PriZon Break

[nasKo]

 

Afternoon all, welcome back to your regular programming of IWBUMS 41 Public Beta news.

 

We’re going to try to release patch 41.40 onto the beta channel next week, although this will be dependent on getting the gamepad version of the new tutorial finalised.

 

Once it hits we will likely need some gameplay difficulty feedback from you the playing public, Zac’s recent anim smoothening has made combat feel a lot better in most cases (especially spears and knives) but the added finesse *might* have made things slightly easier in these cases. We’re going to be addressing this internally during the interim, clearly, but that’ll be the feedback we’ll be looking for overall.

 

Oh, and Public Service Announcement: when we patch your current watches will be made redundant. Sorry, you’ll have to find a new one to tell the time and how long you’ve survived for.

 

But, on the plus side, you will be able to customise yourself a little more – as one of our testers did last week.

MP WORK

Multiplayer work for 41 continues apace, Yuri has been continuing his work on fixing up issues where zombie behaviour on clients doesn’t match that of servers.

 

A specific issue within this was when zombies are climbing fences, as well as other such behaviours that would desync clients from servers. As such he’s been going through all the different animation states to make sure they behave properly on multiplayer.

For now he’s duplicating zombie animation states with multiplayer specific versions, but he will also have to explore how he could combine these into the single zombie animation data set to avoid replicating data in the game, which may be difficult to maintain as the builds and patches go by.

 

Here’s a video of it running. Note that zombie combat is pretty much indistinguishable from single player here – throughout all this our intention has been to establish this even when there are higher pings to the server to deal with, or when the server is lagging or stalling. So far, so good – on that. We, like you, cannot wait to get to the testing stage.

Next, after a bit of polish, will come the player character syncing – covering animation to clothing, blood and the various other things that have been added to build 41. Alongside this we will be investigating the server via the fake client bots we discussed a few weeks ago, which will allow us to simulate 60 player servers in a test environment and figure out what’s causing the severe lag and server stalls on high player counts. While there’s still some distance to go, it feels like things are taking shape.

41.40 NEW PATCH STUFF

In addition to stuff mentioned in previous weeks’ blogs:
 

• An optional way of interacting with context menus. Instead of displaying child menus to the left or right of the parent menu, the parent menu is hidden and replaced by next one. This gets rid of cascading waterfalls of submenus, and was initially designed for split-screen and controller players. That said, we’re really starting to like it for keyboard and mouse too. For now, it’ll be found as an Accessibility Option.

• General menu and hot bar tidy-up. You can drag equipment between primary and secondary, clearer indicators of what can be equipped in which slot, you can finally unlock a car trunk with a controller etc
• Fixed not being able to start bandaging wounds while moving
• New “Wear” submenu for garments that can be worn in different ways: Baseball cap, Poncho, Fanny Pack, Hoodie etc.
• Accessibility option that can toggle aim on and off by tapping the Aim key. Holding the Aim key for more than 1/2 a second aims without forcing aim on, so aiming stops when the Aim key is released.

 

Also likely to be a part of 41.40 is some exploratory work from Turbo, who has been looking into one of our most longstanding issues that we’ve never really cracked – and weren’t sure how to crack without adding in months and months of extra mapping work.

This issue was players falling through non-solid rooftops – due to the way our mapping tools work the back sides of unseen N and W rooftops, glass rooftops and sloped rooftops can still currently result in broken limbs and death.

Turbo’s code solution for this is to automatically create floors beneath the player’s feet in these instances, and right now is working out how to universally apply this to edge-cases and make it look more visually appealing.

 

This week’s escape to victory from Anatolii. 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!

[Blake81]

4 hours ago, nasKo said:

New “Wear” submenu for garments that can be worn in different ways: Baseball cap, Poncho, Fanny Pack, Hoodie etc.

Does this mean we'll be able to wear jackets and coats open?

[nasKo]

2 hours ago, Blake81 said:

Does this mean we'll be able to wear jackets and coats open?

No. This is merely listing the existing ways to wear things in a more convenient manner.

[Blake81]

Ah, OK... Pity... hope we can get that in eventually. Especially for the doctor's coat.

[syfy]

will be nice to not worry about falling thru the roofs anymore.

had a LOT of broken legs & ankles due to that 🚑

 

 

 

or maybe it was sloppy gameplay? 🤔

[trombonaught]

No more worries about zombies hiding under the cover of menu cascades! Woo!

[Dr_Cox1911]

I'm really eager to try the new menu style, before I play it I can't really tell which control scheme I like more, but this seems pretty sleek. MP news is good as always👍