vek

xD yeah... very respectful
 
I get that you are upset about losing a one-year-run but I also guess it's not the first time you encountered a house alarm, so what did also happen that you were not aware of the zombie (in the house)?
My deaths are usually caused by a lack of attention and too much confidence... getting cocky.
 
Btw. you can change the house alarm settings so that zombies would also activate them. I never did it myself because I think that this would be even crappier as everytime you enter a fresh cell an alarm goes off somewhere and all the zombies in the vicinity start wandering there, I guess (depending on how it's implemented). But as I said iI never tried it so maybe it will work for you?
 
And one question (to all house owners): I would've thought that all house alarms do have batteries?!
 

Besides cosmetic - there really isn't any purpose to add so many guns \ calibers
Since the weapon combat system is essentially RNG. RNG whether you hit, RNG whether you kill
 
For example just using
Rifle \ Pistol - ammo no caliber but with;
 
AP Round -> HIgher chance of destroying limbs of zombies \ Goes through armored heads of zombies
JHP Round -> HIgher chance of killing Zombie due to severe damage
Normal Round -> No Bonus
 
Shotgun has  
Slug -> Knockback + high damage
Buckshot -> Higher chance of Limb Dismemberment
Birdshot -> Plentiful \ Low damage 
 
 

I agree that all this melee fighting is somewhat unrealistic but I don't think that bows or slingshots would be that common either in the first few days of the apocalypse, because why would they? The few survivors wouldn't be aware that the loud shooting attracts them from the neighbouring town as there was/is chaos right to the day we start. Most of the people in possession of a firearm would use it, I guess.
More firearms variation would be very much realistic I agree, but it doesn't do much gameplay wise so I would postpone it as there are a few mods that already fill this gap.

По координатам 10910х10030 в небольшом доме комнаты расположены так, что единственный вход в одну из спален только через санузел.

It's a nice idea and I really would love to see such a mechanic ingame but let's look at the current state... you can fill your main inventory up to around 15 without getting encumbrance modifiers at all and fact is that at this weight you are running around with 2-3 long weapons, a load of clothes, some tools and food. I don't know about you but if I don't have a backpack with me I usually carry a phone and a wallet... and everything else would have to be in my hands (or my back if attachable). So we can assume that the main inventory value includes all those small compartments in and on your clothing too because otherwise this value would be way smaller.

Clothing in the game should be able to carry objects considering so many articles of it have pockets, zippers, pouches, etc.
 
I'm tired of my military backpack and my fanny packs getting filled to the brim with stuff and I still don't have room for everything. Notice how I didn't mention main inventory until now. 
 
Well that's because I really don't recommend the main inventory for carrying things. Sure you need it for your clothes, your containers and a few objects here and there but you're really supposed to use your containers which get full as hell really fast and easily. You want to reduce that encumberment as much as possible while carrying as much as possible after all.
 
So anyways here's how it could work; either have each article of clothing that can hold anything have its own icon (like a container icon e.g. backpack) or have each article of clothing have a dropdown menu (by its sprite menu icon) in which the player would drag items in and out of.
 
Like instead of having to immediately load your fanny packs after your main inventory and backpack are full (like yours truly) you could load up your pockets on your pants, coat, jacket, etc. with items.
 
Stuff like cargo pants could hold a ton of stuff like matches, lighters, nails, small food items, flash light, etc.. which would be really great! Jeans wouldn't hold as much and as for pocket less yoga pants they couldn't hold anything.
 
Damaged clothing might hold less due to damaged pockets.

I noticed this recently, when in combat stance the farming tooltip still appears.  If the code checked whether the player was in combat stance I think that would be better.
 
Not now game, I'm busy! 
 

 
 
 
 

This bug happens when you jump out of a window thats higher than the ground floor while speeding up the ingame time. It happens regardless of your encumberence, traits, fps, mods or where the window is facing. Sometimes it leaves you with a fracture but most of the time it kills you.
-Note:fast forward 1x wont kill you but it will leave you with a fracture or a deep wound, fast forward 2x and 3x will always kill you.
 
