight tp’ing zombies and a bit of confused zeds when lots of players are around – but the overall experience is so smooth and SO PZ.”
 
So, what items are on the list for polish and fixing ready for the next Wednesday MP test? Well, among other things, the following are in the spotlight:
 
We’re seeing occasional black-boxing and car weirdness (as seen above) so we 100% need to crack down on this. Players can’t move after being shot We’ve got some item-duping on different events, like falls Player lighting (flashlights etc) isn’t synced Some SFX still aren’t matching up Lots of general improvement to connections, admin settings, chatbox etc.
  Other non-MP stuff done this week:
 
Zombies can now pathfind through destroyable objects. They prefer to go around, but if there is no other path, they’ll thump on walls and crates, etc.
  (We are aware that, coupled with the zeds crawling beneath cars update in 41.50 this will be making your lives even more difficult – and are testing this to see how it plays and will be looking at ways to compensate for it, perhaps increased wall and object health etc)
 
Some really promising optimization that should see a frame-rate and load time boost. General balance to: survivor zeds, loot spawn locations, item weights, some nutrition and whether or not you enjoy eating raw dead animals.
  SPIFFO’S FINAL THOUGHT:

Although everything is looking very positive with the MP stuff PLEASE note that we still have a very long ‘to do’ list before we can consider a public IWBUMS beta release and Community Megatests.

We are sorry for being such massive teases with this stuff, but we hope you’ll agree it’s better than radio silence.
Also, don’t walk on campfires.
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!