Hey everyone, quite a bit in this week’s Mondoid. Just a quick note before we dive in though. It’s sometimes tricky to ascertain what’s in upcoming builds (and past ones)  from a browse of our weekly blogs – so we’ll be now be maintaining a ‘PZ Status and Build history‘ page on our website from now on. Everything from our launch on Steam up until the present day will be covered there, so it should also be handy to let returning players see what’s been added during their absence.


Work in the anims branch continues – tying up loose ends and making sure the entire game is playable and makes sense visually in terms of character action and behaviour. An example of this can be seen in the second half of the following video, to prevent the fairly odd sight of the player character sprinting at full pelt through thick woods. The following are just two of the many animation sequences we’ve implemented over the past week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1nWNdPU768


After our successful first test of in-game VOIP, positional player voices and volume we have just received the second updated drop of General Arcade’s fiddlings with the PZ mainframe. It’s got added server options, configurable voice audibility over distance, better microphone boost and voice volume control and now supports all our various supported platforms.

We still need to spin the build up on an internal dedicated server and give it a proper test, but GA are hopeful that we’re now not far from integrating VOIP into Build 35 – or at least to open up the VOIP build to a wider brigand of testers on the TIS forums. We’ll keep you updated on that front.


RJ has spent the last few weeks amassing a vast number of new features, tweaks and smoothenings requested by our hardcore playing community – all of which are now playable inour open IWBUMS public beta. This week, however, he’s turned his attention towards the fine folks who host servers for MP play, and who have needed more control and player-inspection powers for a long old time.

The model we’re using is that of the awesome, wonderful and rightly revered Ultima Online and introduces Server Access levels for Admin Staff with different levels of power and responsibility. Full details of Observer, GM, Overseer, Moderator and Admin roles can be found here on the TIS forums.

Added into this are better recorded spawn/death coordinates, a teleportation command and other ways to deal with cheatiness. There’s also a new UI that’ll let moderators and upwards modify player traits, professions, names, usernames, XP and whatnot.




Right now RJ is working on an info sheet of sorts so admins can track player activity better, but he’ll be returning to the ever-growing pile of main game player suggestions found here on the forum in the near future, so if you want to add your thoughts then please do so!


Mash continues work on Build 35’s second big new map location, as well as filling in a bunch of the nowhere-zone cells currently on the PZ map with detail and traces of civilization. She has, however, performed what we call a ‘Mash Smash’ as to revealing what the new area is – wanting it to be a surprise to beta testers when it hits IWBUMS.


Turbo has tied his implementation of our community’s fine narrative content translation work(Russian, German, Spanish, Turkish Polish and French right now) to finalising a public version WordZed for the modding community – our in-house radio and TV writing/editing/timing and wavelength broadcast tool.

It wasn’t hugely user-friendly formerly (which is why it wasn’t released) but now comes with an added Search functionality, options and a general smoother edit process.



We want to tweak it further, and to write a decent manual, but intend to beta release it in our Community Translation it for feedback as soon as we can. In the mean-time Writer Will has also been editing existing narrative content for use on VHS tapes and CDs for character entertainment and boredom relief after most broadcasts cut out, and is also tapping up some new home-taped content too.

This week’s zombie stick-up from Original Nickname of Steamton, Steamshire. The 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 here! The BOIT now also flags that our Discord is now open. There are many cats that live in there, and all of them are cool. Oh, and check out the new PZ Status and Build History page if you’re so inclined too.

Hey everyone, quite a bit in this week’s Mondoid. Just a quick note before we dive in though. It’s sometimes tricky to ascertain what’s in upcoming builds (and past ones)  from a browse of our weekly blogs – so we’ll be now be maintaining a ‘PZ Status and Build history‘ page on our website from now on. Everything from our launch on Steam up until the present day will be covered there, so it should also be handy to let returning players see what’s been added during their absence.


