Hey all. Here’s the current goings-on over in Zomboid Towers.


We’ve just released Vehicles Build 37 – and it’s got quite a long changelist given as a case of the judders held back last Thursday’s release. You can see the full version details, and find details on how to join the beta, in this thread.

Vehicles are easily the biggest technology upgrade that PZ has had since its inception – and Build 37 builds on work already complete by including the MP lag work we mentioned last week directed by our Technical Director friend BitBaboon Steve, but now also has had a lot of improvements to our map/chunk streaming both online and off, and a big change in how our game handle’s Java’s jolt-inducing ‘garbage collection’. To this end aspects of it remain fairly experimental, in that they work nicely behind closed doors but require wider testing – which is where you guys and your bug/performance/gameplay reports come in.

We’ve also made some changes to how the frame compensation is handled, and have fixed issues with the framerate smoothing which resulted in time slowing down during gameplay, which led to occasional uneven gameplay and treacley movement in a few recent builds. Instead the game may occasionally hitch for a frame, whereas before it might drag the framerate and game speed down for a second or more.

This far more mild hitch is something we can tackle later on, in general the smoothness of gameplay should more than make up for it. Beyond this other highlights of the build follow, some which we mentioned last week – others have been added to the version as the week goes on.

• Mash’s map expansion that fills in many of the gaps between our major towns and zombie troublespots – which will hopefully allow for vehicle exploration and more out-of-town hideaways and safehouses. Here’s that map showing the general areas you’ll be able to find new stuff.]

• Item and bag loss bug tracked down and patched, that will come as a welcome relief to our testers. This comes alongside a multitude of fixes to the various vehicle parts, errors in the UI screens for the various new vehicles, issues that arose when a co-op friend was in your vehicle and switching seats or trying to sound the horn and bugs that arose when zeds attack your car.

• For testing and MP admin purposes – an admin can now spawn keys, gas and repair cars. [In a quick side community requested side-project Tim also allowed for day length in sandbox to allow all hours up to 24.]

• New switch-seat keybind (Z) to allow you to move around inside the car easier (and choose which door to exit from if there’s a horde pawing at your wing mirror), a ‘V’ keybind to hide/show the radial menu and other interface improvements/fixes.

• Increased spawn chances for tire pumps, barbed wire, sandbags and milk. XP tweaks for the Mechanic Skill. Nerfed tire pressure impact on speed. Fixed up interactions when you’re looting piles of crates – which previously could be a pita – and some player-requested improvements to the composting system. Lots of other tweaks and fixes,

Next week’s build should have some new vehicle sound effects – the new ones in Build 37 are better that what we have before. These will be alongside further optimizations to world streaming, tile-rendering and loaded vehicle textures that we already have in the can, but didn’t want to mix into an already change-heavy beta version. (We realise the code-y aspect of this news isn’t particularly sexy, but hope you’ll feel the difference when you play.)

Beyond this, the process is to knock off tasks from our internal management system (whether found by our intrepid QA twosome of Jake and Sasha, or transferred from community reports) to the point at which we want an influx of new testers from the move to IWBUMS, and beyond that the influx of a LOT of new testers from a public release.


We have the majority of the team working on finalising vehicles at the moment (specifically RJ, Yuri and EP) but in the background there’s clearly Bitbaboon Mark prepping anims for the team to switch over onto once the vehicles dust settles, alongside various other members of the team working on the framework of future map content.

Two other features currently in the oven for a build beyond vehicles, meanwhile are GA Stas working on his chat window – and Turbo’s revamped fog/snow weather progression that we hope to have new timelapse vids/details on next week.

This week’s endangered police vehicle from [TOD]malex97145. 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 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! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. In other news check out the new RP Season over on New Dawn. Fanks!

Hey all. Here’s the current goings-on over in Zomboid Towers.


We’ve just released Vehicles Build 37 – and it’s got quite a long changelist given as a case of the judders held back last Thursday’s release. You can see the full version details, and find details on how to join the beta, in this thread.