No mods were used in the clip.
2024-04-07 21-12-22.mkv

This issue should be fixed when B42 comes out. Do let us know how it goes! 

Actually, there are only two character models in the game, one for men and another one for women.
 
This make the game lacks face variety, everyone looks the same, the only difference is the hairstyle or the skin color.
 
The addition of more face models will add variety to multiplayer servers, better blender models faces, etc.
 
 (Important with the addition of flyers and newspaper featuring blender created models in B42)
 
I think more character customization overall is a needed addition for the game.

You need to wait for the door to close fully. Listen to the sound. If you move before the closed SFX play, the door is still open.

Tall fences no longer being indestructible is a very welcome change and its going to have a big impact on gameplay. Less safety is better in this game.

When such heights appear in the game, the question of skydiving will arise. And then the zombies will fall like peas on the asphalt, and the character will smoothly glide on a parachute and move on. Heh heh.)

In zombie games, almost nowhere is found, perhaps, the simplest armor to make and at the same time making a person invulnerable to scratches and zombie bites - you can put on thick clothes and wrap it with layers of adhesive tape, sufficient so that a person cannot bite through it, but leaving the opportunity to move normally.

In zombie games, almost nowhere is found, perhaps, the simplest armor to make and at the same time making a person invulnerable to scratches and zombie bites - you can put on thick clothes and wrap it with layers of adhesive tape, sufficient so that a person cannot bite through it, but leaving the opportunity to move normally.

That looks sweet ! Is it me or the outdoor night is darker than inside the bunker? Should be the same darkness in my opinion, and it would be perfect !
 
Just a question, why not releasing some small updates progressively on unstable branch? like grass, or fences, that should be compatible with the actual build ?
 
I think that would be very appreciated by the community to have fresh things to try out ! (like me after +4k played hours)

Yeah I'd like to be able to see up them stairs too instead of having to rely on the online map of the game world. 
 
You know remembering which building had which steps so I can orientate my character properly to prepare for a zombie attack.
 
If going into a building to clear it out is always a risk at least allow me to be strategic about it starting with being able to look at them stairs!

Hey all, a good mix of things this ‘doid.
 
Fun gameplay stuff, and a chunk of info we wanted to flag for modder-awareness and the more tech-minded amongst you. (Feel free to skip that bit to get to the more enticing gun stuff from Fenris that’s become its first application.)
 
Onwards, then.
HUNKER INNA BUNKER
Permanent underground structures are being added to the internal build’s map for testing.
 
As discussed before some basement locations will be randomised to add surprise flavour to your looting, but there’ll be plenty of ever-present locations that will likely be survivor favourites for taking over and making your own.
 
Here’s a fun example, which also very clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of B42’s tech upgrade that governs the realistic spread of light. It really is very dark down there, and with that very claustrophobic and scary…
 
 
Another aspect of the underground structures is sound, and now we’ve got more and more of these in the test build our sound team will be working to cut out wildlife sounds, add muffle, echo, drips and such. Likewise, meanwhile, another focus is adjusting the noise of ‘street level’ activity when you climb higher in buildings.
 
It’s also worth mentioning that in 42, or at least certainly its unstable release, you will not be able to tunnel or break down the external walls of underground structures. This is something it would be healthy for the engine to be able to do (although we’d never have Minecraft-style insta-tunnels in vanilla, clearly) but is probably a can of worms best opened later down the line.
 
CRAFTING
In amongst the feverish connecting of code wires from others on the crafting team, Turbo has been working on the new interface that will allow for hand-crafting items on in-game surfaces.
 
We’ve got something ready to go into the internal build, but in its current WIP form still needs some polish – and probably isn’t quite ready to show off before its rough edges have been smoothed out.
 
In essence though, this work has been to cater for crafting items that aren’t as straightforward as ripping clothing to make bandages or opening a can of beans (which will always be feasible just in your hands) but don’t necessarily need a specialized workstation either.
 