Work in the anims branch continues – tying up loose ends and making sure the entire game is playable and makes sense visually in terms of character action and behaviour. An example of this can be seen in the second half of the following video, to prevent the fairly odd sight of the player character sprinting at full pelt through thick woods. The following are just two of the many animation sequences we’ve implemented over the past week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1nWNdPU768


After our successful first test of in-game VOIP, positional player voices and volume we have just received the second updated drop of General Arcade’s fiddlings with the PZ mainframe. It’s got added server options, configurable voice audibility over distance, better microphone boost and voice volume control and now supports all our various supported platforms.

We still need to spin the build up on an internal dedicated server and give it a proper test, but GA are hopeful that we’re now not far from integrating VOIP into Build 35 – or at least to open up the VOIP build to a wider brigand of testers on the TIS forums. We’ll keep you updated on that front.


RJ has spent the last few weeks amassing a vast number of new features, tweaks and smoothenings requested by our hardcore playing community – all of which are now playable inour open IWBUMS public beta. This week, however, he’s turned his attention towards the fine folks who host servers for MP play, and who have needed more control and player-inspection powers for a long old time.

The model we’re using is that of the awesome, wonderful and rightly revered Ultima Online and introduces Server Access levels for Admin Staff with different levels of power and responsibility. Full details of Observer, GM, Overseer, Moderator and Admin roles can be found here on the TIS forums.

Added into this are better recorded spawn/death coordinates, a teleportation command and other ways to deal with cheatiness. There’s also a new UI that’ll let moderators and upwards modify player traits, professions, names, usernames, XP and whatnot.




Right now RJ is working on an info sheet of sorts so admins can track player activity better, but he’ll be returning to the ever-growing pile of main game player suggestions found here on the forum in the near future, so if you want to add your thoughts then please do so!


Mash continues work on Build 35’s second big new map location, as well as filling in a bunch of the nowhere-zone cells currently on the PZ map with detail and traces of civilization. She has, however, performed what we call a ‘Mash Smash’ as to revealing what the new area is – wanting it to be a surprise to beta testers when it hits IWBUMS.


Turbo has tied his implementation of our community’s fine narrative content translation work(Russian, German, Spanish, Turkish Polish and French right now) to finalising a public version WordZed for the modding community – our in-house radio and TV writing/editing/timing and wavelength broadcast tool.

It wasn’t hugely user-friendly formerly (which is why it wasn’t released) but now comes with an added Search functionality, options and a general smoother edit process.



We want to tweak it further, and to write a decent manual, but intend to beta release it in our Community Translation it for feedback as soon as we can. In the mean-time Writer Will has also been editing existing narrative content for use on VHS tapes and CDs for character entertainment and boredom relief after most broadcasts cut out, and is also tapping up some new home-taped content too.

This week’s zombie stick-up from Original Nickname of Steamton, Steamshire. The 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 here! The BOIT now also flags that our Discord is now open. There are many cats that live in there, and all of them are cool. Oh, and check out the new PZ Status and Build History page if you’re so inclined too.

 

Mondoid time everyone. We’ve got good progress going on the new map stuff, handy feedback being addressed on last week’s VOIP integration tests and should have community radio/TV content going into the test later this week – but here’s the more headliner items:



The public beta of Build 35 now has a pretty goliath changelist, and if you so choose you can get into the IWBUMS action using the info available here. Over the past week there have been three builds: 35.13, 35.14, 35.15 and 35.16 and they’ve covered a bunch of fantastic additions, smoothenings and ‘quality of life’ improvements. Many of these have been direct community suggestions, so if you’d like to add to the pile then you can do so in this handy thread. Here are some notable additions that’ve gone in over the past week:

• The container or corpse that your character is currently looting now is now highlighted in orange, meaning that it’s now far easier to be sure you haven’t missed anything. This seems to be making the beta testers make happy noises. (Final colour choice still being debated).