Vehicles are easily the biggest technology upgrade that PZ has had since its inception – and Build 37 builds on work already complete by including the MP lag work we mentioned last week directed by our Technical Director friend BitBaboon Steve, but now also has had a lot of improvements to our map/chunk streaming both online and off, and a big change in how our game handle’s Java’s jolt-inducing ‘garbage collection’. To this end aspects of it remain fairly experimental, in that they work nicely behind closed doors but require wider testing – which is where you guys and your bug/performance/gameplay reports come in.

We’ve also made some changes to how the frame compensation is handled, and have fixed issues with the framerate smoothing which resulted in time slowing down during gameplay, which led to occasional uneven gameplay and treacley movement in a few recent builds. Instead the game may occasionally hitch for a frame, whereas before it might drag the framerate and game speed down for a second or more.

This far more mild hitch is something we can tackle later on, in general the smoothness of gameplay should more than make up for it. Beyond this other highlights of the build follow, some which we mentioned last week – others have been added to the version as the week goes on.

• Mash’s map expansion that fills in many of the gaps between our major towns and zombie troublespots – which will hopefully allow for vehicle exploration and more out-of-town hideaways and safehouses. Here’s that map showing the general areas you’ll be able to find new stuff.]

• Item and bag loss bug tracked down and patched, that will come as a welcome relief to our testers. This comes alongside a multitude of fixes to the various vehicle parts, errors in the UI screens for the various new vehicles, issues that arose when a co-op friend was in your vehicle and switching seats or trying to sound the horn and bugs that arose when zeds attack your car.

• For testing and MP admin purposes – an admin can now spawn keys, gas and repair cars. [In a quick side community requested side-project Tim also allowed for day length in sandbox to allow all hours up to 24.]

• New switch-seat keybind (Z) to allow you to move around inside the car easier (and choose which door to exit from if there’s a horde pawing at your wing mirror), a ‘V’ keybind to hide/show the radial menu and other interface improvements/fixes.

• Increased spawn chances for tire pumps, barbed wire, sandbags and milk. XP tweaks for the Mechanic Skill. Nerfed tire pressure impact on speed. Fixed up interactions when you’re looting piles of crates – which previously could be a pita – and some player-requested improvements to the composting system. Lots of other tweaks and fixes,

Next week’s build should have some new vehicle sound effects – the new ones in Build 37 are better that what we have before. These will be alongside further optimizations to world streaming, tile-rendering and loaded vehicle textures that we already have in the can, but didn’t want to mix into an already change-heavy beta version. (We realise the code-y aspect of this news isn’t particularly sexy, but hope you’ll feel the difference when you play.)

Beyond this, the process is to knock off tasks from our internal management system (whether found by our intrepid QA twosome of Jake and Sasha, or transferred from community reports) to the point at which we want an influx of new testers from the move to IWBUMS, and beyond that the influx of a LOT of new testers from a public release.


We have the majority of the team working on finalising vehicles at the moment (specifically RJ, Yuri and EP) but in the background there’s clearly Bitbaboon Mark prepping anims for the team to switch over onto once the vehicles dust settles, alongside various other members of the team working on the framework of future map content.

Two other features currently in the oven for a build beyond vehicles, meanwhile are GA Stas working on his chat window – and Turbo’s revamped fog/snow weather progression that we hope to have new timelapse vids/details on next week.

This week’s endangered police vehicle from [TOD]malex97145. 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 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! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. In other news check out the new RP Season over on New Dawn. Fanks!

Hey all. Here’s the news on what’s happening with current/forthcoming builds from Zomboid HQ.

We’ve got public Vehicles beta 37 just about ready to drop – it includes:

• Work that stems from our friendly Technical Director favourite uncle Bitbaboon Steve on our netcode – intended to address MP lag via the discovery of elements of vehicle data clogging up the pipes, and the way that server saves work. We’ve also put some extra work into being more strict with what the game considers as physics objects, which should cut down on memory and processing. (Internally we’re seeing some higher FPS read-outs from built up areas like West Point, and we’d be very interested to hear if this is replicated on beta tester set-ups come release).
  
  
• New map areas filling in countryside, farms and smaller settlements  between West Point and Riverside, and March Ridge and Rosewood . This includes new town zones and foraging zones, especially around Riverside – alongside missing map elements in that town, and general decoration map-wide. A few secret areas will be hiding in amongst it all too.