Activities like preparing a sandwich or making a nailed baseball bat logically require a handy surface to perform the work. The way it’s being implemented – any logical surface will do (tables, counters etc) but this sort of crafting will no longer be possible while standing in the middle of the street with zombies approaching.
 
In terms of changes in player habits and behaviour going from 41 to 42, this will probably be the one that’s felt most keenly. There’s a lot of muscle memory we’ll be scrubbing out here, after all. However we are doing our utmost to keep it logical, and to keep it real.
 
The current challenge has been to devise an interface that accomplishes all the tasks necessary: providing a handy way of browsing or looking up the recipes, allowing for crafting of multiple objects, allowing the use of tools to modify the quality or success chances of the crafting, and giving access to all the functionality provided in the crafting update.
 
We’re not there yet on this surface level, but functionally on the code level it’s all there and working and ready to be integrated into the game. Next steps will be to make the UI as clean and convenient as can be, improving and iterating as we go, as it’s such a core aspect of 42.
 
(Just to reiterate, however, simple crafts like ripping bandages and so on will still be craftable in the way they are in 41: right clicking the item and clicking the relevant right click menu option. This is still the most immediate and convenient way for a player to do these split second crafts in the midst of action.)
 
Meanwhile, of course, the results of all this new crafting continue to get pumped through from the art department, prepped and laid into the code. Here’s a few that popped through recently.
 
MULTIPLAYER
We haven’t heard from the MP bods in a little while so let’s go over to Andrei for a little while:

“We are very busy on the Multiplayer side of things. When Build 41 MP was first released we had three coders on our team, and now due to the success of 41 we have five.
 
As many will be aware we have been focused on anti-cheat functionality for the last several months which is now being finalized: preventing cheating with inventory and items by moving their processing from clients to the server.
 
Clearly simultaneous to this we have also been working on the integration of new 42-specific gameplay – most notably adding support for animals into MP.
 
We have also been moving the team onto the fixes, feature requests and changes we have heard from the community.
 
Some highlights of this are as follows, but please note that our list is long and not everything will be mentioned! If you’ve felt it or found it annoying in your MP play then it is probably on our list:
 
Privacy and Anti-Cheat work. We are improving our anti-cheat functionality, and adding various new mechanisms. Improving synchronization of characters between clients. We are debugging and fixing issues where zombies appear unexpectedly for the player, or players teleport instead of walking. PVP animations and logging. Current hit reactions in PVP lead to unfair and unfun behaviours, likewise there are issues with disconnecting during PVP. We are planning to fix this and extend PVP logging. Safehouses. As players will be aware, there are various issues related to exploits and safehouse raids that we need to fix. We also have a lot of things in mind for nice-to-have improvements that we hope to share with you in future blogs.  
Thanks to Andrei for his thoughts and, again, to underline – this isn’t the only stuff that’s on their ‘to do’ list. It is, however, what’s in their sights over the month ahead.
 
While we are talking MP, however, it would be remiss to not mention another side project that’s gone into the game recently.
This is disguise option for multiplayer which, if enabled by the server admin, will allow players to disguise their username by wearing a combination of lower and upper face coverings, or indeed full face coverings.
 
The hope is that these will create some interesting dynamics for RP and PVP servers, and indeed for general banditry purposes.
 
(Clearly there’s also a few failsafes having to be built into this! Admins will be able to can also disguise themselves too if enabled and will always see right through disguises, there’s an option to disable disguises inside safehouses, and the system can be disabled entirely on servers that don’t want anonymity to be a feature).
 
OTHER FUN STUFF
Okay, before we get to some of the more in-depth stuff some quickfire smaller nuggets of interesting things that have gone into the game recently.
We are making some character traits have more direct gameplay implications – with a case-in-point being character builds with vision-related issues. Likewise, helmets and headgear that limit what your player can see will get similar, but not identical, effects.
 
(PLEASE NOTE: effect seen in the following video is WIP. It was an internal video, but is too fun not to share)
 
 

The Event Zone’s Wild West tourist attraction is now in testing and open for business – now featuring a new game item that is the wooden coffin.
 
