Auld Lang Zyne

[Rathlord]

Auld Lang Zyne

Last day of 2020, last blog of 2020. It’s a shortish one, but hopefully a good one coming after three evening’s worth of bug-chasing on an internal Build 41 MP server.

 

Over our own Western variant on Christmas Yuri and Andrei (who are Russian and therefore celebrate winter festivities next week) have made sure that the Multiplayer Strike Force has not fallen silent.

 

They’ve been syncing various states that weren’t in alignment, sorting out instances of player de-sync, working out the best way to judge zombie shamble speed over the server/client, adding debug charts and tables, fixing zombie hearing in MP, sorting out gunplay and various other necessary things.

 

Meanwhile a big pile of bug reports and videos have been stacking up from three nights of testing for the team to tackle in the New Year – none of them looking like they’re of ‘omg hideous delay’ stature, but still certainly enough for us all to chew through once the team has fully returned to their keyboards.

 

Here are a few tester reports detailing their overall experience, as that’s probably the best way to let you know how it’s feeling currently.

 

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“There are still various bumps, glitches and issues to fix before this could be classed as stable enough for public tests in my opinion, but as a whole so far the progress is unreal. The game boots up on a click and loading times are much quicker, the animations run super smooth and the zombie hordes move scarily good too.“

 

“Spotting your dead self in a crowd is now much harder but fun to do, building with others is a blast and there seems to have been an eradication of a lot of problems 40 currently has. One thing I do find really amazing to see are the different variations in style on other players, you can really see everyone’s individuality for the character they are portraying and playing as.”

“Overall it does still need a bit more time to work out the kinks though.”

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“Finally got some time to try the multiplayer, it felt pretty good. The biggest issues I had were that sometimes the zombies would keep moving toward me for a second or so after they had “died” and then snap back to the dead position suddenly. I saw clothes disappear and then quickly reappear a couple of times when killing a Z.“

 

“Also at one point I was moving a large group of zombies and managed to break LoS, when I reappeared they were still moving towards my current position, but then it seemed like the server said ‘oh wait we lost him’ and they all turned and moved towards where they should have lost me instead. Overall though looking good!“

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“There’s definitely enough significant issues that show me it’s not in the right shape for an immediate ‘right now‘ beta release, especially in situations involving multiple players in proximity to each other.”

 

“BUT it’s shocking smooth, my expectations were exceeded, and gameplay is strong. Also I’ve never experienced such quick and painless server logins.”

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There you go then. TLDR is that the test sessions went really well, people had fun and it’s clear that all this effort has been worth it, but also that we’ve got a busy (exciting) time ahead of us when 2021 rolls around.

 

We promise we’ll be getting you all in as soon as the time is right, both for initial community megatest sessions (player numbers in these initial testing sessions has been relatively small) and then of course the wider 41 public beta release. Have a good new year all, and see you on the other side!

 

This week’s Murder Shack from Injen. 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!

[Alexander742]

Good

[-MaVerick-]

Happy new year dearest community and dev team <3