Zorak

I get:
 
"You have been kicked because your files don't match the server's"

I'm on IWBUMS 38.27

There's a new Sandbox option under the World category, "Rotten-Food Removal".  This is the number of days after food becomes rotten that it is removed from the world.  It won't remove rotten food from Compost bins.

Parked vehicles in driveways and Parking lots shouldn't look like someone ran out and  vandalized every car. only the cars that are abandoned on the highways should be the ones with the damaged textures.

560. With the cars, we need Garage doors, maybe with keys and remotes to open close when you are near. Its hard to add a safe garage to a base without them
 
and speaking about doors...
 
561. Double doors for the construction menu to craft.

Admin ability to safehouse any building.   
Admin ability to set an "area" for a safehouse.  For player made buildings. 

Disclaimer: I'm probably wrong on some of this. For much of it, I was,  some guy on the forum. I'm also not a programmer by trade.

Why is it all so unfocused seeming? 
Each member of the team was hired for specific reasons, has specific talents, and has a specific role to fulfill. It's not possible to focus on "one thing,' unless the goal is to poorly manage people and cease any semblance of regular, public builds. This means most people on the team are generalists, rather than specialists in a certain area. 

EA differs from traditional software development
Normally, in software development, you have clear goal posts: alpha -> beta -> release -> maintenance. Only the last two involve the public, ignoring QA.

Instead, Early Access, alpha funded, and  (in some cases) open source projects differ from the traditional model for  for several reasons, most of which involve the availability of that software to the public:
the public-facing game needs to be maintained; any new features and content needs to be viable on release to the public, rather than good enough for an internal proof of concept; it's necessary to continually engage the customer and (try to) provide a novel experience with each update; and, for some, the expectation is the game can't get boring  until finished, otherwise it's a failure, no matter how much time is played in it (not unlike an MMO).
It’s not a linear process, for the most part
Even if it were possible to just focus on one thing, software development (as a whole) isn't a linear process. Certain aspects of it is (cars depend on a physics engine), but for the most part you're constantly repeating a loop, each one resulting in a subsequent release (design -> code -> test -> release -> maintain) for every little thing.
 
Let’s look at one example: the evolution of PZ’s graphical system 
Ignoring hindsight or those that specifically work in compatibility testing, who could have predicted that Intel integrated graphics adapters would "shadow" VRAM (it doubles the texture size of art assets in the game)?
 
Doesn't sound that bad, but consider that PZ's often played (and bought early on) by players that had hardware from the mid 2006s. These aren't machines that can handle a 2 GB of art assets (they often have 2 GB of RAM, as is).
 
Much of the progression of graphics for the game was driven by this. It's largely been the responsibility of a single dev:
You've realized 16 FPS, hand drawn animations are killing your artist and slowing down the rest of the game. You now have snazzy 30 frame animations that are generated in 3D Max, touched up in Photoshop or an equivalent program. You planned for customization of character appearance (different clothing and colors). Suddenly your 2000 frames of character / zombie animations is something nuts, because each piece of clothing and color needs to have their  own spirtesheet of thousands of frames. Well, first you remove the need for color. You produce greyscale sprite sheets and apply the color at runtime to save texture space. This is still taking up way too much time. Even adding a new animation like climbing through a window just blows out your max RAM requirements. You implement a compression scheme, but, oh no, nVidia cards on Macintosh don't like that.  It's a minor problem (details aren't visible in the texture) and only affects a small number of Macintosh users, so there's little you can do here.  While this happens, new actions are added to the game and new textures for the map, plus modding support has to be accounted in the RAM budget.  Now we move to 3D models that are drawn off-screen, turned into a 2D image with pixelation, and drawn on-screen. RAM problems solved! But . . . for all the map and item textures. Here's Intel and certain Linux drivers here to tell you that Frame Buffer Objects aren't supported in certain classes of hardware (Intel HD 2000 and below, Radeon 4xxx and below, Intel  Graphics Media Accelerator 985 and below).  
Well, what do you do?
 