• Drainable items now reduce in weight according to how many times they’ve been used – so water bottles, bags of coal, gas cans etc. get appropriately lighter when they contain less and less. Drainable items can also now be consolidated into one so, for example, two half full gas cans can be now be consolidated into one that’s full and another that’s empty.
• Composting is now in-game, providing a use for rotten food. A wooden compost bin can be built from the Carpentry menu, after which food placed inside will slowly turn into compost. You can then use a sack to retrieve it, and use it to fertilize your crops.

• It was indicated that on MP servers it’d be good to have clearly identifiable crates for particular item storage, so you can now paint anything wooden in your chosen colours – as well as almost any interior walls, which was another request.
• Leaving cooking pots, bowls, buckets or saucepans on the ground when it’s raining will result in them (slowly) filling with rainwater.
• A new smoker trait has been added, which means smoking will reduce stress and increase your character’s happiness, but increase stress and unhappiness if he or she goes without smoking for an extended period. Non-smokers might also feel mild nausea if they have a puff or two.
• Other stuff: UI panel tutorial info added, fatigue/boredom/unhappiness tweaks, Health panel auto-uses inventory items and fire extinguishers added to loot table.
• More other stuff: Park Ranger and Lumberjack move faster through trees, Generators are more drained the more objects they’re plugged into, mail boxes now spawn magazines and newspapers and zombie-damaged sheet rope sprites are now added.
• More, more other stuff: Jars can now be found in packs of six to encourage players to pickle their food. XP balancing. Lots of bugs quietly smothered in their bug beds.

We’ve got plenty in and working, and doing so in awesome ways, but want to release something for testing once we’ve got the gaps that’ve popped up filled in. Now we’ve got slick animations any omissions, or stuff the game could get away with in its more basic form, stick out like a sore thumb.

Formerly we could just have it happen with no animation (have the character walk through the counter to open a window for example) and it’d be fine, now everything looks so good this sort of ‘visual smudge’ looks wrong and really stands out. Another example of this is making ‘looting while carrying a weapon’ look half sensible. We’re going to keep on filling in the gaps rather than throw it out into the mix of the current IWBUMS test, which is a pain but will be worth it in the end.

Once we’ve got the Incidentals out of the way (and, yes, that was an Alisha’s Attic reference) we can release and get motoring with the pipeline that leads to all of our other 1.0 features.

While we have this back and forth with Martin the Animator we’re also making sure that keyboard and mouse feel fun and responsive with the new system. You can’t turn on a dime with the new animations, so it can feel a little clunky when you’re indoors – so we’re also balancing that as we go along. Likewise we’re making sure that the shift between running and walking, and vice versa, feels nice and responsive.

More next week gang, thanks for dropping by.

This week’s zombie stick-up from Sergeant Giacomo in Steamsville . The 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 here! The CBOIT is now also excited about our Discord chat too. Oh, and check out Nolan’s awesome Nocturnal Zombies mod.Nolan is cool.

 

Mondoid time everyone. We’ve got good progress going on the new map stuff, handy feedback being addressed on last week’s VOIP integration tests and should have community radio/TV content going into the test later this week – but here’s the more headliner items:



The public beta of Build 35 now has a pretty goliath changelist, and if you so choose you can get into the IWBUMS action using the info available here. Over the past week there have been three builds: 35.13, 35.14, 35.15 and 35.16 and they’ve covered a bunch of fantastic additions, smoothenings and ‘quality of life’ improvements. Many of these have been direct community suggestions, so if you’d like to add to the pile then you can do so in this handy thread. Here are some notable additions that’ve gone in over the past week:

• The container or corpse that your character is currently looting now is now highlighted in orange, meaning that it’s now far easier to be sure you haven’t missed anything. This seems to be making the beta testers make happy noises. (Final colour choice still being debated).