• In terms of gameplay – tire pressure’s impact on speed has been nerfed significantly, while we’ve also polished the Mechanic UI to give clearer indications of success/failure via visuals and SFX. A fair amount of irritation caused by dual keybindings (on foot vs. in vehicle key functions) will also be cleared up.
  
  
• Connall, fresh from zoning the new map, is now coming back to the  ‘Small But Important’ Community Request thread – while elsewhere the general bug blitz continues when it comes to vehicle textures, item transfer speeds, crawlers damaging vehicles and zombies attacking the relevant part of the car where you’re visible to them (or were last visible to them) as opposed to banging on the driver door. The annoying issue of occasional item loss has also been tracked down and, hopefully, consigned to oblivion.
  
  
• New vehicle SFX for vans and higher performance vehicles are part of the new build. Although, with this said, these still aren’t perfect – so we have found someone who works at a friend’s game studio who’s created a procedural engine sound system – which means we can obtain custom engine loops for different car types to feed into Bitbaboon Steve’s new code. This means that we no longer have to dredge internet sound banks, or consider making actual vehicle recordings ourselves – and likewise will make the process easier when adding new vehicles, and hopefully noisier industrial/military vehicles, later on down the line.

Vehicle beta 37 had been aimed for a Thursday release but internal testing has revealed some FPS hitches in MP as well as occasional unsightly streaks that would likely annoy. We’ll release when these irritations are nixed, and have Uncle Bitbaboon Steve on duty tomorrow to help improve stuff further too.

Outside this more imminent work on vehicles coding continues for the builds ahead including Bitbaboon Mark preparing the animation system so we can move over to it in the versions beyond vehicles, Turbo back with us and working on his improved snow/fog/mist and general weather upgrade, and General Arcade’s Stas working on our new chat/admin system for MP.

(With the latter we’re slightly changing tack and opting for a less multi-tabbed variant, and have also compiled a checklist for Stas to ensure that all the commands/features are in-keeping with what’s expected from MP in this day and age so we hit the ground running with something we’re pleased with. It should still be ready to drop into testing once vehicles are done.)

While discussing this with Stas, the issue of PZ text appearing really small on high resolution screens came up – itself something we know we have to deal with, and hope to as a part of our upgrade to lwjgl3. In the mean-time, however, if you have issues then as a part of our conversations EnigmaGrey also came up with this nifty Big Freakin’ Font mod – that’ll help with high res and couch play users. Let us know how you get on with it.

This week’s snowfield caper from Wanktarded. 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 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! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!

Hey all. Here’s the news on what’s happening with current/forthcoming builds from Zomboid HQ.

We’ve got public Vehicles beta 37 just about ready to drop – it includes:

• Work that stems from our friendly Technical Director favourite uncle Bitbaboon Steve on our netcode – intended to address MP lag via the discovery of elements of vehicle data clogging up the pipes, and the way that server saves work. We’ve also put some extra work into being more strict with what the game considers as physics objects, which should cut down on memory and processing. (Internally we’re seeing some higher FPS read-outs from built up areas like West Point, and we’d be very interested to hear if this is replicated on beta tester set-ups come release).
  
  
• New map areas filling in countryside, farms and smaller settlements  between West Point and Riverside, and March Ridge and Rosewood . This includes new town zones and foraging zones, especially around Riverside – alongside missing map elements in that town, and general decoration map-wide. A few secret areas will be hiding in amongst it all too.

• In terms of gameplay – tire pressure’s impact on speed has been nerfed significantly, while we’ve also polished the Mechanic UI to give clearer indications of success/failure via visuals and SFX. A fair amount of irritation caused by dual keybindings (on foot vs. in vehicle key functions) will also be cleared up.
  
  
• Connall, fresh from zoning the new map, is now coming back to the  ‘Small But Important’ Community Request thread – while elsewhere the general bug blitz continues when it comes to vehicle textures, item transfer speeds, crawlers damaging vehicles and zombies attacking the relevant part of the car where you’re visible to them (or were last visible to them) as opposed to banging on the driver door. The annoying issue of occasional item loss has also been tracked down and, hopefully, consigned to oblivion.
  