 
Our good friend Ash from TEA has been working with us to integrate Bink into PZ, which is some cool middleware that grown-up games use to play videos, cut-scenes and the like.
 
We’re primarily getting it integrated for some cosmetic changes you’ll discover when you boot up the game that’ll be seen at a later date, but it also means that we can now show tutorial videos and such in-game.
 
In future it also makes moving images on TV screens, cinema screens etc. a possibility – although that’ll be a luxury that comes about long after 42 unstable.
 
 
Finally, in the Fun Stuff section – Fox’s 4K-ification mission continues. In fact, it’s nearly done and higher-resolution UIs for 4K players will shortly become available in the internal test build.
 
With higher resolutions, meanwhile comes higher resolution screen furniture. So bid a hearty hello to some of your new, newly detailed, moodles. Friendly folk, aren’t they?
 
PROF’S PROC-GEN
ProfMobius, he of Minecraft heritage who we brought on board towards the end of last year, has been working on the procedurally generated wilderness to exist outside the map borders to allow for a not quite infinite but huge world outside the main map.
 
Currently he’s working on automatic blending between hand crafted content such as the edge of the map with the generated wilderness biomes, to allow for a smooth and seamless transition between them without visible borders.
 
This will also be invaluable for modders, as currently it’s a rather difficult task to blend the edges of a modded map with the vanilla map, which often results in an ugly sudden border of trees or vegetation changes as you transition.
 
The new system will blend in the procedural elements gradually into the vegetation that exists on a modded map, so the border will be less jarring.
He’s also looking into generating roads so they continue from the borders of the main map, which will massively expand the canvas for modders to position their modded maps – what with them now being able to space them out amongst a huge game world instead of overwriting or extending the main map which will vastly reduce the potential for conflicts.
Definitions for biomes, as well as template for road styles will be creatable in lua, allowing for easy modding to provide more diverse and new biomes with different vegetation, different road styles, and ultimately modders will also have access to the building stamping functionality provided by the basement system and could well extend that to place buildings in the world too.
 
The full wilderness map will have a different set of biomes to choose from, allowing less realistic but more varied biomes to be feasible: travelling an hour down the road to get from a desert to a tundra, for example.
 
For obvious reason, however, the extension of the main game map borders will be restricted to sensible Kentucky biomes, but may be able to include stuff like farmland as well as forests and plains.
 
With this system in place, and the huge swaths of wilderness with convenient road networks to utilize, it’s our hope that a heavily map-modded game could have a truly huge gameplay area 100s of times bigger than currently, with potentially miles of wilderness between major locations added by modders
IMGUI DEBUGGING
Okay – this is the technical bit for modders I warned you about. There’s some fun gun-related stuff afterwards if you make it through.
Finally, we expect this to be more of interest to modders than general players, but it will also impact the ease of future development of the game so is good news all around.
 
For the ease of integration of various aspects of Build 43 we took some time to implement a debug gui library known as imgui into the game which replaces our somewhat time- consuming lua based debug interfaces. We realised that it would likely benefit Build 42 content too, and as such it became part of its glorious whole – and indeed started giving us results the very next day.
 
Imgui is, essentially, the industry standard for providing powerful easy-to-implement debugging uis into game engines and it’s already paying dividends.
If you are bored at this point it’s fine to skip to the guns.
First of all, before anyone gets excited about this being used for mod UIs for gameplay, we’re strictly only allowing this to be enabled when debug is activated in the game.
 
This is because the way imgui needs to be rendered is extremely detrimental to our rendering multithreading since it doesn’t support it on opengl, as well as this the entire point of the system is to provide extremely quick to implement debugging UI that favours ease of implementation over performance.
 
As such we need to put our foot down on restricting the new UI to debugging otherwise we’d quickly see our performance gains eaten up dramatically by modded games. We do plan a big UI overhaul in future but want to use UI middleware suited for actual end user gameplay, with all the performance, swishes, fades, pulses and slickness the UI finally deserved. ImGui is not that.
 