You're forced to have a 2D and 3D pipeline that has to be maintained for the life of the game Oh, and the map's just too big at this point to work with the RAM budget. Loading screens suck, and the goal from the beginning was a streaming, open world anyway. You still want to expand gameplay, have lots of unique NPCs running around, and you want it to be clearly visible to players just what those NPCs are doing, too, let's not forget. So you implement a streaming map, RAM requirements go down, and you're able to add more textures.  
Now, a ton of people can't play the game, any work in 3D has to be duplicated in 2D, NPCs need to be rewritten both due to public rejection and change in tech, the game world is now too large for NPCs to exist in it so a secondary game on top of it needs to be written to abstract their behavior, and the current animation system way, way too inflexible to expand on. It needs to be redone and it needs to solve the flaws inherent with the current game, that's going to make playing with NPCs a shit experience.
 
So you work on a new animation system (tied into NPCs for testing) , hire a modeler, and get to work implementing blends, a model loader, rotational root motion, optimization, and start removing all the hard-coded bits and bobs from the prior four years of development. But, shocker, it's taken four years to get here and finding new talent to take on the problem (and the risk of an indie) is difficult.
 
Some will argue that NPCs could just go out without all of this but . . . what would even be the point? You'd have to cut them back down and toss out a bunch of stuff to make it nice to play. Just as you'd have to cut out all the MP work if you wanted to an SP build of animations. Oh, and certain features are proving to be a bastard -- can't get all the art assets out, disappointing everyone even if it were released.
 
Fortunately, TIS did manage to find some new talent to take it on and now there's three people instead of one person working on it, but that doesn't really matter to the public: it's not out yet.
 

@King-Salomon Not quite what i mean, Salomon. Here's a neandering reply that might or might not make any sense.
 
If we just look at cars, there was little need to make trunks removable, for there two be three different tires, or for there to be two separate 12v batteries. It doesn't really seem to accomplish the goal of making it simple,. Some of it isn't realistic, or based on the American reality when it comes to car parts (vintage-appearance white-wall radial tires exist, balloon / ply haven't really been in use since late 70s). It's odd to have such a degree of detail and choice for seats, but not to consider the removal and installation of an engine, or some basic tinkering options in the right-click menu. To be fair to RJ, I think he will consider it and I'm not saying any of the above is bad. It just needs to take a bit more inspiration from reality and get polished up a bit. Maybe shake out some of the over-complexity. It's a great start.
 
Complexity itself isn't bad. There's a ton in the game that's just over-simplified and, while I disagree with certain additions for this specific skill, they could really benefit from additional detail. For example, changing carpentry to foundation -> frame -> sheathing material and basing the max height / quality of the result based on the options. We got the start of that with 2x building, but then it just kind of faded into the background as other things were worked on. Electrician and engineering are prime examples of this. You basically have one method to gain XP (disassemble things) and you can only do one specific thing with them. Medical professions are even more lacking. They just give debuffs to healing. No unique recipes or actions.  These are entire professions that won't have anywhere near the depth of the mechanical skill, but could be expanded to be consistent with other skills, like cooking. It really should be -- aside from whatever the Meta Director thing does in the future, this is the meat of the game.
 
Some of this is just because PZ's setting is a bit too realistic, by choice. Cars aren't likely to feel that unique or customized because a lot of this is going to be behind the scenes (invisible stats, limited physics model and terrain, not a racing-sim), cars will be relatively plentiful (quarantine, so it's not like there's anywhere for them to go), and TIS is going to be limited by how much customization they can do to the 3D models (unlike a rogue-like, such as CDDA).
 
Complexity, in the right places, is really fun. It gives us the ability to make choices. Customization for customization's sake, like three different tires in a game where it won't really have much of an impact, is just kind of pointless  (we're not going to be drifting corners in extreme head-to-head races) . . .

Visible loot on pickup trucks would be neat.

OMG that vid is 1,5 yo

God yes.

Here's hoping for spiked contraptions.

OMG that vid is 1,5 yo

OMG that vid is 1,5 yo

Fair points, but I am not talking about "knowledge" I am talking about "skills" - if you understand the basics of electricity and metallworking (or maschine working) [Skill] you can repair an old car IF you have the knowledge  (not the new ones but the old ones) [Recpt/Knowledge]
 
The point is, you have more or less useless skills in the game - and combining them for SKILL (not knowledge) might help the game
 
your points are good but they can achived by getting the know-how with books, magazines etc rather that adding a new skill which is only usefull again in lvl 1-2 imo

IMO car spawns are to "clean", all of them are nicely parked. I miss some abandoned cars mid road, car barricades across the road. In general its too clean for zombie apocalypse.
 
