Hey everyone – today we’re retiring our Steam vehicles beta branch and moving it into our traditional ‘I Will Back Up My Save’ beta slot as Build 39.

If you’ve been holding off from trying out our trucks, vans and cars as you were waiting for them to feel stable and (almost/increasingly) non-buggy then we’d politely ask you to consider entering the fray today.

We need an extra burst of community testers for the final patches before launch. We need to know:

• What’s unclear about the way we’ve implemented Vehicles and the Mechanics skill
• How the game runs on your machine. [And if there are any issues we will 100% need to know what sort of computer it is, alongside your tech specs]
• How vehicles are changing the way you play – both in the early and late game. And, of course, whether or not you’re having fun.
• Any bugs and weirdness that stick out like a sore thumb.

Please post feedback in the Build 39 in the new thread on our forums.

You can find the IWBUMS beta branch in your Project Zomboid – right click on Project Zomboid in the Steam games list, left click on properties and navigate to the Betas tab.

(Please note that, due to the extent of engine and gameplay changes in Build 39, existing savegames will not be compatible – a Steam beta branch of the pre-vehicles Build 38.30 will be available at the time of launch should people wish to finish off their existing games before moving onto vehicles.)

Clearly the team’s main focus is currently on getting Build 39 polished and out of the door – yesterday releasing Vehicles Build 41 that addressed issues impacting on community translations, missing car spawn zones, lots of player-crafter gate related bugs, split-screen niggles and lots of other fixes.

In the background, meanwhile, Bitbaboon Mark continues his animations work for when the team crosses over to them, Stas is polishing his new MP chat system to drop into Build 40 and Turbo is working on ‘type of sky’ game colours (the shade of the screen when its sunny, normal, cloudy etc) and should have some time-lapse vids to show next week.



This week’s ignored rest stop from Wei. 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

Hey everyone – today we’re retiring our Steam vehicles beta branch and moving it into our traditional ‘I Will Back Up My Save’ beta slot as Build 39.

If you’ve been holding off from trying out our trucks, vans and cars as you were waiting for them to feel stable and (almost/increasingly) non-buggy then we’d politely ask you to consider entering the fray today.

We need an extra burst of community testers for the final patches before launch. We need to know:

• What’s unclear about the way we’ve implemented Vehicles and the Mechanics skill
• How the game runs on your machine. [And if there are any issues we will 100% need to know what sort of computer it is, alongside your tech specs]
• How vehicles are changing the way you play – both in the early and late game. And, of course, whether or not you’re having fun.
• Any bugs and weirdness that stick out like a sore thumb.

Please post feedback in the Build 39 in the new thread on our forums.

You can find the IWBUMS beta branch in your Project Zomboid – right click on Project Zomboid in the Steam games list, left click on properties and navigate to the Betas tab.

(Please note that, due to the extent of engine and gameplay changes in Build 39, existing savegames will not be compatible – a Steam beta branch of the pre-vehicles Build 38.30 will be available at the time of launch should people wish to finish off their existing games before moving onto vehicles.)

Clearly the team’s main focus is currently on getting Build 39 polished and out of the door – yesterday releasing Vehicles Build 41 that addressed issues impacting on community translations, missing car spawn zones, lots of player-crafter gate related bugs, split-screen niggles and lots of other fixes.

In the background, meanwhile, Bitbaboon Mark continues his animations work for when the team crosses over to them, Stas is polishing his new MP chat system to drop into Build 40 and Turbo is working on ‘type of sky’ game colours (the shade of the screen when its sunny, normal, cloudy etc) and should have some time-lapse vids to show next week.



This week’s ignored rest stop from Wei. 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

 
Happy Thursday all, and a Maundy one too – if you’re partial to that sort of thing.


We’ve just updated the Public Vehicle Beta to version 40, the details of which can be found here . It’s quite a long changelist as it’s two weeks of tweaks and bug fixes, but the headlines run as follows.

• We’ve made quite a few changes to speed up zombies when they respond to sound. This will hopefully reduce the amount of lag from zombies when they’re lured by car/siren noise, and indeed in general when a horde is on the move. The change under the bonnet is that sounds are heard on the game’s chunk system, so will there will be less iteration and tests made by each individual zed. We’ve also slightly lowered the frequency of long range car sound triggers to further ease this, without making too much of a dent on zombie attraction.