In debug mode, the game can now run with more a ‘development IDE’ feel, with various inspectors and dockable windows to examine the bowels of the game and the game viewport as a dockable and resizable window. For example you can inspect all the game UI elements active to allow for easier UI work and debugging within the game, and you can inspect variables on a plotted graph to help balance values over time. Otherwise you can inspect in-game textures and other assets, and numerous other helpful things which should really aid in demystifying the game’s innards for our modding community.
 
 
Modders will be able to dive in and look into the guts of lua and java at runtime to inspect anything they like: navigating through characters, items, or anything else to inspect them.
 
Imgui also contains a fully functional text editor. We plan for this to be completely integrated for lua editing within the game itself, as well as a more robust debugger to replace the slightly ropey F11 one we currently have, however this is also a challenge due to the way lua executes so will come later.
 
In the meantime, for a nice Build 43 behind the scenes, here is the in-game AI behaviour editing UI with breakpoints, stepping and watch window:
In terms of more imminent usage for game-improvement, meanwhile, let’s move over to Fenris at the gun range.
 
GUN IMPROVEMENTS
From the second imgui was made available Fenris, he of ORGM mod vintage, leapt at the opportunity to use its features to do some intensive firearms work: making them more useful at lower skill levels without breaking balance, while also providing for more tweaks for accuracy based on the player’s actions.
 
Here he is on the firing range, with imgui active.
 
 
Here, the graph shows a new AimingDelay mechanic (the blue line) first initially dropping after the player starts to stablise their aim, then rising with each shot – then overlaid with the recoil delay and animation states. We see him taking timed shots and waiting briefly so his aim stabilises again. The effect can then be seen across the different skill levels, and how the rate of fire changes.
 
Fenris’ work on improvement here is extensive, but aspects of his commits to the game these past two weeks have included:
 
Rebalance of how hit chances and recoil are calculated, and general RoF with firearms. Improved the target highlighting which was previously misleading, with the colour shifting to green shades with lower hit chances than expected. This is now corrected to go green closer to 80%. Previously only aiming & reloading skills, the distance to target and how long ago you stopped moving had an effect on the highlight. Now Strength helps with recoil, Dexterous and All-Thumbs impact on shouldering the weapon, and Eagle-Eyed and Shortsighted can change the optimal sight range. Rates of Fire have been increased to more realistic expectations, but it now takes a bit of time to stabilize your aim when initially shouldering the weapon or after each shot. This time is reduced by aiming skill and various traits and conditions. Firing as fast as possible is less accurate then taking your time and lining up the shot. The lighting of the target square is also now taken into account.  
FINALLY
We saw this pop up on the YouTubes and thought it was a great run-down on what we’ve been working on. Our thanks to CosmiicSteem for the vid!
 
This week’s foggy safehouse from Rick Grimes, though presumably not the real one. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found 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 industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

A new question that becomes even more relevant with the introduction of a new global lighting system: if a character in a dark corridor does not see, but hears a zombie that already exists, but has not yet been drawn by the game, he can shoot into the darkness, but this will not do anything, because the zombie is disembodied until the game draws it?
Or until the zombie is drawn by the game, it will not be heard?

Thanks to the developers for the interesting information.
It's cool that the bit fragment can also be used as a weapon.
The underground parking was especially pleased.
In the last picture, the gentleman is strange not so much with a mustache as with leopard underpants.
I really ask the developers not to overdo it with a slightly zany weapon. Leave it to the modders.

Thanks to the developers for the interesting information.
It's cool that the bit fragment can also be used as a weapon.
The underground parking was especially pleased.
In the last picture, the gentleman is strange not so much with a mustache as with leopard underpants.
I really ask the developers not to overdo it with a slightly zany weapon. Leave it to the modders.

It’s been a really big week for us, as we merged the second-to-last element of Build 42 into the main codebase across the rest of the team – which is the long awaited tech upgrade which brings a whole host of improvements to the engine.
 