  
• New vehicle SFX for vans and higher performance vehicles are part of the new build. Although, with this said, these still aren’t perfect – so we have found someone who works at a friend’s game studio who’s created a procedural engine sound system – which means we can obtain custom engine loops for different car types to feed into Bitbaboon Steve’s new code. This means that we no longer have to dredge internet sound banks, or consider making actual vehicle recordings ourselves – and likewise will make the process easier when adding new vehicles, and hopefully noisier industrial/military vehicles, later on down the line.

Vehicle beta 37 had been aimed for a Thursday release but internal testing has revealed some FPS hitches in MP as well as occasional unsightly streaks that would likely annoy. We’ll release when these irritations are nixed, and have Uncle Bitbaboon Steve on duty tomorrow to help improve stuff further too.

Outside this more imminent work on vehicles coding continues for the builds ahead including Bitbaboon Mark preparing the animation system so we can move over to it in the versions beyond vehicles, Turbo back with us and working on his improved snow/fog/mist and general weather upgrade, and General Arcade’s Stas working on our new chat/admin system for MP.

(With the latter we’re slightly changing tack and opting for a less multi-tabbed variant, and have also compiled a checklist for Stas to ensure that all the commands/features are in-keeping with what’s expected from MP in this day and age so we hit the ground running with something we’re pleased with. It should still be ready to drop into testing once vehicles are done.)

While discussing this with Stas, the issue of PZ text appearing really small on high resolution screens came up – itself something we know we have to deal with, and hope to as a part of our upgrade to lwjgl3. In the mean-time, however, if you have issues then as a part of our conversations EnigmaGrey also came up with this nifty Big Freakin’ Font mod – that’ll help with high res and couch play users. Let us know how you get on with it.

This week’s snowfield caper from Wanktarded. 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 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! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!

Greetings all. We released public beta Vehicle Build 35 last Friday, the top-line of which was the introduction of two new cars – the jeep-esque Dash Ranger and the more luxurious Mercia Lang 400. Build 35 also introduced better vehicle variety/colour spawns, better interaction with the new car overlays on the Mechanic skill UI, better gamepad control and lots of balance/polish. If you want to help out with MP testing then the Spiffospace server is a good place to hang out.

Vehicle build 35.3 also introduced Bitbaboon Steve’s new engine/exhaust sound system, which means that driving around is now far less of an irritant on the ears. Please note, however, that currently the truck engine noises are placed on all vehicles.

Now we have the engine noise system in-game it’s easy to get new variants in-game, but sourcing the relevant sounds to feed into it is a little trickier – not least due to our isometric perspective (away from the internal noises of the engine itself) and the fact that we feature ‘normal’ cars rather than the performance vehicles that are in so many other games. We have a few irons in the fire with this, however, and should have more fitting sounds for standard cars in the next few builds.

Here’s a quick video of what’s ‘latest’ in the build right now – alongside the tire pump that’ll be going into Build 36. [The new car’s hood/bonnet might still be a little pinched, we will likely improve on this.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbvD3H-9gQ4

Something else that came up after the release of Build 35 was the decision to hold back a lot of our work on the item sync optimization until a later version – as it was clear that the gremlins it was going to keep on throwing up were now in danger of delaying a public Vehicles release. As such this has been reverted to the system we have in the current public build, which came at the cost of the reintroduction of several MP sync bugs – half of which have now been hotfixed, with more to follow when we release Vehicles beta 36 in the coming days.

Vehicles beta 36 will largely comprise of polish and bug fixes destined to make our community testers life a little better – with issues addressing safehouses, damaged vehicle textures, Muffler degradation, aforementioned residual sync oddities, odd night-time lighting on vehicles and various other stuff.

Under the hood, meanwhile, it also comes with a networking optimization that should help on chunk-loading when you’re driving at speed – that of compressing info on identical items are now compressed to a single item. So, especially on a modded server, your connection will take less of a beating when it’s being informed of the thousands of lovingly stored nails in containers up ahead. It should hopefully speed things up, and also make for less sync bugs appearing in general. Connall, meanwhile, will hopefully have finished zoning the new parts of Mash’s map for the build next week.