• Currently in Six Months Later it’s too hard to find a working car as batteries have generally died. As such we’ve now changed this to spawn some fully charged batteries, no matter your chosen difficulty or the time since the outbreak, to simulate a more recent use. We’ve also nerfed the impact of world age on the battery remaining delta to help with this.

• Since the introduction of vehicles it’s been an issue getting them into player-made bases. As such, RJ and Mash have conjured up a variety of gates to make your entrances/exits a little more dignified.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-slZcP7X56U

• Loot discovered in vehicles has been bugging out for a while now – so in Build 40 this has been fixed up and there should be a lot more varied in-car discoveries. We’ve also added a lot more varied ‘general crap’ in vehicles, and likewise a few extra ‘owner profession’ loot spawns – like construction worker, taxi driver, painter and decorator etc.

• After our recent bout of optimizations we’ve added a menu option to let people choose their own preferred framerate levels for UI vs. general game FPS, and upped the default UI setting too. We’ll use user feedback from this to determine the best default value in future versions.

• A big problem in MP has been that passengers got cruelly dumped by the roadside while the driver sped off ahead, and vehicles could get a bit ‘blinky’ too – an issue compounded by lag. General Arcade’s Yuri has been on the case and this should be improved. There’s still a slight issue with the passenger-view of the vehicle jumping around a bit, but on the whole it’s a lot more playable – and Yuri is looking to get it fixed up for next week’s version.

• There may be a few issues with cars visibly juddering at top speed and occasionally on gear changes in multiplayer. We’re looking into these issues and will resolve as soon as possible.

For next week’s build (which we intend to be moved into the traditional IWBUMS beta slot as long as public testing of Build 40 doesn’t throw up any clangers) in amongst many/varied other improvements and fixes, General Arcade’s Yuri has been working on a neat little system that will decrease the irritating occasions upon which the player character is super-imposed on the car it’s standing behind – essentially creating shifting ‘bounding boxes’ around vehicles that are separate from the physics one.

Also for next week’s version Uncle Bitbaboon Steve has done some work improving network connectivity in the fight against lag, and will be with us again tomorrow to implement the final sounds for normal and small cars.

Steve’s colleague Mark, meanwhile, has been plugging away at the animation system we intend to switch dev over to once Vehicles are out of the door – most of his work last week comprising of bringing it all up to date with the considerable amount of core engine adjustments brought about in our recent optimization push. General Arcade’s Stas, meanwhile, has provided a first iteration of his new MP chat update to check out, and is now doing the same ‘bringing up to date with optimizations’ task with our forthcoming lwgl3 upgrade.

Elsewhere Turbo has been working on the new weather system we hope to get into a post-vehicles build – details of which can be found here. He’s been on a lot of ‘under the hood’ aspects this week, but has also improved how general periods of weather work – setting them up so they can be easily changed and transition a lot better. His intent is so that periods of showers, heavy rainfall and thunder clouds generate in a more variable way, and don’t always have the same expected pattern.

Now that the new wilderness/farmland map expansion is out and players are finding cool stuff like the kiddie summer camp Mash is officially moving entirely onto a bigger, and much more urban, setting with our fictionalised version of Louisville – an area that won’t be as big as the real thing, but will still be really big (and plenty big enough) in existing PZ terms.

The broad layout is done (redesigned from what we’ve shown as hints previously) which was no mean feat in itself – and now begins the process of hand-crafting all the buildings and adding details. We’ve got a stash of interesting and previously unseen pre-made buildings to slot in though, and RingoD will be stepping in to help out with residential areas, but even with this it’ll be a long, long task to complete, and as such we won’t be talking about it much about it again until it nears completion.

This week’s featured rooftop party from Bromo BR. 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. Finally, those open to a spot of YouTube zombie parkour might be interested in a movie version Indiegogo. Cheers all!

 
Happy Thursday all, and a Maundy one too – if you’re partial to that sort of thing.


We’ve just updated the Public Vehicle Beta to version 40, the details of which can be found here . It’s quite a long changelist as it’s two weeks of tweaks and bug fixes, but the headlines run as follows.