It’s currently being tested and the feedback has been super positive so far. This said, it’s also brought over lots of small bugs, visual glitches, and issues with new depth map clipping items incorrectly. Nothing over-dramatic, but enough stuff to keep testers and coders alike fully occupied.
This is where a lot of our brains have been at recently, so we thought we’d give you an update on the engine as it now stands while testers run around kicking its tires – alongside some videos they have made along the way.
 
Likewise, we also have some examples of some of its new capabilities that we will be able to explore in future – perhaps during the Unstable beta, perhaps beyond.
 
So, a run-down of what this tech upgrade brings into the game:
 
OPTIMIZATION
We’ve made huge optimizations to the rendering of the map that should have a huge impact for most lower-midrange and upwards systems. We are now easily able to get a solid framerate even on 4K, or on furthest zoom. The difference in performance is honestly surprising, and extremely satisfying.
 
For full disclosure, however, we’ve discovered that a few of the absolutely lowest end systems capable of running our game are still adversely affected. This is because the solution for such large FPS optimization comes at the expense of GPU memory usage for the caching textures used. Cards with extremely low dedicated GPU memory may run into problems.
 
We’re investigating and trying to optimize this further to make sure as many systems as possible can benefit, and worst case scenario these optimizations will be disabled on systems where they would do more harm than good.
 
However, it’s still entirely possible that we’ll be able to resolve this completely and provide a large boost to even the most potato systems. More likely, we’ll provide some kind of automatic detection to provide as large a portion of the optimizations as possible for a GPU’s available memory. This will be our next task post visual-bug clear out.
 
Generally we estimate that a huge majority of our playerbase will benefit greatly from the optimizations. Since most of the optimization frustrations we hear come from players who feel their machine should be able to run PZ at a solid framerate, we feel this work will ease the vast majority of performance sadness we see in the community.
 
VIEW CONE
Another improvement born out of necessity is an improved and smoother viewing cone. Due to the optimizations, it was no longer feasible to alter the lighting of tiles frequently enough to allow for the smooth light changes required for our tile based viewing cone.
 
As such we needed to implement a completely separate and newly-coded viewing cone that didn’t rely on tile lighting – which truth be told we were never a huge fan of anyway.
 
Now we have a much more accurate, smooth and fancy viewing cone – and now we have extra hands on it internally feedback is being collated so that we can provide plenty of requested options to allow you to tweak it this way and that. (Making it more or less visible probably being the primary one.)
 
 
 
LIGHT PROPAGATION
The new lighting system is now in full testing, and seems to be working pretty well so far.
 
This new propagation system allows for much prettier and more convincing lighting of the world, especially now we have basements which would have been extremely unsatisfying with our existing 41 lighting.
 
41’s system basically had an ‘ambient light’ level that permeated the entirety of the world depending on the time of the day. Then on top of that indoors would get a reduction in ambient light to make them slightly darker than outside.
 
The new system propagates light from light sources such as bulbs, or the sun, across tiles to simulate reflective light. It’s not something cutting-edge that you’d expect from the Unreal Engine, or something, but for our purposes it’s extremely effective. It allows for light from a window to creep across the room, allows for rooms with no natural lighting to be in complete darkness even during the day, allows more immersive coloured lighting, and all manner of other things not previously possible in PZ.
 
Most importantly of all, it fixes the room lighting issues that plague b41 when room layouts are changed with sledgehammers leaving strange lighting artifacts on the floor, since all lighting is calculated purely based on the geometry of the rooms now.
 
With this will now come gameplay balance – there’s debate on the team as to whether the player character should have a little more clarity in the darkness, some internal spots are a little more inky-blue than black, and new gameplay elements like not being able to read in the dark will need finetuning to the new visual.
 
Also seen in the following video, for extra immersion, doors are now fully animated – as discussed last time. This makes a huge difference to the feel of interacting with them during gameplay.
 
 
   
OVERGROUND UNDERGROUND
We’re still in the process of adding basement spots around the map – whether random or permanent. However, as discussed previously, the new upgraded engine allows support for levels from -32 to +32.
 
This allows for both much more convincingly tall skyscrapers for city locations, as well as for basements and potentially sprawling underground complexes. The mapping and modding is gonna be wild.
 