• Drainable items now reduce in weight according to how many times they’ve been used – so water bottles, bags of coal, gas cans etc. get appropriately lighter when they contain less and less. Drainable items can also now be consolidated into one so, for example, two half full gas cans can be now be consolidated into one that’s full and another that’s empty.
• Composting is now in-game, providing a use for rotten food. A wooden compost bin can be built from the Carpentry menu, after which food placed inside will slowly turn into compost. You can then use a sack to retrieve it, and use it to fertilize your crops.

• It was indicated that on MP servers it’d be good to have clearly identifiable crates for particular item storage, so you can now paint anything wooden in your chosen colours – as well as almost any interior walls, which was another request.
• Leaving cooking pots, bowls, buckets or saucepans on the ground when it’s raining will result in them (slowly) filling with rainwater.
• A new smoker trait has been added, which means smoking will reduce stress and increase your character’s happiness, but increase stress and unhappiness if he or she goes without smoking for an extended period. Non-smokers might also feel mild nausea if they have a puff or two.
• Other stuff: UI panel tutorial info added, fatigue/boredom/unhappiness tweaks, Health panel auto-uses inventory items and fire extinguishers added to loot table.
• More other stuff: Park Ranger and Lumberjack move faster through trees, Generators are more drained the more objects they’re plugged into, mail boxes now spawn magazines and newspapers and zombie-damaged sheet rope sprites are now added.
• More, more other stuff: Jars can now be found in packs of six to encourage players to pickle their food. XP balancing. Lots of bugs quietly smothered in their bug beds.

We’ve got plenty in and working, and doing so in awesome ways, but want to release something for testing once we’ve got the gaps that’ve popped up filled in. Now we’ve got slick animations any omissions, or stuff the game could get away with in its more basic form, stick out like a sore thumb.

Formerly we could just have it happen with no animation (have the character walk through the counter to open a window for example) and it’d be fine, now everything looks so good this sort of ‘visual smudge’ looks wrong and really stands out. Another example of this is making ‘looting while carrying a weapon’ look half sensible. We’re going to keep on filling in the gaps rather than throw it out into the mix of the current IWBUMS test, which is a pain but will be worth it in the end.

Once we’ve got the Incidentals out of the way (and, yes, that was an Alisha’s Attic reference) we can release and get motoring with the pipeline that leads to all of our other 1.0 features.

While we have this back and forth with Martin the Animator we’re also making sure that keyboard and mouse feel fun and responsive with the new system. You can’t turn on a dime with the new animations, so it can feel a little clunky when you’re indoors – so we’re also balancing that as we go along. Likewise we’re making sure that the shift between running and walking, and vice versa, feels nice and responsive.

More next week gang, thanks for dropping by.

This week’s zombie stick-up from Sergeant Giacomo in Steamsville . The 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 here! The CBOIT is now also excited about our Discord chat too. Oh, and check out Nolan’s awesome Nocturnal Zombies mod.Nolan is cool.

Hey all, welcome back to PZ’s weekly goings-on blog. Let’s delve into what’s going on with some of the features dropping into near-future builds.



The new animations system is the first step in our internal plan to feed all our remaining 1.0 features into the game, something we’ll expand on once we’ve kicked the anims out of the door. Right now we’re under the hood implementing the remaining actions and tying some others into gameplay systems, plus going back and forth with Martin the Animator if anything needs adjusting.

We’re also at the stage now that we can spot any stray required animations that slipped through the net. For example in last week’s video we saw the new ‘zombie climbs through a window and over a counter’ animation – but implementing it flagged that we didn’t have that in reverse. Now counters next to windows are collidable again zombies no longer had an exit route, so Martin is on the case.

Meanwhile, Binky has been finalising the look of the re-animated zeds – which will in turn be able to have various injury, blood, headwear and clothing overlays.





We’ve had the first drop of General Arcade’s VOIP-ed version of PZ! It still needs finetuning, polish, UI work and complex fiddling on the Mac/Linux versions but the first test carried out over the weekend revealed plenty of encouraging details, alongside spotlighting bugs for our Russian friends to fix.