• We’ve made quite a few changes to speed up zombies when they respond to sound. This will hopefully reduce the amount of lag from zombies when they’re lured by car/siren noise, and indeed in general when a horde is on the move. The change under the bonnet is that sounds are heard on the game’s chunk system, so will there will be less iteration and tests made by each individual zed. We’ve also slightly lowered the frequency of long range car sound triggers to further ease this, without making too much of a dent on zombie attraction.

• Currently in Six Months Later it’s too hard to find a working car as batteries have generally died. As such we’ve now changed this to spawn some fully charged batteries, no matter your chosen difficulty or the time since the outbreak, to simulate a more recent use. We’ve also nerfed the impact of world age on the battery remaining delta to help with this.

• Since the introduction of vehicles it’s been an issue getting them into player-made bases. As such, RJ and Mash have conjured up a variety of gates to make your entrances/exits a little more dignified.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-slZcP7X56U

• Loot discovered in vehicles has been bugging out for a while now – so in Build 40 this has been fixed up and there should be a lot more varied in-car discoveries. We’ve also added a lot more varied ‘general crap’ in vehicles, and likewise a few extra ‘owner profession’ loot spawns – like construction worker, taxi driver, painter and decorator etc.

• After our recent bout of optimizations we’ve added a menu option to let people choose their own preferred framerate levels for UI vs. general game FPS, and upped the default UI setting too. We’ll use user feedback from this to determine the best default value in future versions.

• A big problem in MP has been that passengers got cruelly dumped by the roadside while the driver sped off ahead, and vehicles could get a bit ‘blinky’ too – an issue compounded by lag. General Arcade’s Yuri has been on the case and this should be improved. There’s still a slight issue with the passenger-view of the vehicle jumping around a bit, but on the whole it’s a lot more playable – and Yuri is looking to get it fixed up for next week’s version.

• There may be a few issues with cars visibly juddering at top speed and occasionally on gear changes in multiplayer. We’re looking into these issues and will resolve as soon as possible.

For next week’s build (which we intend to be moved into the traditional IWBUMS beta slot as long as public testing of Build 40 doesn’t throw up any clangers) in amongst many/varied other improvements and fixes, General Arcade’s Yuri has been working on a neat little system that will decrease the irritating occasions upon which the player character is super-imposed on the car it’s standing behind – essentially creating shifting ‘bounding boxes’ around vehicles that are separate from the physics one.

Also for next week’s version Uncle Bitbaboon Steve has done some work improving network connectivity in the fight against lag, and will be with us again tomorrow to implement the final sounds for normal and small cars.

Steve’s colleague Mark, meanwhile, has been plugging away at the animation system we intend to switch dev over to once Vehicles are out of the door – most of his work last week comprising of bringing it all up to date with the considerable amount of core engine adjustments brought about in our recent optimization push. General Arcade’s Stas, meanwhile, has provided a first iteration of his new MP chat update to check out, and is now doing the same ‘bringing up to date with optimizations’ task with our forthcoming lwgl3 upgrade.

Elsewhere Turbo has been working on the new weather system we hope to get into a post-vehicles build – details of which can be found here. He’s been on a lot of ‘under the hood’ aspects this week, but has also improved how general periods of weather work – setting them up so they can be easily changed and transition a lot better. His intent is so that periods of showers, heavy rainfall and thunder clouds generate in a more variable way, and don’t always have the same expected pattern.

Now that the new wilderness/farmland map expansion is out and players are finding cool stuff like the kiddie summer camp Mash is officially moving entirely onto a bigger, and much more urban, setting with our fictionalised version of Louisville – an area that won’t be as big as the real thing, but will still be really big (and plenty big enough) in existing PZ terms.

The broad layout is done (redesigned from what we’ve shown as hints previously) which was no mean feat in itself – and now begins the process of hand-crafting all the buildings and adding details. We’ve got a stash of interesting and previously unseen pre-made buildings to slot in though, and RingoD will be stepping in to help out with residential areas, but even with this it’ll be a long, long task to complete, and as such we won’t be talking about it much about it again until it nears completion.

This week’s featured rooftop party from Bromo BR. 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. Finally, those open to a spot of YouTube zombie parkour might be interested in a movie version Indiegogo. Cheers all!