In team news, meanwhile, the PZ workforce (when taking into account our friends at General Arcade currently working on vehicles and new chat functions, and the guys at BitBaboon working on optimization and the new animation system) has doubled in the past year – and it was clear that we needed a few more production people backstage to suit this.

As such we’d like to welcome Sasha to the team – who’ll be working with Jake as a fresh layer of production and QA before our beta builds go live, and helping to filter out show-stoppers before they’re dropped onto our community testers. We’d also like to give a hearty ‘hello’ to General Arcade’s Konstantin to the ‘open task’ sheet – who will be working with Stas and Yuri in terms of QA on their various aspects of Zomboid work.

This week’s house of praise from ssjr66888. 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 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! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!

Greetings all. We released public beta Vehicle Build 35 last Friday, the top-line of which was the introduction of two new cars – the jeep-esque Dash Ranger and the more luxurious Mercia Lang 400. Build 35 also introduced better vehicle variety/colour spawns, better interaction with the new car overlays on the Mechanic skill UI, better gamepad control and lots of balance/polish. If you want to help out with MP testing then the Spiffospace server is a good place to hang out.

Vehicle build 35.3 also introduced Bitbaboon Steve’s new engine/exhaust sound system, which means that driving around is now far less of an irritant on the ears. Please note, however, that currently the truck engine noises are placed on all vehicles.

Now we have the engine noise system in-game it’s easy to get new variants in-game, but sourcing the relevant sounds to feed into it is a little trickier – not least due to our isometric perspective (away from the internal noises of the engine itself) and the fact that we feature ‘normal’ cars rather than the performance vehicles that are in so many other games. We have a few irons in the fire with this, however, and should have more fitting sounds for standard cars in the next few builds.

Here’s a quick video of what’s ‘latest’ in the build right now – alongside the tire pump that’ll be going into Build 36. [The new car’s hood/bonnet might still be a little pinched, we will likely improve on this.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbvD3H-9gQ4

Something else that came up after the release of Build 35 was the decision to hold back a lot of our work on the item sync optimization until a later version – as it was clear that the gremlins it was going to keep on throwing up were now in danger of delaying a public Vehicles release. As such this has been reverted to the system we have in the current public build, which came at the cost of the reintroduction of several MP sync bugs – half of which have now been hotfixed, with more to follow when we release Vehicles beta 36 in the coming days.

Vehicles beta 36 will largely comprise of polish and bug fixes destined to make our community testers life a little better – with issues addressing safehouses, damaged vehicle textures, Muffler degradation, aforementioned residual sync oddities, odd night-time lighting on vehicles and various other stuff.

Under the hood, meanwhile, it also comes with a networking optimization that should help on chunk-loading when you’re driving at speed – that of compressing info on identical items are now compressed to a single item. So, especially on a modded server, your connection will take less of a beating when it’s being informed of the thousands of lovingly stored nails in containers up ahead. It should hopefully speed things up, and also make for less sync bugs appearing in general. Connall, meanwhile, will hopefully have finished zoning the new parts of Mash’s map for the build next week.

In team news, meanwhile, the PZ workforce (when taking into account our friends at General Arcade currently working on vehicles and new chat functions, and the guys at BitBaboon working on optimization and the new animation system) has doubled in the past year – and it was clear that we needed a few more production people backstage to suit this.

As such we’d like to welcome Sasha to the team – who’ll be working with Jake as a fresh layer of production and QA before our beta builds go live, and helping to filter out show-stoppers before they’re dropped onto our community testers. We’d also like to give a hearty ‘hello’ to General Arcade’s Konstantin to the ‘open task’ sheet – who will be working with Stas and Yuri in terms of QA on their various aspects of Zomboid work.

This week’s house of praise from ssjr66888. 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 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! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!

How do everyone. Hope this finds you well and non-fevered.


We just released Vehicle Build 34 – a build primarily comprised of a multitude of fixes and general tidy-up work around the issues bug-harvested from the public Spiffospace test server. The test server itself has been updated, so if you fancy helping us chase down some bugs then please do join in.