In the words of Benjamin ‘Blindcoder’ Schieder, the man behind the PZ map: “One thing that immediately stood out was that positional sound works great! When another player ran circles around me I heard his voice shift from left headphone speaker to right and back. Very good! Another thing that worked was voices growing quieter with distance, but it currently does so too quickly.”

The video of the VOIP test is below, but please remember that this is very much a work in progress. [It’s also getting us quite excited about getting the system tied into Turbo’s in-game radios.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfF8kWwH50M



Mash’s map work continues, with finishing touches to the perimeter of the new residential area now complete. She’s now moving onto some new fun areas that are being dropped into the current map for players to discover. As flagged by Blake81 on the forums, meanwhile, now EP’s tree noise work will let us complete all the wilderness cells on the current map she can also complete the train tracks that many players use as a route between Muld and WP.

Writer Will, meanwhile, is working with Turbo on his entertainment/boredom moodle projects – expanding out Zomboid lore into recorded media, and also correcting the many and varied typos in the game that have been flagged by our gallant community translation teams.

RJ, meanwhile, sits at the foot of a mountain of the community’s ‘small tweak, big impact’ suggestions that we’d like to integrate into the ongoing Build 35 public IWBUMS test before animations drop into the game – with all the cool new gameplay and features they’ll unlock. A lot of the suggestions have been brilliant so far, so if you have another for the list then please post it up in here.

This week’s AMAZING featured image by DramaSetter. The 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 here! The BOIT now also flags that our Discord is now open, and that because people seem to prefer it we’ll probably kill off our IRC soon. Oh and, KPACUBO – someone’s trying to tell you something I think?

Hey all, welcome back to PZ’s weekly goings-on blog. Let’s delve into what’s going on with some of the features dropping into near-future builds.



The new animations system is the first step in our internal plan to feed all our remaining 1.0 features into the game, something we’ll expand on once we’ve kicked the anims out of the door. Right now we’re under the hood implementing the remaining actions and tying some others into gameplay systems, plus going back and forth with Martin the Animator if anything needs adjusting.

We’re also at the stage now that we can spot any stray required animations that slipped through the net. For example in last week’s video we saw the new ‘zombie climbs through a window and over a counter’ animation – but implementing it flagged that we didn’t have that in reverse. Now counters next to windows are collidable again zombies no longer had an exit route, so Martin is on the case.

Meanwhile, Binky has been finalising the look of the re-animated zeds – which will in turn be able to have various injury, blood, headwear and clothing overlays.





We’ve had the first drop of General Arcade’s VOIP-ed version of PZ! It still needs finetuning, polish, UI work and complex fiddling on the Mac/Linux versions but the first test carried out over the weekend revealed plenty of encouraging details, alongside spotlighting bugs for our Russian friends to fix.

In the words of Benjamin ‘Blindcoder’ Schieder, the man behind the PZ map: “One thing that immediately stood out was that positional sound works great! When another player ran circles around me I heard his voice shift from left headphone speaker to right and back. Very good! Another thing that worked was voices growing quieter with distance, but it currently does so too quickly.”

The video of the VOIP test is below, but please remember that this is very much a work in progress. [It’s also getting us quite excited about getting the system tied into Turbo’s in-game radios.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfF8kWwH50M



Mash’s map work continues, with finishing touches to the perimeter of the new residential area now complete. She’s now moving onto some new fun areas that are being dropped into the current map for players to discover. As flagged by Blake81 on the forums, meanwhile, now EP’s tree noise work will let us complete all the wilderness cells on the current map she can also complete the train tracks that many players use as a route between Muld and WP.

Writer Will, meanwhile, is working with Turbo on his entertainment/boredom moodle projects – expanding out Zomboid lore into recorded media, and also correcting the many and varied typos in the game that have been flagged by our gallant community translation teams.