Hello all, welcome to this week’s Thursdoid. A slightly short one, as usual Thursdoider Batsphinx is currently waving the Zomboid flag high at the GDC in that there America, for the betterment of all Zomboids – devs and players alike. Normal Thursdoid blogging will resume next week!

A few things to cover non-the-less.


We were about to release the build today, as a potential IWBUMs version, and in testing last minute have noticed a serious crash issue in MP that needs resolving first, so we’ll look to fix that then release — if not tomorrow, then early next week. A few highlights for what will be coming:

• Since we had a few complaints about the slower UI update speed, we’ve added a menu option to allow people to choose their own level of sacrifice of game FPS for UI framerate, and in addition have raised the default UI framerate a bit. (We’ll see what option most people like to try and determine a good default value in the future. Of course ultimately we’d like to get the UI further optimized, but sadly since it’s written in lua for modding purposes its inherently a bit slower to process than most game uis so we’ll do what we can.)
• Zombie horde optimizations – there is still more to do, but in particular we’ve made significant optimizations to zombies responding to sound, and the way sounds are transmitted across the map, to make handling huge hordes better. Additionally there has been done work on the pathfinding that should make things run better when you’re amongst hordes of the dead. You’ll likely still see FPS drops until we manage to further optimize but you should notice a noticeable improvement, especially when you’re in a vehicle.

There are numerous other fixes and additions, the full changelist of which will be posted when we go live, we just want to get the build fixed up as we’re at the point now where every build should be moving us closer to a polished vehicle build so we can move on to other features we have in the pipe.


Since this has been a rather teeny Thursdoid, we thought we’d share a few nice videos showing some of the new weather systems Turbo has been working on, with new shader effects (along with legacy versions for those without shader support)

Hope you enjoy!

Stormy car ride
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kelQMB62qUI

New shader driven fog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJqxS7FK17c

Super rare night vision goggle prototype:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzgdPDbbUZs

New shader ambiences
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6futPu-g13I


Erstwhile investigators ShylokVakarian and his proclaimed ‘Queen of Loot’ ChatNoir have been running a rather impressive study on loot that appears in player’s starting houses, with some interesting revelations on which spawning towns have the best loot, down to the likelihood of running into good bag or a fabled Spiffo doll in your spawn house. It’s very interesting and useful statistics you should totally check out to help you plan your survival.

Thanks to ShylokVakarian for his study, it’s really great that people are willing to dig this deep into the game we’ve created, and we massively look forward to his other studies in future!

That’s all for this week, apologies its a bit short and version-less, we’ll look to get something out to you ASAP.

This week’s image is from BecquerL. 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. Oh, and check out the findings of the latest great loot survey from ShylokVakarian. Fanks!

Hello all, welcome to this week’s Thursdoid. A slightly short one, as usual Thursdoider Batsphinx is currently waving the Zomboid flag high at the GDC in that there America, for the betterment of all Zomboids – devs and players alike. Normal Thursdoid blogging will resume next week!

A few things to cover non-the-less.


We were about to release the build today, as a potential IWBUMs version, and in testing last minute have noticed a serious crash issue in MP that needs resolving first, so we’ll look to fix that then release — if not tomorrow, then early next week. A few highlights for what will be coming:

• Since we had a few complaints about the slower UI update speed, we’ve added a menu option to allow people to choose their own level of sacrifice of game FPS for UI framerate, and in addition have raised the default UI framerate a bit. (We’ll see what option most people like to try and determine a good default value in the future. Of course ultimately we’d like to get the UI further optimized, but sadly since it’s written in lua for modding purposes its inherently a bit slower to process than most game uis so we’ll do what we can.)
• Zombie horde optimizations – there is still more to do, but in particular we’ve made significant optimizations to zombies responding to sound, and the way sounds are transmitted across the map, to make handling huge hordes better. Additionally there has been done work on the pathfinding that should make things run better when you’re amongst hordes of the dead. You’ll likely still see FPS drops until we manage to further optimize but you should notice a noticeable improvement, especially when you’re in a vehicle.

There are numerous other fixes and additions, the full changelist of which will be posted when we go live, we just want to get the build fixed up as we’re at the point now where every build should be moving us closer to a polished vehicle build so we can move on to other features we have in the pipe.