Part of this is also strapping in engine capabilities to help us in future – and as such please take the following as an EXAMPLE video of what we can now do in PZ.
 
Our coders and mappers have enough on their plates at the moment, and as such this is not a confirmed feature for when 42 goes Unstable.
It will, however, be feasible within the engine which is why we’ve chosen to show it.
 
Essentially, EP has been working on some extra physics engine functionality to allow for the physics to exist on floors other than the ground floor – as well as providing new physics shapes that in future will allow for this. This work was also a necessary foothold for other physics-based features we have brewing for future versions.
 
 
Please note also, just to quell any mapper fears again, these extensive engine and map data structure changes will not make existing map mods invalid. All maps will need to be reexported in the new versions of the tools when we release them, most likely around the time we put out the Unstable beta, but they won’t need to be redone from scratch.
MEANWHILE…
We’re waiting on a big commit to fill in some of the gaps in the crafting system process itself, so in the mean-time lets focus on some of the fun stuff that’ll be coming out the other end: weapons.
 
Clearly we already have the more ‘normal’ and traditional blacksmithed weapons for B42 already, and likewise the more ancient-styled stone axes and such. With these we’re avoiding anything specific to any period or culture, going for real life examples that were common across history and geography, and that could pass as something reasonably iron age, medieval, or post-apocalypse. We have consulted an expert in these matters regarding the designs and selection, and we’re also providing them with further weapon designs as we make them for feedback.
 
But, as we stretch out into our apocalypse we also wanted something a little more… apocalypse-y.
As such, currently what’s being wrapped up are post-apocalypse improvised weapons. These include classic examples like the “nail-spiked weapons”, but also weapons that have been constructed with welding and metalshop tools.
 
With these designs a conscious decision has been made to not think about weapons from other games or zombie media, and instead research was conducted regarding real life improvised /crafted weapons. This included stuff like police collections of seized weapons and trench warfare, with additional inspiration from weapons in Max Mad-style post-apocalypse media.
 
We also took on something of a procedural approach, where we looked at the weapons and items that existed (or could exist) in the game, and imagined them being combined like Lego bricks to create weapons. Granted in many cases we just re-invented the wheel, but that helped keep things grounded, realistic, and consistent with the rest of the game.
 
Although we tried to make these weapons realistic and believable, we have allowed for a couple of weapons to be slightly (reasonably) zany. We’re allowed to have a little fun, after all, and all those weapons will also have realistic drawbacks when wielded.
 
Simultaneous to this, we are also adding some broken versions of existing Zomboid weapons. Some of these broken weapons and their parts will be used in crafting other weapons, but these fragments also exist for gory consequences when weapons break when bashing a zombie with them.
I don’t quite know why we’re using this strange moustachioed gentleman to demonstrate these today, but lets have a proper look at him in any case. Curious chap.
 
BACK TO ANIMS-LAND
Finally, a big welcome to Nick from our colleagues at TEA Games who has joined us to help us implement something we call PenguinTech – after the time Zac got two million on-screen dancing penguins into a Wii game.
 
Originally slated for B41 this will, in essence, be a clever way of optimizing our zombie hordes – pooling what states they are in, and then sharing a smaller pool of zombie skeletons for the same anims. With this, fingers crossed, we’ll get better performance when there’s a horde on-screen and in turn we can be less dainty with their application in your survival.
 
A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found 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 industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

"there’s debate on the team as to whether the player character should have a little more clarity in the darkness"
 
I suppose no light=dark; Cat's eyes trait should maybe give a little more light blue clarity exactly like in the "doors and lightning" video?
Also filters while wearing glasses/sunglasses would be a plus in my opinion
 
Please, no Bethesd* bright nights and indoors !
 
I'm also very exited to try the new lightning system !
 
Cone is a little light, hope it will be possible to make it a little darker in options, that would be great; (I might be wrong tho, probably because i didn't try it myself).

Keep up the good work guys !

This is probably how those who live 800 km south of Canada imagine log cabins without central heating.

It's an isometric game, so why wouldn't you know which direction is which?