RJ, meanwhile, sits at the foot of a mountain of the community’s ‘small tweak, big impact’ suggestions that we’d like to integrate into the ongoing Build 35 public IWBUMS test before animations drop into the game – with all the cool new gameplay and features they’ll unlock. A lot of the suggestions have been brilliant so far, so if you have another for the list then please post it up in here.

This week’s AMAZING featured image by DramaSetter. The 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 here! The BOIT now also flags that our Discord is now open, and that because people seem to prefer it we’ll probably kill off our IRC soon. Oh and, KPACUBO – someone’s trying to tell you something I think?

 
Good evening all, and happy Tuesdoid to those in hemispheres different to our own. Here’s the latest!



Work on anims is pretty intense at the moment, not least because once they’re out there in future builds we can finally start dropping all the background dev work we’ve been accumulating into the game. We’re still tying the anims into gameplay proper, and making some optimizations while we do so, with the current focus being on the zombies themselves. Here’s a WIP look at some anims that we don’t think you’ve seen before. There’s a few bits of weirdness (zombie skin colour, clipping and whatnot) but please forgive that if poss!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiUy7ljuVwc

Animator Martin has also made a close-up vid of the animations for your delectation, although clearly the skin and look aren’t how they now are in-game. Oh, and we didn’t show you this video of ladies at work the other week either.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9_zXxqrsks



Mash is now wrapping up on the new residential area that’ll be found to the South of Muldraugh, and is now turning her attention to dropping in some interesting new locations to explore and hold out in over the map-at-large. We’d like most of this content to come as nice mini-surprises when it’s all dropped into the 35 IWBUMS, but managed to wrestle an image of Mash’s new townhouses from her grasp.





Our favourite Russian-types General Arcade, who beaver away at the larger-scale MP improvements while we concentrate on the main game, report that they’ve made a lot of good progress on getting VOIP into Zomboid, and that all our planned features have been implemented – with adjustments, finetuning and general compatibility stuff now to follow.

“Basic VOIP is definitely working well, and voice quality and bandwidth consumption are quite nice” explains lovely Sergei Shubin. “3D sound positioning is also working well! The most complex feature is AEC – Acoustic Echo Cancellation – and one of our next jobs is to test it out thoroughly. Currently everything works well on Windows in non-Steam mode. Other platform and Steam support is what we’re working on at the moment.”


RJ’s work in the IWBUMS public beta channel continues. His current focus is on ‘small but impactful’ stuff that’s been on the ‘to do’ list for ages, and of course that’s being suggested by the community, so that it’s all been tidied up before the animations drop in. As covered last week there’s now improved fall damage, randomised starting conditions, towels that dry (!) and much more besides.

The latest, 35.12, doubles down on the inventory improvements – bringing in ‘favorited’ items alongside 35.11’s ‘Transfer All’ button and a more Windows-esque approach to Ctrl and Shift selecting items in your bags and inventories. There are also updated tool-tips so it’s clearer what your looted equipment is capable of, and an adjustment to how/where fire spreads in-game.

It sounds like Turbo is also ready to start dropping his community translations, entertainment work and other stuff into testing too – so hopefully that’ll start appearing soon.


A few notes of goings on! First off, if your toast is buttered that way, then there’s a brand new PZ Community Discord channel that’s recently opened for business. Find it here: Secondly, our thanks to Connall for his recent improvements to the Bug Tracker which, as ever, intrepid error-chasers can find here.

Finally, there’s a survey being run about exactly what brings about your demise in PZ – so we can get an idea of what causes the most fatalities currently in-game. It lives behind the link that’s behind the word ‘survey’ in the previous sentence. Thanks you!


This week’s featured image, again, by the inappropriately named Dildo_Baggins. 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 here! Oh, and it should probably flag the Discord from now on too.

 
Good evening all, and happy Tuesdoid to those in hemispheres different to our own. Here’s the latest!