Since this has been a rather teeny Thursdoid, we thought we’d share a few nice videos showing some of the new weather systems Turbo has been working on, with new shader effects (along with legacy versions for those without shader support)

Hope you enjoy!

Stormy car ride
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kelQMB62qUI

New shader driven fog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJqxS7FK17c

Super rare night vision goggle prototype:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzgdPDbbUZs

New shader ambiences
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6futPu-g13I


Erstwhile investigators ShylokVakarian and his proclaimed ‘Queen of Loot’ ChatNoir have been running a rather impressive study on loot that appears in player’s starting houses, with some interesting revelations on which spawning towns have the best loot, down to the likelihood of running into good bag or a fabled Spiffo doll in your spawn house. It’s very interesting and useful statistics you should totally check out to help you plan your survival.

Thanks to ShylokVakarian for his study, it’s really great that people are willing to dig this deep into the game we’ve created, and we massively look forward to his other studies in future!

That’s all for this week, apologies its a bit short and version-less, we’ll look to get something out to you ASAP.

This week’s image is from BecquerL. 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. Oh, and check out the findings of the latest great loot survey from ShylokVakarian. Fanks!

Evenin’ all. Here’s the latest from the Knox Event.

We have just released public vehicles build 39. It’s another fairly weighty changelist, but the highlight of it is that the many, varied and major FPS optimizations we discussed last weekhave arrived. We’d love to hear about any changes you notice in performance. Likewise, however, we will need to hear of any bugs this has introduced. We’ve eradicated most of the gremlins backstage (like checkerboard lighting updates, flickering UIs windows, invisible ground objects etc) but there may well be other curiosities that our in-house testers haven’t found. Please let us know in the build release thread.

Something we are aware of is that in this version there’s more work to do with the UI. We’ve made significant optimizations by sacrificing UI FPS for the sake of the FPS of the overall game, which is clearly of a greater priority. On top of this, some of the windows may appear more transparent than usual. We’ll look to improve smoothness and responsiveness in future builds, but we hope any additional bugs or annoyances will pale compared to the significant FPS improvements. Elsewhere in the vehicles beta, meanwhile:

• In preparation for the full release of the vehicles we’ve also added some tutorial windows that appear when new players first boot the game up. If there are any salient details we’ve missed here then please let us know! We’ve also made it so that vehicles are automatically enabled in all games, unless deselected in Sandbox options.

• For MP we have raised the speed limit we previously imposed when map loading was far more of an issue. The default is now an in-game 80mph, although this can now also be played around with in your Server Options.

• Car spawn zones have been added to the small settlement south of Riverside. Various unclear aspects of in-game text and UI icons have been improved. Car damage at low speeds has been nerfed. Radio transmission ranges have been increased to cater for the extended map.

• In terms of fixed bugs, there are a few, but the biggest irritations hopefully salved include: miniature MP vehicle sizes gone, reversed textures and backwards writing on some vehicles fixed and the much-reported self-duplicating cars on servers addressed. Likewise various background memory leaks and the like have been knocked out of the build, and your FPS no longer holds as much sway over your steering.

Beyond immediate bug fixing from community reports the coming week’s focus will be on wider player-built gates to let players store their vehicles more safely, addressing the teleportation issues that can occur when passengers sit in a lag-impacted vehicle and implementing the final sounds for our ‘normal’ and ‘small’ car types.

While the majority of the team work on the vehicles build – Stas (chat upgrade), Mark (animations) and Turbo (fog, snow and new climate/weather system) continue to work away in the background.

Turbo tends to sit away from the main team (his speciality being over-arching systems that we can tie into the main game like his existing seasonal changes and radio systems) and he’s currently working on an improved dynamic weather system that he hopes will make his existing seasons feel more real, and give a greater sense of day-to-day variety.

This will also mean that different weather effects will move over the map in real-time. Here, for example, is a debug thunderstorm moving over the south of the current map – between March Ridge and West Point.

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

This all generated by a system of simulated cold and warm fronts of varying strengths. An in-game change from Warm to Cold, for example, will result in a day with rain in the morning getting heavier as the day goes on, with the possibility of a tropical storm in summer, or a blizzard in winter. The intensity of the rain, and thunder, meanwhile is all dependent on the simulated front strength.



