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Impendin' 37


nasKo

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Hey all. Simmering in the background the fundaments of our vehicles and animation branches are being tied closer together, Martin’s car and truck models continue to pop into the communal directory to surprise/delight, and the map continues to expand. And while all those cogs and gears are whirring, the following bizness is occurring:

 

BUILD 37

Build 37 should be out this week, it’s content-locked but we’re also having a real bug purge at the moment – and are dead set on getting a clean version out for our upcoming bigger features to then build on.

 

This is extremely boring and frustrating (we know) but we’ve had a bunch of persistent bugs in the main game build for a while now and they needed attending to. It also does feel good to have put some regular villains to the sword, all of whom have been really tough to track and duplicate.

 

As such, much as it all sounds like a terrifying cheese dream, we think that bugs like saucepan rain, self-opening de-synced co-op curtains and windows, several server crashes and a myriad of gamepad/split-screen eccentricities have been fixed in the next IWBUMS public beta build.

 

Additionally, while fixing the persistent black screen flicker you experience in MP when another player wakes up or falls asleep, we also used the opportunity to fix up some sleep mode logic requested by servers that prefer to keep player-sleep active – meaning that players can now wake up independently of each other, wake up if they press the move keys and have a visible sleep clock. This may well need some more polish, but we’re intrigued to see how the system fares online.

 

 

NU-TOOLS

The maps and annotated maps of Build 37 were made possible by a tool made by TurboTuTone – and in amongst his current devices work in the main game CartoZed has now been revamped.

 

We hope its additions will be of a benefit to our map makers, and to aid the creation of in-game maps for the many community-created custom maps that PZ players survive on.

 

It’s now easier to use, scroll and pan, allow mouse selection of specific areas and can be used with user maps. So, for example, here’s a top-down of some of  Xeonyx’s New Denver.

 

New-Denver.jpg

 

Meanwhile CartoZed will also now export an isometric version showing cells of 300×300 tiles, should you crave your own downloadable chunk of the overall PZ map or your own map creation.

iso-look.jpg

Turbo has also updated ItemZed to version 1.2 using feedback from the modders who’ve picked up its mantle, which can be found here.

 

 

BUILDING HERO

A quick shout out to the redoubtable Blackbeard06 who has gone about the laborious task of polishing up, fixing up and categorizing hundreds of user-created buildings that were left with errors after 2x sprites became part of the main game. He’s clearly put a lot of work in, and this means that there are now even more potential new industries and abodes to be added to user maps.

 

 

REDBOID REFORGED

There seems to be a bit of a spurt of new PZ servers appearing at the moment (and if you’d like yours to get some spotlight then please get in touch) but just a brief mention for that hoary old stalwart Redboid – the server of the PZ subreddit. Now under new management and with a few rule changes amidst the familiar faces, it’s a major organ in the online contingent of PZ and it’s good to see it continue to flourish.

 

 

A BRIEF NOTE

In terms of general PZ output – we are listening, wanting to get the ‘good stuff’ out to you and are (hopefully) improving both behind the scenes and in terms of release frequency.

 

Our recent collaborations with General Arcade in the vehicles branch have shown us how fruitful it can be to have fresh faces working at our many different coalfaces, and as such are looking to expand our bank of coders with AAA or indie game dev experience.

 

We already have an iron or two in the fire, but if you have a good, established programming CV in the games industry and enjoy our game (and especially if you’re in NE England) then feel free to give us a shout.

 

 

This week’s ‘Cheers’ vibe from Duncan. 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 blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right hereOur Discord is now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here. Please also note that the CBOIT will be back mid-week with the return of our Mod Spotlight blog on the main PZ site, with a wheel-y good guest star.

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I actually enjoy purging bugs the same way as new content - that or a small additions you've been adding (yay for real coffee!) :D Though I have to admit, you have some work to do purging the bugs, especially if you browse the still open bugs from year's ago :) Unfortunately some may be hard to relate to after a year, but it would be nice if you could eventually mark the old ones, just so it's known they were acknowledged.

 

The only thing I'm not sure about is when you close the bug and it still finds it way, is it better to use the bug marked as solved or to create a new one? So far I pressumed the first one, since it "bumps" the issue to the top, but it would be nice to have some official acknowledgement on the matter ;)

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12 hours ago, Faalagorn said:

I actually enjoy purging bugs the same way as new content - that or a small additions you've been adding (yay for real coffee!) :D Though I have to admit, you have some work to do purging the bugs, especially if you browse the still open bugs from year's ago :) Unfortunately some may be hard to relate to after a year, but it would be nice if you could eventually mark the old ones, just so it's known they were acknowledged.

 

The only thing I'm not sure about is when you close the bug and it still finds it way, is it better to use the bug marked as solved or to create a new one? So far I pressumed the first one, since it "bumps" the issue to the top, but it would be nice to have some official acknowledgement on the matter ;)

You're doing an awesome job at reporting but that little bloopy or that thing from years ago might not have a big impact on the playability. There is a lot on our plates right now, so bear with us, please. We'll get to it, eventually. 
There is no need to bump old bug reports at all, unless you have found something new to them (new way to reproduce them, additional impact somewhere else, etc). 

We don't sort them by what's on top :)

 



 

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4 hours ago, nolanri said:

Just stopping by to throw my name in the consideration pool

 

yeah, I support Nolan's consideration too. As someone relatively new to the game, discovered it in Xmas 16', a lot of his work/content has been essential in maintaining my interest in playing it (and that includes his contributions to Hydrocraft too).  PZ is awesome in how it combines "hardcore" game mechanics from games like CDDA and merges them with controller support, better graphics, to allow more casual players a chance experience this. So his content has been been great to flesh out the game world while the wait continues for actual NPCs and cars. And he has contributed a lot of QA as well, trying to get all the features into the game. 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Something that I think should be addressed in multiplayer is the fact that you can't go back to sleep even if you laid down and immediately get back up.  Sometimes you hit sleep, only to realize you've left the oven on, of you didn't close a door.  This is disruptive to the other players as they now have to wait for your character to be tired again. Maybe like if you've been sleeping for less than 30 minutes, you can go back to sleep immediately?  Thoughts?

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