Work on anims is pretty intense at the moment, not least because once they’re out there in future builds we can finally start dropping all the background dev work we’ve been accumulating into the game. We’re still tying the anims into gameplay proper, and making some optimizations while we do so, with the current focus being on the zombies themselves. Here’s a WIP look at some anims that we don’t think you’ve seen before. There’s a few bits of weirdness (zombie skin colour, clipping and whatnot) but please forgive that if poss!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiUy7ljuVwc

Animator Martin has also made a close-up vid of the animations for your delectation, although clearly the skin and look aren’t how they now are in-game. Oh, and we didn’t show you this video of ladies at work the other week either.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9_zXxqrsks



Mash is now wrapping up on the new residential area that’ll be found to the South of Muldraugh, and is now turning her attention to dropping in some interesting new locations to explore and hold out in over the map-at-large. We’d like most of this content to come as nice mini-surprises when it’s all dropped into the 35 IWBUMS, but managed to wrestle an image of Mash’s new townhouses from her grasp.





Our favourite Russian-types General Arcade, who beaver away at the larger-scale MP improvements while we concentrate on the main game, report that they’ve made a lot of good progress on getting VOIP into Zomboid, and that all our planned features have been implemented – with adjustments, finetuning and general compatibility stuff now to follow.

“Basic VOIP is definitely working well, and voice quality and bandwidth consumption are quite nice” explains lovely Sergei Shubin. “3D sound positioning is also working well! The most complex feature is AEC – Acoustic Echo Cancellation – and one of our next jobs is to test it out thoroughly. Currently everything works well on Windows in non-Steam mode. Other platform and Steam support is what we’re working on at the moment.”


RJ’s work in the IWBUMS public beta channel continues. His current focus is on ‘small but impactful’ stuff that’s been on the ‘to do’ list for ages, and of course that’s being suggested by the community, so that it’s all been tidied up before the animations drop in. As covered last week there’s now improved fall damage, randomised starting conditions, towels that dry (!) and much more besides.

The latest, 35.12, doubles down on the inventory improvements – bringing in ‘favorited’ items alongside 35.11’s ‘Transfer All’ button and a more Windows-esque approach to Ctrl and Shift selecting items in your bags and inventories. There are also updated tool-tips so it’s clearer what your looted equipment is capable of, and an adjustment to how/where fire spreads in-game.

It sounds like Turbo is also ready to start dropping his community translations, entertainment work and other stuff into testing too – so hopefully that’ll start appearing soon.


A few notes of goings on! First off, if your toast is buttered that way, then there’s a brand new PZ Community Discord channel that’s recently opened for business. Find it here: Secondly, our thanks to Connall for his recent improvements to the Bug Tracker which, as ever, intrepid error-chasers can find here.

Finally, there’s a survey being run about exactly what brings about your demise in PZ – so we can get an idea of what causes the most fatalities currently in-game. It lives behind the link that’s behind the word ‘survey’ in the previous sentence. Thanks you!


This week’s featured image, again, by the inappropriately named Dildo_Baggins. 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 here! Oh, and it should probably flag the Discord from now on too.

The ladies have finally made it into the animation build! After a couple of weeks of puzzling incompatibilities and glitches across the export chain, we got everyone together and finally winkled numerous bugs out of the system. So now all the female models are working with the animations that’ve been exported and thrown into the PZ mainframe so far.

As we mentioned before, until the animation build is good to go we’re not going to do Mondoid videos as the time they take to produce/edit/whatever diverts us away from cranking the actual new systems out into the open. That said, we can still show you a few images of the new lady survivors in action.









This should stand as the last technological hurdle for the getting the anims out into testing, although there could possibly be some multiplayer sync issues to work out that would make us consider a single player anim branch initially if that were to turn out to be the case.

Since we’ve been focused on getting the female models working in-game for a fair wedge of the last little while we still have some of the ‘tying in’ of the new animation and combat system to finish off. There’s still a fair few fixes and things to add ahead of us too, but getting the women into the game was by far the biggest.  So we’re definitely edging much closer to getting this stuff out there to you all but, as usual, will refrain from putting a specific ETA on it.