When mixed in with the new fog that’ll see misty mornings slowly clearing in the sunshine this should give a far greater feeling of variety as each day passes. What’s more, as a part of this weather upgrade Turbo is also looking at improving our current use of shaders to increase the feeling of seasonal change in PZ – giving it a subtle yet tangible feeling of it being either a warm and vibrant day of summer, or a pale and hazy day in winter.

Alongside this Turbo intends to improve the SFX to reflect seasonal change better too – removing birdsong from winter, introducing snow crunch etc. When this ready, in the world beyond vehicles, we will also need to rebalance our farming system too in terms of the change in daily/seasonal rainfall – itself a fairly old system that could do with some TLC.

This week’s bannister-less deathtrap from актёрище. 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. Oh, and check out the findings of the latest great loot survey from ShylokVakarian. Fanks!

Evenin’ all. Here’s the latest from the Knox Event.

We have just released public vehicles build 39. It’s another fairly weighty changelist, but the highlight of it is that the many, varied and major FPS optimizations we discussed last weekhave arrived. We’d love to hear about any changes you notice in performance. Likewise, however, we will need to hear of any bugs this has introduced. We’ve eradicated most of the gremlins backstage (like checkerboard lighting updates, flickering UIs windows, invisible ground objects etc) but there may well be other curiosities that our in-house testers haven’t found. Please let us know in the build release thread.

Something we are aware of is that in this version there’s more work to do with the UI. We’ve made significant optimizations by sacrificing UI FPS for the sake of the FPS of the overall game, which is clearly of a greater priority. On top of this, some of the windows may appear more transparent than usual. We’ll look to improve smoothness and responsiveness in future builds, but we hope any additional bugs or annoyances will pale compared to the significant FPS improvements. Elsewhere in the vehicles beta, meanwhile:

• In preparation for the full release of the vehicles we’ve also added some tutorial windows that appear when new players first boot the game up. If there are any salient details we’ve missed here then please let us know! We’ve also made it so that vehicles are automatically enabled in all games, unless deselected in Sandbox options.

• For MP we have raised the speed limit we previously imposed when map loading was far more of an issue. The default is now an in-game 80mph, although this can now also be played around with in your Server Options.

• Car spawn zones have been added to the small settlement south of Riverside. Various unclear aspects of in-game text and UI icons have been improved. Car damage at low speeds has been nerfed. Radio transmission ranges have been increased to cater for the extended map.

• In terms of fixed bugs, there are a few, but the biggest irritations hopefully salved include: miniature MP vehicle sizes gone, reversed textures and backwards writing on some vehicles fixed and the much-reported self-duplicating cars on servers addressed. Likewise various background memory leaks and the like have been knocked out of the build, and your FPS no longer holds as much sway over your steering.

Beyond immediate bug fixing from community reports the coming week’s focus will be on wider player-built gates to let players store their vehicles more safely, addressing the teleportation issues that can occur when passengers sit in a lag-impacted vehicle and implementing the final sounds for our ‘normal’ and ‘small’ car types.

While the majority of the team work on the vehicles build – Stas (chat upgrade), Mark (animations) and Turbo (fog, snow and new climate/weather system) continue to work away in the background.

Turbo tends to sit away from the main team (his speciality being over-arching systems that we can tie into the main game like his existing seasonal changes and radio systems) and he’s currently working on an improved dynamic weather system that he hopes will make his existing seasons feel more real, and give a greater sense of day-to-day variety.

This will also mean that different weather effects will move over the map in real-time. Here, for example, is a debug thunderstorm moving over the south of the current map – between March Ridge and West Point.

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

This all generated by a system of simulated cold and warm fronts of varying strengths. An in-game change from Warm to Cold, for example, will result in a day with rain in the morning getting heavier as the day goes on, with the possibility of a tropical storm in summer, or a blizzard in winter. The intensity of the rain, and thunder, meanwhile is all dependent on the simulated front strength.