There will still be some irregularities on there so be prepared (though testers seem to be having a lot of fun) but overall we’ve pruned back a lot of annoyances in this new build that should bring remaining big issues into a sharper focus.

Also a part of 34 is the updated Mechanics UI visualisation provided by Mash – which should bring a bit more clarity to what’s wrong with your car, or if you don’t have a high enough Mechanics skill then at least show you which area the problem can be found in. There’s one for each primary vehicle class – and seen below are the van and station wagon.





On top of the Vehicles 34 big heap of fixes, we also released 33.4 last Friday. This gave server admins more powers when it comes to organising regular loot respawns, improved the range of car conditions you’ll find on the streets of our towns and also boosted spawn rates for certain hard-to-find loot reported by the community.

Another longstanding issue with vehicles are that the motor sounds have needed a great deal of improvement – we blogged about our first foray into this a while back, but after that it became clear that Bitbaboon Steve’s longstanding experience in this field could create a far better template and system code-side for when additional vehicles are brought on-board and require sound balance.

This system is now in place, and this video shows an initial mix of an idle car, a slow-moving car and a fast-moving car. This isn’t final, however, as we feel it needs more deep exhaust noises instead of the primary engine sound to make it feel more realistic and less abrasive to listen to for long periods.

This will also suit the isometric viewpoint of the game and fit the game’s setting a little better – and likewise we know the car crash noise needs some love. It’s good enough to show y’all though, as it shows the rudiments of the underlying system are working pretty well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GDhwsNEk08

Meanwhile this build’s map expansion (filling in the gaps inside the primary ‘road loop’ around our major settlements for cars to venture into and search for rural safehouses) is now complete in the editor – and now handed over to Connall for the zoning of town areas, foraging areas etc. It will be added into the vehicle build once Connall has finished this dark zone magic.


Bitbaboon Mark continues to work through the sorts of bugs shown in the video from last week– primarily the one from the end of the vid in which states now initialise much more reliably but then get stuck and don’t progress – unless hit with a baseball bat of course.

Other main ‘future build’ work in the pipeline is General Arcade’s Stas who has spent the past month or so bringing our MP chat functions into order, and is now working on an all-singing and all-dancing new communications window. You can see Stas’ latest video of this here – with the word of warning that clearly the visuals are due some polish as we go along.

The levels of chat this allows will be customisable depending on the way you like to play (local rather than direct messaging on RP servers etc) but the (highly work in progress!) video should give an idea of where we’re going in terms of window scaling, local chat, whispers, global chat and the like – with Stas’ future work covering PZ-specific gameplay aspects like safehouse, radio and faction chat.

This week’s road horde from 84th Locklear. 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 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! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!

How do everyone. Hope this finds you well and non-fevered.


We just released Vehicle Build 34 – a build primarily comprised of a multitude of fixes and general tidy-up work around the issues bug-harvested from the public Spiffospace test server. The test server itself has been updated, so if you fancy helping us chase down some bugs then please do join in.

There will still be some irregularities on there so be prepared (though testers seem to be having a lot of fun) but overall we’ve pruned back a lot of annoyances in this new build that should bring remaining big issues into a sharper focus.

Also a part of 34 is the updated Mechanics UI visualisation provided by Mash – which should bring a bit more clarity to what’s wrong with your car, or if you don’t have a high enough Mechanics skill then at least show you which area the problem can be found in. There’s one for each primary vehicle class – and seen below are the van and station wagon.





On top of the Vehicles 34 big heap of fixes, we also released 33.4 last Friday. This gave server admins more powers when it comes to organising regular loot respawns, improved the range of car conditions you’ll find on the streets of our towns and also boosted spawn rates for certain hard-to-find loot reported by the community.

Another longstanding issue with vehicles are that the motor sounds have needed a great deal of improvement – we blogged about our first foray into this a while back, but after that it became clear that Bitbaboon Steve’s longstanding experience in this field could create a far better template and system code-side for when additional vehicles are brought on-board and require sound balance.

This system is now in place, and this video shows an initial mix of an idle car, a slow-moving car and a fast-moving car. This isn’t final, however, as we feel it needs more deep exhaust noises instead of the primary engine sound to make it feel more realistic and less abrasive to listen to for long periods.