The release of the combat/anims/clothing build will open up the path to plugging in the big pile of work we’ve done for our remaining feature milestones. It will also, meanwhile, provide coders like RJ with a deluge of fun new jobs like zoning the ‘career zombies’, adding in new weapons, sounds etc.

As such, in the remaining time before the anims go in, the Build 35 IWBUMS will be used to do lots of ‘small job, big impact’ jobs that we’ve been meaning to do since forever – many of them community and mod team suggestions that’ve been stacking up. As IWBUMS public beta testers are aware – from build 35.9  zombies will be able to tear down sheet ropes, while in future builds we’ll tie sheet rope breakage and fall damage to player weight and attributes.

We’ll also be finally letting towels dry, giving some foods a thirst value, making rotten food disappear rather than be a permanent fixture – that sort of thing. It’s basically ticking off a bunch of ‘small stuff’ that’s been nagging on players in one big go before the animations arrive with all the extra (and awesome) potential that they bring. If you have any such suggestions,like this one nudging us towards tying the ‘E’ button to TVs and channel changes, then please drop ‘em in the forums.



Just a quick note to say that PZ will have a presence at this weekend’s Insomnia gaming event at the Birmingham NEC, and a few members of the team who aren’t banging upcoming builds with spanners will be present on the Sunday and Monday if you want to come over and say hello.

This week’s topless survivor by Eden404 of Steam. The 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 here! Okay thanks bye!

The ladies have finally made it into the animation build! After a couple of weeks of puzzling incompatibilities and glitches across the export chain, we got everyone together and finally winkled numerous bugs out of the system. So now all the female models are working with the animations that’ve been exported and thrown into the PZ mainframe so far.

As we mentioned before, until the animation build is good to go we’re not going to do Mondoid videos as the time they take to produce/edit/whatever diverts us away from cranking the actual new systems out into the open. That said, we can still show you a few images of the new lady survivors in action.









This should stand as the last technological hurdle for the getting the anims out into testing, although there could possibly be some multiplayer sync issues to work out that would make us consider a single player anim branch initially if that were to turn out to be the case.

Since we’ve been focused on getting the female models working in-game for a fair wedge of the last little while we still have some of the ‘tying in’ of the new animation and combat system to finish off. There’s still a fair few fixes and things to add ahead of us too, but getting the women into the game was by far the biggest.  So we’re definitely edging much closer to getting this stuff out there to you all but, as usual, will refrain from putting a specific ETA on it.



The release of the combat/anims/clothing build will open up the path to plugging in the big pile of work we’ve done for our remaining feature milestones. It will also, meanwhile, provide coders like RJ with a deluge of fun new jobs like zoning the ‘career zombies’, adding in new weapons, sounds etc.

As such, in the remaining time before the anims go in, the Build 35 IWBUMS will be used to do lots of ‘small job, big impact’ jobs that we’ve been meaning to do since forever – many of them community and mod team suggestions that’ve been stacking up. As IWBUMS public beta testers are aware – from build 35.9  zombies will be able to tear down sheet ropes, while in future builds we’ll tie sheet rope breakage and fall damage to player weight and attributes.

We’ll also be finally letting towels dry, giving some foods a thirst value, making rotten food disappear rather than be a permanent fixture – that sort of thing. It’s basically ticking off a bunch of ‘small stuff’ that’s been nagging on players in one big go before the animations arrive with all the extra (and awesome) potential that they bring. If you have any such suggestions,like this one nudging us towards tying the ‘E’ button to TVs and channel changes, then please drop ‘em in the forums.



Just a quick note to say that PZ will have a presence at this weekend’s Insomnia gaming event at the Birmingham NEC, and a few members of the team who aren’t banging upcoming builds with spanners will be present on the Sunday and Monday if you want to come over and say hello.

This week’s topless survivor by Eden404 of Steam. The 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 here! Okay thanks bye!