When mixed in with the new fog that’ll see misty mornings slowly clearing in the sunshine this should give a far greater feeling of variety as each day passes. What’s more, as a part of this weather upgrade Turbo is also looking at improving our current use of shaders to increase the feeling of seasonal change in PZ – giving it a subtle yet tangible feeling of it being either a warm and vibrant day of summer, or a pale and hazy day in winter.

Alongside this Turbo intends to improve the SFX to reflect seasonal change better too – removing birdsong from winter, introducing snow crunch etc. When this ready, in the world beyond vehicles, we will also need to rebalance our farming system too in terms of the change in daily/seasonal rainfall – itself a fairly old system that could do with some TLC.

This week’s bannister-less deathtrap from актёрище. 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. Oh, and check out the findings of the latest great loot survey from ShylokVakarian. Fanks!

Ello’ Zomboids and Zombettes. Some cool stuff to talk about this week!


Today we released public vehicles build 38, which is a general fix/polish update while the more structural optimization work detailed below has been running in parallel. You can find the changelist here.

Items of note include an improvement to vehicles clipping over characters and over each other – although to eradicate this completely will require structural work on a depth buffer, and more importantly the rewritten 3D model system that’s a part of future animation builds. This said, this build should at least see a marked improvement.



Other bugs fixed that’ve proved an irritation to testers include far more satisfying zed/vehicle collisions in MP, key loss lessening, a limitation on the threat of invisible trees and the removal of in-car 3D sound to make the sounds less disorientating.


Despite a lot of work and improvement over recent builds, for a little while we hadn’t been satisfied with the performance in our vehicles beta. It was workable, and clear that testers are having a lot of fun with it, but not something we felt was good enough.

As such over the past couple of weeks we’ve been working on what we feel are rather special and significant optimizations – basically going through every area of the game code and shaving off every millisecond we could, and the results have been quite profound.

On our internal test PCs (fairly good set-ups) it’s now possible to obtain a solid 60fps when zoomed out at almost every point in the map, save for the mall and downtown West Point – which regardless are themselves a lot more playable now.

The following video is shot in 1920×1080 and shows the improved performance we’re seeing on standard settings. Note the FPS read out in the top left. We thought about editing together pieces from different tests, however felt that cutting between them may look like sneaky editing, so have opted to use 5 minutes of uninterrupted recorded footage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ9W5gpuErM

This video is recorded in 3800×1600 and shows the sort of performance you could expect on much higher resolutions. Hopefully not that much different from 4k framerates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJLHXqNmuk4

Additionally, as you may be able to tell from the videos, we have also added support for uncapping the FPS into the game options, now the FPS has improved significantly to make use of it. Hopefully this will make those with high refresh-rate monitors happy. Internally we have hit 300+ fps when zoomed in in low density areas of the map with FPS uncapped, which is pretty nice and silky on a 144hz G-Sync monitor!

We had hoped this optimization build would have been ready to release today, but when doing such deep and all-encompassing optimization that touches on many areas of the game, there are always new unintended side effects and new bugs introduced from changing the code to make it faster. Aspects of the UI suddenly become unhinged by the frame-rate, lighting refreshes go wonky etc.

As such we decided to release the existing changelist of Vehicles Beta 38 and leave this until next week, when there’s a few less gremlins in the system. We hope this will then be the candidate for moving vehicles into our established IWBUMS beta as we step up plans for animations etc.


As mentioned previously, alongside the animation systems that Bitbaboon Mark is prepping, we have a few other new systems to drop into testing once vehicles are out of the way.

The first is Stas’ new chat window and functions for MP, and the second, meanwhile, is the new snog/fog that will come hand-in-hand with a general improvement/deepening of how weather works in-game. This all comes from Turbo, once a modder and now a valued contributor to PZ, who generally sits aside from the main team cooking up crazy/intricate concoctions that can then be passed on into the main game.

We should have a full time-lapse next week, although existing fog vids live here, but for now you can see how it all works on Turbo’s debugger. Right now we only have a single daily temperature, precipitation values etc, but now an extra layer on top of the existing climate system will have more varied weather/temperature change throughout the day – and also more realistic weather systems over multiple days.

So a quick example, here you can see a foggy day – in which the sunlight is a white line. Here you can see the light blue fog line building up in the morning, just before the sun rises, after which the sun has rises and the in-game fog starts to fade away.