This will also suit the isometric viewpoint of the game and fit the game’s setting a little better – and likewise we know the car crash noise needs some love. It’s good enough to show y’all though, as it shows the rudiments of the underlying system are working pretty well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GDhwsNEk08

Meanwhile this build’s map expansion (filling in the gaps inside the primary ‘road loop’ around our major settlements for cars to venture into and search for rural safehouses) is now complete in the editor – and now handed over to Connall for the zoning of town areas, foraging areas etc. It will be added into the vehicle build once Connall has finished this dark zone magic.


Bitbaboon Mark continues to work through the sorts of bugs shown in the video from last week– primarily the one from the end of the vid in which states now initialise much more reliably but then get stuck and don’t progress – unless hit with a baseball bat of course.

Other main ‘future build’ work in the pipeline is General Arcade’s Stas who has spent the past month or so bringing our MP chat functions into order, and is now working on an all-singing and all-dancing new communications window. You can see Stas’ latest video of this here – with the word of warning that clearly the visuals are due some polish as we go along.

The levels of chat this allows will be customisable depending on the way you like to play (local rather than direct messaging on RP servers etc) but the (highly work in progress!) video should give an idea of where we’re going in terms of window scaling, local chat, whispers, global chat and the like – with Stas’ future work covering PZ-specific gameplay aspects like safehouse, radio and faction chat.

This week’s road horde from 84th Locklear. 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 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! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!

Happy Thursday one and all.

VEHICLES BUILD

Getting the Spiffospace Test Server up last week has proved really fruitful in terms of both showing us what’s not readily explicable to players about vehicles in the gameplay, and in terms of revealing the MP-related issues that vehicles dev is now turning a little more towards. If you want to help us out with the community bug hunt you can find the server in-game, and report findings here.

Overall vehicles seem to bring a fresh dynamic to the MP experience (should people choose to enable them) as you’re not stuck trying to find your friends on foot, or dependent on lucking out with a choice bag. It’s now a race for a working car to find the rare items and get out of town.

In terms of the community bug harvest, meanwhile, Spiffospace has revealed a seg fault in our PZBullet physics, and let us address most of the item sync issues. There’s still a bunch of stuff to fix up, and some lag to address, but Yuri and RJ’s work towards general server stability in Vehicle Builds 32 and 33 has certainly improved things over the week gone by.

Other issues addressed in these builds include XP changes (with more to come), physics collisions at highest speeds not registering, the erosion system’s saplings no longer causing damage, fire crashes fixed and the spammy game console getting a clear-out.

We’ve also just released 33.1, that sees Connall fiddling around with elements of loot spawn to boost appearances of some items in-game (antibiotics, canning apparatus etc), and RJ introducing some new RNG to give more reliable probability calculations and the like while crafting or dabbling in the Mechanics skill.

Aspects of the vehicles build also being worked on right now (omitting improved fog/snow as irl stuff might knock that into the next version, we’ll see) include:

• Mash is finishing off her countryside map additions and ‘map gap filling’ work. These will generally be found south of Rosewood, the current wildlands between Rosewood and Riverside, along the banks of the Ohio river East and West of Riverside – and a smidge of land close to West Point. This should be handed over to Connall for zoning quite soon, at which point she can turn her attention to the different Mechanics Skill car overlay images for the various different car types we have.
• As discussed last week Bitbaboon Steve has taken over on the new vehicle sounds due to his wealth of experience. When he’s done he’ll be looking into potential memory leaks and garbage collection issues that have been reported on the forums, and on the Spiffospace server.
• Meanwhile: EP continues with his zombie navmesh experiments in terms of zed pathfinding and following that’s intended to reduce performance snarl-ups in high density undead areas.

FUTURE BUILDS

Stas from General Arcade’s work on the new MP chat system continues – this week bringing his existing work that’s brought all the different methods of communications into something that works visually – also thinking about hearing range for whispers/shouts, the ability to ignore/block and making sure it’s all customisable for the different requirements of different servers.