PS. Random item spawn at car trunks would be great !

You're aware that's why we do this kind of test? To balance?
 
Now now, engine can stall, it'll depend on your engine quality, where you got the car, etc.. You can check it from the vehicle menu. Also remember those are cars from 90', could be abandonned for some times etc, stall will be present. Thing being, I didn't touched the engine stall code yet, so i don't know exactly the ratio there, but before this, easy to use was true by default, meaning a 100% engine quality, so like 1% chance of stalling?
 
For gas, it'll depend again, on the car, on how you drive (the higher shift/rpm the less you'll consume, if you do only small road/accelerating a lot, you'll use lot of gas), on the total mass of the car, on the engine's quality etc. What car was it?
 
If you find a van with an engine quality of 40, expect this kind of stuff
 
 
Aw really? Damn, thought a junk yard would look like that Bah, gonna change that then, thanks

IMO car spawns are to "clean", all of them are nicely parked. I miss some abandoned cars mid road, car barricades across the road. In general its too clean for zombie apocalypse.
 
PS. Random item spawn at car trunks would be great !

IMO car spawns are to "clean", all of them are nicely parked. I miss some abandoned cars mid road, car barricades across the road. In general its too clean for zombie apocalypse.
 
PS. Random item spawn at car trunks would be great !

IMO car spawns are to "clean", all of them are nicely parked. I miss some abandoned cars mid road, car barricades across the road. In general its too clean for zombie apocalypse.
 
PS. Random item spawn at car trunks would be great !

IMO car spawns are to "clean", all of them are nicely parked. I miss some abandoned cars mid road, car barricades across the road. In general its too clean for zombie apocalypse.
 
PS. Random item spawn at car trunks would be great !

What RJ's doing at the moment is moving a lot of Yuri's car spawn work into PZ's existing zoning system. So for stuff like this we're having to take one step back, but in order to take a bunch more forwards. That aspect will return a few builds down the road.
 
Cool idea re: car trunks, though don't expect too much mega-loot. If West Point cars are anything like ones I've owned it'll mainly be snack wrappers and damp clothing.

@Zorak
As Batsphinx said, the traffic jam/car on road are my next thing, already started to work on it, but we wanted to do a first version with some multiplayer fixes + my new stuff to see how it goes.
Already started to work on random abandonned vehicle on road, the random item in car's truck shouldn't be too difficult to make, maybe formy next test version

IMO car spawns are to "clean", all of them are nicely parked. I miss some abandoned cars mid road, car barricades across the road. In general its too clean for zombie apocalypse.
 
PS. Random item spawn at car trunks would be great !

Build Vehicle 19:
 
[New]
New method to spawn vehicles, that should look a little more like real life: Lot of experimental zones have been created (mainly in Riverside) including junk yard, special trailer park spawning, etc. Special cars (postal, mccoy...) should spawn in correct place, some can still spawn in the world randomly. New burnt vehicles textures. Some vehicle specifics are now set per car (and not a constant or per zone), can be influenced by the zone vehicle spawned on: Engine loudness Engine quality (junk yard have crappy quality for example) Initial gas Locked doors Balanced cars properties (speed, mass, acceleration, gas tank..) to correspond more with real life and make them more different. Gas consummed now depend on your engine speed, quality and your mass while in movement. Car keys can now spawn in nearby desk. Added new vehicle sandbox options: Car spawn rate: how much cars you want? Initial Gas: initial gas included in new spawned cars. Locked Frequency: frequency the cars will be closed (doesn't influence the chance of having the key spawning around). Gas consumption: (default 1.0) lower or increase the gas consumed by your car.  
[Bug Fix]
Fixed burnt car textures not showing. Added back "vehiclesDisable" in server-settings UI. Fixed bug with map loading infinitely due to a player in a stopped car. Fixed vehicles sometimes disappear when exiting and reloading a save