Meanwhile over longer periods, rather than it feeling rather random, precipitation will be clustered so you can have lots of days without rain and then a longer period of days with a lot of rain/snow.



As you can see from the following picture, the climate modelling goes much deeper than that though, tying temperature, wind, and other factors together into a pretty deep system worthy of Project Zomboid:




This week’s zed race from JoeScore. 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!

Ello’ Zomboids and Zombettes. Some cool stuff to talk about this week!


Today we released public vehicles build 38, which is a general fix/polish update while the more structural optimization work detailed below has been running in parallel. You can find the changelist here.

Items of note include an improvement to vehicles clipping over characters and over each other – although to eradicate this completely will require structural work on a depth buffer, and more importantly the rewritten 3D model system that’s a part of future animation builds. This said, this build should at least see a marked improvement.



Other bugs fixed that’ve proved an irritation to testers include far more satisfying zed/vehicle collisions in MP, key loss lessening, a limitation on the threat of invisible trees and the removal of in-car 3D sound to make the sounds less disorientating.


Despite a lot of work and improvement over recent builds, for a little while we hadn’t been satisfied with the performance in our vehicles beta. It was workable, and clear that testers are having a lot of fun with it, but not something we felt was good enough.

As such over the past couple of weeks we’ve been working on what we feel are rather special and significant optimizations – basically going through every area of the game code and shaving off every millisecond we could, and the results have been quite profound.

On our internal test PCs (fairly good set-ups) it’s now possible to obtain a solid 60fps when zoomed out at almost every point in the map, save for the mall and downtown West Point – which regardless are themselves a lot more playable now.

The following video is shot in 1920×1080 and shows the improved performance we’re seeing on standard settings. Note the FPS read out in the top left. We thought about editing together pieces from different tests, however felt that cutting between them may look like sneaky editing, so have opted to use 5 minutes of uninterrupted recorded footage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ9W5gpuErM

This video is recorded in 3800×1600 and shows the sort of performance you could expect on much higher resolutions. Hopefully not that much different from 4k framerates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJLHXqNmuk4

Additionally, as you may be able to tell from the videos, we have also added support for uncapping the FPS into the game options, now the FPS has improved significantly to make use of it. Hopefully this will make those with high refresh-rate monitors happy. Internally we have hit 300+ fps when zoomed in in low density areas of the map with FPS uncapped, which is pretty nice and silky on a 144hz G-Sync monitor!

We had hoped this optimization build would have been ready to release today, but when doing such deep and all-encompassing optimization that touches on many areas of the game, there are always new unintended side effects and new bugs introduced from changing the code to make it faster. Aspects of the UI suddenly become unhinged by the frame-rate, lighting refreshes go wonky etc.

As such we decided to release the existing changelist of Vehicles Beta 38 and leave this until next week, when there’s a few less gremlins in the system. We hope this will then be the candidate for moving vehicles into our established IWBUMS beta as we step up plans for animations etc.


As mentioned previously, alongside the animation systems that Bitbaboon Mark is prepping, we have a few other new systems to drop into testing once vehicles are out of the way.

The first is Stas’ new chat window and functions for MP, and the second, meanwhile, is the new snog/fog that will come hand-in-hand with a general improvement/deepening of how weather works in-game. This all comes from Turbo, once a modder and now a valued contributor to PZ, who generally sits aside from the main team cooking up crazy/intricate concoctions that can then be passed on into the main game.

We should have a full time-lapse next week, although existing fog vids live here, but for now you can see how it all works on Turbo’s debugger. Right now we only have a single daily temperature, precipitation values etc, but now an extra layer on top of the existing climate system will have more varied weather/temperature change throughout the day – and also more realistic weather systems over multiple days.

So a quick example, here you can see a foggy day – in which the sunlight is a white line. Here you can see the light blue fog line building up in the morning, just before the sun rises, after which the sun has rises and the in-game fog starts to fade away.



Meanwhile over longer periods, rather than it feeling rather random, precipitation will be clustered so you can have lots of days without rain and then a longer period of days with a lot of rain/snow.



As you can see from the following picture, the climate modelling goes much deeper than that though, tying temperature, wind, and other factors together into a pretty deep system worthy of Project Zomboid:




This week’s zed race from JoeScore. 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!