In terms of the animations build, meanwhile, BitBaboon Mark has added in some extra debug info to the code to make both his life of bug-hunting easier, and that of Martin when he goes through to polish visuals. Each character in the world now has its anim state info visible – so it’s clear when things get stuck, and what on.

You can see a video of what this all looks like here.

Since this video was taken some of the major bugs have been worked out – the primary one being zeds who get stuck in a particular anim state having to have it beaten out of them, but there are also ‘slide-along the floor’ zombies for Mark to deal with and for some reason all zombies seem to appear curled up in a little ball when loaded from a savegame.

There’s still some debate as to whether we’ll have to adjust vehicle size too (a fresh image here) but we’ll leave that until everything has been tidied up a bit more – likewise whether or not we keep that t-shirt that has RJ’s face on it. That doesn’t really feel like it’s canon.

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 blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!

Happy Thursday one and all.

VEHICLES BUILD

Getting the Spiffospace Test Server up last week has proved really fruitful in terms of both showing us what’s not readily explicable to players about vehicles in the gameplay, and in terms of revealing the MP-related issues that vehicles dev is now turning a little more towards. If you want to help us out with the community bug hunt you can find the server in-game, and report findings here.

Overall vehicles seem to bring a fresh dynamic to the MP experience (should people choose to enable them) as you’re not stuck trying to find your friends on foot, or dependent on lucking out with a choice bag. It’s now a race for a working car to find the rare items and get out of town.

In terms of the community bug harvest, meanwhile, Spiffospace has revealed a seg fault in our PZBullet physics, and let us address most of the item sync issues. There’s still a bunch of stuff to fix up, and some lag to address, but Yuri and RJ’s work towards general server stability in Vehicle Builds 32 and 33 has certainly improved things over the week gone by.

Other issues addressed in these builds include XP changes (with more to come), physics collisions at highest speeds not registering, the erosion system’s saplings no longer causing damage, fire crashes fixed and the spammy game console getting a clear-out.

We’ve also just released 33.1, that sees Connall fiddling around with elements of loot spawn to boost appearances of some items in-game (antibiotics, canning apparatus etc), and RJ introducing some new RNG to give more reliable probability calculations and the like while crafting or dabbling in the Mechanics skill.

Aspects of the vehicles build also being worked on right now (omitting improved fog/snow as irl stuff might knock that into the next version, we’ll see) include:

• Mash is finishing off her countryside map additions and ‘map gap filling’ work. These will generally be found south of Rosewood, the current wildlands between Rosewood and Riverside, along the banks of the Ohio river East and West of Riverside – and a smidge of land close to West Point. This should be handed over to Connall for zoning quite soon, at which point she can turn her attention to the different Mechanics Skill car overlay images for the various different car types we have.
• As discussed last week Bitbaboon Steve has taken over on the new vehicle sounds due to his wealth of experience. When he’s done he’ll be looking into potential memory leaks and garbage collection issues that have been reported on the forums, and on the Spiffospace server.
• Meanwhile: EP continues with his zombie navmesh experiments in terms of zed pathfinding and following that’s intended to reduce performance snarl-ups in high density undead areas.

FUTURE BUILDS

Stas from General Arcade’s work on the new MP chat system continues – this week bringing his existing work that’s brought all the different methods of communications into something that works visually – also thinking about hearing range for whispers/shouts, the ability to ignore/block and making sure it’s all customisable for the different requirements of different servers.

In terms of the animations build, meanwhile, BitBaboon Mark has added in some extra debug info to the code to make both his life of bug-hunting easier, and that of Martin when he goes through to polish visuals. Each character in the world now has its anim state info visible – so it’s clear when things get stuck, and what on.

You can see a video of what this all looks like here.

Since this video was taken some of the major bugs have been worked out – the primary one being zeds who get stuck in a particular anim state having to have it beaten out of them, but there are also ‘slide-along the floor’ zombies for Mark to deal with and for some reason all zombies seem to appear curled up in a little ball when loaded from a savegame.

There’s still some debate as to whether we’ll have to adjust vehicle size too (a fresh image here) but we’ll leave that until everything has been tidied up a bit more – likewise whether or not we keep that t-shirt that has RJ’s face on it. That doesn’t really feel like it’s canon.

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 blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!